One More on the Phone, My Heart

You write your name a hundred
times on a single sheet of paper, three equidistant columns of thirty-three
lines each, and once, very large, in the empty space at the top, and then you
write on top of these hundred, bolder, the name driven farther into the pulp of
the paper, the ink getting shiny with depth and breadth. You write your name a
thousand times until the tip of your pen tears through the paper, disrupting
one of your capital letters. And what or where does this get you? You are no
closer to self-knowledge or claiming an identity, yet it seems a productive way
to spend your time.

It’s how I spend time, sometimes, when I’m bored. Time to re-invent my
signature, make it more of a reflection of how I am. Less shaky, maybe,
eliminate these needless curves, something that looks flashy yet refined.
Perhaps even more economical. I’ll leave a few letters out this time, or
insinuate them with a dot or line. I do this during play rehearsal when my
scene’s not up. Rehearsal is tiring and repetitive motion helps restore
confidence and focus. Rehearsal is tiring because you’re shifting continuously,
in and out of your character, between the ex-priest and his past, building up a
wall so that the character is unaware of blocking, correct inflection, or how
there are no walls in his friend’s house, just rows of chairs filled with
spectators then arduously climbing up the wall minutes later to hear the notes
from my director. Rehearsal even seems an inadequate word for what I am
doing…I’m still struggling to firmly pin the character down, make his decisions
for him. It changes every day with new information and discovery; it could even
change on stage, depending on the night, the itchiness of the costume sweater
vest, the intensity of the pace the cast decides upon unconsciously. It wears
me out, and I write my name down.

You look over the sheet of paper and the century of names, and they are all
alike, but nowhere near identical. What shifts from name to name? Is it the
pulse, an effect of the heart? Or is it in the nerves, stimulus and response, a
psychological deterrent against uniformity? Then the names become days or
hours, your shifting moods and ideas anchored to the constant of your face,
your wardrobe, your saw tooth smile and nodding eyes.

The paper crumples between your two hands, your unique fingerprints
half-retained on its wrinkled surface, and it is thrown away…What is it like to
name your baby? It seems like it should be a source of paranoia or at least
deep concern: the words attached to a person whose personality hasn’t yet

crystallized, whose features are not refined or even formed. It’s like buying a
gift for the host of a party you are going to without knowing anything about
them. How could it possibly be apt and eternally worthwhile?

But it does, somehow, come to mean you. This bodiless twin you were born with, your
name. Through the years it shapes you by hearing it said, the inflections
and emotions friends and strangers give it, from your mother’s scolding to your
lover’s pounding chants.

I’m standing on a stage saying my lines. In this play I am an ex-priest, a
friend of the family, and a former lover of one of the leads. It’s a
complicated role. I don’t really look the part, but the director believes in
me. It’s a student play anyway, the cast and audience all made up of
twenty-somethings, and those of us in this unified age group, this third decade
of our lives, have the ability—or maybe even the need—to translate what we see
into something relevant to ourselves, our point in time. The twenty-somethings
of the cast are seen as the fifty-somethings of the play’s world, not just in
the sense of suspended disbelief, but also in the sense of prophecy and
self-image.

We are at the time when we must juggle our whole lives, keeping a careful eye
on whatever stage is in the perilous position of mid-air. We must pick and
choose from our past, our childhood, taking what is valuable and rejecting that
which is either painful or obsolete. We must stay in the present because that
is what is expected of us as the trend-setters for the trend-starved portion of
the population. We must enjoy our bodies while they last, stretching, flexing,
reaching out one hand for another, rolling in bed in unison while still
thrusting away, moving as if cameras are always zooming in. From here on out
you only get fatter, hairier, spongier, blind, deaf, and dumb—for the sake of
the eyes watching you from both ahead and behind, use your body’s prime! Cue
the kiss, drive your knuckles through some fucker’s forehead, come on her face
with well-timed accuracy, the perfect moment for the perfect image. Motivate
your elders’ fantasies; live a life the teen queens will want to usurp, because
after this, it’s all downhill, brother. Your term is over, there’s new blood,
ankle biters and Persians rising up in the east, or you’ve become a father,
made partner, lost a limb, and life has seized the reins from your eager hands
and is now taking you for a ride. So we prepare, throwing the bones of
culture on the ground and trying to read what it will be like, what to know,
how to act like a fifty-something, what to fear and regret or how to avoid
those things altogether.

And through it all—your name. You think it’s the only thing you really own, but
is it? It’s more like something on a screen, a designation, a part with eternal
significance played by several actors with different faces, different voices.
When are you really you? You sit in the tub with an overturned glass of juice
on the tiles next to you, and, startled, you think, “Jesus, did it just happen
again? Did someone else just take over?” You wonder if maturity or
something like it pays that much attention to timetables; isn’t it more like
plates shifting underneath the earth? So that, in mid-afternoon, your fault
lines shudder and you suddenly realize you don’t like that song anymore, in
fact, you hate it, despise it, want to publish manifestoes against it. Your
lover is no longer attractive to you either in her familiarity or her façade;
the apartment suddenly has a smell and that’s when you put your finger on
it—that smells like the old me. Open the windows! Then, in the midst of your
furious scrubbing and cleansing the phone rings—Are you there? “Yes, yes!
Speaking…”—and things seem somewhat stable. The new House has assumed control,
and it’s time to secure the borders.

Burn all photographs! Recall all love letters! Shred all records! Delete the
poems from the hard drive! Masquerading as a private investigator you call
people up from your past and future to find out what they know, what they
remember about you. We’ll see if it all checks out or if there are kinks,
inconsistencies, conflicts with what you hope to become, what you irrevocably
are now. Murder the ones who know too much; sweet-talk and bribe the others so
that their story jives with the facts you’ve written down on your little spiral
notebook.

I’m on the stage, and in this play I die, I get poisoned by my former lover,
and I remain on stage, sitting at the kitchen table, dead as disco. Each time
the play is performed my mind drifts somewhere else. I don’t listen to the
other actors arguing through the climax and crying during the resolution—limbo.
I’m unaware of the audience even, just concentrating on errands I have to run
tomorrow or revising an intro paragraph for a research paper, writing it in my
head then mentally going over it in ink so that it sticks. The play ends and I
rise from the kitchen table and take the few steps to the proscenium where I
shed the ex-priest character (that’s really all he is, an ex-priest) with a bow
and become me, actor, viewer, pussy-ass bitch, stand-up guy, irresponsible
drinker, straight-A student, clueless hipster, feverish and healthy, an object
of applause.