The nicest goddamn dame.

I keep a photograph of Bette Davis on my desk.

She's there shooting me a slightly skeptical, plenty amused look whenever I've fallen into a screeching, maudlin fit (or as I call it, every day). She's the patron saint of fighters: People who fight for life, rail against it, battle for success, pummel obstacles, claw themselves across the finish line. 

I became a fan almost before I saw her; perhaps I really did. My first impression was a waking dream I had, a fragmentary scrap of something, the morning her death was announced. I was 13, and had just started Grade 8. (Grade 8! The nadir. No wonder I discovered B.D., and thank heaven I did.) My radio alarm switched on at 7 am one morning to tell me that an actress I'd never heard of was dead--the person who said, "I'm the nicest goddamn dame who ever lived."


I still get a nervous, thrilled burst in my stomach when I hear those words. I was practicing meekness to survive junior high, which only established me further as School Pariah. Here was a great lady saying, if you're going to be nice, don't be.

Think back to when you were young and you'd tucked a book (like me, was it a biography of Bette Davis or a book of Dorothy Parker's reviews?) into your science textbook and your teacher didn't reveal you because, as he later explained, he'd thought, "Well, at least she's reading." They all had an unquestioned confidence in the potential energy that emanated from you, and you could coast on that energy--and more so, on that confidence--for twenty years, being the bright one, the promising one, gimlet-eyed and flinty.

And then--

There's no resounding clap of thunder, no cymbal crash, just a gradual, sinking apprehension. You realize only when it's gone that potential energy dissipates. Or even worse, you realize that you are the outcome of that potential. This is all there ever was; and what you are is what you were going to be.

Yesterday as I happily paid the barista for breakfast:

Organic, artisanal dark roast

A green smoothie

And a candied plum & almond scone

I realized I was forking out ten bucks

For coffee, juice and a bun.

Red in Steel city

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The customs officer asked me why I’d want to go to Pittsburgh. I was too tired and too cranky to answer him. Today I wish I had said,

Because the Rachel Carson Bridge is next to the Andy Warhol Bridge. Because there are American Revolutionary soldiers buried smack in the middle of downtown in a cemetery the size of my apartment. Because a man lugging a keg of beer into an Irish pub put it back on the sidewalk and leaned on it so he had the breath to wish me good day. Because when I passed for the third time the same elderly man sitting on his stoop, he pointed to my canvas bag that said “The Lost Girl,” slapped his knees, and chortled, “That’s right!” Because lost in the Mexican War Streets I stumbled upon both the birthplace of Gertrude Stein and the home of George Washington Gale Ferris, Jr., who invented the Ferris Wheel. Because a gentleman carrying his very ladylike little Japanese Chin stood next to me while I was taking photos of old steel crests and talked about urban renewal and historical legacies, and then when I asked for the most scenic route downtown he appraised me and said, “I would be comfortable with you on the 6^th Street Bridge, not that I’m saying anything about mayhem, but that would make me the most comfortable.” (Was it the big eyes and the Lost Girl bag?) Because viewing the gorgeous Millvale Murals at St. Nicholas Croatian Catholic Church, a Pete Seeger-quoting retired nurse swung klieg lights around the walls and brandished her cane at the more significant details. Because of the kid at the Strip District coffeeshop explaining to his outraged girlfriend that he’d had to take down the barista for taking his coffee way too seriously, and also for playing Nirvana “like we’re fucking Seattle or something.” Because everywhere I turned some guy called me 'Red.' Because crickets sing all summer long, but their crickets sound like an orchestra performing Beethoven’s 5^th with buzzsaws. Because the Ohio River is born and rolls away right at the point of Pittsburgh’s downtown. Because if you want to watch the glorious copper-and-slate sunset, you’re going to have to watch it set over Heinz Field, goddammit. The sun is just a fair-to-middling star but the Steelers are the Steelers.

Smashed possibilities

One of my undergrad profs once shared an idea from contemporary physics. This was a humanities prof and I was doodling, so forgive the unscientific details: The idea was that the universe stretched out in many different layers and everything was likely, but each time we made a choice, we reached in and wrested it from the multiplicity of possibilities, which were smashed, and a new tangle of possibilities stretched out from our winning choice. I remember that phrase, smashed possibilities. I think it paralyzed me. My writer’s block built up around me not long after that, and stretched up, up, up for ten years. I still worry about it. Any time I bend my head down over a new sentence, I have taken one idea, just a glimmer, and I’m oblivious to a hundred more. Things happen around me that I’ll never see, things that might change me.

But it’s better to catch even one thought than none, and seizing one possibility out of many is better than a web of possibilities, densely tangled, ever growing. A few weeks ago I sat in the Orpheum Theatre, high up in the cheap seats, taking in the muralled ceiling, the crystal chandelier, the velvet curtain, the rush, the beauty, the art, and everything seemed to swell up like a bubble. I thought a familiar thought, that this is too huge to capture. It’s like swimming against a rip tide.