#74: Vagabond

(originally published Feb. 2, 2011)

As I write, there’s a piece of luggage on the floor of the study, semi-unpacked. It should have been fully unpacked a week ago, but since then, it’s become a piece of furniture: the cats play around it, sleep in it, make themselves comfortable in its presence. Matthew looks at it pityingly. He knows the more he mentions it, the more it becomes a permanent fixture. Better to let the clothes get coated in cat fur. That’ll teach him.

I’ve lived out of suitcases for weeks before. Cardboard boxes, months.

I have a reason, this time, for not unpacking. Soon, I will make a 2-hour drive to Washington, D.C., for the three-day Associated Writing Programs conference (sort of like the Modern Language Association conference but with 200% less despair and 200% more alcohol). The sweaters stay put, as do the thick socks and other pieces of clothing designed to keep me warm.

A winter storm makes inexorable progress across the midsection of the United States, like a roll of unwanted flab. It will soon suffocate the East Coast. About 2 miles from our home, there’s a car buried to its windows in snow, victim of the previous storm. A baby mammoth, separated from the herd, caught in ice.

Vagabond opens with a shot of a girl in a ditch, frozen to death. When the police lift her into a body bag, her legs stay rigid. They look as if they might snap off.

I’m neither worried about ice on the roads nor about my ability to maneuver through a skid. I am worried about what I should have in the car but don’t: flares, thermal blanket, reflective orange signs—things in case I end up in a ditch. I could probably build a small shelter out of the clothes packed (or intended for packing) for the trip.

You could read my reluctance to unpack (ever!) as an indication that no place feels like home. At any moment, I may have to uproot myself and settle someplace new. Why, therefore, invest the energy to put away belongings when you might have to gather them up again?

You could also read the exact opposite: this place where I’ve dropped my luggage—home—is where I feel comfortable enough to leave things in disarray, knowing that they’ll always be there (or, at least, until Matthew’s frustration reaches post-mettlesome levels).

(It could also be that I’m lazy. Don’t ask Matthew what he thinks.)

Someone close to me once told me he had spent a short time homeless. Only a week or so. It was during the summertime so he could sleep on park benches without fear of hypothermia. I wonder if this has affected his idea of ‘home.’  When he moves into a place, he immediately makes it his: art on the walls, pictures on every horizontal surface, everything in place, everything in order. It makes him feel safe, I think. Content.

Mona, the titular Vagabond, carries her home—a thin red cloth tent—on her back. It makes her feel similarly safe.

And then the cold closes in.

#73: Cléo from 5 to 7

(originally published Jan. 28, 2011)

In the early 1980s, Madonna optioned American remake rights for Cleo from 5 to 7, and on a French television program years later, Agnès Varda compliments her, describing her as “a natural-born actress” and a “genius at adaptation.” But the remake never happened.

If it had, Josh would have seen it. Josh, my best friend, worshiped everything Madonna. I enjoyed her music but was tepid on her films, whereas Josh owned all her albums and had seen all her movies—even surefire duds Shanghai Surprise and Body of Evidence. When Badlands played its heroic 45-minute marathon of “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina,” Josh danced the entire duration, raising his arms Peron-style during the chorus.

The remake fell through, Madonna says, because Varda wanted to maintain a loose, improvisational style, but the studio demanded a script before they would fund the film. Madonna says to Varda, “I should have done it the way you wanted to do it.”

For the two years I lived in D.C., Josh and I were inseparable. He drove a powder-blue Crown Victoria, which he referred to as “the hoopty.” We lived frugally and wildly, filling up on $1 Whopper Jrs. before wreaking mayhem at Soho Coffee, or Georgetown, or LBJ Park. Freedom was a parachute, and the real world approached slowly, a dream growing moment by moment.

***

Josh and I had an ancillary friend, Nicky, who preferred the spelling “Nikki” because he that’s the way a star would have it. ‘Nikki,’ short and chubby, with curly, dirty blonde hair, liked thin Lycra shirts that, when worn, stretched and became sheer. I never heard him perform, but he always talked about working with this producer or that producer, and Josh and I humored him, equal parts teasing and exasperation.

At the turning point of Cleo from 5 to 7, Cleo sings “Cry of Love” in the presence of her composer and lyricist. They appreciate her emotivity while attributing her tantrums and tears to her diva complex, never understanding the deeper currents and fears running beneath. They might as well roll their eyes: Women!

One warm evening, the Josh, Nicky and I were walking up 17th on our way to Cobalt, which had an Thursday night 80s dance party. On the street was a fortune teller at a fold-out table. Come on, they cajoled, get your palm read  I relented. For $5, the woman told me: You work with computers. Something with science or math. I thought: You’re only saying that because 1) I’m Asian and 2) because I don’t buy your bullshit.

Cleo from 5 to 7 starts with color footage of Cleo getting a tarot card reading. Varda explains that the color indicates fiction: trying to predict the future is fiction. The black-and-white? That’s reality. That’s now.

A few years later, Josh sent me a CD. We’d begun our long separation and estrangement—our lives now in black and white. I don’t know where he lives today. He included a note: “You are one of the lucky people in the world to own this rarity!” It was Nikki’s demo CD, a splash of past color for lives going forward in real-time.