Long May You Run
Special Guest Feature From Essayist Chloe Caldwell
Guest Post for Smalldoggies Magazine, on October 6, 2011
If you were born in May, I will probably rip pages of poetry out of books for you and put them in my pocket to give to you when I see you. I will steal books from the Strand bookstore and from the library for you. I will make you things, like journals and collages and animals out of Sculpey clay and I will clean my room when you come over. You will be the only reason I will ever clean my room. I will do drugs with you. I will give you a typewriter. I will not be able to keep my hands off of you. I will pick flowers and bring them to your windowsill. I will want to borrow your things. I will talk a lot around you because that is what I do around people I like. I will like you and I will maybe even love you. I will snoop through your shit because I will think you are amazing and creative and communicative. I will pick fights with you out of insecurity and neuroses. I will want to smash glass and kill flowers and kill you. I will move across the country to make sure I can live without you. I will move across the country to find you. You will be all I will meet.
I know it is rude to call people by numbers. But that is how I am doing this.
Number Five of May. I loved him because he was my older brother’s best Brooklyn friend. Because I met him a few hours after I moved to New York City and my life felt different. Because he had glasses. Because he made me an origami box to keep my jewelry in. Because he brought atlases to bars. Because he had an encyclopedia for a brain and a slim body. Because he always sat on floors and he only used pencils, never pens. Because he told me that if you live in New York, you live in dog years. Because he was right. Because he liked to play follow the leader and because he gave me a journal. Before Number Five moved back to the Midwest from New York City, I put my typewriter that he loved in the language section of The Strand bookstore where he worked. He found it. He still has it.
The Sixth of May was from San Diego. He was my roommate in Washington Heights. It was New York hot. We had no air-conditioner. We watched Sandy Kane and took cold showers together late at night. We drank St. Ides forties and shared a mutual love for Elliott Smith. He made me laugh because he carried his stuff around in a plastic bag. Number Six was sharp, sharp, sharp and sarcastic. He reminded me of Will from Will and Grace. He read a lot of Salinger and he ate a lot of Chinese food. He walked around in his underwear often and had a lithe body. He’d go get us bagels and Plan B in the mornings. During sex, Number Six he asked me if he could slap me and I said no. Then I changed my mind and said yes.
Number Eight is hard to talk about and not just because he is dead because even when he was alive he was hard to talk about. He was a boy with a ponytail and a Tom Waits t-shirt. We ate each other alive for a while. We ate Wonder Bread and snorted heroin for a while. He wrote me poems and songs. He gave the songs to me on cassette tapes with handmade illustrated covers. He let me keep his copy of Junky. Number Eight had the perfect penis. Slightly curved. Number Eight said he had a monkey on his back. That he felt like Einstein selling hot dogs. That he was the only asshole in New York with any umbrella etiquette. That I should respect myself more. Number Eight died on the Eighth. I don’t know if I ever loved him. I just know that I wanted to be him. I just know that some days I want to drink a bottle of liquor and roll around on his grave. The last time I saw Number Eight we made a painting together. His paintings were always violent—skulls deteriorating, women bleeding and heads flying off of bodies with the Manhattan skyline in the background. We sat on our knees in the dim kitchen with full glasses of red wine and small bottles of paint. I followed his lead. I spilled my wine on the canvas. He said who cares. The creation was a mass of emotion, a wash of red and yellow. Blood and taxicabs. There was music on and he leaned forward and kissed my forehead. His lips stayed there while he whispered, “I wish this was my life.” The night Number Eight killed himself, I brought the painting outside and left it on the street corner. Something I wish I hadn’t done.
I sleep well next to Number Nine. I wake up well next to number Nine. Number Nine and I try to align our breathing. Number Nine is new and current in my life, so it is hard to know what to say about him yet. I cradle his head in my arms. Number Nine is nice and gives hand and full body massages. Number Nine tells me I am very beautiful. Number Nine likes to drink pitchers of beer while making many ambitious to do lists and goal lists. We get on because I like doing those things too. Sometimes we spend Saturdays making lists and origami frogs and eating chicken wings. We wake up on Sundays and have sex to The Beatles radio show. Number Nine likes to dance and has nice teeth. I feel like I am ruining things with number Nine before they even begin because I have showed him I’m crazy too early. Number Nine has glasses and sort of looks like Number Five, and on the first day we met, I told him that.
Ever since I got back from my visit to New York, Number Thirteen has been very affectionate. He takes my hand now when I see him like he is scared I am going to go away again. He never used to hold my hand. When he met me at the airport, he asked, “Were you sad?” I asked him why I would be sad and he said, “Because you didn’t get to see me for a while.” He holds my hand now even while we are just having milkshakes and French fries side by side at Scooter’s Burgers looking out the window to Market Street. That’s what we were doing yesterday when Time Of The Season by The Zombies came on and I remembered that that was one of Number Eight’s favorite songs. I felt pre-menstrual and emotional and had watery eyes and Number Thirteen kept holding my hand and asked me why I was sad and told me that he loved me. Number Thirteen doesn’t care what anyone thinks. He wears a Spiderman costume--mask included--and carries a sword around with him most days of the week. He says he will protect me from the bad guys. He likes me to pretend I am Cinderella for him. Over the milkshakes, Number Thirteen told me he thinks vaginas are weird (they look like small butts but triangular) and he is very happy to have a penis instead. He asked me if I was sad I had a vagina. I said yes, that sometimes it sucks. He asked me if I hate it. I told him he shouldn't use the word hate. He told me I shouldn't use the word sucks. Number Thirteen recently turned four.
Number Sixteen is a chewing gum enthusiast. He is a pyromaniac. He is a photographer. He is a wrestler and he is a pothead. He is a lacrosse player. He sends me the up and coming kinds of gum--like the one that changes from fruity to minty--in Ziploc bags. I like to think that Number Sixteen and I have a bond that runs deep even though we only see each other once a year now, if we are lucky. The last time I saw sixteen we walked barefoot around Boston smoking bowls in a rainstorm.
Nineteen was my first May love. His name was Cameron but he changed it to Kamaran. We met at a guitar camp. We were fifteen. I thought he was cool because he was getting emancipated from his parents. He truly believed that he was John Lennon reincarnated. We bought Coricidin Cough & Cold and popped eight of them each and that was the first time I tripped. There was something about his eyes—something that was so important to me and now I don't remember. Maybe one eye was lazy. Color blind? Two different colors? Not sure. But I was completely in love with Kamaran. The camp lasted two weeks. My dad picked me up and I sobbed for four hours on the drive home. I was on that Coricidin kick and got a few of my friends to do it with me. They hated me for it. Four years later Number Nineteen contacted me when I lived in the city. His email address was lennon1969. He asked me to meet him at Grand Central Station. I spotted him from a distance. He was with his Mom.
Twenty-two is my bravest number. Twenty-two is brave because he handles me and I am learning that I am hard to handle. He hasn’t walked away and maybe he should have. Actually, once he did start walking away, on my birthday, when I picked a fight, but then he remembered my cell-phone was charging at his apartment and he claims that’s the only reason he came back. Another time he drove away angry on his motorcycle, so I flew away to Berlin for a few months. But we always come back. We just keep ramming together, as he puts it. Twenty-two puts up with my lovesick shit. Twenty-two shouldn’t have to put up with so much of my shit. I just realized that now. I could swallow number twenty-two in one gulp. Number Twenty-two and I met at a Monday night memoir writing class during the winter. I loved his writing. I asked him how he could write like that. I wanted to write like that. A special thing happened that winter. Things aligned. We listened to Jigsaw Falling Into Place by Radiohead a lot. The special thing kept happening through the spring, summer, fall and following winter. We listened to Waterloo Sunset by The Kinks a lot. Everything was eerily romantic. I am always writing with number twenty-two in mind. My number Twenty-two is my best friend. He calls me his sex fantasy robot. His muse. We have an intensity you can hold in your hand, that you can pick up and put down. Sometimes Twenty-two’s love is the only love that matters to me.
Number Twenty-three was my bartender. Number Twenty-three is Irish and likes The Pogues. Number Twenty-three dresses very odd. He wears pins on his T-shirts. He wears Pogues T-shirts. Number Twenty-three turned me on to a beer that he described as tasting like bananas and cloves. I became heavily addicted to the beer. Fransizkaner. Number Twenty-three refilled my beer free of charge every time it was a quarter of the way down. I lived at that bar. Number Twenty-three told me I gave him indecent thoughts. I think number Twenty-three reminded me of number twenty-two. And I am always looking for another Twenty-two. I moved to a different neighborhood so number twenty-three is not my bartender anymore.
Number Twenty-Eight is the only person that ever came on my face. This makes him important in a way and it makes me remember him though nothing else about him is was worth remembering. Number Twenty-eight and I got into an embarrassing public spat at a bar, (the bar that Number Twenty-three was the bartender at) about Twitter. I was against it. He was for it and had good reasons to back it up. He said he couldn’t believe how passionate I was about detesting Twitter. We didn’t talk for a long time after that. Now we talk again and to my chagrin I am very passionate about twitter, except on the contrary view.
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Chloe Caldwell is a writer from upstate New York. Her first book of personal essays, Legs Get Led Astray will be published in April 2012 by Future Tense Books. Excerpts from the book can be found on The Rumpus and Mr. Beller's Neighborhood. She writes a column called "Love & Music" for The Faster Times and she loves the band Okkervil River. That's where her book title comes from. Her essay, "That Was Called Love" was nominated for a 2011 Pushcart Prize and called a Notable Story of 2010 by storySouth Million.
This essay will also appear in her forthcoming book. More information is on her website.