In her mind, and in my own.
Pretending can help in so many ways.
Now we hear birds chirping in the morning when we sit alone in the kitchen drinking coffee, even though it is winter. (These must be either tough, hardy city birds unafraid of low temperatures, or birds too lazy to migrate.) Mom always had the TV blaring because she liked to “listen to people talk,” so we never knew about the birds chirping before. Thirty-nine years in this house, and this is the first time we ever heard birds chirping in the morning sunlight while we drank our coffee in the kitchen.
A symphony of birds.
Have you ever really listened to birds chirping—really truly listened?
So pretty it makes your chest ache.
My grief counselor Wendy says I need to work on being more social and forming a “support group” of friends. She was here in my kitchen once when the morning birds were chirping and Wendy paused midsentence, cocked her ear toward the window, squinted her eyes, and wrinkled her nose.
Then she said, “Hear that?”
I nodded.
A cocky smile bloomed just before she said—as only someone so young could—in this upbeat cheerleader voice, “They like being together in a flock. Hear how happy they are? How joyful? You need to find your flock now. Finally leave the nest, so to speak. Fly even. Fly! There’s a lot of sky out there for brave birds. Do you want to fly, Bartholomew? Do you?”
She said all of those words quickly, so that she was out of breath by the time she finished her cheery cheer. Her face was flushed robin’s-breast red, like it gets whenever she’s making what she considers to be a remarkably extraordinary point. She looked at me wide-eyed—“kaleidoscope eyes,” the Beatles sing—and I knew the response to her call, what I was supposed to say, what would make her so happy, what would validate her existence in my kitchen and make her feel as though her efforts mattered, but I couldn’t say it.
I just couldn’t.
It took a lot of effort to remain calm, because part of me—the evil black core of me where the tiny angry man lives—wanted to grab Wendy’s birdlike shoulders and shake all of the freckles off her beautiful young face while I screamed at her, yelling with a force mighty enough to blow back her hair, “I am your elder! Respect me!”
“Bartholomew?” she said, looking up from under her thin orange eyebrows, which are the color of crunchy sidewalk leaves.
“I am not a bird,” I told her in the calmest voice available to me at that time, and stared fiercely at my brown shoelaces, trying to remain still.
I am not a bird, Richard Gere.
You know this already, I know, because you are a wise man.
Not a bird.
Not a bird.
Not.
A.
Bird.
Your admiring fan,
Bartholomew Neil
2
THAT GUY HUNG OUT WITH PROSTITUTES
Dear Mr. Richard Gere,
In order to remedy the gaps in our collective knowledge of each other, I went to the library and googled you on the Internet.
Patrons are permitted to look up anything at the library except pornography. I know because I once saw a man (with gray dreads that made his head look like a dead dusty spider plant) get kicked out for viewing Internet pornography in the library. He was sitting next to me, rubbing his crotch through his filthy, incredibly baggy jeans. On his screen were two naked women on all fours like dogs licking each other’s anuses. They kept moaning, “Ewwwww-yeah!” and “Mmmmmm-haaaa-YES!” I remember laughing because it was so ridiculous. The women acting like dogs, not the fact that the man was kicked out.
(Do people really enjoy looking at women behaving in this manner? I find it hard to believe, but if it is on the Internet, there must be a market. And not just crazy library patrons either—but people with computers at home, where such viewing is allowed.)
An older librarian came over and said, “This is not appropriate. Sir, you cannot behave this way here. This is entirely unacceptable! There are rules, sir. Sir, please.”
The man yelled at the librarian, refusing to go. He said, “I ain’t no sir! I’m a man! M-A-N MAN! H-U-M-A-N HUMAN B-E-I-N-G!” which made the old librarian jump and take a step back. She did not like his spelling at her.
Everyone in the library had turned and was staring by this point.
I was glad The Girlbrarian was not there to see.
(The Girlbrarian would not have been able to deal with such a situation, and I like that about her. She’s beautifully slow to take action. She thinks about things a lot before she makes a move. I watched her once as she sorted through books that had been damaged. I don’t know for sure, but based on my observations, I guessed it was her job to decide which damaged books should be thrown away and which should be taped together and kept. Most people would have glanced cursorily and quickly tossed each book to its fate one way or the other, right or left, keep or trash, but she examined the books so carefully, turning each over and over like precious dead butterflies that she could maybe open and make fly again if only she were gentle enough. I watched her for three full hours from the other side of the library as I pretended to read the newspaper. It was a miraculous sight to behold, until one of the other librarians came over and yelled at The Girlbrarian for taking so much time. She said, “These aren’t gilded in gold, Elizabeth!” The Girlbrarian flinched when the words hit her ears, and she hid in her long brown hair that covers her face like a waterfall can cover the entrance to a mysterious cave. That older librarian sorted through the remaining books in less than five minutes as The Girlbrarian watched through her hair with her shoulders slumped. I saw The Girlbrarian’s hands start to reach for several books as they were tossed into the throwaway pile, but she managed to refrain and her fingers never got more than five or so inches from her white-corduroy-covered thighs. You could tell The Girlbrarian wanted to intervene and argue on behalf of many of the books.)
Have you noticed that far too often the best people in the world lack power, Richard Gere?
China has power.
Tibet lacks power.
Are you impressed with my research into and knowledge of your favorite cause?
When the police arrived, the pornography man—who was most likely homeless, because he smelled like fish guts rotting in an old leather boot—shook his head several times, like he was really dismayed, disappointed even, and then he yelled, “I’ve paid taxes in my life! Dozens of times! Thousands of dollars. I’ve funded the U.S. government, which is your employer! You! And you! And you! All of you are government employees! Public servants. You work for us! The people! Not the other way around. I am your boss. You! You! YOU!” He pointed his index finger at all of the library workers and policemen. “Now I want my representation! This is a free country! If I want to look at porno, I can, because it’s my constitutional right as an American citizen. Porno for everyone!” The man ranted for some time about how much American presidents loved sex. Bill Clinton’s stained dress. Thomas Jefferson making love to his slaves. JFK and Marilyn Monroe. I wrote most of it down in my notebook immediately, because it was interesting, real, spontaneous, even if it remains unconfirmed, and is most likely an exaggeration.
But I recognized something important that most people do not understand: that homeless man was pretending he had the right to speak openly and freely, and pretending can be more important than settling for what is agreed upon as true—what everyone else is holding up as fact. (In this case, the fact was this: homeless men are not supposed to speak to people with homes—especially in a confident manner.) Facts are not always as important as pretending. Pretending gave that man the power he needed that day to speak his mind. Most of the government employees will never speak their minds, which is why they were so afraid of the homeless man. He disrupted their lives with his pornography and interesting presidential proclamations. If only more people pretended for good causes. If only The Girlbrarian could pretend more effectively—she would accomplish
many great things, I am sure of it. The problem is that madmen do all of the pretending and action taking. Have you noticed this?
I always write down interesting important things.
I don’t look at pornography because I am a Catholic, and I try not to masturbate, but I’m not always successful with my efforts.
Do you ever masturbate, Richard Gere?
I bet you haven’t had to masturbate in a long time—not since you became famous. When you marry a supermodel like Cindy Crawford, you probably don’t ever have to masturbate again. (I know you are no longer married to Cindy Crawford, but Carey Lowell. Like I said, I’ve been researching you.) Why would you even need pornography, with such beautiful women in your home?
Is it wrong for Buddhists to masturbate?
I used to tie my hands to my bedposts—you can do this without help if you practice enough times to master the art of making effective wrist nooses—in an effort to keep from masturbating as I fell asleep at night. But then Mom—who seemed never to tire of liberating me in the a.m., whenever I called out for freedom—reluctantly told me it was better to masturbate than have sex with strange women who have diseases like AIDS and herpes and the flu. She said you can even get the flu from having sex with strangers, and that many people die from the flu every year, which is why we got flu shots at Rite Aid every September.
But Mom also said, if I needed gratification, I should take care of it myself. She said that to me when I was in my twenties and was arrested for trying to solicit a prostitute who was an undercover cop.
Father McNamee arranged for a lawyer to help me and took me to the thrift store to shop for a suit. The men working at the thrift shop were homosexuals, and were—according to Father McNamee—therefore well versed in fashion. They were nice and helped me find the perfect courtroom outfit. “How does he look?” Father McNamee asked them when I came out of the dressing room. “Innocent,” one of the homosexuals said, and then smiled proudly.
“Catholics aren’t supposed to approve of homosexuality, right?” I asked Father McNamee when we were walking home.
“Catholics aren’t supposed to get arrested for soliciting the services of prostitutes either,” he said in this terse, almost mean way, even though he knew I was (and even looked) innocent.
“I liked the homosexuals who helped me find my suit. Is that wrong according to the Catholic Church?” I asked. “I just want a definitive answer.”
“Between you and me only—off the record—it’s not wrong,” Father McNamee said. “I liked them too. I’ve known Harvey for thirty years.”
“Who’s Harvey?”
“The owner of the store—and my friend.”
“So you have homosexual friends?”
“Of course,” he said, but he sort of whispered it fast.
During a dinner at our home, Mom once said to Father McNamee, “Seventy-five percent of all priests are gay. That’s why the church makes homosexuality a sin. Every rectory would be an all-out Roman orgy if they didn’t.”
They both laughed so hard at that one, maybe because they had been drinking bottles of wine.
When I went to court the judge said it was entrapment, because the cop—who was dressed up in a pink wig and a leather miniskirt and pointy cone bra and the highest heels you have ever seen—had stopped me on my way home from the library and rubbed up against my leg, calling me “Big Baby Daddy” (which was confusing, because how can you simultaneously be a baby and a daddy?) and asking me for money.
I asked how much she needed, and she said, “Twenty for head. Sixty for anything you want.” (I wrote that down later in my Interesting Things I Have Heard notebook.) No one had ever rubbed up against my leg like that before—it felt like I was frozen in time and space, like an ancient caveman trapped in ice or amber maybe—like it was a moment, and so I agreed to give the pink-haired woman some money with a nod, mostly because I thought it would make her happy, and my mouth was too dry to speak.
To be honest, I thought it would make her keep rubbing against my leg too, and that felt really, really good—like I was a stack of pancakes and she was the butter melting on top of me, sliding down. And I also did this because she had hypnotized me with her lips and eyes and mind and her makeup and her smell and her sweat—I wanted her to rub up against my thigh forever.
Pancakes and butter.
It all felt very lucky, like I had won a prize.
But just as soon as I pulled money out of my wallet, all of these men jumped out from behind trees and trash cans—pointing guns and flashing badges and screaming for me to get down on my knees and put my hands behind my head. They had a bullhorn that hurt my ears and made me feel like there were angry wasps tunneling through my mind. When they handcuffed my wrists behind my back, I was so afraid, I peed my pants and the cops yelled at me because they didn’t want “the piss” to get on the seat of their cruiser. One of them called me “a fucking retard,” I remember, because I wrote that down later in my notebook too—and also, I don’t like to be called a retard, but have often been called one, which is unfair and maybe even cruel.
He said, “Another fucking retard. He pissed himself. Look!”
The men laughed and the woman dressed in the pink wig lit up a cigarette as she rolled her eyes at me and shook her head.
“We should put this pathetic sack of shit out of his misery,” said a short cop. He was dressed like a bum, but his badge was hanging around his neck. It shimmered under the streetlights. He had a compact modern pistol in his hand, like what cops on TV carry. I worried that he was really going to shoot me between the eyes, because he looked at me like he didn’t believe I should exist, and all he had to do was pull a trigger to make me disappear forever. He had the power.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and meant it. I didn’t want to be the root of so much trouble. I was starting to believe that the angry cop was right about me. “I didn’t mean to cause any inconvenience.”
He shook his head disgustedly—like I was dog dirt he had just accidentally stepped in—and then he walked away, scraping me off on the rough cold sidewalk until his sole was completely clean of me.
I hope you have surmised by now that I am not a retard, Richard Gere.
I am “above average intelligence.”
Mom always told me that, anyway. She said I scored remarkably high on an unconventional IQ test my elementary school required its students to take, but that the world doesn’t always measure intelligence the right way.
“The world likes money better than truth,” Mom also used to say. “So we’re screwed!”
She used to laugh so hard whenever she said that.
“And you’re just a little off,” Mom would say. “Off in the best of ways. Perfect the way you are. My beautiful son. Bartholomew Neil. I love you so much.”
My young grief counselor Wendy says I am “emotionally disturbed” and “developmentally stunted” from having lived in a “codependent relationship” with my mother for so many years.
I don’t think Wendy likes Mom very much.
She once said Mom fed off me, which made my mother sound like a cannibal with a bone through her nose, stirring me up in some giant cauldron perched upon a pile of flaming wood.
Mom wasn’t like that at all; she was no cannibal.
This all went into my notebook.
Wendy told me I was “emotionally disturbed” and “developmentally stunted” when I asked why I needed a grief counselor, since I wasn’t really sad anymore that Mom had died—when I told her I had made peace and didn’t cry at night or anything like that. I had no grief to manage. She was wasting her time.
“She died peacefully because of the morphine,” I said. “And I’ll see Mom again in heaven.”
Wendy the grief counselor ignored my mention of heaven. She said, “You say you haven’t even cried yet. Yet. You are most likely repressing many emotions.”
“Do birds repress things?” I said, as a joke, keeping my eyes on my shoelaces, and Wendy laughed in
a good way that made me feel like I had stumped her with her own metaphor, and was therefore not a retard.
But as I was saying before, Mom had to come get me out of jail, and it took so long that my pants were dry by the time she got there, but my thighs had chapped from rubbing against wet jeans because I was pacing while incarcerated.
There was this interesting Puerto Rican man in my cell wearing makeup and he kept blowing kisses at me and saying he wanted to “cut me gently” whenever the cops weren’t around. I know he was Puerto Rican because he had on a T-shirt that read PUERTO RICANS FUCK BETTER. Although maybe he could have been a non–Puerto Rican who just liked to have sex with Puerto Ricans, I suppose. Regardless, it was interesting and unusual, so I wrote it in my notebook.
That night, after she bailed me out of jail and took me home, Mom told me that self-gratification—while it was technically a sin in the Catholic Church, sometimes referred to as the sin of Onan—was probably the path for me. She wasn’t really mad at me for getting arrested, especially after I told her what had happened—how the pink-haired woman had basically jumped out of an alley and began to rub against my leg before I could say or do anything. Mom nodded and said she wished she had told me about self-gratification before all of this happened, but such talks were usually the job of the father, and my father had died far before I was old enough for sex talks, so Mom really isn’t to be blamed.
That night Mom came into my room, sat on the edge of my bed like she used to when I was a boy, pointed above my headboard to the crucifix—her gift to me when I was confirmed—and she said, “That guy hung out with prostitutes. He got arrested too. So you’re in good company, Bartholomew. Don’t let this rip you apart inside, okay?” When I didn’t respond, Mom said, “I wish you had run into a Vivian Ward instead of an undercover cop.” She was referencing Julia Roberts’s character in Pretty Woman, which I don’t have to tell you. “I want more. I want the fairy tale,” Mom said, just like Julia Roberts said to you in the movie. “I want the fairy tale for you, Bartholomew. If I couldn’t have it, I want it for you. So keep believing in fairy tales, okay? Keep believing that even some prostitutes are good-hearted women. Believe. Pretend even!” I don’t know why—maybe because Mom was always so hopeful for me, and I never could manage to confirm her wild suspicions about her only son—but I had to turn my face away from her. I felt the tears coming, the pressure building up behind my eyes. Mom ran her fingers through my hair for a few minutes, like she did when I was a boy. Even though I was too old to be tucked in like that, I was glad she did what she did. It made the angry man in my stomach fall asleep. It was like her hand was able to perform a miracle that night. “I want the fairy tale for you, my sweet, sweet trusting boy,” she said once more before she turned out the lights and exited my bedroom.