Search Results for: The Awl

Convenience Store Woman

Photo by Aaron Gilbreath

Sayaka Murata | Convenience Store Woman | Grove Press | June 2018 | 21 minutes (5,652 words)

A convenience store is a world of sound. From the tinkle of the door chime to the voices of TV celebrities advertising new products over the in-store cable network, to the calls of the store workers, the beeps of the barcode scanner, the rustle of customers picking up items and placing them in baskets, and the clacking of heels walking around the store. It all blends into the convenience store sound that ceaselessly caresses my eardrums.

I hear the faint rattle of a new plastic bottle rolling into place as a customer takes one out of the refrigerator, and look up instantly. A cold drink is often the last item customers take before coming to the checkout till, and my body responds automatically to the sound. I see a woman holding a bottle of mineral water while perusing the desserts and look back down.

As I arrange the display of newly delivered rice balls, my body picks up information from the multitude of sounds around the store. At this time of day, rice balls, sandwiches, and salads are what sell best. Another part-timer, Sugawara, is over at the other side of the store checking off items with a handheld scanner. I continue laying out the pristine, machine-made food neatly on the shelves of the cold display: in the middle I place two rows of the new flavor, spicy cod roe with cream cheese, alongside two rows of the store’s best-selling flavor, tuna mayonnaise, and then I line the less popular dry bonito shavings in soy sauce flavor next to those. Speed is of the essence, and I barely use my head as the rules ingrained in me issue instructions directly to my body.

Alerted by a faint clink of coins I turn and look over at the cash register. It’s a sound I’m sensitive to, since customers who come just to buy cigarettes or a newspaper often jingle coins in their hand or pocket. And yes: as I’d thought, a man with a can of coffee in one hand, the other hand in his pocket, is approaching the till. I quickly move through the store, slide behind the counter, and stand at the ready so as not to keep him waiting.

“Irasshaimasé! Good morning, sir.”

I bow and take the can of coffee he holds out to me.

“Oh, and a pack of Marlboro Menthol Lights.”

“Right away, sir.” I take out a pack of the cigarettes and scan the barcode. “Please confirm your age on the touch screen.”

As he does so, I notice him glance at the hot-food cabinet. I could ask him whether he’d like anything else, but when a customer appears to be dithering over whether or not to buy something, I make a point of taking a step back and waiting.

“And a corn dog.”

“Right away, sir. Thank you.”

I disinfect my hands with alcohol, open the hot cabinet, and take out a corn dog.

“Shall I put the hot food and cold drink in separate bags?”

“Oh no, don’t bother. Together’s fine.”

I put the can of coffee, cigarettes, and corn dog into a small-size bag. Until then the man had been jingling the coins in his pocket, but now he suddenly moves his hand to his breast pocket as though something has just occurred to him. Instantly I deduce that he will use electronic money.

“I’ll pay by Suica.”

“Certainly, sir. Please touch your card here.”

I automatically read the customer’s minutest movements and gaze, and my body acts reflexively in response. My ears and eyes are important sensors to catch their every move and desire. Taking the utmost care not to cause the customer any discomfort by observing him or her too closely, I swiftly move my hands according to whatever signals I pick up.

“Your receipt, sir. Thank you for your custom!”

“Thanks,” he says, taking his receipt and leaving.

“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting,” I say with a bow to the woman next in the queue. “Irasshaimasé. Good morning!” Read more…

A Girl’s Guide to Missiles

AP Photo/Phil Sandlin, File

Karen Piper | A Girl’s Guide to Missiles | Viking | August 2018 | 38 minutes (7,502 words)

Don’t touch any ordnance,” the guide said. “If you see any lying around. It could explode.” Fiftyish and portly, he was wearing jeans and a T­shirt and might have passed for a truck driver if not for the B­2 bomber on his cap. Above the plane, the hat read “Northrop,” where I assumed he must have worked, maybe even on the B­2. The group of twenty or so tripod­toting tourists, there to photograph the largest collection of petroglyphs in the Western Hemisphere, looked around warily. A few people laughed, others fidgeted. Only my mom and I knew that we really could explode.

“Ordnance, what’s ordnance?” the woman next to me whispered with a plaintive smile as we began our walk into the canyons. One glance at her tripod made me worry. It was almost as tall as her, and she looked wobbly already.

“Missiles, bombs, that sort of thing,” I said. She stopped and stepped back, her smile dropping. What did she expect? I thought. We were at China Lake Naval Weapons Center, after all. Things were supposed to explode. Read more…

An Introduction To Death

iStock / Getty Images Plus / Unsplash, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

A.M. Homes | Longreads | August 2018 | 5 minutes (1,200 words)

I wrote my first book when I was 15, a collection of poems called “An Introduction to Death With Excerpts From Life.” I was in 10th grade and the way some people take a year abroad, I took a year locked in my room. I smoked, I wrote poems, I emerged a few times a day and delivered those hand-written verses to my mother who had recently gone back to school to get a masters degree in Counseling Psychology.

Listen to A.M. Homes read “An Introduction to Death” and chat with Essays Editor Sari Botton on The Longreads Podcast.

I was her worst nightmare; her classmates, men and women twenty years younger than her, came to the house for study sessions. And there I would be, a chunky 14-year-old who smelled like a tobacco farm, sneaking past them and into the kitchen.  “Here,” I would say, depositing another poem on the counter. “Can you type it for me?” And later, when her classmates had gone home, my mother would get out the Smith Corona and she would type the poem and cry. Did I do this to be intentionally mean to her? Or did I do it because I wanted her to know how much I was suffering? Probably both. My mother would type and cry and call the shrink. I would hear her whispering from her own hiding place in the laundry room. She was worried, very worried. The poems were confessions of primal rage, angst that knew no limit, an outsider identity that had no name, ennui to infinity. I was an adopted child whose grief and sense of powerlessness were boundless. There was no version of getting it right.
Read more…

Listening for a Way Out

Kathy Kmonicek / AP

Niya Marie | Longreads | August 2018 | 24 minutes (4,808 words)

After I wedged Whitney Houston into our conversation for the fifty-eleventh time, C. cut me down for every sixth grader at the lunch table to devour.

“Why do you talk about her so much?”

“What’re you, gay?”

And then:

The looks, the laughs at what was funny, in more ways than one.

The fire crackling in my chest.

The choking silence as every word in my defense turned to ash in my throat.

I’d been called a lot of things by then, but not that. Unlike my Kmart clothes, freckled nose, burning bush of unpressed, sun-reddened hair, and coke-bottle-thick glasses, that was not legible. Economics and genetics aside, I looked like all the other girls, donning fitted jeans and Ts, the occasional skort. And like all the other girls, I gabbed about an attraction to the smartest, sportiest boy in our class. I never fully committed to the act, though. The last classmate I kissed on the sly was two grades and one school ago — and not a boy. I would cup my hands around her ear and let my lips brush her lobe as if I were just whispering a bit of gossip. We’d kiss like that in plain view of an entire classroom and no one ever caught on. That was the thrill. At recess, we’d run off to the edge of the schoolyard, hide behind one of the gangly trees, and kiss on the mouth. There was no way for C. to know about my old kissing-friend, or the fact that I secretly wanted to make C. my new one. She didn’t know I was enamored of her height, her athleticism, the curl of her long lashes, the brightness of her big brown eyes, even that blade of a tongue. My actions, my appearance betrayed nothing. Yet here I was, giving myself away somehow.

C.’s irritation was understandable. We had homeroom and math together, P.E., then lunch. I had spent most of the day at her heels, in her ear, creating opportunities to bring up yet another item about Whitney that I had read or seen the night before. It was the My Love Is Your Love era, and Whitney was everywhere again. After a blockbuster world tour and three successful soundtracks, Whitney’s fourth studio album was highly anticipated. My Love Is Your Love was the first CD I ever purchased, and also the second after I overplayed that copy. Before my grandmother gifted me a modern stereo, I had a banged-up Walkman and a heap of cassettes with song titles reduced to flecks of unreadable white ink. I couldn’t wait to get home to watch every television appearance possible, especially when Whitney was a guest on Oprah. Two of my favorite people in the whole wide world in the same frame; two black female icons who’d cemented their place in history breathing the same air — this is what beholding God should feel like. When I wasn’t scouring the television for Whitney, I spent hours on my Gateway (another gift from my grandmother) downloading every bootlegged live recording I could manage with dial-up. At checkout in the supermarket, I would slip any magazine bearing Whitney’s face onto the conveyor belt, somewhere beneath the Lunchables, Fruit Roll-Ups, and Pop-Tarts. My mother never balked at buying these little indulgences for me. She never looked at me funny either; not even when I used to open every issue of Jet to the Beauty of the Week, spread them out at the bay window of our old single-wide trailer, and pick the fairest of them all.

C. could not have known about my private beauty pageant. Or my dancing with the mop instead of the broom. Or any of the girls I had kissed and touched in dark cellarways and dollhouses; against cinder blocks under trailers; in back rooms lit only by the blue-white glow of infomercial TV. Or all the things I used to do under the covers with my friend, T.

C. wasn’t there with me as I watched a scene in Sister, Sister play out my very own fantasy. In one episode, Tia and Tamera dream up their birth mother and Whitney’s face appears in their mutual thought bubble. If a stroke of real-life movie magic couldn’t make Whitney my mother, Oprah would do.

C. had it all wrong and all right all at once.

Maybe some girls dream of white knights on white horses stealing them away to safety. I dreamt of a golden-throated black beauty, the fairest of fairy godmothers, lifting me from my life and into the firmament that I imagined only her voice — “The Voice” — could ever reach. Could ever escape to. When the cords of her slender neck thickened and writhed like roots growing up and not down, threatening eruption, that’s what I heard: the way out.

* * *

The last time T. and I saw each other face-to-face, I’d shoved her so hard that she fell over and her head bounced off her bedroom floor like a basketball, abruptly ending the visit. My half-assed apology insisted that T. shared some of the blame. I can’t remember what I said I was getting her back for because, frankly, it was a lie. Something I’d concocted on the spot in an effort to rewrite the truth. Our friendship, at least for her, somehow remained unscathed. Maybe she believed I was sorry. Maybe she understood why I couldn’t tell the truth. Clearly, she’d forgiven me. Why else would she have been on the other end of that line, waiting for me to click over from a call that I’d lied about receiving? With my hand over the mouthpiece, I listened to her breathe, patiently waiting for her best friend to return, entirely unaware that she had run away from her months ago and was never coming back.

T. and I became fast friends when we were around 6 years old. We were next-door neighbors in an apartment complex in Camden, South Carolina. I had more bullies than friends in school, but at home, I had T., and we’d play for hours. About a year after we became friends, my mother overdosed. I remember trying to reach her through those faraway eyes moments before they shut me out. If I were to have tossed a penny into them, I would’ve never heard the splash. After her recovery, she, her second husband, my younger brother, and I moved into a single-wide about six miles away in Lugoff. One end of our street fed into a major highway. The other end was cut off by a strip of conifers. Our trailer sat between a day care center and an auto repair/car wash combo. Across from us was a huge plot of undeveloped land overrun with dandelions. My mother got a job at a gas station that was about a five-minute walk away. We were isolated; hopefully, so isolated that my mother couldn’t take “sick,” as she called it.

I had spent most of the day at her heels, in her ear, creating opportunities to bring up yet another item about Whitney that I had read or seen the night before. It was the My Love Is Your Love era and Whitney was everywhere again.

It was through my mother that I met an out lesbian for the first time when I was about 8 years old. They worked together at the register. G. was butch with flesh as white and dimpled as my grandmother’s dumpling dough. She had a slick, gray mullet that was yellowing from chain-smoking. Her curly-headed younger girlfriend didn’t believe in bras. The beaters she wore left nothing to my imagination.

G. and her girlfriend lived together in a trailer nowhere near the gas station. I can’t remember why we were even there, what necessity my mother had run out of. We never talked about lack, like the occasional need for an abundance of candles or boiled water for baths. Whatever the reason, I was happy to visit. I had so many questions that I dared not ask.

How could these two women get away with this?

Did they know black women who did this?

Are they happy?


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I ear-hustled from afar like I was getting paid by the word. At some point, the girlfriend got one too many beers in her and treated my mother to a lively reenactment of how G. would squirm and squeal while getting finger-fucked. They laughed loud and hard, secure in the belief that I had no idea what they were talking about, especially not from the opposite end of the trailer. But I did know, and I felt like I shouldn’t have.

I wasn’t grateful for living in a single-wide, especially not one with outdoor paint you could wipe off with your fingers. Our cat killed the mice, but he couldn’t do a damn thing to the roaches. I would check my clothes and backpack obsessively before heading to school out of fear that one day, one of those little fuckers would crawl out of something I owned and I’d never live down the embarrassment. The girls at school whose acceptance I craved all lived in little single-family houses or apartment complexes that bore stately names like Pepperidge-something Manor. I never invited them over.

I didn’t have to front for T. She knew what I had come from because she was still there. She knew other things about me, too, that those girls at my new school never would. Those girls never witnessed my tomboyish side, the me who gladly climbed trees to fetch her cat, who tramped through the woods in steel-toe boots, their black leather shredded by detritus. Whenever T. came over, we would stay outside most of the day and slurp honeysuckle, eat wild berries on a dare, make mud pies out of red clay, and rove our conquered field of dandelion. At night, we’d explore each other’s bodies with the same zeal.

It had been like that between us since before the move. I gave T. no reason to believe the nature of our friendship would ever change. Until that day in T.’s apartment. We hadn’t seen each other all summer, and now we were brand new fifth graders. We retreated to her bedroom while our mothers caught up in front of a B movie. T. expected it to be like it was — handsy games of make believe that covered up an attraction we dared not name. I pushed her off her own bed and her head slammed into the floor. She cried harder than I expected, her face a map of heartbreak, red tributaries carving it up. I wanted to believe I’d only hurt her physically. I apologized for that and nothing more. T. didn’t know that while we were apart, I had been shown “the way, the truth, and the life”*; that I didn’t want to go on being fresh like a little heathen.

For most of my childhood, I split my time between South Carolina and a “chorus of mamas,”* 600 miles away in Philadelphia. Sometimes I’d go for leisure, sometimes for necessity. My maternal great-grandmother took me in for a spell before kindergarten so I would no longer have to witness my mother’s first husband beat the breath out of her. In the summer, I’d stay with my maternal grandmother, but not for long periods, because her second husband wasn’t comfortable having a girl around the house. I also spent time with my godmother, who was single. She had worked under my grandmother for the state government, and she’d been friends with my mother until their paths diverged. My godmother had a stable upbringing in a loving two-parent family on a nice swath of countryside. She also had a nice job, a nice house, a nice car, and a beautiful singing voice. I coveted that idyll, and she credited it all to Jesus. When fourth grade came to an end, I said my goodbyes to T. and headed north. That may have been the summer I attended Vacation Bible School with my great-grandmother. Or, it may have been the summer I went to my first amusement park, played miniature golf, and cleaved to my godmother’s hip as her rendition of “Amazing Grace” flowed through me like a crystal-clear spring. Either way, the message to me was unambiguous: there was refuge in religion.

On average, there were 2.4 Bibles per room in my great-grandmother’s row home: the KJV, the NIV, the NASB, etc. I used to flip to the concordance of each translation to find the most wiggle room for girls like me. None of them gave an inch. Her den housed my first personal library. The room overlooked her piece of yard out back, which was mostly cemented over, save for a small plot of tangerine-colored lilies. There were many Bibles, of course, and also books about the Bible. There was my little collection of slim Disney hardcovers, The Three Little Pigs, Thank You, God, and Charlotte’s Web. Every title was meticulously maintained. No dog-eared pages. No dust. I’d read there for hours. During the day, the sun would come through the window full force. At night, the potted jasmine would bloom and I’d lie out on the stiff, squeaky sofa as the fragrance swaddled me.

After my great-aunt (whom I didn’t know well) died of cancer, the library grew more secular with the addition of her books. The only paperback missing its cover and spine beckoned me, though I wouldn’t have the courage to sneak it into my bedroom until high school. It was James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, furtively tucked between two books about prayer and healing. That is how I could remain in the fold: efface myself, then find a real man to blow my back out. No one ever explicitly said this, but no one ever had to. I gleaned it from the homophobic panic that took over my meek and mild great-grandmother when a female congregant pecked her cheek too often; from faggot falling as nonchalantly as a preposition out of my grandmother’s mouth to disparage men who weren’t macho or simply pissed her off; from never deciphering the mystery of my godmother’s sister who, in her muted masculinity, seemed to disappear in plain sight, as if she’d slipped the heart of herself under a cushion or behind a curtain, leaving only the husk in our midst. She could very well have been a single heterosexual woman who liked men’s clothes, close-cropped cuts, golf, motorcycles, and fading into the wallpaper, but I knew I could never ask.

I knew even before I got my first period that I was expected to marry a man and bear his children. More importantly, I had come to want that life for myself. When the weight of self-blame is upon you, oppression — cloaked in the raiment of redemption and purification — can be rather seductive. That den sustained my love of reading, but also my secret shame. It may have been the summer I was 7, or it may have been the summer I was 8. I do remember that these were still the days of pigtails and pink lotion for me. But not for ______. She was a teenager, and she was supposed to be my friend. I would let her in time and time again until I felt like some grubby plaything left out in the dirt. The shame festered, and the Good Book offered a salve.

By the second semester of fifth grade, my immediate family and I resettled in a different part of Lugoff. We moved into a brand-new double-wide on a dirt road hewn through God’s nowhere. We now had a fireplace, jacuzzi, stand-alone shower, dishwasher, ice maker, washer and dryer, and more trees than I could ever climb, all thanks to a massive loan from my grandmother. The roaches had moved in with us, so I still didn’t invite people over, but I was quite proud of the come-up.

T. wanted to see for herself. That’s why she had called. I lied, said my other line was beeping, then pretended to click over. I was stalling for a way to get rid of T. for good. I hoped she would get frustrated, hang up, and never call again. But she didn’t. I clicked back over and told her that I had to get off the phone and talk to another friend. Then I heard the sadness welling up. “You see her every day. Why do you want to talk to her more than me? Don’t you like me anymore?”

I think it’s telling that I can’t recall what I said in response. Who wants to remember herself as the villain? We hung up and never spoke to each other again.

In seventh grade, my family and I traveled to Philadelphia to celebrate my great-grandmother’s 80th birthday. It was there that I got saved. In the midst of talking, laughing, and eating, the Pastor Reverend Dr. turned to me and asked, “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?” How was I to reply to that? “No” seemed wrong. I fumbled for an answer as one would a light switch in the dark. I had been found wanting, and there was nothing I hated more than lack. Here I was, book-smart but spiritually bereft. He said all I had to do was repeat Romans 10:9–10. I did. Then I cried the River Jordan as family and friends rejoiced. Everyone assumed they were tears of joy, so I did, too. Surely, it was the joy of having been born anew, cleansed of all my wickedness.

Maybe some girls dream of white knights on white horses stealing them away to safety. I dreamt of a golden-throated black beauty, the fairest of fairy godmothers, lifting me from my life and into the firmament that I imagined only her voice, ‘The Voice,’ could ever reach.

That summer, my great-grandmother gave me a Bible of my own with silver-gilded page edges and a silk page marker. It was bound in dark-blue leather with my full name imprinted on the front cover in silver foil. I toted it to church every Sunday in a canvas cover, its black striking against the cream upholstery of a fellow deaconess’ evergreen Lincoln Town Car. As we inched down Stenton Avenue, I’d smooth the front of my skirt, willing it to be longer, or better yet, to be slacks. You don’t get much of a say when you don’t buy your own clothes. I could wear pant suits, occasionally. My grandmothers would say, “You got pretty legs like your mother. Why hide them?”

During the sermon, the Pastor Reverend Dr. would call out a scripture, and I would turn to it in a matter of seconds. I’d look forward, eyes eager, spine straight, while the freshly barbered, coiffed, and behatted heads around me were still bowed, brows creased in concentration, onionskin pages rustling like dead leaves in a fall wind. I would feel an approving smile beaming at me from among the sopranos. It’s not just about knowing the Old Testament from the New. You need to know the order of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and their greatest hits. You need to know that Acts is before Corinthians, and Hebrews before all the other Johns.

I would see T. one last time, in eighth grade, at some event at her middle school. I would see her dressed like a boy in baggy jeans, an oversize shirt and straight-backs, chasing some girl up an aisle. I would see her, but she wouldn’t see me. I was just another girl in tight bell-bottoms and butterfly clips. I didn’t stand out from any of my friends and that’s how I liked it. If T. had come to my school, she might have found me groping a ticklish football player’s abs.

* * *

I wouldn’t come out until sophomore year of college when I was 200 miles away and mentally prepared to maintain that distance if I had to. I told my mother, and she told her mother, and none of us told the church mother.

I am told that the first question my grandmother asked was, “Did somebody do something to her?”

My mother once told a therapist what happened to her as a child at the hands of a female cousin and his first question was, “So are you gay?”

And what did I tell myself, as the girl who likes girls who was taken advantage of by a girl and not the big bad wolf she’d learned to expect? I internalized sexual abuse as the consequence of my own aberrant sexuality. After all, who wants to remember herself as the victim?

* * *

The last time I stayed up to catch one of Whitney’s comebacks was in February 2009. It was my senior year of college, and I should have been working on my thesis. Instead, I was splayed out over my comforter with bleary, hungry eyes fixed on an online feed of Clive Davis’s annual pre-Grammys gala. Three years later, hours before that same event, Whitney was gone. At the time the news broke, I was living with my great-grandmother, jobless, hopeless, and contemplating suicide as my final way out. My family was unaware of this. My mother called to see how I was holding up, but Whitney’s death hadn’t hit me the way she’d expected it to. I’d already been dragged underwater by my own untreated mental health issues, so the death of my idol fell over me like a single drop of rain.

Truth be told, over the course of the previous decade I’d become less fanatical and more casual in my appreciation of Whitney. I could believe that she’d conquered the worst of her addiction even if Diane Sawyer wasn’t buying it. But the voice never lied. With the 2002 release of Houston’s fifth studio album, Just Whitney, even I couldn’t deny its considerable deterioration. The bottomless eyes later captured in tabloids were too hauntingly familiar, so I looked away. I know that I watched Whitney’s widely publicized interview with Oprah in the fall of 2009 the same way I know I ate food that day. By comparison, my memory of her appearance on the show 10 years prior is as vivid as the prints and pinks and greens of her Dolce & Gabbana wardrobe.

As a child, I had tethered my wildest dreams to Whitney’s fairy-tale rise to pop superstardom because, to me, she was invulnerable, inviolable, absolutely untouchable. My mother and I were not. I do not remember precisely every departure and arrival in my childhood, but I do remember when Whitney was there to get me through it. She was on the Greyhound bus with my mother and me, in a pair of headphones, lulling me to sleep with “Jesus Loves Me” as my leaden noggin fell onto the lap of the passenger next to us. She was on the radio shoopin’ as our white Pontiac cut through a sea of blackness. Whether my little elbows were propped up on a concrete floor, or a peel-away carpet, or some thick shag, there was Whitney soaring in The Bodyguard on broadcast TV at the end of the year. When Whitney finally fell down to earth, I couldn’t quite make sense of the conflicting emotions it stirred in me. Distancing myself was a way of bracing for how her story eventually ended.

* * *

I deliberately avoided all of the postmortems served up in the wake of Whitney’s death. The massive amount of coverage devoted to her drug addiction felt like an effect passed off as a cause. I dismissed celebrity interviews, prime-time specials, and Hollywood treatments like Lifetime’s Whitney (2015) as attempts to stitch up the pieces of a complex life, hide the seams, and use the result to repackage the shopworn trope of the self-destructive female artist. The recent documentaries — Nick Broomfield and Rudi Dolezal’s Whitney: Can I Be Me (2017) and Kevin Macdonald’s Whitney (2018) — are not wholly exempt from this criticism.

In chronicling the megastar’s rise and fall, the directors exhibit a keen interest in the latter over the former. Broomfield and Dolezal open with footage from the day of Whitney’s death, complete with audio of the 911 call. It is clear from the first shot that her demise is the fuel for their vehicle. In an announcement for Whitney, the only film authorized by Houston’s estate, the director Macdonald expressed that he “approached Whitney’s life like a mystery story; why did someone with so much raw talent and beauty self-destruct so publicly and painfully?” I bristled at the premise and concluded I would have no interest in whatever incomplete or recycled theories came next, authorized or not. Then the Cannes Film Festival reviews broke my assumptions wide open.

When the cords of her slender neck thickened and writhed like roots growing up and not down, threatening eruption, that’s what I heard: the way out.

I was at work, sitting in an office that bore no trace of me as an occupant because I didn’t intend to stay much longer. It was nearing lunchtime, and I was surfing online as a distraction. I wasn’t even looking for it, but there it was in big bold letters: bombshell. Whitney allegedly had been molested as a child by her cousin, the late singer Dee Dee Warwick. My stomach began to pretzel to the extent that I lost my appetite for good.

And then I cried, as I reflected on that unbound and unmoored feeling that no refuge, real or imagined, ever managed to undo. Every time I had turned to the sheer power and pure emotion of Whitney’s voice to give me a sense of security, I’d been unaware that she might have been struggling to find that same security within herself. My desire to see Whitney when it opened on July 6th was borne of recognition.

The revelation of the abuse that dominated every headline after Cannes doesn’t appear until the end of the movie; every whodunit needs its pearl-clutching plot twist. Setting aside what may or may not have been Macdonald’s intentions, the placement of that particular information is an accurate depiction of how unassimilable trauma can be in relation to one’s life story. Trauma resists subsumption under our mythologies of self and has no respect for the boundaries of time. Instead, it hangs outside of our neat narratives like a bully waiting to ambush us after school. Except this bully, we can’t outrun.

* * *

My relationship with my mother had improved significantly after she responded to my coming out with, “You aren’t telling me anything I don’t already know. I just want you to be happy.” I called her after watching the film, angered and saddened in equal measure. Talking about it was my oblique way of tugging on a thread of conversation we tend to pick up only to put down in favor of sunnier subjects.

She listened as I sputtered from one topic to the next. After I finally took a breath, she opened up about her depression. “It’s trapping me in my own body,” she said. She confessed that she has survived four suicide attempts. I feared that she was trying to tell me there would be a fifth. I felt that it was not the appropriate time to tell her I’d tendered my notice of resignation three weeks prior so as not to leave anyone in the lurch. There I was, again, with my toes curled over the edge of my resolve to stay put.

The truth is, I have been dancing on that edge for almost 10 years. I still live in my great-grandmother’s home. She passed away in 2013. The Pastor Reverend Dr. who saved me and presided over her funeral has been succeeded by his son. The deaconess who used to drive us to church in an old Lincoln that took up two parking spaces is now driving a crossover. I know this purely by chance. A couple years ago, I was taking a long walk up the avenue, and when I was about 10 feet from the post office, she pulled up to the curb in a new car. As I was coming up on her passenger-side mirror, she rolled down her window, thrust a letter toward me, and asked me to put it in the mailbox for her. There was no polite preamble, no utterance of my name, just an instruction from an elder to a young’un. I don’t believe she recognized me, and that suited me just fine. The neighborhood kid who flees to the ivory tower only to return and linger for nine years and counting tends to be hyper-visible. I appreciate the times when I go unseen.

The house is almost exactly as my great-grandmother left it. Except the den. After she passed, a fresh layer of dust took up residence. Then the plants died. Too much sun and not enough water. The arms and legs of the rocker slipped out of their sockets. The threadbare couch began leaking straw. One night on a whim, I hauled the furniture out to the sidewalk for trash collection. I packed up the books and moved them into the basement. Then I swept and mopped the linoleum floor, and wiped down the baseboards. In 2015, I turned the empty space into a weight room.

I’d like to move someday for good. Until then, I make myself scarce. I have everything I need shipped to my front door. I wash my clothes up the street around 7 a.m. on a Sunday when the block is still asleep and the laundromat is deserted. I don’t take long walks up the avenue anymore; I run.

*John 14:6, KJV

*From Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.

* * *

Niya Marie‘s work has appeared in The Rumpus. She lives in Philadelphia.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

 

We Stand on Guard for Bieber

Dominic Lipinski / AP, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | August 2018 | 18 minutes (4,330 words)

Stratford, Ontario, doesn’t announce itself. The first time I traveled there, in mid-February, I drove into its center before knowing I was actually in it. I had not noticed a sign. All I had seen were miles of flat snowy farmland — the odd silo, field upon field — a row of frosted evergreens lining the horizon. Stratford, population 31,465, is like any other small tourist town in Ontario — shabby strip malls, magisterial churches, brick Main Street, overpriced eateries. Like so many Canadian cities, it’s the kind of place where a kid could be born and, happily enough, have just as much chance of staying as leaving.

People generally visit Stratford in the summer for its renowned Shakespeare festival, but I went during the off-season. A couple of miles ahead of the town center, my boyfriend and I passed what appeared to be a school bus holding zone — about a dozen of them, parked like blocks of life-size Legos — before arriving at the Stratford Perth Museum. It was 10 a.m. on a Saturday, the opening time for the press day of the “Steps to Stardom” exhibit, which traced Justin Bieber’s life, all 24 years of it, back to his Stratford childhood. It was quiet. The exhibit scarcely announced itself either, aside from two festive planters flanking the entrance, each festooned with curlicued silver-sprayed twigs wrapped in bows and billowy purple gauze, a color that, for those in the know, announces JUSTIN BIEBER as surely as it might have once announced royalty. In the next room, even quieter, the “Railway Century” exhibit politely stood by with its black-and-white photographs of the industry that had built the town that had built Justin Bieber. Read more…

Weird in the Daylight

Photo by Todd Gunsher

Corbie Hill | No Depression | Spring 2018 | 20 minutes (4,135 words)

The apocalypse came early to Maiden Lane.

The houses on this short dead-end road stand empty and condemned, their doors yawning open and letting in the weather. Just a few hundred yards away, traffic buzzes on Hillsborough Street, a main thoroughfare in Raleigh, North Carolina, that borders N.C. State University. Here, though, everything is uninhabited and decaying. Someone has spray painted “fuck frats” in bold red across the face of the first house on the left, a little single-story blue place in the shadow of a spotless new building. Skillet Gilmore walks into the dilapidated structure without hesitation.

“Karl [Agell] from Corrosion [of Conformity] lived here,” he says. Then he goes room by room, naming other friends who lived in them in the 1990s.

The place is completely wrecked. The floors complain underfoot as if they could give way, and there are gaping holes where the heater vents used to be. The fireplaces have been disassembled with sledgehammers.

“Honestly, it doesn’t look that much worse than it did,” Gilmore offers.

He would know. The house Gilmore lived in at one point in the ‘90s is farther down Maiden Lane on the right. So he and Caitlin Cary, who both played in storied Raleigh alt-country band Whiskeytown and who now are married, lead me into that one, too, again going room by room and naming the previous occupants. A construction truck idles outside and across the street, but nobody comes out to tell us to leave. Nobody bothers us at all. Read more…

Seeing Private Everyman

Life Magazine March 16, 1942, courtesy the author / Nevin Ruttanaboonta, Unsplash

Steve Edwards | Longreads | July 2018 | 16 minutes (4,482 words)

When my wife was first pregnant with our son, it startled me to think that the life we were living before his arrival would be a mystery to him, part of some dim and distant past. All he would have were our stories. And because we lived far from our respective families, stories would be almost all he would have of them, too. It may have been first-time father jitters, but it felt important that he know something of his people and what we were all about. Or maybe I just imagined him a captive audience to whom I could tell stories my wife had already heard a thousand times.

My family’s big story was my grandfather’s brush with fame in Life magazine. During World War II and beyond, he was Life’s Private Everyman — Charles E. Teed of Effingham, Illinois, a figure meant to typify selectees in the war effort. On March 16, 1942, he graced the cover and was profiled in a long feature article. In 1961, he appeared alongside the 20th century’s most notable celebrities in Life’s 25th-anniversary issue. There’s Marilyn Monroe on one page. There’s Granddad on another. By Life’s estimation, “victory over the common enemy” depended upon Granddad and men like him, and whether, when the time came — in a line paraphrased from War and Peace — they shouted “‘Hurrah!’ or “‘We are lost!’” I was 10 when he died. Nearly everything I know about his life, I learned from the magazine.

I remember the night a copy of that magazine was brought to the dinner table. The dishes had all been swept away and it was placed before me. I was instructed in the careful turning of its pages so as not to rip them.

At first, I didn’t understand. The Granddad I knew, then in his late 50s and early 60s, wasn’t anybody famous. He shot pool, taught us pinochle, and took us fishing. He worked in a factory and often came home exhausted at night. “I’m sorry, honey,” he’d sometimes say to my brother and me when requests to shoot pool came down in the after-dinner hours, “I’m too tired.” But there he was on the cover, a skinny John Wayne.

He’d been photographed from below, solitary, outlined only in sky, his eyes set on something in the middle distance. He wore a field jacket and gloves. The bayonet on his rifle stabbed into a corner of the frame. In the photographs inside the magazine, he looked like one of my miniature plastic Army men come to life. He sprinted through the woods out on maneuvers; scrubbed canvas puttees and cartridge belts; swept up on KP. And there were other pictures, earlier ones, which my great-grandmother had supplied from home: Granddad at 6 in a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit, and later, in the backyard, playing Cowboys and Indians. In a picture of his sixth grade class, he stood in the back row, smiling and self-possessed, described by Life as the “tallest and best-looking boy” of the bunch. And how proud he seemed at 16 and already 6-foot-2, dressed in his Sunday finest — a white collar shirt, a pair of high-waisted slacks cinched tight by a belt — on a front-porch step beside his grinning and equally handsome 6-foot-6 father.

It was a revelation to see him so young. It was a revelation, too, to imagine that people all around the country — millions of them — had looked upon these same images. When his issue first hit newsstands, Pearl Harbor had happened but we were still several months away from any major land battle. It was a time of deep uncertainty. The lives of those willing to sacrifice themselves for the country were stories yet to be written.

It was a time of deep uncertainty. The lives of those willing to sacrifice themselves for the country were stories yet to be written.

For reasons even he never knew, Life chose Granddad to represent those possibilities. Maybe it was his good looks. Maybe he was just in the right place at the right time. Regardless, there he was, an icon of the everyman.

Hope writ large.

After that night at the dinner table, I don’t think I ever looked at him the same. Though my understanding of the war was incomplete, only a child’s understanding, I felt great pride that he had been someone our country turned to for hope. And I knew that appearing on the cover of Life meant he was anything but ordinary. And if the magazine changed the way I saw him, it also changed the way I saw myself. Maybe there was something brave in me. Maybe I could give people hope. The feeling was that Granddad mattered, and that I could matter, too. And if I could pass along anything to my son, it would be that.

* * *

So much of what we think we know about each other — even the people we love — is predicated on what we don’t know. Or can’t know. Or what is kept from us as children for our own good. On nights Granddad wasn’t too tired for a game of pool, I remember watching him hover silent as a shark around the table in his basement, chalking his cue and lining up shot after shot and slamming them home. Other nights he’d pull out his projector and show clips of 8 mm film he’d taken at the go-kart races at the fairgrounds, or some scene from a fishing trip out at Lake Sara. In my earliest memories, it’s the 4th of July and I’m sitting atop an old-fashioned oak-barrel ice cream maker while he turns the crank. Around us are friends and family with sweating cans of Coors, talking and laughing and telling stories, their enormous Oldsmobiles and Buicks parked at odd angles down the street. I remember his gentleness in those moments, the care he took teaching me how to hold a pool cue, how to aim and think about angles when making a bank shot. The only time I ever heard an edge creep into his voice was a night the news showed images of the famine in Ethiopia. Granny saw the children’s bloated stomachs and got a pained looked on her face and told him to turn it off. “This is what’s happening,” he hissed. “You have to look.”

From my vantage as a 43-year-old looking back, I’m tempted to say that the news footage triggered the PTSD from which he must surely have suffered. Something in how he scowled at the television so intently — his laser-like focus on it — betrayed a nervous system that had trained itself to be ever-vigilant for signs of trauma.


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Against the innocence of my childhood memories, it takes an act of imagination to consider the scope and severity of the suffering Granddad endured. The picture of his father and him so proud on that porch step was taken around 1936, in the heart of the Great Depression. A little over three years later, his father — a workman for the Illinois Central Railroad — was hit and killed by a freight train, his lanky 6-foot-6 frame severed at the waist. Granddad had just graduated high school, his whole future ahead of him.

In their profile, Life rendered his father’s death as part of Granddad’s backstory, a detail that testified to the humanity of ordinary selectees and that celebrated the American ethos of overcoming adversity by reinventing yourself. His father’s death wasn’t a tragedy but an opportunity. With an insurance payout and a settlement from the railroad, Granddad and my great-grandmother started a restaurant in downtown Effingham called the Heart Café. He put in grueling 17-hour days, bussing tables, manning the cash register, sweeping up. And it was at the Heart Café, in the depths of his loss, that he met Violet Kincaid — Granny — a dark-haired young woman from a nearby farm who took a waitress job. In a story my mother says isn’t true, or maybe only half true, Life wrote that Granny dropped a tray of dirty dishes on her first day: “Teed helped her pick up the pieces, they looked into each other’s eyes and it was all over for Teed.” Six weeks later they got engaged, and not long after, in July 1941, he was drafted into the army.

There is an almost irresistible romance to his story — from its tragic beginnings, to his sudden fame on the cover of Life, to the fear of death in battle that must have hovered in his mind like an ungraspable wisp of steam.

And those starkly beautiful black-and-white Life photographs only served to amplify the drama and spectacle.

But the reality of war was that in the course of his 27 months as a combat soldier in the infantry, Granddad had seen “a lot of things die.” That’s how he described it to Life editors in an interview for the 25th-anniversary issue in 1961. In Morocco, he’d stormed the docks at Safi under sniper fire, and later marched 250 miles across the desert to Port Lyautey. In Sicily, he led pack mules up mountains so steep the mules sometimes fell off. Outside St. Lô, France — a city Allied bombs reduced to rubble — he was shot in the chest and crawled under an apple tree to die. Luckily for him (and me) a field guide found him.

He told Life he remembered thinking that “the orchard and the clouds were the last things [he] was going to see.”

Instead he spent the next two years in a hospital. In his absence from Effingham, The Heart went under and so his first job upon arriving home was racking billiards at a bar. He and Granny saved up and started a ma-and-pop grocery, only to see it run out of business when national chains swooped in. He taught himself TV repair, started a shop out of his home. When that was no longer profitable he took a line job at a factory.

All his life he worked and scraped by and found a way to provide. He answered his country’s call for sacrifice and never quit on his family and embodied every bit of the rugged selflessness of a John Wayne war flick. His private life, however, would have been more morally complicated. No matter how selflessly he gave himself after the war, he still had to live with the things he’d done to survive it. And as such, despite millions of people having come to know him from his photographs in Life, he may have felt invisible.

And as such, despite millions of people having come to know him from his photographs in Life, he may have felt invisible.

In a 1943 column about how war changed soldiers like Granddad, who’d spent years on the front lines, the famous World War II correspondent Ernie Pyle wrote that: “The most vivid change is the casual and workshop manner in which they now talk about killing. They have made the psychological transition from the normal belief that taking human life is sinful, over to a new professional outlook where killing is a craft. To them now there is nothing morally wrong about killing. In fact it is an admirable thing.” I don’t believe — can’t believe — becoming a professional at killing is something any veteran walks away from easily or without harm. I think Granddad would have wanted to protect us, his family, from the trauma he knew. He would have wanted to protect himself from the pain of our knowing. But how often the dead, friend and enemy alike, must have sat in the room with us, their ghosts crowding the card table while we bid for trump in games of pinochle. While 8 mm films flickered on a screen in the basement. While I sat atop an ice cream maker and Granddad turned the crank some long-lost 4th of July.

I remember one night — it must have been a year or two before he died — he came into my bedroom with a gift. It was a small framed black-and-white picture of him at 16. In the photograph his hair was slick and black, his cheeks tinted a rosy pink. He held out the picture and said he thought I might like to have it for my desk.

Something about the moment overwhelmed me. I didn’t know what to make of such a gift. And I refused to accept it.

He nodded and quietly left, taking the picture with him. The next morning I had a change of heart and tried to tell him I wanted it after all but the words failed me. He packed the picture into his suitcase. I never saw it again.

In the hard light of morning, maybe giving me a picture of himself felt too much like vanity. Maybe he realized that his memories from 16 — before his father was killed, before the war came along and changed everything — would be lost on an ’80s kid like me. There is no salvaging the past, no storing it up in someone else for safe keeping. Maybe a man who killed in war in order to live should have known better than to be sentimental. But I think about what it says about his heart, and maybe all hearts, that he wanted me to know him. That after years of hard knocks, some part of him remained tender enough to be hurt by a child.

One thing I’ve learned as a writer is that the stories inside us — especially the ones that hurt — have to come out. Whatever the cost of telling them, the cost of holding onto them is greater. As such, I think the courage it took Granddad to go to war had a twin in the courage it took him to examine his life afterward, and to offer its fractures for the world to see. When Life contacted him in 1960, wanting to catch up with “Private Everyman” for the magazine’s 25th-anniversary special double issue, he could have said no. Instead, he agreed to be photographed over the course of a whirlwind two-week trip that took him from Effingham to Fort Bragg, Normandy, Casablanca, Palermo, New York City, and back — the places the war had taken him 15 years before. Life billed the story “an adventure in time as well as a journey through space.”

On each leg of the trip, elaborate “re-creation” photos — pictures meant to invoke Granddad’s experiences in the war — were staged. In one shot, taken in France, he and some soldiers from a nearby Army post flank a crack-filled farmhouse, rifles drawn. In another, in the mountains of Sicily, he squats beside a pack mule, the white slash of a cigarette in his mouth. Alongside the “re-creation” shots are shots of the man he’d become — the 40-year-old husband and father hammering a sign for his TV repair shop in the front yard; the laconic veteran reading names on the white stone crosses in the cemetery at Omaha Beach.

In one man lived the other.

Of all the images of Granddad to have appeared in Life, the shots from November 1960 are the most personally affecting to me. For one, he looks more like the man I remember from when I was kid. For another, there’s something in his countenance — a flintiness and melancholy — that suggests an incalculable depth of hurt.

It’s there, too, in the quotes Life editors lifted from their interview with him to serve as captions for the pictures. Under the shot of the crack-filled farmhouse in France, Granddad says: You never could tell about those broken-up farmyard buildings in Normandy. You could be running into a sniper there or a booby trap or, on the other hand, you might get real lucky and find a keg of Calvados. I guess there’s only one thing you can say about war after you get to know something about it, and that is it’s rough. The circumspection and carefulness of his talk — and the euphemism of war as “rough” — speaks to the unspeakable.

And to that I would only add that photographs like Granddad’s, in simultaneously concealing as much as they reveal, testify to a fundamental truth of being human: We live by illusions. We curate our lives like stories in a magazine.

Some part of me has always been drawn to hidden truths. Like a kid turning over a rock, I’m curious about what’s underneath the tidy and convenient narratives we create to smooth over the chaos of life. Staged to suggest Granddad’s memories of war, those “re-creation” shots fascinate me. They are conspicuously absent of blood and suffering and death. The stink of human misery doesn’t rise off the page like black smoke. At the same time, however, could even the most graphic of photographs capture that? And confronted with the true horrors of war, who could stand to look at them? Not the readers of Life, I don’t suppose. For them — and for me — the suggestion of war is as far as we can go. The rest is a journey of the imagination. “To take a photograph,” writes Susan Sontag in On Photography, “is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.” And to that I would only add that photographs like Granddad’s, in simultaneously concealing as much as they reveal, testify to a fundamental truth of being human: We live by illusions. We curate our lives like stories in a magazine.

* * *

The photographer who accompanied Granddad on that 1960 “adventure in time” was a man named Leonard McCombe. Other Life photographers of the era — Frank Capra, Henri Cartier-Bresson, W. Eugene Smith — enjoy more name recognition, but McCombe’s photographs are every bit as incisive and iconic. He was born on the Isle of Mann, and at 19 had been embedded as a photographer with British troops in Normandy not far from where Granddad was shot. The trip was something of a return for him, too.

Several years ago, I had a brief email exchange with McCombe. He had retired from photography and now owned an apple orchard on Long Island. Having heard from an online connection that I was looking for information about his trip with Granddad, he wrote to me out of the blue:

Dear Mr. Edwards,

I am now in my late eighties, and I don’t do any interviews. My memory is not perfect, but I could answer a few questions by email. I was sent by the editors of Life about fifty years ago to do a story on your grandfather. My job was to get a picture story and I did not make any notes. Remembrance of the past was the theme of the story.

Sincerely,
Leonard McCombe

I wrote back immediately, saying I was simply curious what he might remember and whether he had any stories to share. Two weeks later, a page of McCombe’s remembrances arrived via email. He remembered Granddad’s backstory of growing up poor during the Depression, and losing his dad; starting a restaurant with my great-grandmother; and meeting a “pretty waitress” (Granny) and getting married quick. He remembered that “one thing [Granddad] liked in the army was marching with the band,” because “he felt for the first time like one of the boys.” He told me about shots he’d made in Effingham, and how from there they traveled to Fort Bragg and Normandy, where Granddad had landed at Utah Beach on D-Day Plus 4. “Chuck remembered fighting in the hedgerows,” McCombe wrote, “and securing abandoned farmhouses with landmines going off, booby-traps, and snipers in the orchards.” After Normandy it was on to Morocco and to Sicily, where McCombe said he made his best shots — photographs of Granddad in “the high mountains with mules carrying munitions and food supplies to the troops.”

I read and reread the email, savoring even the smallest fragments of story. Like the day they had lunch with an innkeeper at the Lyon D’Or, a small hotel in Bayeux, and listened as she told about being awoken in the night during the initial D-Day bombardment. Or how, during one of the “re-creation” photo sessions, the local soldiers they brought in had set off so many smoke bombs McCombe feared a visit from the police.

The stories McCombe shared brought the trip to life in a way the photographs alone couldn’t. Beneath the images’ glossy surfaces were the sacrifices he and Granddad had made to get them. The conscious choice to look.

In one sliver of a story, McCombe mentioned that their flight from Paris to Casablanca had been full of German tourists. The irony wasn’t lost on me. In the days prior, Granddad had been photographed wandering Utah Beach looking at remnants of the big German guns that fired upon him. He stood in an orchard like the one where a sniper put a bullet in his chest. Only 15 years had passed since he’d crawled under that apple tree to die. No time at all. The voices of those German tourists must have chilled his blood.

Life wrote that for Granddad “the slow summoning up of memory was always a poignant experience, sometimes tender, often painful. … Most of those who were there with him are long since vanished into the past.” And now that he has long since vanished, I marvel at his willingness to participate in that summoning.

What compelled him to do it? Did he want to test himself? Did he feel some kind of obligation to Life’s readership?

I can only speculate about his motivations. I know as much about Granddad’s private thoughts and feelings as I do about the circumstances that landed him on the cover of Life in the first place. But against everything I can’t know stands a simple fact: He was there. One of the first “re-creation” photographs of the trip — a shot that never made it into the magazine but that I discovered years later in an online archive — boldly underscores the seriousness of his commitment. In the picture, a group of men at the railroad yards stand over a body that’s been covered by a blanket. One man has his hand on his head as though in shock. The image is composed so that a nearby freighter’s boxcars crowd out the entire right side of the frame. Foregrounded on the left and taking up nearly as much space, his back to the camera, Granddad looks on. He’s dressed in clothes he might have worn at 19 — a denim jacket, a wool cap with earflaps. He and Leonard McCombe, on maybe the first day of their trip around the world and back, had staged the scene of his father’s tragic death. When I look at the picture, I don’t see the picture. I smell pitch oozing from railroad ties. I feel the heat and rumble of the freighter’s big engine. No one else could have known what he felt standing there. Maybe that was reason enough to want to tell the story.

In 1944, after he’d been shot, Granddad thought the last things he was going to see were the clouds and the sky. Forty years later, dying of lung cancer in the Veterans’ Administration hospital in Danville, Illinois, the thought became a kind of wish. After chemo and surgery, talk had turned to him coming home. Granny bought a chair and a beach umbrella so he could sit in the backyard and listen to birds and watch the clouds. I imagined him getting better, stronger, putting on weight, not coughing anymore, his hair growing back, his arm around my shoulders some afternoon at Lake Shelbyville fishing for black crappie. But the night he got the all clear, the relief was too much. Instead of coming home, he died in his sleep.

At 10 years old, nothing had ever scared me as much as walking into his hospital room and seeing him so frail. My brother and I stood by his bed, stunned, just looking at him and trying not to cry. He slowly pulled the oxygen tube from his nostrils and put a thumb over the vents and beckoned my brother to come close.

When my brother leaned in, Granddad lifted his thumb from the tube and blasted him in the face with the cold air.

Or I should say he tried to blast him with cold air. His movements were too slow and shaky to really make it happen. And my brother only pretended to be surprised. But that was Granddad — he didn’t want us to be afraid.

The better story from his last days was one I learned later, secondhand from my mother. Upon Granddad’s arrival at the VA, word somehow got out that Private Everyman, the soldier featured in those old Life magazines, had been admitted. In their wheelchairs and hospital gowns, people began stopping by to pay their respects. They struck up conversations with him in the day room and on the elevator. They remembered him.

According to my mother, Granddad delighted in being recognized. She said that when they all got to talking he was like a king holding court. These years later it strikes me that in Granddad’s photographs in Life, his fellow vets had seen themselves, their triumphs and struggles. They had felt acknowledged by the witness he bore. And it occurs to me, too, that in chatting him up in the VA and telling him their stories from the war years, they acknowledged him. The tremendous gift of that stops me cold. No one in the world escapes from trauma and tragedy — it’s coming for us all. But in sharing our stories, we can see and be seen.

My son is nearly nine now, around the age I was when I first read about Granddad in Life. He likes legends of knights and castles and dragons. Lately he’s been putting together the story of how his mom and I met, and coming to terms with the puzzling fact that we were once children ourselves. One of these nights, after we’ve finished dinner and cleaned up the dishes, I’ll bring out one of Granddad’s copies of Life and instruct him in the careful turning of its pages. I’ll tell him everything I can about the people in the pictures. I’ll try to answer any question that might spring to mind — about the war, or why people are always fighting. I don’t know what it will mean to him, if anything. Maybe for him the story will be how meaningful it all was to me. Or maybe it will blur and fade, one more dog-eared photograph waiting to be discovered in memory’s dusty attic. Anything is possible. We live in a little town in Massachusetts, surrounded by orchards like the one in France where Granddad nearly died. Someday years from now my son may even realize why, when we’re out driving, I always point out pretty clouds in the sky.

***

Steve Edwards is author of Breaking into the Backcountry, a memoir of his time as the caretaker of a wilderness homestead in southern Oregon. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife and son.

***

Editor: Krista Stevens

Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Fact-checker: Ethan Chiel

On the Origins of the Word ハーフ, or Hafu (Half): Belonging and Not Belonging at Once

Miss Japan Ariana Miyamoto at the Miss Universe pageant Sunday, Dec. 20, 2015, in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/John Locher)

In the final installment of her Catapult column, “Mistranslate,” author Nina Coomes writes about the word, ハーフ, or hafu,“the Japanized pronunciation of the English word half. It is used primarily to describe biracial people who have one parent of European descent. While unraveling the word’s origins, Coomes thinks through evolving ideas of citizenship and beauty in Japan, and brings us along her journey to understand what it means to come from more than one place.

When I began writing these essays months ago, I wanted to write toward ease in an uneasy place. I was trying to reconcile my two tongues by going beyond the limits of dictionary definitions, telling stories of reverence and recognition along the way. I assumed my work would mean tying things together; taking what felt disparate and attempting to make it fit into a larger lexicon.

So I wrote the first essay, and the next, and the one after that, and what I thought was going to be a body of work focused on finding harmonies between two voices instead evolved into cacophony. I found myself scrawling a veritable dictionary of mistranslation in my notebook, the margins darkening as my handwriting turned frantic. It is actually laughable—I wanted to try to make my home in a place of mistranslation, and yet here I am surprised by the home I’ve begun to write.

Similarly, when I began writing about the term hafu, I initially thought I would write about an identity that was more than simply half of something, blending English and Japanese to explain the other. Instead what I’m finding is that I have no easy conclusion in any language. I am just beginning to sink my teeth into all the uncertainties I’m discovering.

Read the essay

The Rub of Rough Sex

iStock/Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Chelsea G. Summers | Longreads | July 2018 | 15 minutes (3,801 words)

 
This is a piece about abuse. This is a piece about kink and a piece about consent. This is a piece about the law. This is a piece about some powerful men whom I’ve never met, and it’s a piece about some nobody men whom I’ve loved. This is a piece about rough sex, about “rough sex,” and about how these two categories overlap and rub each other raw. This is a piece that was hard for me to write and may be hard for you to read. Most of all, this is a piece about why masculinity is fractured, and how women get caught in its cracks.

***

On May 7 of this year, The New Yorker dropped its Eric Schneiderman bombshell. The article, cowritten by Jane Mayer and Ronan Farrow, gives voice to four women who detail their experiences with Schneiderman, the New York attorney general at the time, and accuse him of repeated instances of “nonconsensual physical violence.” Presented as a thread in the unfolding #MeToo fabric of sexual abuse allegations, this New Yorker piece told four women’s stories of how Schneiderman slapped and choked them, “frequently in bed and never with their consent.” Within a day, Schneiderman had resigned his office.

I read the Mayer and Farrow piece with a mounting sense of dread, horror, and recognition. I’ve never met Schneiderman; I’ve never met the victims who allege his abuse. But I knew what these women were describing because I too have felt something like those slaps, those stings, that choking fear. I understood the disconnect between thinking you were dating a “woke” man, a guy who understood in his guts the inequity of being a woman in this patriarchal world, and finding that this man was a rank, abusive hypocrite.

Born and raised in Manhattan, Schneiderman glows with an idealized aura of the East Coast elite. After graduating from Amherst College and Harvard Law School, Schniederman worked as a public interest attorney before turning to public office. In 1998, Schneiderman ran for a New York Senate seat in New York’s 31st district, which at the time stretched from the Upper West Side through Washington Heights and into Riverdale in the Bronx. Schneiderman won that election. He won the next election. And he won four times more, eventually parlaying his state congressional successes into his winning 2010 bid for New York attorney general. By all public accounts, Schneiderman used his power and his privilege as a champion for women and for the poor. You couldn’t draw a better poster boy for American liberalism.

I think I voted for Schneiderman. Why would I not? I was a progressive Democrat, and Schneiderman looked like an exciting candidate. Supporting both women’s access to abortion and victims of domestic violence, Schneiderman’s record on women’s issues was strong. Indeed, as state senator, Schneiderman introduced and passed the Strangulation Prevention Act of 2010, a bill that specifically categorized choking as a criminal felony. In his nicely cut, nondescript suits and silver fox hair, Schneiderman embodied consummate “woke” manliness, a guy who can execute a decent jump shot, then effortlessly quash dickish locker-room talk.
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Confessions of An Unredeemed Fan

Shirlaine Forrest / Getty

Leslie Jamison | Tin House | Spring 2017 | 18 minutes (4,943 words)

Amy Winehouse’s last big concert was in Belgrade, a month before she died. This was June of 2011. Billed as the beginning of her comeback tour, the gig turned into one of her most infamous train wrecks: when she came on stage, she was drunk beyond the point of making sense, beyond the point of standing — tripping and crouching, sitting down to take off her shoes, leaning into her bass guitarist and holding his hand. The crowd started heckling her early and didn’t let up. “Sing!” they shouted. “Sing! Sing!”

Her eyes were as large as a child’s, as if she’d been dropped into a life she had no idea how to live. Her life had been unmanageable for years. But the thing was, she had all this management: a promoter, a producer, a father. She was asleep when they put her on the plane to Serbia. She slept for the whole flight, woke up to her own life, and heard: Sing! Her fans loved her as long as she gave them what they needed — as long as she broke down so they could watch, as long as she picked herself back up again so she could give them her voice. Her backup guys in their orange suits didn’t know what to do with her.

The footage of Belgrade is nearly impossible to believe, but there it is, happening over and over again, as many times as you want to click the YouTube refresh button. Amy stumbles along in her tiny yellow dress with ragged stripes of black, a bruised banana. When she falls off an amp, her drummer’s smile stretches into something more like a grimace. Is this an oh-those-self-destructive-music-legends-how-they-fuck-up moment or an actually-this-woman-is-basically-committing-suicide-right-in-front-of-you moment? He isn’t sure what face to make. The public didn’t know what face to make for years. “She’s shit-faced,” says a voice on the YouTube video. “She doesn’t know where she is.” And then: “Look at her. Look at her.” At a certain point, her face changes. She’s not confused anymore, or scared. She’s smirking. Her smirk seems to say, I’m done with this. She throws the mic. Someone hands her another. One voice cries out: “Sing or give me my money back!”


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She finally does sing, her voice barely audible above her music — above the song she’d written to turn her heartbreak into something beautiful, something profitable, your love goes and my love grows, the music that had turned her into a tabloid sensation it never seemed like she wanted to be. At a certain point, her voice is no longer audible above the noise of the crowd, the sounds of their frustration and desire, their voices reminding her of the words to her own song.

* * *

The public loved to see Amy fucking up. They loved to hate her, loved to judge her, loved to feel bad for her. They loved to relate to her, whatever the terms of that relation, because it brought them closer to her, and what they wanted most was access. The public loved to watch her falling apart. The darkness inside her was always spilling out. They got more of it than they wanted: She couldn’t sing for them in Belgrade. She couldn’t stay alive for them in London.

The public loved to see Amy fucking up. They loved to hate her, loved to judge her, loved to feel bad for her.

At a concert on the Isle of Wight, where she slurred her mumbled words behind a wheel bearing the title HMS Winehouse, she sang “Rehab,” her unrepentant rallying cry, and drank from a plastic cup of wine held close to her mouth. She had to choose between drinking and singing — moment by moment, on a physical, literal level: she couldn’t do both at once. She was already drunk. At the end of the song, she threw the cup and an arc of booze sprayed across the stage, streaking it like paint. No, no, no, she sang. She wouldn’t go to rehab. Instead, she was doing this.

There are thousands of comments on her YouTube clips, full of taffy strands of pity: It’s really sad to see a human being like this. Or else harsh strokes of judgment: She is the definition of trash, nice voice or not! She is a disgrace to music and all the hard-working musicians around the globe. Fifty years after the emergence of Morton Jellinek’s disease model of alcoholism, people are still trying to figure out if it’s a sickness or a sin: Addiction = retardation . . . the crowd was right to boo her . . . So many people dream of being a Singer and being on stage and Amy just threw it all away.

Someone else: I see someone with a broken heart.

After Belgrade, one newscaster wondered: “Why do they keep putting her on stage? Surely they know she has a problem.” Another said: “This was supposed to be a comeback. And she TOTALLY. BLEW. IT.”

Something about her addiction made people angry. But that anger wasn’t simple. The woman who wrote, Amy just threw it all away, had a story of her own: As for accidentally OD’ing that’s bullshit. My dad didn’t have a fucking accident when he overdosed on heroin . . . Me and my brothers just stood and watched as the paramedics revived him. Someone else just had a question: Does she want to go back to rehab now ;P

* * *

The soap opera version of the story went something like this: Amy’s drinking got out of control after a breakup with Blake, her no-good junkie boyfriend, and then her friends tried to make her go to rehab. She said, no, no, no, and then she wrote an album that blew up, fueled by the anthem of her refusal to get better. Her career went through the stratosphere and Blake fought to get her back. They were madly in love. They got married in Miami, and hugely addicted to crack back home in London. At the peak of her use, she was spending £16,000 a week on hard drugs.

After Amy almost overdosed, her friends and family staged an intervention at a Four Seasons in Hampshire. The doctor said if she had another seizure, she’d die. But she went on her US tour anyway. She and Blake kept doing drugs together till he went to prison. She won five Grammys but she wasn’t allowed to attend the ceremony because of all the drugs. In her acceptance speech — delivered at a club in London, where she was watching from afar — she said: “For my Blake, my Blake incarcerated.”

A YouTube video from six months after Blake’s incarceration shows Amy high on crack, playing with a bunch of newborn mice. Watching it is like falling into some one else’s terrible dream. “This one has a message for Blake,” Amy says, holding one of the wriggling furless mice on her finger. She gives us a squeaky mouse-voice, pleading: “Blake, please don’t divorce me.” The mouse-voice says: “I’m only a day old but I know what love is.”

Even after Amy finally stopped the hard drugs, she kept drinking. She and Blake got divorced, mouse pleas notwithstanding. She kept drinking, and kept singing, but never made another record. She stopped drinking, kept drinking, stopped drinking, kept drinking — until her body finally just gave up. When she died, her blood alcohol content was over .4 percent, five times the legal limit for drunk driving. The coroner ruled it “death by misadventure.”

* * *

The paparazzi loved Amy. They couldn’t get enough of her. They loved her beauty. They loved its blemishing even more. They didn’t just want her beehive hair; they wanted it ratty. They didn’t just want her eyeliner cat’s-eyes; they wanted them smeared. Their photos tried to zoom in on her cuts and bruises; the damage from her crack binges and booze benders. Little wounds were like openings in the tent flaps of her privacy. The camera got close on her wet flesh as if it were trying to get inside the wounds themselves, the closest thing to fucking that a camera could manage. The paparazzi wanted to get right into her bloodstream.

Amy once said to her husband: I want to feel what you feel. And that’s what the public wanted from her — to know what she felt, to get under her skin. But also they wanted to jump away again, hide under the safe cover of irony: What crawled into her hair and died there? one comedian wanted to know. She looks like a campaign poster for neglected horses. Her broke-down addict self was irritating. It was so fucking sad. OMG, it was funny.

Her addiction kept delivering physical evidence of her vulnerability, her bruises and her gashes and her emaciated body, and comedians kept delivering jokes so everyone could metabolize the horror of what was happening, like a five-year-long video of someone slowly dying in public. One paparazzi photographer took a photo of her getting into a car and started snapping shots closer and closer on her crotch, then posted these photos as proof that she was wearing diapers — that she’d started wearing them because she couldn’t control her bodily functions. It was unending, our collective fascination with the self-inflicted weakness of a beautiful woman.

Why were we obsessed with her anti-rehab anthem? It’s a great song, straight-up and flat-out, jaunty and sublime, Amy’s singular voice all acrobatic and vaulting and rich, like vinyl and leather; the chorus blunt and surprising, full of defiance where you might expect to find the keeling croon of self-pity. The song finds hope and energy in its own rhythms. It’s not interested in self-care. The no, no, no of refusing rehab echoes another kind of assertion: Yes I been black, but when I come back, you’ll know, know, know. No turns into know: resistance becomes knowledge. This isn’t just refusal; it’s a declaration of presence.

It was unending, our collective fascination with the self-inflicted weakness of a beautiful woman.

The unrepentant junkie had been a beloved figure for a long time, an unleashed alternative to the good little sober boy. William Burroughs’s 1953 cult classic, Junkie, was subtitled Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict. It offered an appealing antidote to the bow-tied conversion narrative.

During the same decade, just as federal legislation against “narcotic addicts” was growing more draconian — mandating minimum sentences and constructing the addict as villain — people created another vision of the addict in stark opposition to these moralizing measures: someone who wasn’t apologizing for anything, who was spinning something defiant or even beautiful from the darkness of their compulsion. Elizabeth Hardwick loved to imagine that Billie Holiday faced the wreckage of her life with unrepentant grandeur. She admired Holiday’s “luminous self-destruction,” and her refusal to play nice: “there did not seem to be any pleading need to quit, to modify.” But that was its own myth; Holiday tried to kick her habit many times.

Perhaps with Amy, decades later, it was liberating to see someone who didn’t want to get better; who seemed to say, Fuck it, let’s DRINK. Let’s roll the foil and smoke. If Amy was an unredeemed addict, then “Rehab” was her battle cry: She sang it over and over and over again. She sang it and stumbled; she sang it and drank; she sang it and spilled her wine. She tripped over her sky-scraper heels. “I’m not gonna spend ten weeks,” she sang. “Have everyone think I’m on the mend.”

It was exciting to hear her resist the solace of mending and its easy answers, to hear her reject gift-wrapped redemption, refuse to give it to us — the public act of recuperating pain by performing its transcendence. She refused to get better.

But maybe “unrepentant” wasn’t an alternative to the fantasy of conversion so much as another flavor of fantasy. Maybe fuck it was a fantasy. Maybe our collective vision of her alchemy — ache altered into chorus — depended on a myth that wasn’t quite true. As the poet John Berryman put it, even he had to fight the “delusion that my art depended on my drinking.” That delusion was what he had to break, he felt, if he ever wanted to get sober.

Amy launched her career on refusing rehab, but she actually went to rehab four times. On a home video from her first stint at an island rehab mansion called the Causeway Retreat, Blake taunts her to sing a revised version of “Rehab.” Can she still sing, no, no, no, now that she’s actually in treatment? Will she have to sing, yes?

Amy launched her career on refusing rehab, but she actually went to rehab four times.

But she doesn’t seem particularly drawn to the joke. She tells him: “I don’t mind it here, actually.”

* * *

Amy Winehouse was born in London in September of 1983, three months after I was born across an ocean. When she was twenty-seven, she died from too much booze in her blood. When I was twenty-seven, I gave up booze entirely. Maybe these correspondences are part of the reason I grew so obsessed with her life, and with the possibility of what her life might have looked like sober. Or maybe these correspondences are just the little pieces of her I’d like to claim for myself. People love claiming little pieces of Amy for themselves: “Everyone wanted a piece of her,” said her friend Nick, her first manager.

By the time I found myself wanting a piece of Amy, in memoriam, I’d been sober for years. But I could still remember what it had felt like to be unsober — gloriously, unapologetically unsober: drinking whiskey by a bonfire, feeling the sluice of heat down my throat, its rhyme with the flames at my fingertips. I remembered how drinking felt like constant apology; how a blackout could drop inside your life like hostile terrain, behind enemy lines, and how getting drunk also felt absolutely necessary, the only horizon of relief — like the perspective point in a painting, the crucial pivot everything else referred to. I remembered how the prospect of sobriety seemed like unrelenting gray, after luminous, disjunctive nights — a bleak horizon, a shirt washed so many times it had lost all its color. What could the straight line of on the mend hold that might rival the dark, sparkling sweep of falling apart?

* * *

When I imagined sobriety, before I got sober, I imagined The Shining: Jack Nicholson playing a writer white-knuckling his way through bitter sobriety in an empty mountain resort — the opposite of rehab, solitary confinement instead of company — or else a rehab full of ghosts. He spent his days punching a single sentence into his typewriter, over and over: All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

On the night she won five Grammys, Amy told one of her best friends: “Jules, this is so boring without drugs.”

Part of me wants to tell her: You were wrong. It wasn’t boring without drugs. You just needed to learn how to live sober. Part of me wants to tell her about church basements and evening coffee dates in diners, about the primal thrill of sitting across from someone who has felt some version of what you’ve felt — the fear of boredom, the urge to flee pain, or dissolve self, or permit self — and hear them say it out loud, how liberating that feels, in recovery, resonance not as easy moral or redemption but as a sense of outward possibility, drawing a door on something that looked like a wall.

That is part of me. Another part of me knows I’m drawn to watching her destroy herself. In one short story about an alcoholic going to rehab, Raymond Carver writes: “Part of me wanted help. But there was another part.”

This was the other part: drugs and booze were part of why Amy’s life was so interesting, to me and to everyone. They were part of why we wanted to keep getting closer, wanted to bring our magnifying glasses and our microscopes, our telephoto lenses, to give ourselves a better view of her heartbreak.

Even the title of Asif Kapadia’s 2015 documentary about her life confesses our collective desire for proximity: just Amy. As if we all knew her; or could still get to know her, even after she was dead, maybe because she had died. As if she were still available to us; as if she had ever been. Amy. It’s ridiculous I call her that. But I find it hard to call her anything else. The film summons the fantasy of intimacy but also ironizes it. It’s full of paparazzi shouting: “Amy! Amy! Amy!” like the chorus to another song.

Off their tongues, in their mouths, her first name doesn’t summon intimacy but its distortion; not private relation but its violation. “Cheer up, Amy!” one tabloid guy calls out, after she shoves a few of his colleagues out of the way. Then a year later, when her body is being carried out of her Camden mansion, a voice says, “Rest in peace, Amy,” a perfect stranger, still on a first-name basis.

* * *

Every story about a dead girl needs a villain, and Amy dangles a few suspects: Maybe her promoter killed her by keeping the machinery of her fame running even when her body was getting crushed by it. Maybe her father killed her by not giving her the love she needed when she was young. Maybe her husband killed her by giving her the thing that numbed the pain her father had already caused, and by causing even more pain that needed numbing.

The film offers Amy as victim-addict and Blake as villain-addict: the woman who got sucked into crack; the man who dragged her into its thrall. We don’t have to reconcile these types: addict as victim; addict as villain. We’re allowed to project them across two conveniently discrete human bodies.

When the documentary shows Blake coming back into Amy’s life, after her album about their breakup made her a star, it visually frames his return as a literal emergence from darkness: he materializes from a dark doorway across a series of paparazzi shots. He’s like a demon, ready to take her back: Back to Black. A doctor who consulted with both of them said: “It was a common case of one person having a situation that was very beneficial to his using . . . not wanting the other person to get better for fear of losing the gravy train.”

Of Amy, the doctor said simply: “She was a very vulnerable woman.”

Amy’s addiction meant she was vulnerable, while Blake’s addiction meant he preyed on someone vulnerable. Amy needed to be protected; Blake needed to be protected from. But Blake needed crack for reasons of his own: “It literally eradicates any kind of negative feeling,” he said once. This was a man who had tried to slit his wrists as a boy, at the age of nine. Was that not vulnerability as well?

* * *

Really the film’s greatest villain is celebrity itself: we killed her. Celebrity was an ally to Amy’s addiction, and an enemy to her art. It kept her in gigs rather than in the studio. Kapadia’s documentary has an uneasy relationship to the paparazzi it documents. They are its villains — all menace and flash, shutters like staccato gunfire — but also its collaborators. The film is built largely from their footage. At one point we see Amy closing a curtain; gazing out her window warily, protecting herself from view. But we can only witness that violation because the violation gave us a record of her resistance.

Celebrity was an ally to Amy’s addiction, and an enemy to her art.

The film critiques the paparazzi’s hunger for access, but also raises the stakes on this hunger — effectively, implicitly — by promising to take us deeper inside Amy’s wounds than the paparazzi ever did. By showing the harsh glare and invasive constancy of paparazzi as one kind of access, heartless and shallow, the film invites us to think of its exploration as another kind of access entirely, full of depth and compassion. We want to feel better about our hunger, but it’s still hunger: We’re still after her, still sniffing the trail of her blood. We still just want in.

Or I should say: I wanted in. I’m not pleased or proud — but there it was, that desire. Winehouse’s life was gone, Amy’s life was gone, and that only made me want to get deeper inside what her life had been. My own drunk life was gone and sometimes I wanted to get back inside it, too. Sometimes I didn’t feel done with it. When I saw ten empty champagne flutes in front of her on a tabletop in St. Lucia, I felt sad for her, and I felt shame — shame at my own desire for proximity — and I also felt thirsty. Even the empty vodka bottles cluttering her home; all of it made me remember that old fuck it feeling. She’d followed it somewhere else.

When I watched the public obsession on film, an endless fuel driving the celebrity that killed her, their eager hands buying the magazines the paparazzi peppered with their eager angles, I hated that public. I also knew I was part of it. The fact of the film itself was almost sickening: we had outlived her, and we were still obsessed with her.

At one point, the film gives us the photo collage of a bender, after Amy’s first stint in rehab: her face darkened by smeared mascara, Blake’s whole face covered in streaks of blood; his arms in bandages, holding his cigarettes; her ballet flats covered in splotches of red. He’d cut himself with a bottle and she had to do it, too, because she wanted to feel whatever he felt, and we want to see the blood on her, so we can feel what she felt, too, or convince ourselves we’ve gotten close.

The film describes the bathroom at her recording studio after she’d covered it with her own vomit; the white towels darkened by mascara where she’d wiped her face. The film narrates these details while showing a video of Amy playing guitar in the studio: she is binging on booze and purging beauty, still metabolizing the pain, still turning it into song.

It was uncomfortable to watch the film because it was exposing a fixation and exploiting it at once. I cried when I watched it, and I wanted it to end. Then I wanted to watch it from the beginning, so I could cry again. I watched the end of the film at least twenty times, the haunting piano composition that plays as her corpse is carried from her house to a private ambulance in the street, as a doctor’s voice speculates that years of starving and purging and drinking “just made her heart stop.” I watched mourners gathering awkwardly in the street, after her funeral service: a man in a kippah standing with his head bowed in grief, one hand to his face; her mother using a cane to get into her car. I thought: Who filmed this private grief? I thought: Who am I, watching it?

“I died a hundred times,” Amy sings in one of her torch songs, and I kept hitting rewind — to watch her die again.

* * *

“This isn’t Amy,” her mother said in 2007. “It’s as if her whole life’s turned into a stage performance.” Amy always had a sense of humor about the dark silhouette she cast, the ways in which she had become an archetype. When the Guardian asked, “What keeps you awake at night?” She said: “Being sober.” She was self-aware about her “issues” and their public performance. “What is your most unappealing habit?” she was asked once. She said: “Being an abusive drunk.”

She seemed to get a kick out of performing a kind of ironized self-destruction, spelling Blake’s name on her stomach with a shard of glass while Terry Richardson snapped photographs. She called it “chickenscratch on her tummy,” but it wasn’t just performance. She’d really cut herself for years. Her arms were covered with scars.

She seemed to get a kick out of performing a kind of ironized self-destruction

Mos Def remembers watching Amy smoke crack one night and thinking: This is someone who is trying to disappear. Near the end, her doctor asked her: “Do you want to die?” She said: “No, I don’t want to die.” Her bodyguard said she didn’t want to do that final gig in Belgrade: “Can’t go anywhere. Can’t hide anywhere. She needed an escape.” He said, “Then the drinking . . . Escape route, innit?”

* * *

When I watched Amy change across the course of the documentary, watched her body shrink across the years, I felt as if I were watching the disappearance Mos Def described her craving. She went from a voluptuous girl to an emaciated creature; from plump to skeletal. Her beehive got so huge. Her body got so tiny.

Her tiny body was part of the outsized myth, too, our collective awe at how the force of her voice — and the chaos of her her feverish dysfunction — was somehow held by the slip and twigs of her body. Her Rolling Stone cover profile started with her size: “Alongside the world’s tallest free-standing tower, one of the world’s tiniest pop stars is crouched next to a garbage pail, collecting a pile of eyeliner pencils and mascara tubes between her hands.” It’s all there: She was tiny. She was obsessed with her own beauty. She was close to the garbage.

In that profile, she says she wanted a different kind of life: “I know I’m talented, but I wasn’t put here to sing. I was put here to be a wife and a mom and to look after my family. She told one newspaper she wanted to be remembered as genuine.

Billie Holiday may have been beloved for what Hardwick called “the sheer enormity of her vices. . . the outrageousness of them,” but she had other dreams: She wanted to buy a farm in the country and take in orphans. She once tried to adopt a child in Boston, but the judge wouldn’t let her because of her drug record. Hardwick loved the absence of “any pleading need to quit, to modify” in Holiday, and admired that she spoke with “cold anger” of “various cures that had been forced upon her. But Holiday wasn’t entirely resistant to quitting or to cures. Her anger was directed at the particular kind of “cure” that involved arrest and incarceration, persecution at the hands of federal agents. As a black woman, her addiction made her more vulnerable to being treated as a criminal: she spent nearly a year in a West Virginia prison, and died handcuffed to her hospital bed. She hated that cure, but as for the junk itself? She tried to quit over and over again. To her pianist she said: “Carl, don’t you ever use this shit! It’s no good for you! Stay away from it! You don’t want to end up like me!”

* * *

If Amy had gone to rehab that first time, we might have never gotten Back to Black, but I wonder what we would have gotten instead. I would have loved to hear her sing sober. Not just two weeks sober, but three years sober, twenty years sober. “She had the complete gift,” Tony Bennett once said of her. “If she had lived, I would have said, ‘Life teaches you, really, how to live it; if you live long enough.’”

I never lived Amy’s life and she never lived mine, but I know that when I see her on that stage in Belgrade, as if she’s been air-dropped into a moment she can’t possibly fathom, I think of coming out of a blackout into the strange new world of a Mexican bathroom stall, or a dirt basement, wearing handcuffs, tasting gin and citrus, or some breezeless bedroom where it was easier to let a man finish fucking me than it was to stop him.

I know that when I watch Amy stumbling across that stage in Belgrade, and finally squatting there — still and quiet, smiling — just waiting for something to happen or something to stop happening, I feel less that I know what is happening in her and more that her eyes know something that happened in me. I feel sad she didn’t get years of ordinary coffee dates and people saying, I get that, that she was doomed to her singularity and her vodka-thinned blood and all her drunken stumbling under the broken tower of her beehive, hair like a pagoda on her head and her body barely holding the weight — until it wasn’t, until it couldn’t any longer.

* * *

“Confessions of an Unredeemed Fan” by Leslie Jamison. Copyright © 2017 Leslie Jamison, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.

Leslie Jamison teaches at the Columbia University MFA program, where she directs the nonfiction concentration and leads the Marian House Project. Her latest book, The Recovering, was published in April 2018. She’s also written a novel, The Gin Closet, and a collection of essays, The Empathy Exams. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Oxford American, A Public Space, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Believer.