Dear Mr. You (3 page)

No one wants to hear about the congenital melancholy that gnaws at the soul of a teenaged girl, and there was no one for me to tell. Skulking through life as a loser was oddly shaming though, and has continued to trail me through realities that flat out contradicted it. At sixteen I only wanted to be worth the level of beseeching I felt in the wail of your harmonica. It went inside me, that sound. It crept up and under my skirt and made my skin beg back. There had to be someone as lonely as me who needed to be kissed and infuriated in just the right way.
I know how to do all that
is what I thought.

It may be that everyone feels peripheral in high school. My one friend and I stuck together, but some days I would walk halfway to school in the morning only to turn around and go back. I started counting my credits in my head, one day realizing I could leave high school altogether in a few months if I took extra classes. “What about graduation? What about prom?” I heard a few ask. “Precisely,” I thought to myself.

I packed up my records and went to live with my sister, who would instill me with some kind of confidence if it killed her, she would help find somewhere with others like me and stand quietly applauding when I took my first baby steps toward it. My first college dorm room had your album cover taped to the door. I was at arts school now, having finally said out loud that I wanted to be an
actress, and I was in the right place. Nothing I could do on that campus was weird enough. Surrounded by every other rejected neighborhood freak, we were unleashed. Freedom didn’t fit yet, but if I wasn’t entirely authentic, I was making friends and jokes like I’d always known how. Boys were following me. I wore opera gloves to breakfast and held my unitard on with safety pins. My friend Ken and I did our one-man shows for each other (he in a straight-jacket, me in a coffin) and he’d sing Waits at the piano while I hung on him and wept. Joe M. called me “girl with no spine”; always draped over a boy like I had no bone or muscle to sit up on my own. We were happily unhinged, those of us who aspired to be Malkovich; to make theater that was incendiary and new. Led by my friend Peter, we started creating it in rehearsal spaces at night. When security banged on my door with a tornado warning, I gave them the finger. My legs were wrapped around the face of a green-eyed boy who also ignored that safety evacuation while you blasted from the turntable at a nearly unlistenable level. I couldn’t get life loud enough.

The last time I saw you in concert I stood on the stage by the soundboard. The fact that you seem to know who I am is still confounding, but someone told you it was my birthday and you sang a song for me. I was about as close to detonation as I get.

Afterward I listened to you talk about the show. There is a level of purity in your approach that you could have left by the side of the road years ago. It doesn’t come for free the way you do it and I get the feeling you couldn’t live with yourself if you faked your way through. You said

We are the custodians of people’s memories

You feel a responsibility to your audience when you play live. You said you can let it go the way of formula with everyone leaving reasonably sated, or invent it in the moment, which always comes with the risk of failure. It’s your goal to go digging for it each time, letting it grow out and under the audience until they’re part of its composition. I have to hold that up as a metaphor for everything, being prepared and then being brave enough to just be there. Just listen and follow, maybe jump. Everyone leans in, it brings them into your emotional vicinity, because, you said

Risk creates intimacy

That works everywhere, but onstage it’s more common to opt for the easy way. It’s a whole other gift when you relinquish being impressive in the moment to make it about the moment itself. Then the love you’re getting back from the crowd is out of the picture. Without risk, it’s just handing out a bunch of pie. Everyone is content but I’m not sure it endures or changes anyone. The clearest about this was maybe Bob Dylan. When asked how he could stand being booed and keep on playing, he said, “You got to realize you can kill someone with kindness, too.”

Sometimes I still have to go back and sit on the swing set with you at midnight. Feel myself reflected in the broken but unbeatable gaze of another misfit toy. Your songs were so often about an elsewhere, a promised land where things would be okay, like the Three Sisters’ insistent longing for Moscow. Amidst the slamming doors in your songs was a tenderness I was dying for. Listening to you sing about it, romance grew in me like a lotus in
the mud, and you always held your car door open so nicely in my dreams. I could sigh just remembering it now. Always looking at me like I mattered, who cares if you were trapped inside vinyl. It got me through, dreaming of your backseat, and that was Moscow enough for me.

Any normal person can juggle. You made it clear that sure, certain people could not, but they were abnormally uncoordinated and would never be actors. I was on the fast track to failure being one of two people in the entire class who could not juggle. I could barely toss.

At breakfast the freshmen could be seen juggling biscuits. At lunch the lawn was littered with us juggling packs of Marlboro Lights while also smoking them, and at night some would exit the showers juggling sticks of deodorant. The hotshots would show off, but most were hoping just to pass the mandatory juggling exam held each week. I was privy to a lot of gruesome meltdowns on the hill that you didn’t know about since teachers rarely wandered there. First-year drama students would buckle from the pressure. They’d throw their beanbags into the grass, swearing
through clenched teeth. Everyone except me and one other girl,
^I
though, could keep them in the air for at least a few seconds.

My friend P. was a proficient juggler, part of the group who could have been plucked off campus and shuttled away to Big Apple Circus. He would join the contingent on the lawn that could juggle while doing somersaults; he could have easily juggled while rebuilding the engine for someone’s car. He was, in fact, in all the promo materials for the school, a photo of him looking gorgeous and juggling
while on a unicycle.
My friend M. was a competent juggler. M. didn’t go to sleep chasing dreams of you lobbing swords at him until his head flew off. He only went to bed fearing I might have sex with his roommate while he had to pretend to be asleep. Sorry about that, M. I mean, guilty.

M. meditated a lot because his Aunt O. had sent him to a Transcendental Meditation teacher. I thought that was weird. He’d sit there on the freezing dorm room floor, eyes closed and drooling a little for twenty minutes twice a day. Years later I learned meditation and it changed me profoundly. I now sit there every day with eyes closed, but I hardly ever drool. I’m sorry that, okay, I also had some amount of sex with M.’s roommate while he was meditating ten feet away. It was his special time and that was creepy of me.

You as our teacher must have realized that we did things most college freshmen aren’t expected to do. During voice class we jogged across campus in our “blacks,” the spandex uniform
we wore as first-year drama students, and as we jogged we held a piece of cork between our teeth to relax our jaw muscles. L., our voice teacher, sent us out the door, clapping her hands to establish a rhythm and urging us to “Flick those fetlocks! Flick! Flick them!” We trotted into other buildings where ballet dancers and opera singers would barely notice us jogging by while chanting SPA LA LA YA YA YA GA GA GA (with the corks it came out more PHA RA RA YUL YUL YUL CAW CAW CAW).

For the frontier exercise in acting class we sat with eyes closed, rocking side to side and waiting for the urge to roll or jump into the space and enter our “frontier.” Landing in a difficult personal memory, we’d describe our feelings as the teacher walked us through the reexperiencing of it. Frontier involved weeping and shouting unintelligibly, whereas in speech class we articulated plosives and mastered “liquid u’s” so that the word
duty
became more “dyutee” than “doody.” In text class we sat on the floor in leg warmers taking copious notes while our chain-smoking professor broke down the import of the stress in “Our Town” being on “Town,” and not “Our.”

My other classes were not the same kind of struggle as yours. I did well in Marty’s class with frontier and the “No Rose Without a Thorn”
^II
exercise. In dance class I was not bad at the routine set to “Eye of the Tiger.” We were stuffing in everything we could and
generally having the time of our lives, yet still the elderly, the infirm, could juggle better than me. I sensed you suspecting that my special-needs juggling was emblematic of my inability to be “neutral.”

The drama faculty wanted us to find artistic “neutrality.” If we didn’t find it we could be drop-kicked all the way home, and my failure to find a neutral-suit made you throw up your hands. I tried but couldn’t even fake it. It’s a speed I don’t offer on my gearshift. I was not issued the particular tool kit of middle. Gymnastics was also an issue. For those who couldn’t swing a handspring by themselves, another student was poised at the spring-off point to “spot” us. When it was my turn the spotter would assume the posture, knowing deep down there would be nothing to spot. My handspring was basically me scurrying down the mat and reaching out with the beginnings of a cartwheel, then squatting and contracting into a ball as though I’d been hit with severe abdominal cramps. Then I’d pop up, arms raised and an impish expression on my face. I thought impish would suggest the spirit of those Russian girls in the Olympics with micro ponytails who never menstruate, but it only made me look spastic.

Gymnastics was a bust, but my low point was the day you were teaching the forward undulation walk. First you had us lie on the ground to relax our back muscles. I intentionally did not lie next to M. because I knew he’d try to make me laugh or he’d have a distracting erection, so I went over by V. and C. My class had a real camaraderie, even our wild parties or mini orgies
^III
had
a ring of Swiss Family Robinson, and there was no sabotaging. As a result I didn’t feel completely isolated when you marched over and snapped at me. “This isn’t naptime! Wake up.”

I wasn’t tired or even spacing out. I was trying to let go of the blockage in my lower back, I triple swear, but the thing you could not have been expected to understand was that I have my entire life given people the wrong signals with my face, which was actually working overtime to find an expression that was neutral and someone who understood how to work in opposition, but I was not the sum of those faces. I was still the face that sometimes infuriated others against my will. (I know you thought my lizard was inappropriate during the animal exercise. I really don’t recall trying to make my lizard overtly sexual, per se.) Regardless, in that moment I said nothing and stood up with the rest of the class. I was across from S. and we began undulating, but you were not happy and walked through the maze of black Danskins, waving your arms and telling us to just, please. Stop. You stood in front of us but facing the mirror. You shook your head, giving a Kabuki version of a shrug and then you said, “Don’t you people understand about working in opposition!”

We did not.

I wonder if you still teach that? Where you catch an impulse and throw it to someone after undulating through your center? Forgive me but I feel like an impulse is not something you can catch. You can catch a ride to Mr. Waffle, you can catch herpes, but an impulse is supposed to spring
from you
and is mechanically antecedent to a reflex, because it can be squelched, whereas a reflex is automatic, isn’t it? When impulses need curtailing, you have to learn “impulse control,” so can you really see one coming from an
outside source in sweatpants and, like, catch it? Wouldn’t that be like catching someone’s repression? Sorry, did you consider calling it “Catching a vibe,” or even “Seize that wave”? I’m not certain it was useful. Maybe that’s why we did it, though. To dive in and not ask why, maybe that was the point. I can say in retrospect that actually, to do a move so unsexy in front of your peers with or without a cork lodged in your jaw has to be useful. I’m wondering if I misunderstood the whole thing? It’s possible that I exhibited some kind of rejection of it that showed on my face despite my protestations of being the most eager student ever. Wow. Okay, so maybe I was not entirely honest about me. Myself. For what it’s worth I think I may get the value of it, however circuitous my arrival at this understanding may be. Yes. So it’s safe to say I am late. In getting it.

On that day though, after admonishing the entire class you turned away from the mirror to face me, and said, only to my face, while pointing, also at my face

Why can’t you get this Why can’t you get anything

Cut to me pulling the midterm evaluation letter from my mailbox that had
ARTS PROBATION
stamped across it. The letter basically stated that I needed to fix myself or I would be gone.

I was ashamed and embarrassed. I hated that I would have to tell my father even though I knew he would take my side. I read the evaluation from you that explained why you had suggested that probation. You said that

She asks inappropriate questions that disrupt class

She appears spaced-out and bored

The lack of physical energy is alarming

Her use of sexuality is offensive

I was so mad. I felt like I was trying to be what you wanted and you were stuck in your categorical rejection of everything I was. Am.

I sulked but not so much that I would be caught caring what you thought of me. I went back to the dorm and sat holding the letter, reading and rereading the notice of my potential expulsion. My friend M. came in and asked what was up and I told him that you hated me. I said you were a turd and what you’d written on the evaluation was bogus. I showed him the letter and while still holding it and looking down at it without expression he asked me