Search Results for: music

The Case for Letting Malibu Burn

AP Photo/Ringo H.W. Chiu

Mike Davis | Ecology of Fear | Metropolitan Books | September 1998 | 20 minutes (5,921 words)

 

“Homes, of course, will arise here in the thousands. Many a peak will have its castle.”

—John Russell McCarthy, These Waiting Hills (1925)

 

Late August to early October is the infernal season in Los Angeles. Downtown is usually shrouded in acrid yellow smog while heat waves billow down Wilshire Boulevard. Outside air-conditioned skyscrapers, homeless people huddle miserably in every available shadow.

Across the Harbor Freeway, the overcrowded tenements of the Westlake district—Los Angeles’s Spanish Harlem—are intolerable ovens. Suffocating in their tiny rooms, immigrant families flee to the fire escapes, stoops, and sidewalks. Anxious mothers swab their babies’ foreheads with water while older children, eyes stinging from the smog, cry for paletas: the flavored cones of shaved ice sold by pushcart vendors. Shirtless young men—some with formidable jail-made biceps and mural-size tattoos of the Virgin of Guadalupe across their backs—monopolize the shade of tienda awnings. Amid hundreds of acres of molten asphalt and concrete there is scarcely a weed, much less a lawn or tree.

Thirty miles away, the Malibu coast—where hyperbole meets the surf—basks in altogether different weather. The temperature is 85°F (20 degrees cooler than Downtown), and the cobalt blue sky is clear enough to discern the wispish form of Santa Barbara Island, nearly 50 miles offshore. At Zuma surfers ride the curl under the insouciant gazes of their personal sun goddesses, while at Topanga Beach, horse trainers canter Appaloosas across the wet sand. Indifferent to the misery on the “mainland,” the residents of Malibu suffer through another boringly perfect day.

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Blowin’ Up the ‘90s

Mark Terrill, Associated Press / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Rebecca Schuman | Longreads | December 2018 | 11 minutes (2,795 words)

The ’90s Are Old is a Longreads series by Rebecca Schuman, wherein she unpacks the cultural legacy of a decade that refuses to age gracefully.

* * *

The 1990s did not end on January 1, 2000. The monumental anti-climax of Y2K — a computer “bug” that was supposed to screech our Earth to a Scooby-Doo foot-cloud halt, but instead did bupkis — was a truly apt expression of the preceding decade. But even discounting Y2K, I’ve got some serious issues with the alleged “turn of the actual millennium” as the endpoint of the most intentionally underwhelming decade of the 20th century. And not just because 2000 (zero-zero) is so obvious and overplayed — though there is, of course, that.

The actual termination point of the ‘90s required an attitudinal shift that would decentralize the role of Generation X as the admittedly-petulant target of all culture and advertising — the thawing of the winter of the bong-ripping couch-slacker’s discontent; the disappearance of gin and juice from house-party bars; the centering of the hot tub on The Real World; the sobering realization that both men and women were from Earth and just sucked; the demise, for that matter, of Suck itself.

In point of incontrovertible fact, the 1990s would not end in the United States until the aughts’ resurgence of aggressive consumerism and even more aggressive vacuity came to dominate all aspects of sociopolitical and popular culture. So the only question is: When was that? There are more potential answers than squiggles on a Fido Dido sweatshirt.

Was it in 2001, when the original Fast and the Furious premiered? 1996, when Blur released that WOO-hoo song? Was it 2010 — you heard me, two thousand and ten — when enough grandparents had shuffled off the mortal coil to make the primary avenue of written news consumption digital rather than paper?

I have spent an unnecessarily and perhaps questionably extensive amount of time researching in this subfield, and I present my findings to you now in a perplexing new format (I believe it is called a “list-cicle”?) that is apparently the only thing young people are able to read.

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Seventeen

Kristina Servant / Flickr CC

Steve Edwards | Longreads | December 2018 | 19 minutes (5,135 words)

I don’t remember the therapist’s name, only that he had closely cropped silver hair, a soft voice, and kind, deep-set eyes. He was a postdoc in the psychology department — whatever that meant. He wanted me to know that our sessions would be recorded and could be included in his dissertation — whatever that meant — and would I be OK with that? I said sure. He smiled and studied my face. It was September, a smell of rain in the air. One of those evenings when the dark sets in early and surprises you.

I’d just started my senior year of high school but had already been accepted to Purdue, which was only a half hour from home and where my brother had enrolled two years prior. I’d been to campus once or twice to go to parties with him. But I’d never been there by myself. I’d never been inside the psych building.

My mother set up the meeting. I didn’t know what I wanted to study, and she thought the university would have career counselors. She looked up counseling services in the phone book and made an appointment.

It was an honest mistake. Like the time I told her I needed a cup for baseball and she’d bought me a plastic drinking cup. She hadn’t been to a four-year university. My father, who had earned a degree in chemistry from Eastern Illinois, wasn’t any help with administrative tasks and probably wouldn’t have known any different either. What other kinds of counseling services besides career counseling would there be at a university? And I went along with it because that’s what I did: I floated like a cloud through my life. If my parents thought I needed to be somewhere and do something, I went there and did it. Not out of duty so much as out of a desire to avoid conflict. The thought of fighting over things I didn’t care about depressed me.

And I went along with it because that’s what I did: I floated like a cloud through my life…Not out of duty so much as out of a desire to avoid conflict. The thought of fighting over things I didn’t care about depressed me.

If anything, however, I thought maybe counseling services could help me choose a major, which apparently was important. I’d looked at the lists when we filled out the application, and most of them seemed terrible. Economics. Accounting. Some I didn’t even know what they were. Sophomore year of high school we’d taken a long fill-in-the-blank aptitude test to help us identify future careers. One question asked if we liked to be outside. I said yes and was told I should be a farmer. But even I knew that that wasn’t how farming worked. I felt duped by the test and wrote it off, like I’d already written off most of school. It was all one big time suck, state-sanctioned babysitting until we turned 16. None of my teachers seemed happy with their lives and careers. Better not to even think about it.

The therapist asked me a few questions about myself and I answered them. I’d grown up in a tiny town not far from campus. My folks were still married, and both worked — my mom as a doctor’s assistant and my dad for a pharmaceutical plant — and my brother went to school here. We were in a band together. I played bass.

“You’re interested in thinking more about choosing a major. Thinking about a career,” the therapist said. “Yes?”

“I guess.”

“What sounds good?”

“I want to be a poet,” I said.

He nodded thoughtfully and wrote something in his notebook. When he looked up again, I said if not a poet, a rock star.

“A musician?”

“Sure.”

He nodded again, wrote more in his notebook. I glanced around the room, which was square and sterile, lit by a fluorescent light, the walls a soft neutral tone. I had no idea where the camera that was recording us was located.

Over the next hour, as we kept chatting, the questions got surprisingly personal. But what did I care — I floated. If this was what I was here to do, might as well get it over with. Might as well tell the truth. Did I believe in God? Sure. Was I sexually active? Yes. Or at least I had been. Had I ever considered suicide? Yes. What was the occasion? Some nights, I said, just out driving, I thought about popping my seatbelt and steering into oncoming traffic. What kept you from doing it? I didn’t know. I didn’t want to hurt anybody else. And I guess, honestly, I just wanted to see how everything was going to end. He wrote it all down. This was a far cry from the fill-in-the-blank aptitude test I took sophomore year. I kept looking around the room, my armpits sweating. Wherever they had hidden the camera it was very discreet.


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That I would accidentally end up in therapy was emblematic of my life at 17. Things just seemed to happen to me, and out of curiosity and boredom I went along with them. Other people were such mysteries. I would watch my parents and teachers and kids at school and wonder why they did the things they did or thought the things they thought. It all seemed arbitrary. And no matter how long or deep my ruminations, I got no closer to understanding. The path of least resistance became my mode. I rolled my jeans, wore only certain brands of shoes, combed my hair how everybody else combed theirs. I wasn’t a conformist in hopes of attaining some higher social status. Rather, it was the easiest way not to care. I had music and TV shows and being outside and reading if the book was any good. Maybe someday I’d get motivated.

That I would accidentally end up in therapy was emblematic of my life at 17.

***

I hadn’t known Rachel Thompson well when we started going together the previous spring. She was a grade behind me. She ran cross-country and was a junior varsity cheerleader, and when she and her friend got dumped by their boyfriends mere weeks before prom, they approached my best friend and me about double dating. It was only after agreeing that I learned Rachel had something of a reputation.

“You play your cards right,” my friend whispered to me conspiratorially over the phone one night, “and you could end up getting laid.”

I didn’t hate the idea.

How many times had I paused in the crowded hallways at school and watched girls rushing to and from class, laughing, books in their arms, and wondered — sadly, self-pityingly — if any of them wanted it as badly as I did?

But I wasn’t enough of an asshole to commiserate about something like that with my friend on the phone. Or at least not about a specific person. Or maybe I’m getting it all wrong in the remembering and we were always talking about girls at school, objectifying them, talking up the things we would do if given the chance. Maybe I didn’t commiserate on the phone that night with my friend because this time it was about me.

Rachel Thompson lived in a little farmhouse way off in the country. School consolidation in our rural Indiana county put 25 miles of cornfields and grain silos between us, distance enough that every trip out felt like a journey. Her dad worked at a factory in town and was missing his front teeth but wore partials. Her mom was friendly and frail, a special ed teacher where I’d gone to middle school. They had a biological son who was 21 and already married, and Rachel, who they’d adopted as a baby. They loved each other and were a happy family and they welcomed me as one of their own straight away. The day of prom I came dressed in my tux and with a corsage to pin to Rachel’s dress, and everyone was there, all smiles and warmth and good cheer. Her brother had a camcorder and kept ribbing me about being unable to get the corsage on right until finally her mother stepped in and straightened things out.

I liked the Thompsons, and I liked Rachel. In the weeks after prom, we spent more and more time together. We were both on the track team and would hold hands and talk on the long bus rides home from away meets. On the weekends, I’d drive out to her house and watch movies on TV with her and her folks, and afterwards we’d hang out in the living room alone. They had a piano. She’d play and sing “The Rose” and “From a Distance” by Bette Midler. I loved the warmth of her voice, the way it filled the whole house.

“Play your cards right and you could end up getting laid,” my friend had said. But he didn’t know how she played the piano. Neither did I. I couldn’t have anticipated the intimacy of those performances in her living room. The occasional missed chord followed by a correction. Her voice reaching up for a note.

Being around her made me feel like a different person. Or maybe more like myself. As though I didn’t have to blend in or hide. As though I was worth something for no other reason than that I was here and we were together.

‘Play your cards right and you could end up getting laid,’ my friend had said. But he didn’t know how she played the piano. Neither did I. I couldn’t have anticipated the intimacy of those performances in her living room. The occasional missed chord followed by a correction. Her voice reaching up for a note.

We used to listen to Pink Floyd late at night. We made out to it sometimes, too, down in my folks’ basement. I didn’t understand the meaning of the lyrics, just that they were meaningful. The way a line could lift me out of myself and remake me. The way kissing Rachel could lift me out of myself and remake me. I felt stupidly lucky. Happy. What had I done to make any of this happen? I had no idea. And I didn’t care. I couldn’t see a single advantage to thinking too much and somehow jinxing it all.

I remember one afternoon we were driving some empty county road listening to the radio and talking as the cornfields whizzed past. Rachel reached over and lay a hand on my thigh. I glanced at her, smiling, uncertain. She stared straight ahead. As I kept driving, she inched her hand over until she was holding me with it. Everything got quiet. The music and the fields swam away from us. I pressed on the accelerator — 60, 70, 80 mph. Nothing had ever felt as thrilling. Then she laughed. And I laughed. Finally we came to a stoplight at an intersection with another highway and she took her hand back.

“Don’t think bad of me,” she said.

“Why would I?”

“For that.”

“I don’t,” I said. “I liked it.”

I never thought bad of Rachel — for anything. She knew what she wanted, and people who knew what they wanted fascinated me. How did they know? Was there something they understood about the world that I didn’t? Some anxious part of me always feared I was living life the wrong way. The thought of screwing up paralyzed me. Even as a kid, my family had called me “Lump” because rather than jump into the action, I sat back and studied the other kids and only joined the fun when I knew it was safe.

Rachel didn’t need a career counselor or to take an aptitude test. After high school she was going to enroll in a two-year associates degree and then work as an administrative assistant. She already typed 70 words per minute and with practice could reach 100 or 110. She had a starting salary in mind, a neighborhood where she wanted to live. I’d listen to her tell me these things and marvel at her confidence.

I didn’t know what I wanted. I didn’t even really know my options. I figured I’d go to college and see what happened. That had been the only real story my parents had pushed on me — go to college. We didn’t talk about what it would be like or what I might do once I was there. One night my mother was helping me fill out my application. I had to check a box for a major as part of the process. I mentioned Creative Writing, the only thing on the list that looked halfway interesting. My mother pointed to the major right above it: Communication. She thought liberal arts majors all took pretty much the same classes and said communication might sound better on a résumé. We were sitting at the kitchen table. She looked up at me, pen poised and ready. “OK,” I said. “Communication.”

Some anxious part of me always feared I was living life the wrong way. The thought of screwing up paralyzed me.

I didn’t want to argue because on some level it didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to convince her and I didn’t want go to the trouble of trying. It was easier to concede. But beneath that expedience opened a sinkhole of unacknowledged truth. I didn’t want to share that part of my life — my private thoughts and feelings, my hopes and dreams and vulnerabilities — with her. Or with anyone. It didn’t feel safe. There is plenty of poetry in small-town Indiana but there aren’t many poets there to sing it. For years, on instinct, I stuffed down my emotions, hid my heart away, kept secret the million delicious melancholies a poet perceives before language arrives to set them free. Part of the reason people who knew what they wanted fascinated me was that I couldn’t figure out how they dealt with the pain of being so exposed. Or didn’t they feel what I felt inside? The burden of some fragile, unacknowledged gift. A sense of life’s utter strangeness. Life’s brutality and grace. What I had learned was to blend in, to keep perfectly still. If no one knew me, no one could hurt me.

But at the same time, I was desperate to be known. On long drives through the country, or after we’d made out on the couch in her living room, I’d spill my guts to Rachel, talking music, telling stories about my family, sharing poems I’d written in a journal. And I’d ask questions, too, and listen to her answers. She was kind, thoughtful, funny. That she could so easily be herself had opened up space for me to do the same. And she never judged me. I remember when we finally had sex — my first time — she didn’t laugh at how quickly it was all over. Or she laughed but not in a bad way. She said, “You’re kidding, right?” but seemed more amused than anything, and after a few minutes we tried again with greater success. It was tentative and awkward and fun and sweet.

Afterward, we got dressed and drove to her brother’s house for a family picnic and kept looking at each other, sharing glances. I realized half the fun of sex was knowing you’d had it, the secret in your smile. Though maybe if anyone in her family had really looked at us just then they’d have known. And that was the other exciting part I hadn’t considered — the work of keeping it a secret. Her hulking factory-worker father with the missing front teeth, giant teddy bear though he was to Rachel, could have crushed me like a beer can. But I was too dumb and happy to be afraid. I piled baked beans and hot dogs and potato salad onto a plate.

The one person I told, a friend since kindergarten who I knew I could trust, said, “Have you even told her you love her yet?”

“No,” I said.

“Do you?” he said.

The question surprised me. I hadn’t considered it once in the whole time Rachel and I had been hanging out. It felt beside the point. Of course I loved her. Did I have to say it for her to know? Had I made a mistake by not saying it? Had I broken some unspoken rule? It pained me to think I’d messed something up without even knowing.

The next time we had sex I whispered “I love you” in her ear. She didn’t say it back. She sighed and said, “You’re sweet.”

Of the two of us, Rachel was the sweet one. I remember on her dad’s birthday, she wanted to surprise him at work so we hit Taco Bell and Burger King and McDonald’s, got him a big bag full of his favorite fast food treats for lunch. He worked on the shop floor at Alcoa, an aluminum supplier. When he came out to greet us he was sweating and streaked with grease. And at first he thought something was wrong — what were we doing there? Then she handed him the bag and he looked inside. Tacos. Burgers. A hot apple pie. The look on his face as he realized she’d gone to all those different places for him. I thought he might cry right on the spot.

The next time we had sex I whispered ‘I love you’ in her ear. She didn’t say it back. She sighed and said, ‘You’re sweet.’

My dad worked in a factory, too — a pharmaceutical plant — but I’d never taken him lunch as a surprise. I hardly even knew what he did there all day long. Family meant something more to Rachel. On one of those nights she’d played the piano and sung for me, we ended up snuggling on the couch. She told me about her biological mother.

“All I know about her,” she said, “was that she was morbidly obese. So I have to watch myself. That’s all I really know.”

We’d had sex several times, but I’d never felt closer to her, or more overwhelmed by tenderness, than in that moment. It was how she said I love you back.

One Sunday night in early summer, I went with the Thompsons and some of their friends to a carnival a half hour down the road in Crawfordsville. Rachel had been coming to the carnival, she said, for as long as she could remember. It reminded me of the county fair I’d gone to every summer when I was a kid and would stay for a few weeks with my grandparents in Illinois. It made me think about how inside Rachel was a whole world of memories and experiences, and that I was lucky for a glimpse. That night we walked the fairway holding hands. Barkers called for us to toss softballs into milk canisters, pitch pennies onto plates. Swells of melodic pipe organ music spilled from the carousel. Kids spun themselves dizzy on a Tilt-A-Whirl. I remember looking up at the Ferris wheel — this giant spinning disc of light against the night’s darkness — and how, at the very top, an empty seat rocked back and forth. The poet in me knew it meant something but I wasn’t sure what. For a moment, I felt unaccountably sad and alone, even though there were people all around and I was in love.

***

In mid-July, Rachel and I spent a week apart — and at 17, a week is a long time. Led by my mother and a friend, my church youth group attended the Presbyterian Youth Triennium at Purdue, where some 5,000 kids from around the country swarm campus for seven days of fellowship and singing and sharing ideas.

It was something to do the way going to church was something to do. Every Sunday I dutifully got up, got dressed, and endured boring Sunday school lessons and sermons and droned along with the hymns. I liked some of the stories, like when Jesus turned over the money changers’ tables in the temple, but the supernatural stuff left me cold and I instinctively hated people’s moralism and judgmental attitudes. Part of every service was a prayer the congregation read aloud. The gist was to acknowledge our selfishness and insufficiency, our pettiness, our weakness, the stain of sin made manifest through our desires.

It fetishized shame.

I remember always wondering why we should apologize for being human when we’d never asked to be born. And if God made these bodies of ours, why deny ourselves the pleasure or pain of inhabiting them?

On the first night of Triennium, everyone gathered in Purdue’s Elliot Hall of Music. It was crowded and noisy, more like a rock concert than a church service. “Brown-Eyed Girl” played over the loudspeakers and kids my age — several thousand of them — sang and swayed and hung off each other. I didn’t know what to think, only that I liked it. And whatever it was that allowed them to so freely express themselves — I wanted it.

Over the course of the week, I met kids from California, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Hawaii. They were vibrant and energized. They talked about travel, music, movies, art, poetry, philosophy. Things no one had ever really talked to me about before — or at least not with that intensity. Learning about their lives gave me a glimpse of something beyond Indiana and its cornfields and grain silos and empty railroad tracks, and beyond boring hymns and the weekly recitation of my inadequacies at church. What if instead of being passive and private and cautious, I became joyful and engaged with life like these people I was meeting? What did I have to lose?

What if instead of being passive and private and cautious, I became joyful and engaged with life like these people I was meeting? What did I have to lose?

Rachel and I spoke by phone once or twice that week. It was hard to explain to her what was happening inside of me. I didn’t have the words yet. And I felt guilty. Anxious. A feeling had begun to creep over me that I’d been dishonest with her somehow, that maybe I hadn’t really loved her but only been interested in sex. If I was going to be joyful and free, I had to look at myself clearly. I had to be honest. That I wanted sex at all felt like an indictment enough against my character to prove I was capable of using someone for it. I don’t know. It was irrational. Somehow feeling excited about a new life seemed a betrayal of the old.

I remember driving out to see her the day after Triennium ended. We laid in a hammock in her backyard and I probably sounded like a lunatic trying to convey to her how spiritually enlightened I felt. That night we had dinner and watched a movie with her folks. After they went to bed we made out on the couch.

“Do you think,” Rachel said breathlessly in my ear, “that you’d come right away … I mean, if we just put it in for a second?”

“Yes.”

“You would?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Probably.”

We sat up and straightened our clothes. Her curly hair glinted in the lamp light, the ends all frazzled. She was pretty. She smelled like fresh laundry. It seemed like maybe a thousand years since her mom had helped me pin the corsage to her prom dress.

We broke up at the end of July, during the Tippecanoe County 4-H fair. I don’t recall exactly what Rachel’s involvement had been with the fair but her being there meant we didn’t see each other or talk on the phone much, and with that on the heels of my week away, an inevitable drift set in. I remember feeling secretly grateful for the time apart. Since that night at her house after Triennium, I’d only started to feel more guilty and anxious about our having had sex. It had nothing to do with her but with me. It had nothing to do with sex. Or God. Rather, it was the part of my psyche obsessed with protecting itself from hurt. I don’t know how to explain it, only that it’s always been there, a dark current in my thoughts. The most generous interpretation I can give it is to say that it wielded shame like a weapon in a misguided attempt to save me from myself. It raised doubts. It lied. It preferred the cold certainty of loneliness over the chaos of love. I was too confused to say anything to Rachel, to even try to talk things through. Instead, I said nothing. I stopped acting like her boyfriend and waited for her to break up with me.

The night she called and suggested we hang out with other people, I quickly agreed. She said it just seemed like we were in different places right now. She was confused but not upset, or at least not outwardly so. I said she should enjoy being at the fair. She should have fun and hang out with whomever she wanted.

After we hung up, I waited to feel something, but nothing came. A coldness, maybe. There had been guys in her life before me, and there would be guys in her life after me. That’s what I told myself to assuage my guilt. I had chosen fear over her.

The last time I saw Rachel that summer was in my parents’ kitchen a few weeks before school started. She stopped by to drop off a T-shirt or something I’d left at her house. She talked for a while with my folks and my brother, and then we were alone.

“My period came,” she said.

My cheeks burned.

“Good,” I said.

She had told me when we first started having sex that the physicality of her cross-country training meant that sometimes her period skipped a month but not to worry about it. It startled me to have already forgotten to worry. Meanwhile, the whole last month, she had been wondering if she could be carrying my baby.

“It’s weird, isn’t it?” she said, pushing a glass of iced tea from one hand to another. “To think that we used to do that?”

“No.”

“It’s not weird?”

“It’s not weird,” I said.

But I said it in a way that meant I didn’t want to keep talking about this — not if it was going to hurt. In that moment I was the human equivalent of a closed door. I thought the best thing for both of us was to pretend nothing had happened. I couldn’t look her in the eye. I said again it wasn’t weird, and that she shouldn’t feel bad. She stared into her glass of iced tea. If there was more she wanted to say, she kept it to herself. She said she should probably go. I said OK.

A therapist might have been able to help me sort through the complexity of such a moment and find some compassion for myself. A therapist might have inquired into the circumstances and early life events that made turning into the human equivalent of a closed door seem like my best option. I could also have used a therapist to process my return to earth after the high of my spiritual awakening. Maybe I’d had a vision of some new possibility for a life outside Indiana and the narrow walls of my thinking, but I still had a year of high school to get through. I spent most of it goofing off, playing guitar, pretending I was some kind of poet by reciting “The Waste Land” in speech class. It made me feel important to tell a room of my peers that April was the cruelest month. Who cared what it meant?

In the process, I might have seen Rachel more clearly, too. At 17 I didn’t understand how much our culture hates women, that a woman couldn’t want sex — the same thing I wanted — without paying a price. I thought if I loved her none of that mattered. I thought being nice was enough. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that I carefully avoided thinking about those things. Nothing in my training for manhood required it.

At 17 I didn’t understand how much our culture hates women, that a woman couldn’t want sex — the same thing I wanted — without paying a price. I thought if I loved her none of that mattered. I thought being nice was enough. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that I carefully avoided thinking about those things.

I remember in the hallway at school one day that fall, Rachel’s ex-boyfriend came up and slapped me on the back and said, “Know why we go out with girls like Rachel? Because they like to fuck.”

He said it matter-of-factly, without a trace of rancor or vengeance. As I recall, he was smiling, practically congratulating me. In my naivete, I chalked it up to his just being an asshole, end of story. Across the years, however, what I see is a boy convincing himself — and trying to convince me — that fucking is all women are for. There aren’t enough therapists in the world to fix what’s wrong with men like that.

I’ve had the good fortune of returning to therapy as an adult — on purpose this time — and one of the questions my therapist likes to ask is what I’d say so my former self if I could. What would I like for him to know in moments of hardship or stress? And I’m always shocked when the answer arrives, some bit of simple wisdom that was inside me all along. That to be human is to hurt. That love is worth the suffering it brings. But really all I want to do is put my arm around him and tell him to buck up, maybe read him a poem by somebody who’s still alive. I want him to know nobody’s perfect and there’s a chance every day to make things right if you fuck up. And I want to thank him for that image of the empty seat at top of the Ferris Wheel, which has become a talisman for my intention to open myself to things I don’t understand. “You did your job,” I want to tell him. “You got me here.”

Not that I know for sure how that all happened. I had maybe three sessions with the kind-eyed “career counselor” at Purdue before I figured out that we weren’t really talking about careers. And I think it surprised him at the end of that third session when I announced I would no longer be coming to see him. He was surprised but didn’t try to convince me to stay. He said he thought I was very mature for my age, and that I had a bright future ahead of me. I felt bad and hoped I wasn’t letting him down. I didn’t want to mess up his research and writing. But I could tell from his questions about my life, and from his genuine interest in the answers, that if we kept talking he was going to make me feel things I didn’t want to feel. I wasn’t ready for that. I didn’t know if I’d ever be ready. What kind of comfort was there in confronting the things that hurt you? The times you’d been cruel or the victim of cruelty? What could possibly be gained by diving into the question of why you wanted the things you wanted? The longer I could put off that conversation the better, even if some part of me knew it was inevitable. What I wanted at 17 was to glide just a little longer in the safety of my childhood. What I wanted was to float. And that’s what I did, out of his office into the dark of another September night.

***

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

Shelved: Jimmy Scott’s Falling In Love Is Wonderful

Frans Schellekens/Redferns /Getty

By 1962, Ray Charles had fully crossed over. It started with his 1959 Top 10 hit “What’d I Say,” continued with the Grammy-winning “Georgia On My Mind” and “Hit the Road, Jack,” and culminated in two smash country music albums, yielding the number one single “I Can’t Stop Loving You.” Proficient at bebop, fluent in country, and having practically invented soul, it seemed there was no style of popular music Ray Charles couldn’t master. Beyond his prodigious songwriting and piano playing abilities, Charles was most famously a vocal interpreter. With his newfound wealth, he founded Tangerine Records in 1962. The first thing he did was produce and release a record by one of his favorite singers, Jimmy Scott.

Jimmy Scott had been recording since the late 1940s and made several notable if unprofitable albums with Savoy Records in the 1950s. His work was almost universally loved by the most influential vocalists of the era, a group that included Dinah Washington, Ruth Brown, and Billie Holiday. Ray Charles implicitly understood the singer’s potential and believed he had the key to Scott’s elusive success.

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What Has Everyone Got Against Dave Matthews?

MONTGOMERY, AL - APRIL 27: Dave Matthews performs during The Concert for Peace and Justice celebrating the opening of The Legacy Museum at Riverwalk Amphitheater on April 27, 2018 in Montgomery, Alabama. (Photo by Taylor Hill/Getty Images)

You may remember the Dave Matthews Band from your Gen X ’90s. Despite the fact that nobody seems to want to admit to enjoying their music, they continue to be wildly successful and Dave Matthews uses his fame to help support charitable causes on a regular basis. At Seattle Met, Allison Williams wonders why there’s a Dave Matthews “dad-bod”-shaped hole in Seattle’s idea of musical genius, overshadowed by bands like Pearl Jam and Nirvana.

He married and moved to Seattle where his wife studied holistic medicine, buying a house on an unremarkable block of Wallingford in 2001. Today the tiny blue Craftsman, even with its finished basement and artfully overgrown front garden, would barely qualify as a Seattle starter home. Dave still owns the property, valued at less than a million dollars in a city where that barely buys a dog house. Seattleites do double takes when Dave pops up at QFC or an Eastlake punk show, but he seems to crave the anonymity he found here. He declined to be interviewed for this story, but in 2012 he told critic Gene Stout, “For the most part, I feel comfortably middle class in Seattle.”

Less quiet was the band’s growing philanthropic force. Dave became a director of Willie Nelson’s Farm Aid but his specialty is disaster relief; DMB played charity shows post-Katrina, post-tsunami, post-floods. And relief for human-borne disasters too: post-Standing Rock, post-Virginia Tech massacre. After white supremacists marched on Charlottesville, where he still has roots and real estate, the man who left South Africa’s apartheid headlined a unity concert in his adopted hometown.

Even as they faded from radio prominence, Dave Matthews Band racked up sales, dropping a whopping 96 total live releases on CD and digital. The most recent milestone: When the band released Come Tomorrow this June, its success marked the seventh consecutive number-one debut on the Billboard 200 list for studio albums — the first time it’s happened. To any band, ever.

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The Sainthood of Dave Matthews Has Been Indefinitely Postponed

Longreads Pick

“When I tell Seattle music critic Charles R. Cross that I’m writing about the Dave Matthews Band, he immediately quips, ‘Why? Did you lose a bet with your editor?’”

Source: Seattle Met
Published: Nov 27, 2018
Length: 15 minutes (3,805 words)

Alexa de Paris

Warner Brothers, Getty / Corbis / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Miles Marshall Lewis | Longreads | November 2018 | 14 minutes (3,622 words)

When I first heard the song “Alexa de Paris” by Prince and the Revolution in the spring of 1986, I was only a year younger than Alexa, and I had no idea who she was. No one ever said. Alexa Fioroni was a painter who taught and traveled the world, but most notably, she danced. Born in Oklahoma City, she moved to the South of France with her mother after her parents’ divorce in the 1970s. She took ballet lessons there from a South American expatriate at 9 years old. By 14, she had enrolled in an intensive study program at the Opéra National de Paris, the only American pirouetting around, later advancing to the Conservatoire de Paris dance school. She remained elusive to me until I began researching this essay. As I listened to the orchestral strings and guitar solos of the song’s gorgeous symphonic rock back then, Paris was just as much a mystery to me as Alexa Fioroni.

Because what was Paris to a 15-year-old black boy from the Bronx? Beyond a vague familiarity with the Eiffel Tower, I had zero points of reference. None of the personalities well known to me much later meant anything to me then: Frantz Fanon, Serge Gainsbourg, Jean-Luc Godard, Aimé Césaire, François Truffaut, Brigitte Bardot. The advanced placement English classes at my public high school didn’t teach négritude. They eventually got around to existentialism — Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus — but not until senior year. James Baldwin lived in France, but I hadn’t read James Baldwin. Black Boy had blown me away back in sixth grade. For years, Richard Wright might’ve been the only black writer I was aware of (aside from Alex Haley), but nobody told me he’d lived in Paris. My parents didn’t have passports; my grandparents didn’t have passports.

That wasn’t always the case. Faded vacation photographs from Paris lay buried somewhere in a photo box at the bottom of a closet in our three-bedroom apartment, pictures of the trip my mom took with a girlfriend as a high school graduation gift in 1969. By 1970 she’d be a married mother, a yawning chasm stretched between the 18-year-old Evander High School student she’d been and the 19-year-old South Bronx homemaker she’d so quickly become.

* * *

My first impressions of Paris, my first time bothering to consider the city as a real place with real people walking around it came from Under the Cherry Moon, the romantic comedy Prince filmed on the French Riviera in late 1985. The movie wasn’t set in Paris. I didn’t understand that at the time. A soundtrack album, Parade, preceded the film by four months, and I pored over the packaging in my bedroom for all the clues I could find about this follow-up to Purple Rain. The packaging of the album — yes, a vinyl disc meant for turntables, enclosed in a cardboard sleeve finely designed with cover art — contained black-and-white photos of Prince and the Revolution collaged with strips of pages from a French novel. But I didn’t know French then — I skirted through Italian classes with a string of D’s. The page ribbons could have come from a porn magazine, a cookbook, or some instruction manual.


 

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The Parade album-liner photomontage fixes the Venus de Milo amid guitarist Wendy Melvoin, bassist Brown Mark, and keyboardist Matt Fink as if Aphrodite had joined the Revolution. Prince placed the melancholy piano piece “Venus de Milo” at the end of Parade’s side one. A statue of the Greek goddess is actually on permanent display at the Louvre museum in Paris. French by association I suppose. Parade also featured “Do U Lie?,” a whimsical bit of café jazz complete with accordion and introduced by a French girl explaining, “Les enfants qui mentent ne vont pas au paradis.” Children who lie don’t go to heaven. Prince flattered the object of his affection on the chorus to one of my favorites, “Girls & Boys,” with “vous êtes très belle” and talk of kissing on the steps of Versailles. (Where was that? I wondered.) Plus, the majestically beautiful instrumental “Alexa de Paris” was the flip-side bonus to Parade’s “Mountains” single. Orchestral arrangements conducted by the late Clare Fischer gave Parade more of a European feel than any of Prince’s seven previous albums — the French horns, the trumpets and trombones, the violins and violas.

Because what was Paris to a 15-year-old black boy from the Bronx? Beyond a vague familiarity with the Eiffel Tower, I had zero points of reference.

* * *

Piano practice swallowed a lot of my hours in the 1980s. An older Jewish woman a few buildings away offered lessons. My mother and father forced me out of my comforting cocoon of comic books and TV addiction to learn the piano for 12 months. I was 9. They promised I could drop the private class after a year if I wasn’t interested anymore. I wasn’t. But by the time Parade arrived I’d discovered sheet music to songs I felt like learning and came back to the piano. I’d spend just enough practice time after school to learn Janet Jackson and Doug E. Fresh and Prince songs by heart. Mostly Prince songs. My grandmother’s upright piano could never be pitch-perfectly tuned, but furniture movers hauled it from her South Bronx apartment straight to my bedroom anyway for those childhood lessons. I learned “The Beautiful Ones” on that out-of-tune Kemble. “Paisley Park,” “Pop Life” and “God (Love Theme from Purple Rain)” too. By the time I mastered the chords of “Under the Cherry Moon,” its namesake finally showed up in movie theaters.

Prince’s tragicomedy bombed, but that didn’t matter. In my mind I was following in his footsteps: learning his songs; writing terrible lyrics; taking the Truman High recording studio class taught by the choir director (a white rap producer who managed Doug E. Fresh); having sex; acting pretentious. I fantasized about moving on to guitar, or songwriting, or whatever else necessary to grow up to be just like Prince. I was 15, I had time. But with Under the Cherry Moon, Prince now knew something I definitely didn’t. He knew France. I had to get there.

* * *

I made it into college by the skin of my teeth. I returned home from Atlanta after freshman year for my first summer break and met a beautiful girl on the uptown 6 train. This was when I still marked my life and times by whichever Prince album occupied the record stores, and so it was the Year of Batman, 1989. (It was also the year of the first De La Soul album, 3 Feet High and Rising, and the year of Do the Right Thing, but with my 18-year-old obsessions, that hot summer could only have been the Year of Batman.) We peeked at one another when the other wasn’t looking, over and over, as the train stopped and started on its way to the terminus at Pelham Bay Park. We never spoke. We waved a week later at Times Square station, surprised to see each other again in another borough. I still couldn’t speak. I wasn’t much good at courageous flirtation. I’d heard Prince suffered from shyness and I could relate. When I finally saw her again — apricot skin, smiling eyes, round face draped by thin extension braids — I found my courage. Simone was a rising senior at the performing arts high school downtown, the one from Fame. Her youth didn’t make me any braver.

Simone danced in the video to Young MC’s “Bust a Move” that summer. I’d play the cassette single on a loop in my boombox back down at school and think of her. She sang, she danced, she acted. Simone idolized triple threats like Debbie Allen and Vanessa Williams, full of artistic plans and schemes. We spent the summer of Batman at the Sound Factory nightclub downtown dancing to “French Kiss.” She modeled clothes for me at Emilio Cavallini on Madison Avenue, where she worked. Right away I had romanticized my idea of her — some ingénue artiste — out of all proportion, killing any possibility of an authentic relationship. Friend zone, meet unrequited love. A pretty girl from the Bronx with dreams, so different from the handful of girlfriends in my brief history with love, Simone suffered my awkward advances through graduation and her first few years at Sarah Lawrence College.

There was no one more appropriate to introduce me to Paris than Simone, studying abroad in 1994 at the École Normale de Musique conservatory. “Do the Boodiewop” somehow failed to catapult her girl group Ariél onto the radio in ’92, but the trio’s full album remained a work in progress. The pipe-dream illusions of my own imaginary music career ended in college. I hadn’t rehearsed any Prince songs into memory since “Scandalous” back in the Year of Batman; I’d left my atrocious song-lyric poetry aside. When Simone invited me to stay at her studio in the 13th arrondissement, I was a first-year law student in New York City and an aspiring music journalist trying to build on a Vibe magazine internship from the previous summer. I was also still aspiring to sleep with Simone four years after first peeping at her on the 6 train.

I prepped myself for Paris with some rental videotapes from Tower Video: oldies like April in Paris, Funny Face, and An American in Paris. I don’t remember anything about them now; none made an impact. Terence Trent D’Arby mentioned 18th-century French novelist Honoré de Balzac in his album notes as a personal hero, so I left for France reading The Chouans — another work of art that entered in one ear and out the other. I touched down at Charles de Gaulle airport in platform shoes and Gap bell-bottoms because (thanks Lenny Kravitz) how else could one arrive in Paris for the first time?

This was when I still marked my life and times by whichever Prince album occupied the record stores.

Rubbernecking from the backseat of Simone’s Martiniquan girlfriend’s red Fiat, I soaked in all the beige buildings with their decorative architecture, the crowded cafés, twentysomethings like me dressed in black and dragging cigarettes. But saying overmuch about the sights and smells of the city rings false to me. The truth is, I’d flown more than 2,000 miles across the Atlantic to get laid. France wasn’t my first time abroad. Two years prior I visited my college girlfriend studying in Madrid and already experienced my first fish-out-of-water feelings with Spanish culture. Nine months back, I’d flown to London alone for a week as a graduation gift. Still, in many ways, I was 23 going on 19, with an immature, naïve sense of entitlement telling me international travel was some kind of given. France eventually turned out to be a liberating place for me years later, for reasons that would’ve been unfamiliar that first time around. But as an eight-day vacation, visiting a crush I hoped to seduce in the most romantic city in the world, my Parisian experience went only as deep as I could receive it at the time.

Imagine Hippopotamus as the Olive Garden of Paris, an appropriate enough place for hungry young adults on a budget. My palate at the time wasn’t too far advanced beyond Chef Boyardee anyway. Out on the town with Simone, night number one, I ordered a saumon fumé expecting something like the Southern salmon croquettes I grew up on. I can’t remember what fish I expected canard to be. I’d never eaten smoked salmon or duck before. Hundreds of francs wasted. I thought we’d hail the French equivalent of a Manhattan yellow taxi, but Parisian cabs only lay in wait on certain street corners, so we walked back to her apartment sightseeing and people-watching. At her studio she introduced me to the music of an Icelander named Björk. I’d waited all night for the dessert of Simone’s lips, and before falling asleep together, she served them up. They tasted like a French kiss on the steps of Versailles.

Simone made me laugh constantly; our time together always a sitcom. She was the most talented woman I’d ever dated at that point, and cute enough to get cast in a Kwamé video. What magnetized me the most was her artist’s life, her hustle, her self-actualization. She was my first artistic love, a reflection of what I started daring to see in myself. The next morning she had an appointment at a recording studio, singing on the demo of some French musicians. I stayed behind, folding open the wrought-iron shutters in her window frame to stare out onto the Asian Quarter. James Baldwin (I’d gone from never reading him at all to reading everything he’d ever written) once said, “Our crown has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do is wear it.” Many black American men my age never expected to live past 25. Both my hubris and my upbringing told me otherwise. Hands folded behind me, I stood in the sunlight of Simone’s window wearing my crown.

In the future, I’d become a lot more intimately familiar with the city, but in retrospect, Simone took me around to almost everything worth seeing in a week. A Louvre exhibit explored how ancient Egypt influenced Western art. We paid respects at the graves of artists who really didn’t mean all that much to me (Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust) and those who did (Richard Wright, Jim Morrison), walking the winding paths of Père Lachaise cemetery. We shot each other on camera climbing the iron stairway of the Eiffel Tower. The Notre Dame was closed for restoration, but the gothic Sacré-Cœur church gave us a solemn candlelit moment at the highest point in Paris one rainy night. And I braved the Métro by myself for the first time in search of Nutella crêpes, the Moulin Rouge, and New Morning, the site of my favorite Prince bootleg tape. I peered through the nightclub window with the strains of his June 15, 1987 aftershow ringing through my ears.

* * *

Like those Magic Eye posters so popular at precisely that moment in the ’90s, I could always pick out the 3D Prince significance from any 2D locale if I stared long enough. Night number seven, we saw a wack noir movie, Romeo Is Bleeding, on the Champs-Élysées and passed the Nova-Park Élysées luxury hotel on our way to the theater. I knew from Prince biographies that he stayed there in June 1985, holed up in a penthouse suite playing with new synthesizers while his management tried cajoling him into enjoying his first real trip to Paris. I once wrote something about all Prince’s lyrical references to Paris or France and topped out at almost 20. (By contrast, I can’t remember Michael Jackson, that stranger in Moscow, ever mentioning Paris.) Made-up utopias like Paisley Park and Uptown were central to Prince’s work, places where freedom reigns and anything goes — most of all dance, music, sex, and romance. Western history has forever promoted the French capital as a land of liberation, tolerance, equality, sex, and romance. This might account for his Paris obsession in songs like “Sign o’ the Times,” “Condition of the Heart,” “Cindy C,” “Sexy M.F.,” and others. What’s so funny, so typically workaholic Prince is that once he actually got to vacation in Paris, young and rich and famous enough to enjoy anything the city had to offer, he chose to stay in his hotel room playing keyboards.

By mid-August he was back — explaining to his girlfriend Susannah Melvoin why she wouldn’t be costarring in Under the Cherry Moon and proposing marriage in a suite at the Hôtel de Crillon. The beautiful ones celebrated for days at places I couldn’t afford with law school loan reimbursement checks: dinners at Maxim’s and La Tour d’Argent, partying at Le Palace. Soon he was off to Côte d’Azur to film a movie. He was 27.

I once wrote something about all Prince’s lyrical references to Paris or France and topped out at almost 20.

There was no Prince on the night I gambled on going beyond kisses. We’d eaten earlier in the Marais district, at an LGBTQ-popular restaurant called Foufounes (French for Pussies). I’d almost given up on the would-be love affair. At home we split a bottle of wine and aired everything out. Off and on for over four years — through Broadway plays, Alvin Ailey dance shows, movies, dinners — I’d been chasing Simone whenever I was back from college. Even after I committed to someone else: the college sweetheart I’d already been with since the year we first met. Simone always put her dreams above settling down with anybody and I always refused to accept what she was saying.

“I just felt too much pressure to live up to your idea of who I am,” she confessed. Years passed before I saw the truth she kept trying to tell me in different ways. She also just wasn’t that into me, there was that too. Ego and my emotional learning curve made all of that hard to accept. But. On the night there was no Prince, there was Miles Davis and his 18-minute blues, “Star People.” I warmed a bottle of body oil on her electric stove and lay slick, massaging fingers all over her shoulders, back, arms, backside. Then she let me go further. Not completely further, but further. Saturday morning, we woke up spooning and laughed easily.

Years later in an erotica anthology entitled Wanderlust, I published a short story, “Irrésistible,” buffing up the ballad of Simone and Miles with a spritz of sentimental Krylon spray paint. I’d renamed her Solange way before Beyoncé became a thing, a name Simone loved, the name of her Martiniquan girlfriend’s mom. “Irrésistible,” like our affair, ended like this:

In my final moments in Paris at Charles de Gaulle, Solange and I stood at the gate holding hands silently. When my final call was announced, we both smiled. She kissed me twice on the cheeks before I boarded the plane. I turned back to look at her a final time—recalling Charlene’s tears when I left Spain months ago—but Solange had turned to walk away. I turned again and stepped onto the plane.

* * *

Color her peach and black: A pretty mademoiselle in a skintight dress shimmies in a crowd of nearly 20,000 screaming Parisians. The sister dances, excited as all hell, next to her flamboyant teenage cousin Luc. And Prince is onstage — spinning, doing splits, leaping off pianos through “Housequake,” “When Doves Cry,” and “The Cross.” “Hot Thing,” “Purple Rain,” and “1999.” Her very first concert is the Bercy stadium Sign o’ the Times Tour stop, and she’s having the time of her life. Some months down the line she’ll ask a friend to design a dress for her 18th birthday inspired by protégé Jill Jones in the “Mia Bocca” video. Her brown eyes, heavy-lidded like some French-Caribbean femme fatale, hardly blink during the hour and a half drummer Sheila E. bangs her skins and dancer Cat Glover jacks her body across stage and our hero takes guitar solo after guitar solo.

I wish I’d known Christine then; we’d never see Prince together live in concert. Two thousand miles away in the Bronx that day, I might’ve been registering for summer school to make up a math class. In the Year of Sign o’ the Times, I had no idea the woman I’d marry one day was shaking her fanny and screaming for my idol over in Europe while I was fighting my way out of high school with both fists.

“Yesterday I tried to write a novel,” Prince once sang (in 1982, on “Moonbeam Levels”), “but I didn’t know where to begin / So I laid down in the grass tryin’ to feel the world turn.” My stab in the same direction came in 1995, trying to write a novel of my own, at 24, while living in south London studying abroad. Don Draper’s French mom-in-law on Mad Men once dropped a quip about her daughter I’ve never forgotten: “This is what happens when you have the artistic temperament, but you’re not an artist.” I spent most of those months in my Tooting Bec flat proving to myself that my talent outweighed my artistic temperament; my novel was the result. Naturally I can’t bear to read it now, but I finished it, and the completion pulled me out the other side of something.

Law school, in retrospect, and even at the time, was a plan B. I skipped the bar exam by the end, graduating instead into the wave of cultural critics documenting the continuing movement of hip-hop into popular mainstream culture. Eventually there were books I was prouder of: a memoir told in essays about my upbringing in the Bronx; an examination of funk pioneer Sly Stone’s 1960s-hangover album, There’s a Riot Goin’ On. After Simone, I dated a few writers and editors, a wine sommelier, a yoga teacher. When “Irrésistible” got published, I left Simone a copy with the doorman of her Chelsea apartment building; I hadn’t seen her in two years. And by then I’d moved to France.

How else did I grow up after those first days in Paris? Like many of my favorite stories, this isn’t really about me, it’s about Prince. I’ll say this though. The year Prince divorced his second and final wife, Manuela Testolini, the Year of 3121 had I still been keeping track of such things, I married Christine — the mother of our Paris-born 1-year-old son — at the city hall of suburban Arcueil, France, in the spring of 2006. Christine: the Martiniquan girlfriend of Simone who’d picked me up in her red Fiat the fateful day of my first visit to her country. Our origin story as a couple belongs to another essay, from a less impressionable, far less wide-eyed time in my life. And our wedding song was Bebel Gilberto’s dreamy bossa nova, “Samba da Bênção” — not “Alexa de Paris.”

* * *

Miles Marshall Lewis is the Harlem-based author of Promise That You Will Sing About Me: The Power and Poetry of Kendrick Lamar (St. Martin’s Press), due next year. His essays, criticism and celebrity profiles have appeared in GQ, The New York Times, NPR and elsewhere.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Looking Inside My Heart

Illustration by Brittany Molineux

Jen Hyde | Longreads | November 2018 | 22 minutes (6,055 words)

 

The women sit on stools behind four glass partitions in rows of 50, their eyes pressed into the cold eyepieces of their microscopes, sewing bovine pericardium tissue to surgical steel with loops of polyester thread. I’m entranced by the rhythm of these women at work, the fluorescent lights that hang over their heads, and the blue hairnets that match their uniform scrubs. I tell myself, They are real, their labor is real. I feel like I’m looking into a glass vitrine and I must stop myself from mistaking this room for a dream. Each stitch is so small I cannot see their handiwork with my bare eye when later I hold a sample in my hand. This is where they make bioprosthetic heart valves, the very device sewn into my own heart.

The facility, Edwards Lifesciences, in Irvine, California, is 20 miles from my childhood home. I was born with a heart murmur at Anaheim Memorial Medical Center on a late July afternoon in 1985. Shortly after, I was sent by ambulance to Martin Luther King Jr. Hospital, where I was diagnosed with Tetralogy of Fallot, a rare condition involving four heart defects. After two weeks in the NICU, the pediatric cardiology team recommended an open-heart surgery to correct leaky pulmonary and tricuspid valves and to close one of the two holes at the bottom of my heart. The murmur and the other hole, they told my parents, would likely always remain.

When I was 25 and visiting my parents for Christmas, I was diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension. The cardiologist told me that the left side of my heart had dilated and that I needed to seek further medical help. I was a graduate student living in New York City, six months shy of heart failure.

This is where they make bioprosthetic heart valves, the very device sewn into my own heart.

In a corner office that overlooked Brooklyn and the East River, a heart surgeon recommended an open-heart operation to repair my pulmonary heart valve using a bioprosthetic bovine valve. Typically, the bovine valve is used in older patients, my surgeon explained. Made of the pericardium tissue of a cow, the valve will calcify over time. Unlike the mechanical valve, the bovine valve doesn’t require medication. Your quality of life will only get better. A few months after our meeting, I underwent my second open-heart operation, then went about my life in New York in what felt like the same body I’d had before the surgery. My bovine heart valve was invisible to me. I paid $3,000 for the surgery with money I’d earned babysitting and as an office assistant at an architectural studio, and with significant help from my parents. My dad’s insurance, thankfully, covered the rest.

***

The Edwards Lifesciences Irvine campus sits off Red Hill Avenue, largely indistinguishable from the dozens of other office parks on both sides of the street for miles in either direction. The interior of the Edwards campus is sun-filled and temperate. Sarah Huoh, the director for global communications, meets me at the front entrance. Her blonde curls and blue eyes surprise me. Her demeanor is bubbly and warm. As she leads me through the campus, we pass employees in business casual and employees in scrubs. Framed artwork made by employees and patients alike line the walls of the offices. A reminder of where the valves go when they leave the manufacturing room, Sarah tells me.

I was a graduate student living in New York City, six months shy of heart failure.

To get to the production building, Sarah takes me through the center of the campus, through a courtyard where the sound of cars along Red Hill Avenue is hardly audible — a hush among the rustle of the flora and the birds flying from plant to plant. The courtyard is trimmed with succulents and birds of paradise.


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Inside, Sarah tells me that here the valves are sterilized and serialized. Only after they pass many safety inspections are they transported, under federal regulations, to hospitals throughout the United States and internationally. Most of the assemblers are women, Sarah explains. Many of them have prior experience as seamstresses, but that experience isn’t a requirement to work here. I try not to observe them through the glass, but I stare. I stare at the symmetry of their rows of workstations, their identical white lab coats, the rhythm of their elbows moving up and down with each stitch they make as they peer into their microscopes. I’m fascinated by how deeply their handiwork is sewn into my own life. My mother sewed in Indonesia, I tell Sarah. She emigrated here in the early ’80s.

Many of our assemblers are immigrants, Sarah tells me. This can be a great job for someone who doesn’t always work in English, and many of our employees tend to stay with us for a long time. Some have been here for twenty years. They like to cook for one another, and they really take care of each other.

I’m fascinated by how deeply their handiwork is sewn into my own life.

I sense how proud she is of who Edwards employs, and the pride bubbles within me too, because everything about the medical device inside me is reflective of the kind of American I am — a biracial daughter of an immigrant mother and second-generation-American father. We are a single-income, thoroughly middle class family. My first surgery was paid for with help from state grants for children’s health. We lived in a ’60s “starter” tract home in a subdivision off Imperial Highway in La Habra. My home was multicultural and multilingual largely because my bedridden Indonesian grandmother and her Latinx and Indonesian caretakers also lived with us. I built my own identity on binaries: In high school I was the only half Chinese Indonesian student. I wasn’t Asian enough to hang with the other Asian American girls. My best friends were white, and I coveted everything about their home lives and their ability to mix and match fashionable weekend outfits from Target, Nordstrom, and Delia’s. Even though we shared everything from AP English notes to six packs of Smirnoff Ice, I never felt entirely at ease in the world we inhabited as young women. Only now, moments before Sarah will introduce me to the women who sewed my valve, do I feel at ease in Irvine. I hadn’t expected my valve and this place to hold such hybridity within it.

Sarah points to a few assemblers at one end of the facility. In this area technicians clean the pericardium tissue, she explains. After it’s washed, they’ll spread the tissue on a flat surface and take something that looks like a cookie cutter and cut out the leaflets. The leaflets are then sewn onto a structure made of steel that comes from a factory in Switzerland with polyester thread that comes from France.

Only now, moments before Sarah will introduce me to the women who sewed my valve, do I feel at ease in Irvine.

Because I’ve never seen my own bioprosthetic heart valve, I couldn’t imagine its global origins or the human hands that had put it together until I peered into this room.

I watch each woman move like the blood in my body, pulsing through with desire, shame, regret, and longing. Every inch of their bodies are covered in medical garments. Sarah instructs me to put on a pair of latex gloves, then places a sample of my own valve in my hand. I hold it to my eye to study the stitches, but I have trouble seeing a single one. I can’t feel the textures of the valve with my gloved hands; it looks machine made.

Even as I hold it now and observe the women at work on the other side of the glass, it seems like a work of fiction that the valve inside my body had been assembled by them. And yet, as I hold the valve for the first time, despite my disbelief in the very existence of this room, I feel a deep gratitude for these women and their labor. That the object now inside me had been made here, had brought me here to Irvine made me wonder what else I couldn’t see about my own life.

Sarah guides me through a door at the far end of the room. Here, four women from the assembly line have come to meet me. In the changing room they store their bouffant caps, masks, and gloves and emerge in jeans. They look just like my own mother; Asian and Latina women in their early 40s to late 60s. I wonder, had my mom been formally educated, would she have sought out assembly work here?

I watch each woman move like the blood in my body, pulsing through with desire, shame, regret, and longing.

Sarah turns to one of the women: Angie, I think this is your first time meeting a patient.

It is! Angie says, I cannot believe it! She could be in her early 40s. There’s a reddish tint to her hair and a bit of green in her eyes. They are hazel, like mine, and I wonder if she’s also made this silent observation about how alike we appear to be. I lean in for a hug, but Angie does not lean in as far. When we pull away, I nod to the others. It is rare for sewers to meet their patients, Sarah explains. It’s rare for patients to reach out to us.

I’m holding a gift, a bunch of Fino lemons from a tree in my parents’ yard. This morning, my mom helped me nest them in a basket; I added a jar of local Inland Empire honey and herbal tea. My mom gathered a handful of lavender from the backyard to give the basket some color.

Sarah tells me that you like to cook for one another, I say.

The room smells like latex and iodoform. We stand in a semicircle, surrounded by the valve prototypes. The women’s faces are backlit by the lights hanging above their assembly room workstations. I explain the contents of the basket slowly so as to draw out this moment for all of us to process together, unsure of whether my gratitude for their work was accompanied by relief, bewilderment, or both. Where will this conversation go? I wonder.

Angie asks me, Are you from here? I know the hard edges of her consonants. For my mom, a th is a t. When a hearth is a heart or heard.

Originally, I say. And you?

We are from Vietnam, Angie explains, pointing to Mary and Pham. I’m from Mexico, another woman chimes in. She’s petite and doe-eyed, in her mid-40s, I think, and I see both exhaustion and peace in her eyes. I’m Fabi, she says, extending her hand to me.

Pham and Fabi are the managers of your team, Sarah explains. Pham offers her hand to shake mine. I’m so glad you are healthy, she tells me. I shake Pham’s hand and apologize to everyone for my dry, chapped fingers. I tell the women that they are the reason I’m so healthy, and that I’m just beside myself and don’t know what else to say because I don’t. There is no place to sit. I’d love for us to sink our bodies into a curved surface. I sense that none of us wants our exchange to be so formal, but in the moment, with limited resources, I blurt, My mom is from Indonesia, and she sews, too!

Angie says, Oh so you are Asian, too!

Yep, I say. I wonder if she feels bewilderment or relief or annoyance by the connection I’m bringing forth, because it makes the most obvious thing about her appear to be our only commonality.

I hand the basket to Mary, the oldest woman in the group. I do this out of respect for her age, and also because she’s smiling. I sense she may not have comprehended the entirety of my story about the origins of these lemons, that — like with my own mother — the tactility of the gift may say more than what I’ve said in words. Mary smiles and her eyes brighten. The other women peer into the basket. I look again at Angie. Fabi brushes her hand over the lemons. Her fingers move gently across the rinds. Your hands are so delicate, I tell her. Fabi smiles and stretches her hand out in front of us as though she’s admiring a fresh manicure.

I wonder if she feels bewilderment or relief or annoyance by the connection I’m bringing forth, because it makes the most obvious thing about her appear to be our only commonality.

Delicate hands are necessary for all of the small stitches that go into the valves, Sarah adds. Everyone laughs, and Mary stretches her hand out. We all have a look. They’re so youthful! I tell Mary. She blushes.

We dip our heads into the basket to take in the scent of the lemons and lavender, and I make an effort to maintain focus on these women, our semicircle, their hands. I had come with the intention of understanding the nature of the valve inside me more fully, but that fullness has taken on a different form. I knew my heart valve was a foreign object, and I had imagined it was made by foreign hands. But these women were not foreign to me. They look like my mom. They perform life-saving labor, and I wonder about the possibility of our shared experiences of living here in Orange County.

Our meeting is exceptional, Sarah tells me, because they have just finished their workday. Have I prolonged their labor now by obliging them to stay and speak with me? I hope we can meet again, I say as we say goodbye.

I knew my heart valve was a foreign object, and I had imagined it was made by foreign hands. But these women were not foreign to me.

***

My mother emigrated to California in the early ’80s. A Chinese Indonesian woman from Sumatra, she is the adopted daughter of an affluent Peranakan family. Her mother had a hair salon on Jalan Sutomo Road in Medan, a city in central Sumatra, and her family also owned and operated a sewing school just above the salon.

My mother’s two older sisters were educated as a medical doctor and pharmacist, but my mom was never sent to school. Instead, her adoptive mother trained her as a hairstylist and an embroidery teacher. She began working in the salon at 10 years old. When her sisters moved to Jakarta, my mother worked in the salon until her mother closed it and moved them to Jakarta, too. There, she received an invitation from her cousins to come visit the United States. My mom tells me that her sisters paid for her plane ticket to the States and that as she packed her bags for a six-month trip to California, she sensed she wouldn’t return to Indonesia. Her sisters took care of her financially until a year later when she married my dad. Two years after that, I was born.

Until I moved to New York, my parents and I lived in La Habra, a city on the border of Los Angeles and Orange County, whose motto is “A Caring Community.” Our neighbors were Bolivian, Japanese, Chinese, and white. My parents purchased our home in 1990, but they never updated the orange and yellow Moroccan-inspired ’70s linoleum in the kitchen or the orange and avocado carpets in our bedrooms. Apart from a large bamboo-and-glass dining table that my dad surprised my mom with for their anniversary one year, much of the furniture in our house was second-hand — cast-offs from other family members when they updated their homes. Whenever a new-to-us piece of furniture came inside, the item that it replaced was given a new spot in the house: An entertainment stand became a table in the entryway; a display cabinet in the family room became a storage unit for wrapping paper in my closet.

The prized feature of our home was the 27 rose bushes that lined our front and back yards. My mom had grown more than half of them herself with clippings she collected from our neighbors and the gardeners at Our Lady of Guadalupe, where I attended grade school. My mother learned Spanish from the women who cared for my grandmother and practiced it at every opportunity: buying fruits and meats at the Northgate Supermarket, with the owner of King’s Taqueria where we stopped for carne asada tacos, with our Bolivian neighbors.

I learned other languages by watching my mom use the vocabulary she knew to initiate conversations and to use the conversation to acquire new words, new relationships to words, and to the people who helped her find them. I peppered the language in my head with the little Bahasa phrases that enter the English I use when my mom and I speak to each other. It is my first language and her third. Adoo — can you believe it? I’ll begin.

Relationships, I was taught, are more important than the environments that surround them. If I went over to a friend’s for dinner, my mom would send me with cuttings from her garden that she placed in water bottles wrapped in colorful tissue paper — nosegays from one mother to another. As I gave the nosegay to my friend’s mom, I questioned the utility of the reassigned furniture in my house. I wondered why our dishwasher was only ever used as storage for the plastic water bottles she collected to gift her roses and if I would ever meet another person whose house resembled mine.

***

In the Edwards parking lot, I pull my phone out to queue up directions back to my parents’ house. I have seven missed calls from my mom and a text message: I’m going to Super King to get spinach and bananas. Can you pick me up?

Super King is an international discount grocery store one dial-a-ride phone call away from my parents’ new house. When my dad is at work, my mom calls this chauffeur service for senior citizens to bring her to the market for a 50-cent fee. The size of a soccer field, Super King stocks foods from a variety of cultures, and my mom goes at least once a week to practice her Spanish and to stock up on Chinese eggplant, lacinato kale, sliced jackfruit, marinated chicken thighs, handmade flour tortillas, and anything else in season and on sale.

Inside, the air bites the back of my neck. I hadn’t dressed for the arctic temperature of warehouse food preservation. I start my search in the produce section, but I cannot find her sphere of black hair or her shopping cart, full of this week’s specials. I begin a lap around the store and find her asking the butcher to slice the beef thinner. Are you almost done? I ask. I’ve been driving for an hour.

Thirty minutes later, she’s assembling a jigsaw puzzle: each of her fifteen plastic bags belongs to a specific spot in the trunk. Double-bagged steak can cradle a carton of eggs, but an Italian eggplant? Never. An Italian eggplant, like a watermelon, is a corner piece so that its weight will only roll onto the edge of the trunk, which sits lower than the farther edges that abut the backseat of my Chevy Prizm. We are only going a few miles, I say. Assisting her would be futile. We measure time differently.

In the Super King parking lot, I’m pained by the love that governs her labor and assembly and adheres to a family food budget, and I say, Adoo, nothing is going to get ruined in the trunk! She’s protective of her little collection of perfect ingredients. She’ll use them to create the dishes she tells me are my favorite: pandan spicy eggplant, wine beef, and sautéed kale. But I’ve never craved those dishes. The need for them was another feeling entirely.

I’d only spent 10 minutes with Angie, Mary, Fabi, and Pham, and already I long to know them more deeply. I also know I must long with caution, that wanting time is different than creating it. I watch my mom shift her bag of onions for the third time and think, If I could just throw all of this in the trunk, drive home, and — open sesame — the potatoes and cantaloupe didn’t knock into your mint and rosemary, would I create a future of efficient grocery shopping or destroy it?

***

When I was 2 years old, two holes in my heart were repaired in my open-heart operation. In these surgeries doctors treat your bones as elastic bands, bending your ribs and sternum to reach the arteries they will mend. You are awake before and after your surgery, but it is difficult to remember exactly what happened; you are put on a bypass machine that pumps your heart for you, pushing oxygen to your brain in quantities that can cause permanent forgetting.

Sometimes I want to use a word but only see a deep enclosure when I close my eyes, and I wait there until the word reveals my past world.

The first time I envisioned the playroom in the hospital, I saw a large bear dressed as a clown, white bookshelves, and a wheelbarrow. I focused on the the bear for a few minutes, trying to see his face, but instead I saw my mom holding out a spoonful of steamed spinach that she scooped from the Tupperware she still uses today.

***

In the assembly room at Edwards, Sarah told me that the the pericardium heart sac — the tissue used in my heart valve — can be traced back to the group of cows it belonged to. The closest I’ve come to knowing mine is learning that my valve is made of tissue from two cows: one from California and another from Minnesota.

Pericardium is a membrane that keeps the heart safe — as the ancient physician and philosopher Galen called it, perikardion, around the heart. The membrane encloses the muscle and roots of the heart’s four valves, both in the human and the cow. Our own pericardium protects us from the shock of a sudden movement, such as tripping or falling. A viral infection or a heart attack could damage it. So can external violences.

The bovine tissue was considered material waste before the biotech industry found a use for it in the human body. Now each day, some workers in the slaughterhouse slip a cow’s heart out of its sac and spread it on a table. Here, they separate the membrane from fatty tissue and prepare it for cold ship to Irvine. When it arrives, the assemblers who are not sewing receive and wash it until the tissue is neither bovine or human but pieces patterned on the table for the next step in assembly.

In order to sell a medical supply, a farm must adhere to medical safety regulations: The cow must be carefully fed and exercised. A farmer must know its origins. A cow in natural conditions can live upwards of 15 years. For a valve, it is slaughtered at or before 24 months.

In a 2014 paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from Bard College, Yale University, and the Weizmann Institute of Science estimated that cattle use 28 times more land, six times more fertilizer, and 11 times more water than other livestock. Their collective secretions produce more methane than gas or oil production. Before the development of bovine valves, pericardium tissue was another waste in the process of harvesting beef. Now it is another form of income.

I try to make contact with the suppliers of my bovine tissue, but Sarah tells me they often prefer to keep quiet. I don’t persist. Instead, I watch a video that Sarah sends me. It is an Australian news segment on the use of tissue from cow hearts to treat heart conditions, in which an Australian cardiologist praises the technology inside me, saying, It was as if the sky had cleared.

Later in the video two slaughterhouse workers pull a cow’s heart out of its sac like a hospital birth. One holds the muscle’s weight, the other lifts it toward the ceiling like a chalice. They work expertly in a metal room sectioned off from the cow carcasses that hang in rows. Cool pink skin stretched over an animal’s rib cage, a sternum excavated, the organs beneath it mostly gone to waste.

***

My mom doesn’t know her biological parents. She’s never mentioned a curiosity about her origins, only that she was told that her biological mother died giving birth to her and her father grew sick shortly after. He brought her to her adoptive mother, asking that she raise my mom and teach her a trade. She knows she was born in 1949, in Medan, and that as a child she chose September 20th as her birthday. She chose the name Katherine for herself in the mid-’60s when the Indonesian government forbid Chinese Indonesians to keep their given names. Only her sisters and my cousins still call her Kim-Tju. I didn’t know why she could not easily ask questions about her birth parents like I did — Don’t you want to know? I pressed. Giving birth is a painful experience, she once told me, but raising a child causes a lifetime of pain.

Once, my mom told me that when she was 12 and had learned to sew dresses, she left the salon one afternoon to buy fabric for a new outfit she had designed herself. But when she came home, the Javanese nanny that lived with her family advised her to hide what she’d bought. It would enrage her mother. Her mother scolded her for not asking permission. She never described the color, the weight, or the print, as though giving it language would bring on the pain of being a child, or of being adopted. I cannot equate the pain of her childhood to anything I felt in mine. I cannot imagine spoon-feeding a woman who once told you that you had the face of a horse, but I watched my mom do this for my grandmother after she became paralyzed from a stroke in the winter of 1991 and came to live with us.

Unintentionally, my mom passed some of her pain onto me when she prohibited me from shaving my legs or wearing makeup until one day in my junior year of high school when I emerged from the shower with blood running down my shin, having shaved off two inches of my own skin with a rusty disposable Schick razor that I had been using in secret. After that, she helped me explore my personal style. If I wanted to replicate the studded dog collar I saw at Hot Topic, she would show me how to lightly dab the hot glue onto the black faux-leather ribbon I’d bought. For my junior prom, we rode two busses to the Brea Mall to look for a dress. She picked through the price tags on the sale racks and expressed her concerns about finding a supportive 36DD bra to go with the strapless, sweetheart dresses I was drawn to. We ended up walking through the mall’s parking lot to a TJ Maxx in the shopping center across the street where we found not only a prom dress but several pairs of wide-leg cargo jean shorts that I deemed “cool” and she deemed “reasonably priced.” When it was time to head back to the bus stop, I insisted that we walk around the mall rather than through it. It’s quicker to go through Nordstrom, she said.

No, I insisted, it’s faster if we go around it. She wrapped her arms around the large TJ Maxx bag. I’m sweating from this plastic. These clothes are heavy you know, she insisted.

Well then let me carry them, I said, reaching out to take the bag.

No! she barked, turning the bag away from me as though my discount clothing was a swaddled newborn she was guarding from an unfit mother. It’s too heavy for you.

We both knew I’d made us take the long route back to the bus stop. We both knew she insisted on carrying my new clothes because she was afraid that in the heat and with my heart condition something bad might happen.

How do you think this looks? I asked, insisting I was fine and that anyone who happened to see us walking together would think I didn’t care that my five-foot, 90-pound mother was balancing a shopping bag the size of her own body, while I, her able-bodied teenager, towered above her, ambling about completely unencumbered. Who cares what people think, she said. Anything bad could happen to your heart, and then what? You want that?

We both knew she insisted on carrying my new clothes because she was afraid that in the heat and with my heart condition something bad might happen.

I didn’t believe her side of our argument, but then I did not survive the mass killings of ethnic Chinese in the mid-’60s in Indonesia. Her own father was taken for a day and her mother paid for his safe return to their family. Her neighbor was also taken by the Indonesian military for questioning. He also came home, she told me, and the blood from the finger they cut off dripped on the road as he walked to the house.

I still can’t comprehend these stories, but since I visited Edwards and began learning about the different people who’d handled the materials in my heart valve, I return to them again and again. I would love to meet the person who slaughtered my cow and the person who prepared that pericardium tissue, but it seems impossible. I could be sad, or I could see their anonymity as a way to understand how my mom feels about her adoption, and her mother. She is content knowing the family who raised her and kept her alive.

***

Three months after my first visit to Edwards, Sarah invites me to attend their first Patient’s Day. I bring my mom with me because I want to show her where my heart valve was made. We are two of 50 guests — other patients and their caregivers, Edwards employees, and nonprofit partners. The day focuses on ways we can help new patients through advocacy work. I volunteer to assist the American Heart Association with a new support network. I become a Heart Valve Ambassador, a voice from the recovery room and beyond — a survivor — who can assure someone about to undergo open-heart surgery that they are not alone. I sign up because I want to tell these new patients, Right now, another person is making a device that may save your life. I want my mom to meet these women, but because the event is so large our meeting is a brief blur. In front of the vitrines that look into the manufacturing room, among a few other patients also meeting their sewers, Edwards employees and reporters, my mom and I shake hands with Mary, Fabi, and a woman I had not met before, Marta. We only have time to say thank you and hi again. Later, The Orange County Register will run a photo of the two of us waving to my sewers. When I look at the picture, the glass window between us feels thick.

Months later, I’m still thinking about my sewers. I wonder what brought them to the United States, what their families are like, if they really were seamstresses in their previous lives.

I call Sarah to ask if my mom and I can bring food to the women who assembled my heart valve and am surprised and delighted that she loves the idea. I call my mom and ask her if she would like to have lunch at Edwards with the women who made my valve. I would love to, she says happily. It’s really special, you know, to really know who made your heart valve, to see where they work, to meet them.

Can you make lempar ayam, and gado gado and selat pohpia? I ask her.

Adoo! she says. It’s too much work. You can just buy them and say we made them.

But if you make them and I watch, I’ll know how to make them, too, I explain, because I want the lunch to be an opportunity to learn skills she has not passed onto me. To her, domestic labor is right up there with carrying my shopping bags. I only know the tradition of making lempar ayam is an inheritance of the culture I was born into, unlike my heart defect. I want to know how to make this shredded chicken and coconut rice roll because what I know of my maternal lineage ends with my mother, and I believe that her culture, like tradition, can be adopted, like taste, to which one can adapt. Adoo, if that’s what you want, she sighs.

Sarah suggests we come to Edwards in late July after she’s checked the women’s vacation requests to be sure everyone would be on campus. She sends me pictures of a few conference rooms we might have lunch in. I send her the menu and the color scheme for the table setting that I have in mind. In our email exchanges this lunch becomes an event of the season.

***

The night before, I watch my mom shred cabbage and boil melody potatoes to make gado gado. I watch her grind another shallot and thumb of ginger in a mortar with a smooth, palm-size pestle. She pours the peanuts in once she’s made a liquid paste.

I want to know how to make this shredded chicken and coconut rice roll because what I know of my maternal lineage ends with my mother, and I believe that her culture, like tradition, can be adopted, like taste, to which one can adapt.

Around 1 a.m. her pot of water comes to a boil and she reveals another secret: If you can’t get to Chinatown, you can use spaghetti noodles. She flash-fries them with pork and celery using chopsticks to make a menagerie in her serving dish.

I print and bind her recipes into pamphlets to give to everyone tomorrow. When my mom finishes cooking, I open the pantry to find large containers to transport her noodles, lempar, gado gado, and selat pohpia, a Dutch Indonesian canapé of vegetables inside a deep-fried, cup-shaped cracker. Stacks of McDonalds cups and Cool Whip and Knudson cottage cheese tubs fall all over the floor. Why do you keep these when we can afford Gladware, I scream. I’m in her kitchen, not a catalog. I know the reasons, and that I can’t ask her to tell me why every time I open a cabinet.

To save and give everything to your children. To not have ownership over a thing. To discover coupons. To be a registered alien. To be told go back to your country. To ride public transportation. To lose the doll’s clothes you sewed in a flood in your hometown. To never have seen your birth certificate. To know someone else in your family has. To have worked in your family business. To be afraid to interview. To know how you arrived and to be thankful you did not die in your life’s process. I know this like I know we’ve been up for too long, it’s past my bedtime, and I’m upset because I can’t undo my choice to remain awake.

My mom nestles her dishes into a cardboard box while I roll two yards of kelly-green felt across our living room floor and cut out a leaflike pattern to shape a table runner. Tomorrow, we’ll lay the food on top of this runner and serve it on designer paper plates.

Mom, I say, as I twist my left thumb around the pair of right-handed scissors I’m using, tomorrow, it will be helpful if you can make everyone feel comfortable.

Yeah, OK, she says, shifting the dishes around the sheets of folded paper towels she’s tucking into the corners of the box so they fit perfectly. I know, she assures me.

Sarah meets us in the parking lot. She guides us to a sunlit conference room where three square coffee tables have been pushed together around an L-shaped sofa to create a dining room. I unpack my runner and begin setting the table while my mom arranges the layers of gado gado on a glass plate. The women arrive in scrubs, and I’m glad I’d thought to bring kimonos — welcome gifts — to help them feel as pretty as the table we’d set for them. Angie hands me a large double-stem white orchid plant and I place it on the empty side table between the two couches. Pham tells us she can’t stay, so my mom quickly makes a plate of food for her while I help her choose a kimono.

The kimonos, the kelly-green table runner, the gold chargers, the food, the flowers — there’s much to take in, to admire, to start conversation. There’s another woman I did not meet on my first visit to Edwards last year. She introduces herself as Rita, a supervisor on my heart valve team. I’m struck by her radiant olive complexion and how close in age we appear to be. As we settle in on the sofa, I overhear Angie telling my mom that she memorizes her friends’ phone numbers. If you write them in your phone, and you lose your phone, you can’t find anybody, she says.

I’ve heard this before. Do not tell family secrets to anybody, my mom demands. I hate her complacent, immigrant wisdom, but I listen to Angie to see her reasoning.

Angie is an Amerasian. A Vietnamese, biracial American. She tells us that she came to California with her husband and son who drive freight trucks across America.

Fabi asks everyone, If you could go back to one minute in your twenties, what would it be?

My life was very terrible, Angie begins. I am an orphan. I’m so lucky America brings me here. When I come here, I try to work. I try to learn. She tells us that when she first arrived she rode in a taxi. On the freeway it got a flat tire. It sounded like a bomb, she shares. She’s laughing as she thinks back to her reaction. I don’t speak English, she explains. I screamed: I don’t want to die! The taxi driver said calm down. My language he doesn’t understand. He said calm down and I’m so scared.

Rita takes us to an earlier time in her life. At fourteen years old we came to America from Baghdad. We left Iraq in 1993 so I saw the Gulf War, survived the whole thing. When we came here we lived two minutes from Disneyland, and on my first night here I heard the fireworks and and thought we were being attacked again. I ran to my room, underneath my bed, and thought oh my god the Americans came back!

As she shares her story, the music from the Disneyland Electrical Parade plays in my head, and I recall the crowd gathering for the show and how easy it is, when you are young, to feel lost on Main Street when it is dark, and how those fireworks, when you are small and alone are loud, bright, and last an eternity.

Until this day, the fireworks go on every night and everything comes back, Rita continues. You know, Disneyland is supposed to be the happiest place on earth, but I really hate Disneyland.

Mary shares that she is a boat person. In 1980 she left Vietnam with her husband and four children. On a small boat with 139 people. She stopped in Indonesia for a month, then set out for Florida. She and her husband each held two babies on our lap. When I arrived, I couldn’t stand, she says. She came to Edwards in 2001. Everyday I go to work and then I cook and take care of the children, she continues. I want to go to school, but I don’t have time. Two of her children are at UC Irvine and one is at Pomona.

As we continue chatting, Mary grows quiet. I learned English from my children, she says to my mom.

Me too, my mom tells her. Thank you for saving her life, she adds.

We are eating off of compostable Wasara plates designed in Tokyo, placed atop gold craft-paper chargers. Here we are strangers sitting close to one another, drawing ourselves closer. Past their handiwork inside me, and our laughter around us, is a heart’s life expanded that could — at any moment — begin to deteriorate.

When I first came here, Angie tells us, I hate this job. I felt, I can’t do it. Sewing is hard. She tells us that she watched a video about an Edwards patient. Produced by Edwards, such a video would contain a patient’s journey through heart valve disease and would include a personal message of gratitude to employees from patients and sometimes their family members. When I looked at the video, Angie tells us, I looked at the patient and I felt like I must do this job.

Fabi tells me, When I first started to do the visual audit of the valves, to verify that the stitch is in the right place, that the tissue is in good condition, I felt dizzy. I said please God, give me patience — but the inspector who taught me to do the visual audit said Fabi, just take your time.

Nobody, I think, is born with the patience to sew pericardium tissue to a metal frame. I look over at Mary. She is telling my mom, We’re almost the same age. I’m about to be 70! I sew the very small valves now, the ones the size of your little finger. I sew them very slowly.

Rita says, I know that there is a lot of violence going on around the world, that people are hurting and killing each other. We’re in a crisis right now. It might not hit home directly, but it’s important to live your life daily and let the rest just go with the flow.

I think of them holding my heart valve under a microscope, turning it around and around to look for mistakes, for reasons to start over.

For years I have slowly been letting go of the belief that there is a being who makes people hate based on skin color and belief. That violence is unstoppable, or that to resist violence is to be enlightened. That there is a ranking system to kindness.

Toward the end of our lunch, Angie and Fabi begin sharing pictures of their daughters. Fabi’s daughter has just dyed her hair fire-engine red. Her bangs sweep across her left eye. She smiles, confident, in control of her own presence. She loves to play with colors, Fabi tells us, seemingly unenthused.

I think of them holding my heart valve under a microscope, turning it around and around to look for mistakes, for reasons to start over.

I’ve worn my hair down today, so I lift it up and spin around — to my mom’s surprise — to show them my newly shaved undercut. My mom’s not a fan of this either, I tell them. The room swells with more laughter. I look over at my mom and see that she’s placed her hand on Mary’s back. They appear to be moving between the group conversation and their own intimate one, and my heart swells as I look at them, then at the food on the table, at Fabi, Rita, and Angie. Here is the facet of Orange County that I’d hoped to finally see. Here, around this table, among my mom’s foods, I watched my mom care for Mary with the same attention I felt she smothers me with. There was a motherliness to her actions, but I also saw her shaping community with these women, and that I was building myself into this community, too.

Later that afternoon, in the car, my mom tells me she’d barely eaten anything. I hadn’t either. We were too busy listening to everyone’s stories. I have some steak at home, she says. The thought of it and the thought of the lunch we’d just enjoyed are enough to sustain us for the drive home. The two of us are at ease as we slow into rush hour traffic and everyone on the freeway comes to a brief standstill.

***

Jen Hyde is the author of Hua Shi Hua,华诗画 [Drawings & Poems from China], Ahsahta 2017. She is currently at work on Murmur, a 2016 finalist for the Creative Capital Grant in Literature.

Editor: Krista Stevens

Fact checker: Ethan Chiel

Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Missy Elliott’s “Supa Dupa Fly” Came From the Future

Longreads Pick

The second installment in The New Yorker‘s new interactive music series about individual works explores the way Elliott’s 1997 hit album reimagined hip-hop, R&B, videos, fashion, and black female identity, and why its futuristic vision continues to influence listeners.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Nov 20, 2018
Length: 6 minutes (1,711 words)

Link Wray’s Rustic Masterpieces

Rock'n'roll guitarist Link Wray (1929 - 2005) performs on stage at The Venue in London, 2nd June 1979. (Photo by David Warner Ellis/Redferns)

Like a musical missing link, guitarist Link Wray played instrumental music that had no antecedent, yet it signaled the end of the old staid pre-WWII America and ushered in rock and roll, metal, and punk rock. His 1958 hit “Rumble” remains his best known song, though not quite a claim to fame. Mention Wray’s name and many people stare blankly at you, even though they’ve likely heard his songs like “Rumble” and “Ace of Spades” in films like Pulp Fiction.

For the Oxford American, John O’Connor writes a much-deserved portrait of Link and the trio of under-appreciated vocal albums he recorded in the early 1970s inside his family’s chicken shack. O’Connor writes the definitive story of what are called the shack sessions, talking with a lone surviving relative and with the man who produced the recordings and has a complete unreleased fourth shack album. So how did these sessions come about?

Verroca was intrigued and, before returning to New York, asking Link to record an album with him. “What attracted me was how pitiful the whole situation was: this guy who did so much for rock & roll and doesn’t know it. It broke my heart.”

Link must’ve felt himself to be at a turning point. The pain and frustration of the years, a desire to be heard again, came bubbling up. Two days later, he phoned Verroca with a list of demands: no more fucking clubs; you pay the expenses (groceries, utilities, all that); and I want an advance. Verroca agreed to the first two. A serious collector of southwest Native American jewelry and artifacts (“It was the sixties,” he explained), Verroca sold most of it off, including a belt that had belonged to Cochise, the Apache leader, to finance the recording.

The notion to record in the Shack was a no-brainer. Link was comfortable there. Verroca thought it might yield something strange and loose. Again, it was the sixties. A return to simplicity was in the air. But the Shack was also an acoustic fish tank: maddeningly percussive and clunky. Link’s guitar was so loud it bled into the drum and piano mics. Verroca came up with an idea of placing Link’s amp out in the yard and miking it from the window, which had the odd result of broadening the guitar’s range while also effecting a sonic down-surge.

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