Moonwalker, Chapter 8

About Providence. As in:

1. looking to, or preparation for the future, provision; as in
2. skill or wisdom in management, prudence; as in
3. a. the care or benevolent guidance of God or nature
b. an instance of this; as in
4. God as the guiding power of the universe.

Although I thought it was a cliché used by authors who couldn’t think of anything better, I wasn’t tired of it. I was fascinated by all the definitions one word can contain, so I looked up Providence in The Merriam-Webster, who, if Providence was meant to be truly
relevant to this narrative of my life, must be leaving some definitions out because:

1. I didn’t believe in planning for the future
2. thus my poor skills and wisdom in management which could be said to contribute to my imprudent lifestyle.
3. While I might agree that nature with all its bounty (all those coconuts in Florida) could be benevolent, there was still the issue of hurricanes, and of course, in the northeast, winter, so these instances weren’t infallible.
4. a. Needless to say I had serious doubts in God as the guiding power of my universe.
b. Even more needless to say was my serious doubt in the existence of God.
c. After a few drinks I had serious doubts about the universe, which hadn’t changed since I’d gotten sober.

So it was kind of a mystery how I ended up living here after all these years pretending I was a gypsy. Real gypsies don’t ever give up the road. They die on the backs of their ponies, their untamed souls straining to be free from their bodies like the sound of the devil’s violin solo. I tried telling myself I was following in the footsteps of Roger Williams, who’d bailed on The Massachusetts Bay Colony on a horse strapped down with books in the name of religious tolerance, but if I couldn’t fool myself with this excuse, I knew I wouldn’t be successful with anyone else.

Providence was really just the easiest place to go that was close to Block Island where I figured I could get a job and create some kind of more stable life for myself. I didn’t want to end up working in a coffeehouse, but I didn’t get one call back for a job interview based on the resumés I sent to Brown and RISD, various non-profits and private schools, an importer of exotic foods, a travel agent, a company that prepped rich kids for the SATS (I know I didn’t graduate from college, but my scores were stellar. I had a lot of promise in the beginning), a film production company (everyone kept saying the film industry in Providence was going to blow up soon), and an underwater salvage rescue crew. I figured they were my best shot because I was really good at snorkeling, even though they were looking for someone who was certified in SCUBA. They were the only ones who actually did call me in for an interview, but when I told them I thought SCUBA gave divers an unfair advantage over the fish they looked at me strangely and suggested maybe I apply for a job at Butler. I looked it up later and discovered it was the local mental hospital. When I sent in my resumé I got a phone call from admissions asking if I needed help.
When not even my last hope, Wholefoods, would take me (I had been told everyone who worked there was an artist, plus they had health insurance, which would have made my parents so, so happy), I knew I was in trouble and contemplated jumping back on that Greyhound that had taken me to Florida all those years ago.

Wholefoods was honest at least. They told me they didn’t think I’d stick around long enough to make it worth training me, which was probably right, but I was disappointed because everyone there did seem like they were having a good time even though all they were doing was stocking shelves and ringing people up on a register. And I had kind of wanted those health benefits. I hadn’t been to a dentist in 15 years and my mom told me I really should get a mammogram now that I was-one more time, probably not the last--40 years old, even though the thought of having my breasts squeezed by some metal machine terrified me more than the thought of getting cancer. Call me twisted, I'm aware my priorities are skewed.

Providence, Oh, Providence. I wanted the bounty of God or nature to help me plan for my future, but it just wasn’t working out until one day I wandered down from Fox Point to Wickenden Street, thinking to get a coffee at Café Chaos and there it was, the sign I’d been looking for: HELP WANTED.

I’d tried to promise myself I wouldn’t end up working in a coffeehouse, but I must not have really meant it. In any case, I was good at the job and was soon promoted to shift supervisor, which meant I got to boss Zoe around and take the fall if the creamers weren’t full.

I also tried to like the city (I knew love was beyond me), but despite Buddy’s efforts to make it more glamorous, Providence was dingy and drab as a dockside whore, not that there were any in the city. Oh, there were plenty of hookers, but they weren’t anything romantic like that. They were just plain old hookers who smoked crack, shot heroin, and generally went about leading as dismal a life as possible in this dismal city.

The East Side had some nice buildings if you were into brick. That’s where the Brown and RISD campuses were, but I wasn’t. Bricks made me think of ballast stones, of people moaning in the holds of cramped ships, of slaves chained to each other, dying in misery before being tossed by the feet to the sharks. Also, objects to throw through windows. If the revolution the anarchists said was coming soon ever made it to Providence there’d be plenty of ammunition for the overthrow.

“Actually, that’s not what we’re about,” said one I met out back of Chaos when I was hefting a bag of coffee grounds into the dumpster. “We don’t believe in no rules, we just want to make our own. Most of us are actually quite peaceful,” she said while grabbing the bag out of my hands. “Hey, don’t throw those away. We’ll use them for compost.” She was gone before I had a chance to ask her if I could be one too.

After that I just left the bags out back to disappear, feeling virtuous and with a little more hope about humanity, although the last time we came across each other in the alley she promised me she’d bring me some vegetables from their community garden which I have yet to see.

Also, I have a thing about trees. I hate to see them cut down. I mean, I really feel their pain. I don’t know what else we should build our houses with, but it shouldn’t be trees, which is a problem in Providence, because besides bricks, there’s a lot of fine, old Colonial wooden houses and churches being written up as treasures in guidebooks. When you look at them you can see how much older the trees were back then before they were harvested because the clapboards are so wide. I took a tour of the John Brown House once and had to leave, I got so sad from counting the rings on the floor. According to my count, some of those trees had been a thousand years old before they’d been chopped down so we didn’t have to step on the ground anymore.
Providence used to be one big forest. Impossible to believe now, especially on my block which barely had a weed growing up through the cracks in the sidewalk.

If I could stage a revolution it would be an uprising of trees. They’d push their way up with their roots through all the pavement of the world until we all fell to our knees and apologized for the ugliness we’d created, which you could really see when you left the East Side and ventured out into the rest of the city. Ugly lime green or beige aluminum siding and chain link fences seemed to be the preferred décor, although preferred would be pushing it as most people didn’t notice how anything looked because they didn’t care enough about anything. Poverty does that. And I’m not talking about the genteel kind that I lived in where I had the option to compare myself to starving artists like Van Gogh and Picasso because I knew who they were in the first place.

I don’t know where I got the idea that beauty is a virtue. Maybe it was Providence itself. I loved how the early settlers of New England were named after abstract virtues, as if being named Chastity or Prudence could summon those qualities to one’s self. Despite trying to convince myself otherwise by years of dedicated debauchery, I had deep Puritanical roots. I knew there was something severe about me that stopped me from fitting in completely with the truly debauched barflies I surrounded myself with in my heyday--some of them quite sophisticated—for those twenty years I chased the sun up and down the east coast.

I used to debate this with one of my bosses (in a coffeehouse, of course). He was the tannest person I knew without wrinkles. “I rub coconut oil into my skin every night,” he said when I commented on his youthful appearance. He never even bothered going north anymore and seemed genuinely happy. I tried rubbing coconut oil all over myself for a week to see if it would work its magic on me but just ended up with greasy hair and acne, and oil-stained sheets I had to throw out because they started to smell rancid.

“Don’t you think sybaritic is a better word to describe our lives than debauched?” asked that well-lubricated former boss of mine. And if you’re wondering what sybaritic means, you’d be amazed at how many really smart people sling coffee.

I knew. Sybaritic means pleasure—anointing yourself with oil and lolling luxuriously on a tropical beach. I knew all about this way of life, but I’d never truly enjoyed it. In the back of my mind I was always thinking about what I had to do, not to survive, but to make my mark on the world.
I knew I wasn’t truly sybaritic because I even drank with ambition. Almost every night I got drunk to get drunk, not because I enjoyed the taste of alcohol--and I was a connoisseur of drink specials, not of fine wines or exotic tequilas. I only drank top shelf if someone else was buying, otherwise it was whatever cheep vodka was in the well. At least I’d graduated from the Piels Light and Fuzzy Navels from my high school days is what I told myself whenever I started to feel bad about myself.

“Life’s too short to feel bad about yourself,” said my wise, Confucian boss. This was in the stage where he grew a Fu Manchu beard, pinned his long hair up with chopsticks like a geisha and served coffee in a kimono. We were living in Key West, so this mélange of genders didn’t seem weird at all. It was part of the daily pleasure of living in a place where you could do whatever you wanted whenever you wanted to. If there were no limits, wouldn’t you create the most fantastical, fun-filled life for yourself?

I tried to apply his sage advice to my flailing life for awhile, but I couldn’t talk myself out of the idea that I was wasting my time on earth. Twenty years of serving coffee, scraping paint, pulling weeds, and cleaning houses while analyzing my employers from a Marxist feminist perspective and wondering when I was ever going to get to reading Daniel Deronda had worn me down.
One day I looked in the mirror and saw, I was a shabby boat in need of a good detailing. My teak was chipped and peeling, my surfaces no longer smooth to the touch and shining in the tropical sun. I was working in a boatyard restoring trim at the time in exchange for a place to sleep, if you’re wondering where this metaphor came from.

Ferociously sweaty, I looked at the dull trim I’d been scraping for hours and saw the truth: my allure was gone. Even more surprising was the revelation that came with it: so was the allure of the sun. My bloodshot eyes longed for the balm of clouds, low and gray, blocking the horizon.
There’s something I kind of need to admit at this point--a confession that betrays those Puritan roots I hinted at earlier. Despite what I told Zoe and Cally, I did actually go to college. I didn’t like to talk about it because it’s one of the few things in my life I can’t spin as ironic.

I dropped out before I graduated--but it was Yale I went to. I’d dreamed of going there since I was a kid, and I got a full scholarship to study English Literature with a focus on Critical Theory, which was all the rage in the late 80s.

I was ok for the first year. I went to all my classes religiously, had a 4.0 GPA and was the darling of all my professors who all assured me I was going to have a brilliant career following in their footsteps. But something happened my sophomore year that was beyond anything I’d read about in books, aside from fairy tales, which I only knew how to analyze for what they said about the culture they came from. I had no clue what to do when I actually started living one.

In my case I guess it was Sleeping Beauty, except for the beauty part, although I did have raven colored hair, ruby-red lips, and skin white as snow like the princesses always did in fairy tales.
Anyway, right after daylight savings time in late October, as the days grew shorter, I stopped getting out of bed, meaning I slept all day as well as all night, meaning I also stopped reading books and writing papers, meaning I failed all my classes and would have been kicked out of Yale if I hadn’t quit. The last paper I wrote was on Daniel Deronda and was a total failure since I hadn’t read the book.

Deep in the winter of my discontent, it came to me—what I had to do to wake up. On an afternoon where I cracked my eyes open to find myself in a dark-paneled, Gothic dorm room drowning in musty light I heard the words that saved me: “This life doesn’t belong to you,” wafted into the delicate spirals of my ears by the wings of a butterfly who had slipped through the heating ducts, radiant with the promise of secrets revealed if I was brave enough to follow it.
I closed my eyes once, then again, to make sure I wasn’t dreaming, but it was there every time I opened them, my eyelids fluttering like its jewel-toned wings, kaleidoscopic with color that lured me away with the ultimate fool’s gold—the promise that I could really be rescued.

Of course at the time I didn’t really realize this. I just wanted to escape somewhere besides sleep. I managed to get out of bed to go home for Christmas break, but when it was time to go back to classes I got on a Greyhound instead and rode it all the way to Key West, where I started my new classes in debauchery and bacchanalia, sometimes drunk enough to try to excuse my behavior by declaring I was a devotee to Dionysus to people who saw triple on a regular basis.

When summer rolled around I headed back North, to Block Island, this tiny seven mile island off the coast of Rhode Island that most Rhode Islanders hadn’t even been to. It was also full of professional drinkers, though they were less sybaritic than their Key West counterparts since this was New England we’re talking about, but I didn’t mind because the money was good, the beaches glorious, and nobody judged me for not doing something with my life because none of them were either. Well, some of the people we served did, but we just made fun of them for selling their souls for money when we, who cleaned their houses and bussed their tables littered with lobster shells, were free, our souls untainted by corruption, though we started the day with a Bloody Mary so our hands wouldn’t shake in front of the customers.

Back and forth I went, year after year, listening to my parents say “you’re not getting any younger, you know,” but I didn’t believe them because I knew exactly when it was time to go. I left when the butterflies came.

They arrived on the first cool breeze from the north that drifted toward the island from Canada sometime around the end of September when the goldenrod was in full bloom. If you stood at the edge of the clay bluffs on the south side of the island and looked out over the open ocean toward Portugal you might be the first to see one. After that, you couldn’t miss them. They were everywhere—drafting on the breeze kicked up by the ferry, fluttering around the heads of the last holdouts drinking frozen drinks on porch bars; clinging to screen doors and windshield wipers; and of course, they had all the flowers covered, especially the goldenrod, which if you looked closely was where they slept, napping on the stems in the sunlight, wings tucked close to camouflage their flame color.

Monarch butterflies--flocks of them drifting on the arctic air to a legendary pine forest high in the mountains of Mexico. Well, a legend to me at least. One of these days I was going to make it there myself.

It was my favorite time of the year—that time between staying and going. That time was like the moment before you catch what you know is going to be a wave that will bring you all the way to shore. You see it out beyond a couple of waves you know could give you a decent ride and wait, turning into it and paddling head down in complete trust that it will take you. When it comes, you know it’s what you’ve been waiting for your whole life. You hear a voice that says, “Look up! Look up!” and you are no longer lonely, for there right next to you is one unbelievably, delicate butterfly, catching the wave on gilded wings that flash against the sea spume.

Some of them do drown. The wrack is littered with their waterlogged bodies, tangled up in dried rockweed, picked over by seagulls, jumping with sand fleas.

I tried not to think about that sight, but that night, after Zoe and Cally left, I couldn’t get the image of all those crumpled antennae and waterlogged wings out of my mind.

I hadn’t told them, but as well as being the anniversary of the Moonwalk, it was also exactly one year ago tonight that I quit drinking, except for that one little slip up with the bartender and his worm, which I couldn’t forget, try as I might. My palms were still scarred from the broken glass I’d gripped when the mirror had cracked underneath my fingers.

Getting “sober” they called it. I should have been at an AA receiving my one year
chip, but I’d dropped out after six months. I just couldn’t say “Hi, I’m Minerva and I’m an alcoholic,” without feeling like a liar. I’ll admit, I was a drunk, but I had too much faith in the power of words to keep labeling myself something I didn’t want to be for the rest of my life. Besides, I hadn’t been tempted at all by that shot of zambucca Zoe had wanted to buy me.

It was going to be a long rest of the night, I was thinking, when out of the blue the phone rang. It was my mother, calling to see if I was all right, which she never did, especially at two in the morning. Usually we just chatted about whatever had gone on at our respective jobs or what our friends were doing at our scheduled time every other week, so I was surprised she would ask me a direct question about my life.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” she asked again before hanging up.

“I’m fine, Mom. Really. I just can’t sleep.”

“Must be genetic. I can’t either. It gets worse when you get older.”

“Doesn’t everything?”

After we hung up I was left with the ceiling fan and the refrigerator who didn’t seem possessed by magical bees or demons or whatever I’d convinced myself was out to get me. They were just regular electrical appliances draining the life out of the planet.

Did you know there’s no sound on the moon? It’s a vacuum. No sound, no wind, no erosion. Ghosts could speak and throw bricks around and you wouldn’t even know they were there unless you saw where they landed. They could terrify people by howling like banshees, warning them of their impending deaths.

The astronauts said they found no signs of life when they’d landed there forty years ago, but they could have been lying. They could have fallen under its spell. Or it could mean they just couldn’t see the life that was there because there senses were too dull. I know this is sounding pretty out there for a self-proclaimed, jaded cynic, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something just beyond the edge of my eyes the astronauts had missed, something silent that was trying to speak but couldn’t because it was trapped in a vacuum. Something that was trying to suck me into its hungry mouth, growing fat on my suppressed sadness, while I grew brittle and sharp as a sickle.

I walked over to the stack of milk crates where I kept my record collection to see if there was anything that would snap me out of this mood. I must really be freaking people out if my mom is calling me in the middle of the night. Zoe’s whole Sylvia Plath thing had me kind of freaked out about myself.

When I was a kid I loved collecting things—shells, stamps, feathers, stones. I threw them all away the summer I was sixteen, except the stamps which I stuck on postcards and envelopes for the next ten years in odd combinations that must have either puzzled or delighted whoever received them. I didn’t know. I sent them to people I found in the phone book. I felt kind of bad when I thought about them now. I hoped the shells, with the sound of the sea inside them, were still sighing wherever they’d ended up, that the stones hadn’t been crushed into gravel, and that the feathers had managed to drift out of the landfill and fly back to the clouds. Part of the reason behind my new collection was to make up for what I’d done to the first. I figured if I forced myself to collect what I was most scared of those things I’d thrown away might find a little rest and leave me alone.

I was hoping that listening to songs about my greatest fear would help me exorcise it, or at least understand the hold it had on me. I was also convinced this could only happen if I heard the songs on vinyl. There was something about the scratch of the needle when I dropped it in its groove, something about that moment before the song started where I came so close to understanding my fear I could feel it shiver through my bones that could never be replaced by a cold, slick laser that was also used to slice into eyes and other delicate organs.

It was a decent way to pass the night. I might even have done it now and then if I was normal and not an insomniac who had to find ways to pass the time besides agonizing about her own personal apocalypse and the state of the world. I learned so much about the moon from those records you might have said I was an expert on her moods. Sometimes she was benevolent like Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon,” sometimes cruel like “The Killing Moon” of Echo & The Bunnymen. I learned about moon shadows from Cat Stevens and how to moondance from Van Morrison, and how to walk on the moon from The Police. I learned what a little moonlight can do from Billie Holiday and how moonlight in Vermont looked shining on the sycamores, and how sad it was when your love proved untrue and left you blue under a blue moon of Kentucky.
I saw you standing alone there under a blue moon, too. You were even sadder than me, though not as frightened of being alone; though Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s was the saddest of all, drowning in that melancholy moonriver.

When I got to this song I always broke down, feeling the weight of my unlived life—you’re off to see the world, there’s such a lot of world to see, Holly strummed on her guitar on the fire escape, still fooling us she believed she could have it all. But we knew. We knew there was a Bad Moon Rising and we’d never see her again. Not unless we surrendered to The Dark Side of the Moon. I still had a couple I hadn’t even played yet. “Sister Moon” by Sting and REM’s “Man on the Moon,” but I was done fooling myself and there was no one to convince otherwise. I couldn’t even make it back to the sofa. I lay down on the hard, painted floor. A weight settled on my chest, pressing all the air from my lungs. My ribs cracked, bells splintered the humid night, ice-cold. My blood would stop flowing soon.

The lunatic is on the grass. The lunatic is on the grass. Remembering games and daisy chains and laughs. Got to keep the loonies on the path. The lunatic is in the hall. The lunatics are in my hall. The paper holds their folded faces to the floor And every day the paper boy brings more. And if the dam breaks open many years too soon And if there is no room upon the hill And if your head explodes with dark forebodings too I'll see you on the dark side of the moon. The lunatic is in my head. The lunatic is in my head You raise the blade, you make the change You re-arrange me 'til I'm sane. You lock the door And throw away the key There's someone in my head but it's not me. And if the cloud bursts, thunder in your ear You shout and no one seems to hear. And if the band you're in starts playing different tunes I'll see you on the dark side of the moon.

You know what seemed really strange to me now, but which seemed normal when it was happening, was that I knew who Michael Jackson was talking about without him actually saying the name out loud. When he asked me if I knew who he was, he wasn’t asking me if I knew who Michael Jackson was. And when he asked me to save him he wasn’t pleading with me to save him from the overdose that had killed him, like maybe a ghost would have. I knew who he was talking about because I’d been waiting for him for forty years to finally catch up with me.
The Man in the Moon. The thunder in my ear. The someone in my head that wasn’t me.

He’d let me off the hook that first time--why, I didn’t know. He could have crept back in through the slats of the shades when my mom finally pulled me from her breast and left me squirming in my cradle. Now I saw I’d been spared for a reason. Now it was time for me to pay back the boon granted me forty years ago. The only thing I couldn’t remember was what would happen if I didn’t, but I had a feeling I didn’t want to find out.