Don't Get Too Comfortable (11 page)

Even those in the crowd without youngsters in tow rush off to breakfast like it was a Fortune 500 board meeting. Our ranks begin to dwindle considerably. The last hour feels dogged and a good deal less festive standing in a group that gets smaller by the minute, on pavement strewn with trampled, abandoned signs
(LIA AND JODEE. BEST FRIENDS IN NY FOR THE 1ST TIME AND LOVING IT!!).

Randy and I take a caffeine break at the Dean and Deluca facing the Plaza. A woman passes by outside the coffee shop. The window is a reflective surface with people behind it, and she illustrates the depth of her
Today
show Pavlovian conditioning by holding up the 81⁄2 5 11 color Xerox of her infant son, with the words
HI SEAN
on it. She mouths “My boy!” to those of us inside, pointing to her chest.

There is no more security to speak of when Randy and I return to positions to wait until the bitter end. We could now stand outside the studio naked with a shoulder-launched missile. It is down to a skeleton crew of thirty individuals. The already shaky sound on some of the monitors has been turned down significantly, others have been switched off completely. Technicians are striking the outdoor set. By 9:30, it's last call with the lights turned on. It's just sad.

A man in his late forties, salt-and-pepper hair, gray jogging suit, gold cross, approaches and asks Randy if he's planning on keeping his by now slightly bent spring break movie poster.

“I'm moving into a new apartment in Philly. I need artwork. I'm here to see Katie. I sent her a white rose and a letter a while back.”

He is lucid enough to understand that a response would be more than he could ever hope for. Not to worry, he has a contingency plan.

“I'm going to have my picture taken with the fake Katie.” He produces a small flyer for something in the NBC building where one can pose with a life-size cutout, it seems.

“I have a thing for her. Like everyone else in the country,” he confides. “I played college basketball. I broke my glasses.” He is winding a thick rubber band around the bridge of the spectacles which are in two pieces, barely holding them together. “It's only a problem if I drive at night.”

“How did you get here?” I ask.

“I drove.”

Even he doesn't stick around for the very end. When the crypto-stalkers pull up stakes, it's definitely time to leave. The party is breaking up. By the time Katie Couric emerges to sign what can't total more than twelve autographs, the area is being slowly subsumed back into the life of the city, returning to being just more midtown sidewalk, the streets wrested away from the republic and reclaimed for the greatest city in the world as it is traditionally viewed from elsewhere: a heartless, tolerant island teeming with pushcarts, dusky immigrants, tycoons, chorines, homos, Jews, liberals, and, yes, hookers and Yankee Stadium.

MARTHA, MY DEAR

S
he was always an easy target. The jokes only escalated once she was hauled off to the clink. Imperious and controlling, people would say, her projects demanding the anal-retentive concentration of a Persian miniaturist. But now that she had been brought down for insider trading, the airwaves were abuzz with gags about her frantically knitting license-plate cozies and stitching rickrack borders onto the meager curtains in her cell. Let's watch her try to fend off the unwanted advances of the many tattooed bulldaggers who would claim her for their very own prison bitch.

I am not one for making predictions. She is still behind bars at the time of this writing. But I know in my heart that her reemergence will be an unmitigated triumph (the truism is dead wrong: there seem to be nothing
but
second acts in America). Mine is the unshakable faith of one who loves Martha Stewart and always has. I love her for a simple reason: she advocates mastery and competence over purchase. Martha Stewart has taught scores of people—and I'll go out on a limb here and call them women—the value of doing things for themselves. “How to make” almost always trumps “How to buy” in my book. (There are exceptions. I'm perfectly happy not to have to grind my own flour or blow my own lightbulbs.)

It was Martha Stewart, in fact, who made me realize that “art fag,” the disparaging term I used to describe myself and my hobbies, was actually the same thing as being handy. (It was an epithet first hurled at me by some rough boys who walked by me late one night in Brooklyn when I was twenty-four years old. I didn't have the courage to yell back at them, “That's Arthur Fag to you!” I also didn't get it at the time that only a couple of fellow travelers could traffic in such subtle gradations of homosexual phenotypes. The average gay-basher doesn't know enough to call someone a Callas Queen, for example. Besides, “art fag” seemed so apt to describe what I was that I just adopted it as my own.)

I make stuff. Ersatz Joseph Cornell boxes, painted mirrors, that kind of thing. It's an itch, a compulsion that comes over me when I pass by a sidewalk piled with particularly good garbage, or when shopping for a table lamp, I see how little there really is to such an object and how much they're charging. Some people need to exercise every day, others don't feel complete without regular vacations. My salvation lies in time spent alone with an X-Acto knife and commercial-grade adhesive. I make stuff because I can't not make stuff.

During the act of making something, I experience a kind of blissful absence of the self and a loss of time. When I am done, I return to both feeling as restored as if I had been on a trip. I almost never get this feeling any other way. I once spent sixteen hours making 150 wedding invitations by hand and was not for one instant of that time tempted to eat or look at my watch. By contrast, if seated at the computer, I check my e-mail conservatively 30,000 times a day. When I am writing, I must have a snack, call a friend, or abuse myself every ten minutes. I used to think that this was nothing more than the difference between those things we do for love and those we do for money. But that can't be the whole story. I didn't always write for a living, and even back when it was my most fondly held dream to one day be able to do so, writing was always difficult. Writing is like pulling teeth.

From my dick.

I've often wondered what it must be like for one's work life to be a daily exercise in having that feeling of meditative pleasure. There is only one place where I can imagine that happening: the crafts department of
Martha Stewart Living
magazine. Considering that it is the destination of a pilgrimage, it's a bit anticlimactic to find myself in what could be any standard, fluorescent-lit corridor in any standard midtown building—aside from that sheaf of wheat, bound up and propped against the wall by the mail cubbyhole. It's not until I enter the office of Hannah Milman, who heads up the department, and see that every inch of every available surface, shelves and windowsills and radiators, is covered with an embarrassment of craft supplies—apothecary jars filled with seashells and beach glass, bags upon bags of quartz, polished oyster shells, beads, vintage rhinestones, spools of ribbon, silk and velvet flowers—that I know for sure that I have found a home of sorts. I feel both thrilled and envious, although the latter is misplaced. I've managed to amass a healthy trove of materials of my own over the years. At last inventory, the cupboards underneath my bookshelves, eighteen cubic feet of space, were packed solid with takeout soup containers full of tiny bulbs salvaged from old strings of Christmas lights, plastic fish, plastic horses, and some sinisterly cheerful plastic clown heads; seven boxes of Chinese-character flash cards; several dozen black Bakelite rotary-phone dials pulled from a Dumpster in front of the welfare office near my house; numerous packages of gold-foil Chinese joss paper; easily sixty tubes of acrylic paint and almost as many brushes; rhinestones; pearl buttons; a thick bundle of architectural balsa wood; a brick of gray-green plasticene; bulldog clips; pipe cleaners; a tin cracker box of multicolored golf tees, approximately 1,000; six stamp pads; rubber linoleum printing blocks with tubes of ink; five volumes of the 1952
World Book Encyclopedia,
as well as six cracked, leather-bound books of a nineteenth-century technical dictionary; bindery-fabric sample books; three porcelain heads that I salvaged from some trash on Russian Hill in San Francisco well over ten years ago and have yet to make use of; and truest friend to crafters everywhere, assorted cans of polyurethane. (Glorious, glorious polyurethane! To your gorgeous fumes, a woozy hymn, with half the words missing! O resinous forgiver of countless mistakes, whose mirror-bright nacre confers authority, a glassy rime of reason to objects large and small! Hooray and huzzah, I wax for Minwax!)

Still looking around in wonder, my eyes light upon Hannah Milman's collection of eggs. It is the kind of comprehensive assortment of species, sizes, and colors that the good agents at the fish and wildlife service might like to know about. The eggs, many dozen in number, are all empty and clean. I ask her if she blew them out herself, a task which, after the fourth or fifth egg, starts to give one the mother of all headaches. Everyone pitched in, she says. It was for a feature the magazine did about how to make your own Fabergé egg. She shows me one of the finished products, created in-house. The fragile shell has been sawed open with the tiny bit of a Dremel drill, its two perfect halves edged in narrow gold brocade, hinged, and lacquered a pale imperial blue. Inside is a tiny velvet pillow on which a pearl rests like a baby.

It is lovely and useless. I don't really go in for homemade versions of evil czarist frippery, but I tamp down my reservations by repeating to myself what She Herself taught me: these eggs require easily as deft a hand, probably more so, as it takes to refinish a cabinet on the super-butch
This Old House.
At most, it's a difference of degree, not kind. Handy, handy, I am handy.

HANNAH LEADS ME
down the hall to the main workroom. It is not a large space by any means. There is a central table and a work surface running along two walls. On the floor-to-ceiling shelves are clear plastic storage boxes of still more supplies. The project currently under way is traditional Polish Christmas ornaments. Stalks of that selfsame wheat from the hallway are being soaked, folded, twisted, braided, and tied into an endless variety of shapes by half a dozen of Martha's elves. Despite the humility of the materials, there is nothing simple about the ornaments as they are dusted with differing shades of brilliant metallic mica powder, an incredibly toxic substance that has the young man using it—the only man working here, in fact, albeit curiously named Meghan—wearing a double-filtered gas mask. The crafters are all hunched over their small wheaten garlands and wreaths. I ask them if they ever experience that wonderful feeling of absence.

A woman named Kelly says, “When you're making something, you're in a different state. You go into a deep level of concentration, to the point where you're not self-conscious anymore, it's just flowing out of you.”

It's fairly amazing that she has used these words unprompted, because the actual name for the state of mind that she is describing is “flow.” It's a term coined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a University of Chicago–trained psychologist. In trying to codify those moments that give our life purpose, that elevate the consciousness and add complexity to the self, Csikszentmihalyi interviewed athletes, chess players, artists, rock climbers, and found that all of them, when engaged in the act of their choosing, spoke of reaching a level of engagement that is completely unselfconscious, removes them from their everyday worries, and alters their sense of time.

“The biggest challenge for us is that you have to have insta-flow,” Kelly continues. “You
have
to make things. You don't have a choice. That's what you're paid for.”

My flow would fly right out the window at the first sign of external pressure. And that pressure here is a constant. Moreover, it seems more often than not to have to do with Christmas, Thanksgiving, or Easter. I just don't care about the holidays enough. I'm also a little hung up on functionality. I try to not make stuff that is solely decorative. And I'm sort of immune to the spotless, relentlessly American Martha Stewart aesthetic, a kind of family-quilt-inherited-from-the-grandmother-who-never-had-to-run-from-the-Cossacks
goyishkeit
that really isn't my thing. There are reasons beyond my lack of talent and training for why I could never work here.

And yet I still feel a great sense of commonality with these women. I ask them if they think the world divides into people who don't make stuff and people who do. They answer diplomatically, like social workers, saying how everyone has their own special creativity. They think that I'm trying to catch them out in some snobbery, to claim membership in some exclusive group. But I'm talking about something as value neutral as double-jointedness. The inability to look at something without wanting to somehow make it into something else, a compulsion completely separate from aesthetics or talent. I try a different tactic. I ask if they've ever passed by the garbage of Duggal Photo, a processing lab in the Flatiron district. The trash at Duggal almost always has something good: pristine black cardboard, which would cost a lot to buy in a store, or some very nice acetate or clean foam core. Suddenly they know exactly what I'm talking about. Just thinking about it makes their eyes light up like the Cratchett children on Christmas morning.

Actually, there is a much clearer marker by which to divide the population: between the people who make things, and the people who receive the things we make. Staying up late exploring one's obsession of the moment is one thing, foisting the product of those obsessions upon friends and loved ones is something else entirely.

Giving someone an art project might appear very generous on the surface, but in another sense it's an act of bullying. More than a store-bought gift, it's an attempt to curate someone else's taste. You're also consigning them to the task of having to take care of your work. It's a bit like leaving a baby on their doorstep. After the initial amazement at its profound beauty, it simply becomes a liability. I have made and given away easily twenty years' worth of things. Some of the recipients have moved almost that many times. Others have died, gotten divorced, or been widowed. I have made things out of food—polyurethaned food, but food nonetheless.

“I was doing a lot of mushroom prints, and everyone got one for their birthday that year,” muses one of the women. “Actually, you know, come to think of it, I haven't seen a lot of those up. I wonder what happened to them.”

I'm doubtful that much of the stuff I've made is still around. A year on the shelf and then out to the rubbish heap or Goodwill seems like a perfectly suitable statute of limitations to me, but one can never know the mind of another person. I have almost no idea what has happened to a lot of the stuff I've made. I try to track down some of the objects.

For my friend Deb's thirtieth birthday, I made her a box, painted pastel pink and tiled all over in Necco wafers. On the inside is pasted a sticker from the Women's Health Action Mobilization, an activist group she was involved with.
SUPPORT VAGINAL PRIDE,
it says. She has it close at hand when I call about it. That it would be within easy reach in a studio apartment is no surprise. But that she would still have it at all after so many years with such limited living space kind of is.

“I keep it because it's pretty and silly. It's frilly and girly and covered in these ballerina cake-toppers. It's not my style, and that's a joke that you and I share. It's something I have to explain. It's what people at Lillian Vernon might call a conversation piece.”

For the most part, the friends I call have kept the things I made. Sometimes they go missing, but there always seems to be a reason beyond mere neglect. Case in point, my friend Margaret, now settled in Boston. I have to remind her of the mirror I made for her and her then-husband Lander's wedding. She has no memory of it.

“He probably has it. He made a big grab for the stuff,
but I got the car
!” she jokes. After a pause, she says, “You know what, I'm suddenly remembering the mirror. We hung it up. I think he took it! I think his new wife's name is Marta, so he probably just twisted the letters around. That's funny, just thinking about it,
He took that mirror David gave me,
gets me mad at him. I haven't thought about him in years. Talk about the power of repression.”

Talk about the power of repression, indeed. I have made Margaret remember something she hadn't really wanted to, and she turns around and does the same thing to me. She has kept a T-shirt that I painted for her when we were in college. Just hearing her describe it makes me cringe.

“I see it every day. It's very eighties. It's a portrait of someone. Big beautiful eyes, and sensuous lips. The man of your dreams? It's the romantic David I know.”