rm | i watch your hands

The New Year's Eve before I went to Australia, I coat-checked at a loft party because I had no one to be with and work seemed better than trying to make the night something it was not. I was promised a certain negligible amount of cash and that I'd walk about with at least five-hundred dollars in cash form tips.

But the party turned out to be oversold and the bathrooms failed and as the night went on my job went from being potentially lucrative to pure misery as I and the other girls working tried to stop people from pissing in our basement. Everyone was angry and no one tipped, but at five bucks a coat, thousands of dollars were floating around our coffers.

When the police came to shut down the party, because of the overflow and the toilets and the drugs and everything, the guy running the show tried to fob us off with just $100 each. One of the cops pulled me aside and said, "If I were you, I'd get what's yours now," and so I grabbed my things and grabbed a wad of cash out of the box, before calling Kat and meeting her at a restaurant up in her neighborhood.

*

When I was a kid, I bought things like 16 Magazine and Tigerbeat and cut out the photos of the men I had crushes on. I wanted them, and I wanted to be chosen by them, but without question I also wanted to be them. I admired, as much as anything, the line of their clothes, a notion barred to me due to the form of my flesh. Even when I was a young dancer with no shape at all thanks to the work, my spine curved in a certain manner. My ass stuck out. I was born to never be a ballerina. Or a man.

*

At the restaurant, I told Kat the whole sordid tale, only to look up to find, astoundingly, the man I'd stolen from entering the establishment. She told me to leave, to head down the block to near where she lived and she'd meet me there. I bolted and later she came. I was pacing and nervous. She told me the waitress thought I had just broken up with her.

*

Despite the clippings, despite my following the instructions of girldom in a manner that was as much sincere as it was committed and calculated, I found the pictures of the men I dutifully had crushes on nearly impossible to look at. I have written about this before, about my inability to look into or at the eyes of a photo, lest its subject somehow know and inquire why I should think someone like me should be entitled to look at someone like them.

*

Tonight, as Marci and I were walking to the party, I recognized the car wash on the corner of 12th Avenue.

"I coat-checked at a really awful New Year's party on this block once and stole a shit-load of money from the till. It was kinda fucked up, and why when I went to Sydney, I made sure the plane skipped the 31st."

"Which building was it?"

"I don't know. I'm not sure. Maybe when we get closer. Oh, shit, you know.... I think it's where we're going. Just, you know, renovated."

I laughed, nervously.

*

Since my scrapbook childhood, my ability to make eye-contact has always been impaired. I only manage it with people I trust very much.

Mostly, I am, instead, admiring the creases at the corner of your eyes, a map of joys like the rings of trees. Or I am looking at the texture of your skin, which I imagine tells me whether or not you love yourself and how much time you steal alone in the bath before you put on even your private public face. I look at the line of your hair, the cuff of your shirt, whether your watch fits, the jewelry you wear, and how you hold your mouth when you are not speaking.

I watch your hands.

All because I have no ability to mimic voices, but I can copy anyone's hand gestures, body language and cadence; it's the gift of a girl who can never look at photos the way she's supposed to, who knows that far away is as close as she's ever going to get.

*

I don't know who the fuck in New York City goes to a cocktail party in jeans, but I've given up trying to understand, and possibly even judge, these things. There was more of them than there were of me, so I imagine the possibility is high that I'm actually the one getting it wrong.

I told Marci awful stories from Australia and we were catty about nearly everyone else's wardrobe. We stood, we sat, we wandered around, and I tried not to look over her shoulder too much. There's little point in that when you know you can't make eye-contact, and it breaks the rules besides that say there is no such thing as the cool party happening somewhere else.

Eventually, that thing happened where the crowd collectively knew it was time for something to transpire and Marci suggested we wander towards the front. The part of the venue we were in was shockingly small to me, but it was certainly packed. And yet somehow, merely by drifting we wound up front and center behind the row of photographers, one of whom I recognized, but could not place. Maybe he once took pictures of me naked.

As is the case with these events, someone took the stage to introduce someone else, to introduce someone else, to introduce someone else. I worried that I would blush and that someone other than me might notice, like Richard did in Sydney that time I fell down the stairs.

And when the man said Juliet, I certainly did not expect Claire Danes to appear.

She's younger than me and looks older. I admire that. She looks the age she is. I've wondered what that's like for a long time. As the cameras flash in a way that's overwhelming even from behind them, she reads in a hilarious, odd, monotone the introduction that was written for her and talks too about reading cereal boxes in iambic pentameter.

And then Baz Luhrmann takes the stage. And from over here, for the girl who once coat-checked and stole in this awful place and went to Australia and keeps secrets badly and finds it hard to look at pictures, it was very strange being accidentally front and center and statuesque because damn, these shoes I bought are high.

So I looked at his cuffs, meant for cufflinks, but without; the bracelet on one wrist; a ring on the littlest finger of the opposite hand; the ridiculously expansive hand gestures, and I thought simply that oh, I am silly, which is okay, because oh, I am pleased.

Luhrmann told a story or two in the style of the routine-that-is-clearly-a-routine and the he-knows-that-we-know-that-he-knows-that-we-know thing that is the way, both of these events and also just of people who communicate through story more often than through mere assemblages of fact.

It was super great, and the festival presented him with an award thing that had an amazing design (although I shudder when I think of how likely or not it is that that piece of lucite and mirror and construction could possibly make it back to Australia in one piece) and he told this lovely, lovely story about listening to the album of Jesus Christ Superstar as a boy and how his family only could afford to send one boy to see the show and it wasn't him who got to go.

*

I grew up in New York going to the theater, and I grew up with the daughter of the meanest man in show business and parents who bought me an autograph book for when she took us to see 42nd Street. I grew up a knowing child in a knowing place, and I wonder sometimes if stories would have felt different to me had I not grown up unavoidably amongst the mechanics of them. Would they have seemed real enough to me as a child, that I would not feel so urgent a need to dedicate my life to the truth of fiction as an adult? Maybe, I think, the truth of stories would be even more important to me. But I'll never know.

*

It embarrasses me, sometimes, how hard I find it to look at pictures. But it means that I see instead the lovely rings of trees when confronted with the men I've had crushes on, and also that I feel there is a gentleness in the reliability of narrative and pattern as I perceive it, one I am consistently very grateful for on behalf of the twelve-year-old girl I never really wanted, or knew how, to be.

There are other things to report from this evening, but they don't fit in this narrative. I'll share tomorrow. It was scads of fun. Right now I need to go send an email to a boy I once knew informing him that at no point in this evening's adventure did I, in fact, fall down a flight of stairs; just a little giggle that for those in the know. Then? Bed. Have a good one.