Screaming Goat Summer
“ You who do not remember passage from the other world I tell you I could speak again: whatever returns from oblivion returns to find a voice:“ -Louise Glück, Wild Iris
I do not wish to keep writing about death. This Summer started with the loss of a close, irreplaceable friend, and concluded with a dear friend losing her brother under tragic circumstances.
A very dear friend gave S. a “Screaming Goat” as a birthday gift this year. It had a busy Summer.
I went to Evanston a few Sundays ago to look for a copy of the September Italian Vogue, and ended up walking from South Boulevard to Foster.
A love of Penzey’s spices was one of the things my friend who passed away at the beginning of the Summer and I bonded over as we reconnected just before the start of the pandemic, before we co-directed three productions on Zoom together, saw each other for the first (and last time), during a last minute visit to Chicago after quarantine’s end, and before her passing.
Standing in front of the Penzey’s I would shop at for spices when I was bartending just up the street, the reality of her physical absence, and its permanence in this world, landed on me like a piano from the sky. The printed suggestion to “embrace hope” seemed particularly tone deaf, even though it was clearly not intended for me personally.
And I don’t begrudge the necessary rites of grief. After my friend’s passing, as shifts suddenly started to dry up at my last restaurant, and we found ourselves cash poor and time rich at a time when any kind of distraction might have been helpful, I took to my collage table and got to work. In the spirit of making art to survive, which during the pandemic was what had brought us back into each others lives fully, I tried to inhabit a non-linear creative space, and approach in scraps what I could not even cogently approach in poetry at the time.
During the quarantine, our theater work and the writing and reading of my poetry helped to make sense of senseless events, but death, especially her death before even properly reaching middle age, is senseless on a level I could only reckon with privately after writing her a eulogy, which I felt she would have wanted and deserved.
2.
A friend of a friend introduced the term “bummer Summer” into my lexicon not so long after this loss.
A Summer spent with my specific partner, in this specific City, which is amazing during the Summer months, could never be a complete bummer. We had family visit in June, we took walks and shared iced coffee, we visited the dog beach, and we snuck in twice in a row to the same street festival in our neighborhood and saw our favorite eighties cover band.
And I kept working on the collages, and went on a bunch of interviews, and even though I was operating with little gas in the tank, was lucky enough to be hired to work somewhere that didn’t treat my labor and expertise as disposable.
Leaning on a network of family and friends, we somehow eked it out on the financial edge this Summer, and now that things are starting to get back on track, there is a part of me that wonders if the stress of tenuously trying to finance our day to day existence without an income for a month between jobs, and the social exhaustion associated with starting my new job were not entirely unfortunate under these specific circumstances.
Anxiety is motivating, and larger existential questions were certainly eclipsed by far more immediate existential questions, oddly giving me some space and time to heal, as if my grief was set in a cast. If putting one foot in front of the other is both necessary and difficult, it tends to absorb most of the available bandwidth, rather than leaving sadness, regret and anger space to metastasize.
3.
This song reeentered my musical lexicon this Summer and doggedly became its theme,
and while navigating the series of impossibilities that comprised much of this Summer, frequent listening to this iconic performance, freighted with honesty and simplicity, certainly helped.
Cutting up an MCA catalog while collaging, I found this photograph. Although the ship is physically being held up by the hands, it looks more like they’re pulling it down, and the sails are slack.
(Emilio Rojas, Santa María Llena Eres de Gracia, 2018. Color photograph; 14 × 21 in. (35.6 × 53.3 cm).
Collection of DePaul Art Museum, gift of the artist, 2020.10. Image courtesy of the artist.)
It felt apt.
4.
S. Just cut my hair. After I left the French place, I had buzzed off the length on top for the same reason Britney did: it was simply too heavy at the time. I’m tentatively growing it back. He fixed the back for me just now.
The rhythms of my new job are becoming slightly familiar. As I acclimatize, I am reminded of the line in “Famous Blue Raincoat:” “New York is cold, but I like where I'm living/ There's music on Clinton Street all through the evening.”
The restaurant sits on both an intersection of the Chicago River and in the middle of numerous train tracks that serve the subway and Metra. I have always liked bodies of water and trains. It feels like a good place to spend some of my time right now.
We’re at the hinge of roasting season, and I have never craved vegetables more. And junk food also, if I’m being honest. If wolfing a bag of Fritos gives me enough of a raise in spirits, I can get to chopping and roasting. Right now, I need both.
Not just in the visual work, but in the work of crafting sentences, something has loosened recently: my reward for surviving my “return,” as Louise Gluck would have it.
Many years ago, I would not bend when she asked to be seated at a booth for four with one other guest at Casablanca. She asked me if I “knew who she was.” I told her I did, and a booth was out of the question.
Perhaps if I had known that her work would become a lighthouse for me later, I might have relented. It is too late to change that now.
My Aunt draws a tiny tulip on the back of the envelope when she sends out a card, it symbolizes “acceptance with joy.”
I am not yet on her level. I logically understand some similarly untenable losses are just on the horizon, and one process of grief is not like the other. It is not like relearning to ride a bicycle, but more like maybe anticipating you could ride a cyclone if you have to, after you’ve ridden a bull.
As the young black contestant to join the Corny Collins Council, vexedly announces with practiced resignation to her banal panel of judges in a scene early in “Hairspray,” “…I can dance to Lawrence Welk if I have to.”
5.
I had a dream in which S. and I were visiting the Loch Ness Monster’s apartment. It wasn’t home at the time. We kept looking for signs of its inhabitance, but there were few. It was honestly disappointing. It was still said to live there.
I remember feeling a sense of the inexorable sweep of life and the insistence of death very strongly when my Father was successfully battling for his last year, a gut understanding of the inevitability of the end of this particular experience. There’s something both terrifying and freeing about that space. And it is a space we are designed to inhabit, despite its lack of easy amenities.
And it is always in the offing. Reckoning with that exists outside of any zone of pleasure, but the essence of life itself, in the ways it can torment as well as delight us, is predicated on its brevity. This time-anchored layering of experience, delight, horror and everything else will always end, and the piano lid will always close in the silence of the music’s absence.
This has the starkness of a fact. It is not an easy one to live against, but it is the only backdrop we’ve been given.