11. Angela Davis, Katy Perry & Me
The Year of Paying Attention
In a hand-crafted pink pussyhat, Sarah led the way, with Cynthia and her husband Marc (a non-protesting newspaper man, thus no pussyhat), in close pursuit, along with more pink-domed friends, and me bringing up the rear. I shouted, “I just remembered — I don’t like crowds!” But it was too late for that, and this was some crowd, an estimated 470,000 marchers from across the United States, one day after Trump’s inauguration, our little band heading towards the Capitol dome, and in every direction a sea of excited women and children and men.
It all started when Cynthia posted on social media that she and Marc were going to The Women’s March, the day after Trump’s inauguration. I hollered down the hall, “Sarah! Let’s go with them!” The plan came together effortlessly — we would have dinner in Baltimore the night before, and sleep nearby in Sarah’s mother’s then-empty suburban house. Probably nobody would be arrested or injured, and we would be a part of history!
The night before, with our friend Virginia from Brooklyn along for the adventure, the five of us did our best to ignore the big-screen TV mounted near the Thames Street Oyster House bar, but couldn’t help catching glimpses of live coverage of Trump dancing.
We chatted with four women at the next table, who’d traveled from San Antonio and Austin for the march. “My little boy came home from school and said, ‘Mommy, the President doesn’t like Mexican people.’” one woman said. “And I told him, ‘Well, honey, I’m Mexican,’ and he was very upset.” Her sister showed us pictures of her daughters in Austin and the signs they’d made. “Everybody in here is going to the march,” the restaurant owner, a high school friend of Sarah’s, told us, before sending extra desserts to our table, to fortify us for the next day.
We rose early on march day, staggered into the kitchen for coffee, then drove to the MARC train station at the Baltimore airport, to travel to DC. We barely made it onto a tightly packed train platform. Lots of hand-knit pink pussyhats, hand-written protest signs, women of every generation and men in the minority, and a sense of mounting excitement, but also apprehension–would we make it to Washington?
The throng continued to swell, filling the stairs, gathering on both sides of the train tracks. The public address system crackled to life. “You have to wait in line, even if you just have a question — there is no separate question line!” The crowd laughed. One train flew by, so fast that a pussyhat was blown off somebody’s head toward Washington. The crowd gasped. “Please stand away from the yellow platform safety strip,” boomed the harried voice on the PA system. It seemed like every train was going to be packed by the time it got to where we waited. Protesters began to politely push their way back to the parking garage. “We’re going to try to take an Uber,” I heard someone say.
The slight thinning of the crowd gave us a chance to move closer to the perilous yellow safety strip, and I saw the train pulling into the station was crowded but not packed. “C’mon!” yelled Sarah, and I felt panic — we’re going to be separated! Just then my New York subway skills kicked in, and a moment later, somehow, the five of us were smooshed together inside the train, crammed alongside the people we were crammed alongside on the platform. We were going to Washington.
At Union Station, a lone man sported a “Make America Great Again” hat in the waiting area, peering around with an air of stubborn but sheepish determination. Nobody bothered him. Marc wandered over to talk with two African American women, press credentials hanging around his neck, and learned they were from California, one a doctor. I felt like a news groupie. I watched Marc talk to marchers, women in hard hats, in wheelchairs, with toddlers, jotting in his reporter’s notebook with a pencil (“It works even when it’s wet,” explained Cynthia, herself a former journalist).
All March Day, I never quite knew where I was. I followed Sarah, and drove her crazy, not wanting to push into a packed area to get closer to the speakers, ready to move away from the action, acting like a nervous old man. Toward the end of the afternoon a cheer went up as we shuffled past the Newseum, the unfortunately named museum of American reporting. Hooray for journalism! A while later, a resounding “Boo!” rose around us — we were creeping past the Trump hotel.
When it was time to head back to the train station, I set out trotting like a horse returning to the barn. “You’re going too fast,” Cynthia yelled. “We can’t all keep up!” The lines were long. Miraculously we got seats on a train. We picked up pizza to bring home. We were tired and elated. We all wanted to read what Marc hadn’t started writing yet, which had to be filed by morning, for posting online. We all wanted to read about what we’d just experienced.
As I recollect this now, a few days later, I’m already switching out my memories for better ones. On the packed platform, in the swelling crowds, I was irritated. I admit it. Standing in one spot or another, then moving at a snail’s pace from here to there, I couldn’t hear Angela Davis or Katy Perry (and what would Katy Perry talking sound like?). Eating another power bar, not drinking coffee or water for fear of port-a-potty lines, my legs aching, my brain wearying of the chants, feeling old and vaguely irrelevant, I thought, what am I doing here? But now, I only remember how great it all was to be there.
“A beautiful mess,” said the Globe headline. Marc wrote, “Saturday’s event in Washington was a mess, all right — but what a mess! MARC and Metro trains into the city were clogged from the early hours, and estimates grew from the 200,000 marchers initially expected to more than 500,000.”
My god, I thought as I read it — we were there! I heard these people say these things! “As for the mess,” his dispatch continued, “no one I talked to was particularly put out by it. One married lesbian couple from Delaware taking the morning MARC train into the city had been encouraged to bring their young daughter (turning three on Jan. 26) because ‘any march that has lactation stations is kid-friendly.’ That, and the Facebook group Stroller Brigade, with 700 members.”
The morning after, I made scrambled eggs and bacon for us marchers and the reporter, and we went to see the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, then dropped Marc and Cynthia at the airport, and headed into the traffic jam heading home to New York, thinking about Marc’s wrap-up: “So yes, it was a mess, in an overgrown, Occupy kind of way. A mess like democracy itself. And it was good. Now the real work begins.”
***
It’s not getting any warmer in New York, but I don’t care, because I’m in Florida, plenty warm, here to visit Sarah’s mother, in a placid, gated community build around a golf course. Sarah’s mother seems to like me fine, and the feeling’s mutual. The problem is, I’m closer in age to her mother than I am to Sarah. Casting about for a fact to make this situation less awkward, I remember that her father and my father were close in age, both World War II veterans. This must mean we’re essentially the same generation, despite the twenty-five year age difference.
Traditionally, a man in his sixties might scan the obits to gauge how he’s faring in the quest to evade the grim reaper. Instead, I scan the wedding announcements for happy couples divided by an enormous age gulf. Before I fell in love with Sarah, I knew a few couples in a “May/December relationship,” (the blush of Spring on one cheek, the shadow of Death on the other), and I’d think, well, that’s going to end badly. Now I find a groom of my vintage in the paper, his grinning face pushed up next to a beaming woman of Sarah’s age, and I silently exult. “Proof!” I think. “They look happy, and the New York Times doesn’t seem to care about the age difference, so why should anybody– what’s the problem?” My inner judge is unconvinced.
I first saw Sarah in a 12-step meeting. She didn’t speak much, didn’t hang around to chat after the meetings, and when I made a friendly overture one morning, she wasn’t too friendly back. Fine, I thought, we don’t have to be friends. When she did occasionally speak during the meeting, she seemed smart and thoughtful. Then we ran into each other on the streets of Manhattan a couple of times, and stood around chatting about meditation or music or whatever kept her from walking away, and she told me she was writing a memoir, and looking for honest feedback. I volunteered, imagining this might inspire me to do some writing of my own, finally.
I was on to myself, or thought I was. Here was a lovely woman who was interested in talking to me. It was flattering. I’d observed this pattern in my behavior with interesting women (sometimes with men, but in those instances there was no feather display). I knew my habit of perceiving great virtues and sympathetic qualities in virtual strangers, which would fade as I got to know them better. I’d snap out of it, and then we’d still be friends, or we wouldn’t.
But Sarah persisted in appearing rational and intelligent, and she laughed at my jokes. She appeared to know and to like herself. She seemed kind, smart, and consistent. She enjoyed talking with me as much as I did with her. And her memoir was good, ruthlessly honest, stringent and unapologetic. Sometimes we went to coffee shops after recovery meetings, we met to discuss pages a few times in Brooklyn on the weekend, and after I showed her something I’d written, she said it was good, and suggested I try to get it published somewhere.
“I couldn’t do that,” I told her. “My family and friends have no idea about any of the stuff you’re reading. They don’t know that guy.” She looked at me like I was crazy. Why not, she asked. In that moment it began to dawn on me — I’d been impersonating a version of myself since I’d stopped drinking fifteen years earlier, performing a version of myself that was responsible, sober, a man with his shit together. A facade I didn’t know I’d built shook, a tiny crack caused by the uncomprehending look on Sarah’s face. Who was I, anyway? Had my entry into a second recovery program the year prior to this conversation begun to change my perspective?
(I’m not being coy when I don’t name these programs, which saved my life and freed me from much misery. That is the tradition, established many decades ago. Them’s the rules.)
I joined the second fellowship after two friends from the recovery meeting where I met Sarah suggested it. I’d been complaining about something they both thought called for the “the feelings program,” the one for friends and families of problem drinkers, rather than “the beverage program” designed for those very problem drinkers. I heaved a sigh and resolved to investigate. I discovered program two was very similar, and very different. Meetings ran much the same way, but the energy level was more subdued, and I found the focus disorienting. I kept hearing this crazy idea: I was not responsible for the happiness of other people. What? That couldn’t be right. Just as disorienting was the notion that my own happiness was important. Whoa, whoa, whoa — I thought, let me get this straight.
The “beverage” program helped me stop drinking, clear up my thinking, get into healthier habits; it gave me a support system, new friends (along with some strange acquaintances, just like the wider world), and jump-started my growing up, which had been stunted before I’d reached adulthood. This “feelings” program expanded my thinking, about my own satisfaction, and the healthy limits a sane person would put on responsibility for other people’s lives. This new program freaked me out. These new ideas were percolating as I wrote stuff for Sarah to read, and she was perplexed by my embarrassment and shame about revealing myself, accepting myself.
This was quite a curve ball. I’d been operating under the assumption that since I’d quit drinking I’d developed oodles of self-awareness. I’d also figured Sarah would soon enough prove to be charmingly unhinged, considering her background of trauma and abuse, which her book manuscript laid out in vivid detail. I was accustomed to meeting and liking people in recovery meetings, people who presented well, only revealing their neuroses over time, once they let their guard down. I love my friends, who are all a bit crazy, right? But as Sarah and I got to know one another, it was me I noticed with the warped thinking.
It got worse. As our conversations continued I reveled in the freedom to tell the whole truth, not keeping secrets from this open, confident, even-keeled woman. I couldn’t wait for our next meeting, more conversation. I wondered if I was going insane. When I realized I was falling in love, I met Sarah in a Greenwich Village diner to explain that I couldn’t see her anymore, and that I had to try to fix my marriage. I went home and I told my wife I was unhappy. We began couples counseling, and I resumed talking to a Buddhist therapist on my own, a man who’d previously helped me navigate some choppy emotional waters. Couples counseling didn’t make things better. It confirmed that things were broken. I stopped sleeping. I babbled to my closest friends, who thought I was nuts. I felt nuts. My therapist encouraged me to say what was true in sessions with my wife, that I was lonely and unhappy, and then be quiet. I did that, and our conversations with the counselor didn’t go anywhere. It wasn’t anybody’s fault.
But secretly I knew better. It was all my fault, and no one could doubt it. Now, nearly five years after my marriage began to end, I wonder what happened, when it began, what I should have done differently. This train of thought goes precisely nowhere, and still I look out the window, wondering. I didn’t want to hurt my wife and daughters, but I did. My wife didn’t want me to feel lonely and unhappy, but I did. We didn’t think we’d divorce when we got married, but the marriage ended. I wouldn’t recommend a woman like Sarah get involved with a much older man, but she did. I didn’t think a man of my age and background could fall in love like a schoolboy, but damned if I didn’t.
Next week: Congratulations! You May Already Be A Loser!
