the adolescent closet portal
Welcome to the Sunday post.
And: A note to premium subscribers and Founding Members! The first 2024 Mommy's El Camino FRONT SEAT OFFICE HOUR is on Friday, February 23rd at 1pm Pacific. RSVP by replying to this newsletter. We will meet via Zoom for one hour and write/create together, cameras off or on.
Onto the Sunday post.
I must have taken this photo before I ripped everything down and set to painting the room. My mother couldn't stop me from writing in marker on the walls so my friends joined in. We left our marks: song lyrics, jokes, original poetry, quotations of writers living and dead. When I ran out of space there was the closet--where I wrote some of my own and others' erotic poetry, and collaged the inside of one door.
The year must be around 1990 or 1991. The images themselves were culled from the magazines I spent the most time with: Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Vanity Fair, Mademoiselle, and others. The central images is of actress Debra Winger in a portrait by Helmut Newton. I had a strange attachment to Debra Winger in my early teen years. The film Terms of Endearment had come out in 1983 and when it was available on VHS, it was a movie I watched over and over. Recently it was on the Pluto channel and I realized I still know the lines, the beats taken between the lines, and of course, the sentimental piano music that carries scenes.
The character that Winger plays, Emma, is described in one source as being about "a young woman who marries an immature young college professor to escape her mother." Winger was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for this role.
I loved smoking cigarettes in my room, and I loved Debra Winger, her raspy voice, and I loved Emma, the character she played. I, too, was trying to escape my mother. I liked an occasional unfiltered cigarette. The scars on Winger's face, and the shadows, the look that could be described as one of reproach, or suggesting a dare, or stay back. Emma the character, on the other hand, was goofy, sweet, emotionally intelligent, and (spoiler) she dies in the end, before her mother. This was something I thought about, too.
Constellating out from the image of Winger are other dramatic women. Madonna, of course, who was an icon of my youth--jelly bracelets, crucifixes, and lace, we sang "Like A Virgin" at age ten, my friends and I, and Madonna would be a kind of touchstone for some of those years before I abandoned all contemporary pop music in favor of learning the history of 1960s rock via record stores and my former English teacher, and 1980s and 1990s punk via the blaring cassette tapes and live shows at the Reseda Country Club, the Anti-Club, and random boys' living rooms and backyards.
The women, dark-haired, looking through windows, standing apart. The women, dark-haired, cool, in profile or facing away from the viewer, arms up, a pose of either fixing hair or going insane in front of another window. The men are in profile, suited, or facing away, toward the ocean. It wasn't so much sexual as it was a fantasy of sophistication, another universe. I knew no men like this in my life. They looked like keys to the places where I would have my cigarette lit for me, where I would be handed a key, or told a valuable secret.
Smaller images populate around what draws the eye in--I can see from this grainy image, originally developed and printed on glossy paper: a child. A mirror. Trees silhouetted against blue sky. A shade of blue that is still my favorite. The occasional accents of yellow: an unknown and unknowable couple, looking down and away; a landscape that looks desert-ish, with maybe ocotillo against blue sky; a backdrop of ochre mountains and a lone rider on a horse.
There are many more indecipherable images, made indecipherable my time, by quality of paper, by make of camera and scene of development. Back when I was adding and subtracting images from this collage I was likely working at the drugstore where I occasionally worked in the film department, where I received discounts on both film and developing--the developing happening at an unseen lab elsewhere before being returned to the drugstore--long before I entered a darkroom and learned to develop my own photos.
To cover the inside of a door with images makes me think it was (another) attempt at creating my own portal. The door as I remember it was often open so I could look at these images, as though they would remind me of who I was or wanted to be.
When I left my childhood home my mother required that I paint over the writing (a sloppy three coats) and remove every piece of paper I had affixed to the walls where I had often felt trapped. I did it, gladly, if not a little resentfully. Today, there is no outward trace of the marks I made. Unless you peek, and there I am, the adolescent I, deep inside, having left a piece or two on the walls to remember her by.
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Stay safe out there, everyone. Thank you to everyone in the streets, on the phones, and in the background doing everything they can to stop the genocide in Gaza. 🖤
wonderful collage