Slices of Life: Pictures, Portraits, and Profiles

by S.K. Evans

So, you may or may not have seen the trailer for the upcoming Focus Features film by the relatively obscure French documentary filmmaker Thomas Balmès.

OMG BABIES!!!!!!!!!!!!!

That’s right, the flick is succinctly titled Babies and the trailer consists of nothing more than babies doing what they do best: being cute, hitting each other, squishing some poor dog’s face, crying, and smiling goofy toothless grins (all to a catchy/kitschy Sufjan Stevens soundtrack). I don’t think there’s quite enough barfing though; the director should really take some cues from Jackass. Maybe he could also use a little more crying-on-public-transportation while he’s at it. Seriously, though, everyone loves babies, right?

Not me. I generally love all things twee (even Sufjan Stevens), but I hate babies. And I hate how adults get around babies even more.

Also, I don’t really understand why there has to be a movie about this. Less and less women are reproducing in their twenties but… holy God, it’s like you turn 25 and suddenly babies are everywhere. My friend Anna emails me weekly photographs of various family members’ offspring (she has a big family that’s half-Catholic). I think she does it mostly because she gets a kick out of my rote response: Eww. Armed with a handy iPhone camera, she tortures me with pictures of babies.

If I wanted to see babies I could just go down to McCarren park this spring and ogle the cute dudes with their horn-rimmed glasses and their Baby Bjorns (which sounds rather like a kiddie-indie-rock band name to me) and their Snugglies.

Can I boycott this film and cite over-exposure?

Last weekend I went to a small dinner party at which some friends’ baby, Ollie, was the guest of honor. For a few hours, I felt like a Brooklyn cliché. Here we were, a bunch of twenty-somethings hanging out with a baby, joking loudly about sex, eating brie and bruschetta, drinking tea, and listening to the new Beach House record. Ollie was wearing a striped onesie that looked remarkably like something I would wear come summer and faux-fur booties. I kept thinking of this photograph my parents have of their friend Peter passed out drunk in their rosebush while little two-year old me ran around clad only in sandals. How bohemian. How hip.

“I hate babies. I hate babies. I hate babies,” I said to myself as I snuggled his squishy little face and held his teeny-tiny hands.

“I only like this baby,” I defiantly told the parents. I hear it’s all downhill from here.

This movie will probably make billions of dollars.

by S.K. Evans

You bought me Humpty Dumpy as a reconciliation years before we moved in together. More than half a decade later, he still sits proudly in the center of my bed, clad in a royal purple vest. A centerpiece.

He replaced you as my bedfellow. When I pulled out of our shared driveway in a small car full of books and boxes of photographs, I saw you standing there, in corduroys and a thin plaid shirt, in my rear-view mirror. You looked tall and thin and tired. Humpty was crammed in a box with my pillows and cotton panties. Summer was just beginning and all the leaves were electric green.

He followed me to Brooklyn, leaving you behind on that sunlit driveway. He has been tossed to the floor by countless musicians, writers, and academics in various states of unemployment. I have never washed him. The ways in which we are intimate and then not-intimate with each other still baffle me.

You bought him for me the year we fell in love, after an unfortunate incident with his predecessor. By the time you and I were in college, I had loved Pochacco, Hello Kitty’s puppy pal, so much that his white nylon skin was graying and almost translucent. I loved him and I loved you so much that one night, after one too many whiskeys and bitter words, I tore his head open and all his stuffing came tumbling out.

I was nineteen and in tears when I turned up at your door at two a.m. with my broken and abused stuffed animal in my arms. You looked at me with your watery gray eyes and invited me in. You calmly sewed him up as I stifled sobs and fumbled with the dying leaves of your potted plant. For the remaining nine months that he survived, Pochacco was a little canine Frankenstein sitting on my dorm room bed, reminding me just how stupid I could get.

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;
Threescore men and threescore more,
Cannot place Humpty Dumpty as he was before.

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by S.K. Evans

You told me you came to truly love words when you couldn’t speak. You were twenty years old, a former creative writing student, lying paralyzed on a hospital bed in Arizona. The doctors and physical therapists hummed and clucked over you. You heard them but they gave you no hope. You had had a stroke, they said. You would never walk, talk, or move again, they told you. You were trapped with words—yours, theirs, and everyone else’s.

You were on the eve of your thirtieth birthday when I met you. You spoke three languages and read a few more. You were a classicist or a linguist, I was never sure. You always shook hands with your left hand. Walking, you swung your right leg around in a spinning motion, so gracefully that the limp was almost imperceptible. For months I didn’t notice how your right arm always lay quietly at your side as you shifted your silverware across your plate with your left one.

Speaking to yourself aloud, you spent your days unraveling mazes of etymology that made your wife, the playwright, crazy. She was walking around your cold apartment in small-town Ontario, mixing guacamole, drinking rosé, and muttering in Spanish. She moved swiftly through the kitchen and I listened to her beautiful incomprehensible syntaxes. I imagined mobile structures of words. You closed my volume of Deleuze and Guattari, handed me a glass of wine, and said, “You really should read more fiction. It’s good for the soul.”

by S.K. Evans

I hate Christmas Specials. So, when a friend suggested we watch “something Christmas-y” and drink mulled wine, my first thought was: the My So-Called Life Christmas episode! Juliana Hatfield. Homeless guardian angels. Teen angst. Plaid. OMG, perfect.

Besides, after hearing rumors that Billy Corgan is dating Jessica Simpson, I’d really just like to go back to 1994. Back when things still made sense.

Angela Chase may have been my first girl crush. Like Rayanne Graff, however, I didn’t just love her, I wanted to be her. As far as I know, every awkward, vaguely literary, over-sensitive teenage girl did. It’s amazing the show didn’t last (well, I guess not so amazing when you consider that it was one of the first television shows to deal explicitly with gay rights and to explore teenage sexuality and underage drinking). In today’s tween-marketing world, though, Angela would be a hot commodity. She is every twelve year-old girl’s fantasy. She wears multiple layers of flannel, remains a virgin, writes ridiculous poems about gingerbread houses and she still gets the hot stoner guy. Even if the on-and-off relationship was so obviously painful for my fictional emotional doppelganger, the fact that he secretly loved her in a way teenage boys never actually love girls allowed me to maintain the tween illusion that there is actually something profound going on behind that stony façade. Right. Boys are jerks because they like us.
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by S.K. Evans

The guy at the bike shop was cute. He had a bull ring through his nose, the faint outline of two wings tattooed on his neck, and a soft, boyish voice. He was wearing a thick, plaid shirt and I noticed that his hands were black with grease when he passed me a pen. I particularly liked the way he gently but firmly said, “Excuse me, I’m helping her,” when an old Polish man attempted to interrupt our conversation.

I would like to say I imagined us biking through summer fields with sunlight glinting off the spokes of our wheels; giggling as the picnic provisions bounced precariously in my basket. But, no, I felt much how I still feel on my bike months after I hopped back on again: shaky and uncomfortable. It’s not true that you never forget how to ride a bike, you can definitely half-forget.

Bike shops make me nervous. Bicycle mechanics are like vegans; it feels like they’re part of a secret club you’ll never be allowed into even if you stop eating meat and buy a fixie. I always think they might be quietly laughing behind my back as I hit my pedal against the doorframe with a loud smack on my way out. And this is actually quite possible, considering the fact that I went into the bike store to buy a new wheel and lock because I had locked my purple hybrid to my stairwell and then lost the key.

by S.K. Evans

My college boyfriend, Connor, and his roommate, Craig, used to wake up at 7 a.m. on St. Patrick’s Day to start drinking. I was usually thoroughly unimpressed with Connor by noon.

During our sophomore year, he moved into an apartment building that was a mere baby step from a dormitory. Just down the hill from the main campus, the grungy building was inhabited primarily by boys between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two. In retrospect they were not so much boys as dudes. Oddly enough, considering my nose ring and pixie cut at the time, I had a lot of dude-friends in college. You know the type: tattered Che Guevara poster on the wall, hanging precariously above a human-sized bong and a dying plant.

One balmy September afternoon, two Mormon missionaries crept up the stairs of this pseudo-frat house, side-stepping the dreadlocked kid smoking pot out of a beer can on the second floor stairwell and knocking on Craig and Connor’s door. Connor was raised Catholic and loved to argue. Excitedly, he invited the Mormons in for tea and a chat.

He would continue to do so every week for the next few months. I can’t imagine what the missionaries must’ve thought as Connor played house—making tea and biscuits, feigning maturity, and pontificating about Descartes. Their relationship was at once unnatural and symbiotic. The Mormons tried their best to convert their freshly minted atheist host as Otto, Connor’s turtle, swam back and forth in a scummy tank that was lodged in the fake fireplace, in front of a relic of a television that played Pulp Fiction on repeat, distorted through the water. I imagine the Mormons wondered whether or not a turtle was capable of developing epilepsy.

During these visits, Craig was almost always shirtless or in a wife-beater; his family crest displayed prominently on one shoulder and a shamrock on the other. Craig was a former wrestler, a small but sturdy dude who almost always had a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. He’d offer the Mormons a swig of whiskey straight from the bottle at two in the afternoon. When they inevitably declined, he would grumpily listen to the theological debate, quietly smoking his Camel Reds in the corner and eying the visitors with suspicion. Something about their relationship felt like a tall tale of the Old West: the cowboy and the clerics ever watching each other, at an impasse, across a room thick with the smell of whiskey and tobacco. Craig, who grew up in Brooklyn, always imagined himself a bit of a cowboy.

by S.K. Evans

Freddy has been working the reception desk for far longer than the two years I’ve been at my job. I imagine that it’s been fifteen or twenty years now that he has been pawning off Yankees tickets on unsuspecting new hires and showing off the ever-expanding ball of rubber bands that rests on his granite counter. Freddy loves the Mets but inexplicably always seems to have Yankees tickets. He speaks an almost unintelligible brand of English with a heavy Puerto Rican accent through two missing front teeth. I imagine fortunes have been built and lost as countless reporters and editors listened to his lisping tales. You will often see guests and interviewees hold down the open button on the elevator for several minutes and awkwardly pretend to understand him as he mutters on about the weather in Puerto Rico. They are, of course, trying to be polite but most of the veterans to this building know to just smile and let that door close.

Freddy is our doorman who collects rubber bands and races dragsters in Puerto Rico.

Doesn’t everyone sound more interesting as a collection of seemingly arbitrary facts? It is funny how, when you scratch the surface, everyone has a story, but when you really go to town on that surface it turns out we all have the same mundane thoughts and desires. Nonetheless, some tales are both too tall to feel true and too dark to feel false.

Most of what I know about Freddy I learned on the office rumor mill. One afternoon last year, over birthday cupcakes, a few of my coworkers were musing about people’s varied reactions to Freddy. Some of the more senior staff members started listing the facts that had been collected about our mustachioed doorman over the years, and one of the editors mentioned that Freddy had been stationed in Iran during the hostage crisis in 1980. For 444 days between 1979 and 1981, 53 Americans were held hostage after militant Islamic students invaded the Tehran American embassy in support of the Iranian Revolution. Freddy was stuck there in the thick of it, waiting and waiting in an increasingly hostile Islamic state, watching two rescue aircraft crash and eight US servicemen die. We all know what happened next: the remaining aircraft turned back and Jimmy Carter lost his re-election bid. Operation Eagle Claw gained notoriety as one of the most famous public blunders in recent American military history. When it became apparent that the US had tried to covertly liberate the hostages, the mood towards the Americans still in Iran turned even uglier, and Freddy was evacuated to Egypt along with the rest of the US forces.

Freddy is our doorman who collects rubber bands, drag races in Puerto Rico, and escaped Iran during the Iranian hostage crisis. I imagine him, during those weeks or months in 1980, holed up in a desert military base or hiding in a boarded room, with a gun at his side, smoking cigarettes. I imagine him at the foot of the Alborz Mountains or perhaps in the heart of the desert, dreaming about the sunny beaches of Puerto Rico.

by S.K. Evans

It seems everyone’s talking about their neighbors these days. I have one friend whose neighbors are throwing televisions at each other. Ian F. King’s newest neighbor is probably giving him/herself some kind of dermatitis from over-showering.

I can’t help but wonder, “What would Jesus do?” How are we supposed to love these miscreants?

I tend not to spend too much time thinking about my neighbors. I live in a typically shabby Greenpoint apartment building with holes in the floor and no superintendent. Well, I guess we’re not so typical; we haven’t gotten bedbugs (yet). Most of the tenants are in their early- to mid-twenties. I don’t actually talk to any of them, but I can estimate their relative maturity by the recycling bins filled with cans of PBR and by the fact that most of them still don’t understand how to properly separate their garbage and recycling.

I don’t know who inhabits the apartment next to me. I think one of the girls works at a Brooklyn rag and I have made a couple of assumptions about the person with whom I share a thin wall. They are the following:

1. He’s a dude.
2. He’s in his early twenties.
3. He’s perhaps not the hippest of Greenpointers.

These assumptions are based on two things, the first being the low, steady bass I hear pulsing from his room most evenings. The girl who lived in my bedroom before me was convinced that these were the familiar sounds of video-games. The bass line is steady, repetitive with the occasional thunder clap when (I can only assume) something pops out of some cave and attacks Lara Croft. Among these nocturnal noises, never do I hear human voices.

The second basis is that he has the same cell phone alarm as I do and it goes off for a full hour between 7:45 and 8:45 am every weekday. “Just out of college,” I mutter to myself grumpily…

Anyway, I rarely think about this fellow except twice a week or so when I find my bed shaking lightly to the sound of his electronic entertainment. I get up, pound my fist on the wall, pull the covers over my head and wonder, “Are you lonely, too?”

by S.K. Evans

Although I have never tried online dating, I have been on exactly two-point-five dates mediated by social networking sites. The two Facebook dates were with friends of friends, both of whom asked me out completely out of the blue. I am still friends with one of them, almost two years later.

Point five was the date that never happened, the one with whom the timing was never right. We all have at least one of those in our murky romantic histories. I was in college and in a serious, long-term relationship. He was in his early twenties and a regular DJ of sorts at a hip dive bar on St. Laurent Street in Montreal. He somehow found me on Friendster and bookmarked me. I secretly loved the bookmark function with all of its romantic intrigue, but I never had the guts to use it myself. Maybe he liked my predictable Milan Kundera quote or the fact that I had Xiu Xiu listed under my favorite music. Maybe he also loved Harold and Maude. Who knows? He probably bookmarked a lot of girls. But in my romantic, nineteen-year-old mind, he offered a perfect mental escape from the insecurities that often grow cancerous in long-term relationships.

Point five and I never went on a date. By the time I broke up with my boyfriend and boldly emailed point five, he responded that he was flattered and that two months ago he would’ve been thrilled to go out for a drink with me, but that he had just fallen in love. He invited me to come see him spin at Korova. I went with a few friends, politely said hello, and that was that. Shortly thereafter, I got back together with the boy I had been dating and point five faded from my mind.

The truth is, over the years, there would be many more of these imaginary, impossible crushes: the French filmmaker, the quirky New Yorker, the inappropriately attractive student when I was in grad school, and so on. The older I got, the more comfortable I was discussing them and, in doing so, I discovered that my boyfriend also had the occasional roaming thought. Surprisingly, knowledge of this shared secret was somehow comforting and all of these fantasies eventually subsided into the background noise, became minor offshoots of the main narrative.

I hadn’t thought about point five in years. Then, the other day, an old acquaintance from college posted a New York Times Magazine piece on Montreal’s “young, hip neighborhood,” the Plateau. With amusement, I scrolled through the restaurant and bar reviews, until I came across a familiar face. I was shocked. There was point five, leaning coolly against some turntables, drinking a beer.

“Well,” I thought to myself, “missed the boat on that one.”

by S.K. Evans

I’m reading Tropic of Cancer. Swaying in a crowded L train car, I’m always acutely aware of what I’m reading and what it might suggest about me, but particularly so when the book I’m reading has a naked woman on the cover.

Screeching through the tunnel under the East River on their way to or from work, everyone will know I’m a bit of a pervert.

The other day, I was lost in a sea of cunts and French whores on a crowded L train at 6:30 p.m. I glanced slightly to the left of my book, catching a glimpse of a small, faded tattoo on a man’s forearm. I looked up to see Mike, the pedal steel guitar player in my ex-boyfriend’s band. I could tell he had noticed my glance, but averted his wide, kind eyes. I hadn’t seen him in months and we’d never spent much time together. He’s notoriously shy. I lowered my gaze, assuming he’d probably already noticed me and decided not to enter into four-point-five minutes of awkward pleasantries with a girl who used to sleep with his friend. I pretended to read, although the French whores suddenly paled in comparison to my own living romantic bookmark; he stared off into the crowd of Brooklynites, both of us moving gently to the rhythm of the train as it passed ever so slowly under the river.

Running into my ex-boyfriend’s band mate on the L train. This is a Williamsburg haiku.

Sometimes it seems I can’t go anywhere in my neighborhood without running into someone I know—or more precisely someone I’ve seen naked. One ex at Enid’s, another ex at a coffee shop on Bedford, a boy I’d been on a few dates with at Daddy’s. This town is a tattered map of my romantic past, a trajectory forever hurtling forward in what is probably the wrong direction. All we do is drink coffee and booze.

I followed Mike all the way down Bedford Avenue to South Williamsburg where I was meeting a friend for her going-away party, occasionally passing him like a go-cart on a track. It’s remarkably easy to pretend you don’t recognize someone; expressionlessness is a perfect camouflage. And you just keep moving.