The Sellout, Fraud, Fake, Phoniness of Keeping it Real

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“You’re a sellout!” We would say when we wanted our fellow teens to cower. It’s what we did in the 1990’s. Back then, sellout, and its various derivatives, were the most powerful words in the English language. No one could pinpoint what those relative and arbitrary terms meant, but everyone could. Everyone knew how to move the couch to suit their situation, but no one knew where the grooves in the carpet were. We didn’t know what keeping it real meant either, but to paraphrase a Supreme Court Justice’s statement on porn, “We knew it when we saw it.” The only thing we knew for sure was that our favorite musicians, actors and writers were all about keeping it real.  

The term sellout was not as ubiquitous in the halls of our high school, but its derivatives haunted us. Calling someone a suck ass, kiss ass or phony was as damaging to us as calling a punk rocker a sellout. We did everything we could to avoid someone dropping these terms on us. It was our equivalent to the cinematic portrayals of the red scare from the 1950’s in which everyone did everything they could to avoid being called red. We avoided superficial conversation, for example, fearing that someone somewhere might unload a derivative on us.  

There were several shows and movies that taught us how to be real. We had iconic figures who could teach us how to be real, and the prototypes also lived among us. It was up to us to find our role models, but they were out there, keeping it real. If you haven’t spotted the flaws inherent in our system, we didn’t either. We were were scared, confused young people in the 90’s, and just like every kid of every other era, we sought some form of identity to escape that confusion that we hoped others might accept.

Jennie and I worked for an online company. She informed me that she had utter disdain for our boss. I found her screed funny, righteous, and all that. Then that boss (who was actually a nice fella, but he was the man) walked by our desk and dropped a polite, somewhat humorous anecdote on us. Jennie nearly fell out of her chair laughing. What a fraud, I thought. I maintain that she failed to act in a consistent manner, but who cares? Jennie was constantly getting in trouble for falling asleep at her desk. She probably feared losing her job, and she probably thought a little laughter would ingratiate her to the man, or she might have thought the polite, somewhat humorous joke was a lot funnier than I did. Who cares? To my mind Jennie was a sellout, a phony, and a fraud for sucking up to the man. Her laughter shaped what I thought of her forever after, because I thought she wasn’t being real. I thought her laughter was for sale, and she was commodity.  

One of the job duties of my new job as a front desk employee at a hotel was to engage our guests in polite, superficial conversations. I was to make them laugh, feel comfortable, and make them feel at home. “I’m not going to talk to every guest,” I said, believing the boss was shredding my integrity.  

“Well then, you’re fired,” she said.  

“What?”  

“It’s one of your job duties,” she said. “When a guest tells you a story, you are to respond in a way that makes them feel interesting. If they tell a joke, it’s the funniest damn thing you ever heard. If you’re not willing to make an effort in this regard, tell me now, and we’ll start looking for someone who is.”  

It was difficult to shed the artistic personae I spent so much time manufacturing, but I learned to tap into the superficial side of my personality for eight hours a day, five days a week. No one was paying me for my artistic personae anyway, so why was I clinging to whatever arbitrary definition of what it means to be real? No one really cares either. No one dropped to a knee when they heard me pontificate the virtues of the real. They probably considered me a scared little kid who was looking for pointers on how to be a cool individual in an otherwise dark, unmapped location of my life. The breadth of that took me a while to fully appreciate. I thought they appreciated my ability to stay true to the Keeping it Real commandments. They didn’t. When we were sitting at a breakroom table of real people, and someone expressed real virtues, people yawned and moved the conversation forward. If we dared express a view that they might view as the fraudulent, phony view of a sellout, all conversation stopped. We could hear the clinking of glasses and the sizzle of a griddle in the wake of such comments, but no one knew why it was so important that a service employee at a restaurant keep it real during the Sunday breakfast rush.  

I learned to start chit chatting up every hotel guest about every stupid thing I could dream up, and it wasn’t that hard. In some dark recesses of my mind, I would never reveal in closed locations, I actually enjoyed it. My high school buddies probably would’ve turned seven different shades of red if they witnessed it. They would’ve been embarrassed for me, and angry that I sold my soul for a buck, or they might not have noticed it at all. It’s possible that no one was paying half as much attention to me as I thought, and I dreamed up all these elements and definitions of those elements in my head.  

I initially refused to take this newly manufactured ability to tap into the “chat chat, chit chat!” part of my personality out into the real world. My initial vow was to “keep ‘em separated”, until I saw my friends engage in superficial conversation with strangers who weren’t female. They just enjoyed superficial chit chat, talking about nonsense, and they appeared to be having a whale of a good time. “Wait a second!” I wanted to scream. “Didn’t you guys see that one movie, with that real, cool one who refused to chat nonsense? He said that Americans talk too much, and he said that we should all learn to shut up for a minute. Who cares?! What are you talking about? You are in violation my friend!”   

That composite character of our movies, shows, and songs removed himself from pedantic concerns, and he was the quiet, cool prototype dragon we all chased. He effortlessly managed the center of attention by letting his supporting actors fill in the blanks for him and fluff his image. We wanted one person, somewhere, to confuse us with this archetype.  

There was no specific actor, movie, or show we consciously mimicked, but if we built a pyramid, Matt Dillon’s role in The Outsiders might have sat somewhere near the top. It might have been the initial spark, but we didn’t consciously mimic him or any of the other actors who played similar roles. We absorbed these undefined, intangible qualities, however, movie and movie, show after show, song after song, and book after book, until we thought we created something others might buy. When no one did, we probably should’ve put together a different sales strategy, but what would Matt Dillon, Kurt Cobain, and Johnny Depp think? We were brooding shoegazers who didn’t care what anyone else thought, and we repeated that so often that we revealed ourselves as composite caricatures.   

One of the most famous quotes of all time from the Old Testament of the Keeping it Real bible occurred in the movie The Wild One. In that John Paxton, Ben Maddow script, the Mildred character reads the line: “What are you rebelling against Johnny?”  

The Johnny character reads the line: “Whaddya Got?”  

In the real world Mildred would not say anything to preserve Johnny’s reply in a cool liquid that real worlders might want to bathe in. In the real-world Mildred says, “I’m sorry to say I got nothing Johnny.” 

“If you got nothing, don’t say anything Mildred,” the real-world Johnny might say. “You saying something just killed my whole mystique. Imagine if you said nothing. Imagine how powerful that line would’ve been.”   

“I’m sorry Johnny,” Mildred says, clearly shaken. “I’m just a bit actress in this scene.”  

“You don’t understand! I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender, I coulda been real, instead of a service industry worker, which is what I am.”

Tag lines such as keeping it real, selling your soul to the highest bidder, and the more concise sellout are evergreen, of course, but those of us who were hit with them way back when now see the illustrative and inconsistent dichotomy of trying to become real.

Klosterman’s 90’s: Nevermind the 90’s 

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When I first saw Charles John Klosterman had a new book coming out about the The Nineties. I knew he would devote space, for too much space, to Nirvana’s album Nevermind. Klosterman’s essays and books cover a wide array of topics, but his primary focus has always been music. As such, we can call him a music critic without feeling too much guilt about limiting his curriculum vitae (or CV). As a music critic, Klosterman is professionally required to one superlative per every one hundred words. His awareness of this is quota is illustrated by various attempts to qualify his superlatives with qualifiers. The problem with this exercise is that he uses superlatives in conjunction with qualifiers so often that reading a Klosterman book can become a literal exercise in the form of mental jumping jacks.  

Some readers might view an Klosterman’s excessive use of superlatives as silly, but others might view the practice as the author making bold statements. If, that is, the author can back them up, and Klosterman does. Most readers, whether they agree or not, also view it as better reading when an author litters his narrative with bold statements. As my 8th grade teacher once told me after failing an opinion piece of mine, “If you’re going to be wrong, be wrong with conviction.” The problem with superlatives is that most authors feel compelled to address subjective tastes with qualifiers. I write this for those readers who might have a tough time making it through their jumping jacks.  

The best way to call Nevermind the greatest album of all time, as Klosterman does, is to say everything but. This literary device allows the author to load their but with supporting evidence to allow the reader to reach their own conclusions. Yet, those of us who read music critics, like Klosterman, on a regular basis, can’t help but think Nevermind is overrated. Most of us think it was a fantastic and transcendent album (I can’t remember meeting anyone, even those in the “sellout” crowd, who told me they thought the album sucked, but I’m they’re out there). Reading music critics, however, Kurt Cobain walked up Mt. Sanai and came down with these thirteen songs.  

Klosterman qualifies his superlatives in his first essay on Nevermind, saying, “The video for Smells Like Teen Spirit was not more consequential than the reunification of Germany. But Nevermind is the inflection point where one style [heavy metal] of Western culture ends and another begins.” Once he gets that humorous qualifiers out of the way, Klosterman writes that “In the post Nevermind universe, everything had to be filtered through the notion that this specific representation of modernity was the template for what everyone wanted from everything, and that any attempt to understand young people had to begin with an understanding of why Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain looked and acted the way he did.”   

This theory reminded me of a conversation I had with my uncle’s friend on the weekend after John Lennon was killed. I was not yet a teen, and this guy was well into his forties. As such, he had his finger on the pulse of the culture surrounding John Lennon far better than I did. When he said, “The man changed the world,” he said that to defend Lennon against the charge I made that Lennon was nothing more than a rock star. Even at that young age, I knew Lennon was a significant figure in our culture, but I thought the media attention devoted to the man was a bit over the top. “We were all asleep before John Lennon,” he added. “He woke us up.”  

“Really?” I asked. “He affected your life that much?” He maintained it did. 

I lost a lot of respect for my uncle’s friend when he said that, for even then I had a tough time understanding how a rock singer, or any entertainment figure, could alter an individual’s philosophy to such a degree that it changed how they react with people, and the way they lived their life. As I’ve grown older, I realized some people read too many music critics and watched too many retrospective shows with cultural doyens dropping such bromides. The latter often occurs after the tragic death of a cultural icon, and we all rewrite our past to fit that narrative.  

As if to address this issue, Klosterman quotes Larry McMurtry’s Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen. “I suspect that [Walter Benjamin] would be a little surprised by the extent to which what’s given us by the media is our memory now. The media not only supplies us with the memories of all significant events (political, sporting, catastrophic), but edits these memories too.”  

The media permits us to touch the touching sentiment of the moment, so that we might become part of it. We remember where we were when we first heard the news. “I was eating a chili dog at the Dairy Queen that was just three blocks from my home, when a fella in knit cap told me that John Lennon was shot. I’ll never forget that cap. It was blue with a yellow line on it. He also had a beard similar to the one Lennon wore in his solo years. It was almost eery.”  

We repeat the lines media figures and figurines say and write with their king of the mountain characterizations of iconic figures and figurines to impress their peers, because we want to be their audience. We also want to be the writer writing to other writers, and we do so by speaking in superlatives to suggest we understand profound greatness. Common, every day people turn to their friends and say things like, “The voice of a generation, he woke us up, and I think about him every day.” We talk about his music changed our life, and how we’ll never be the same. These are touching sentiments that we might mean in the moment, but they’re enhanced by the media, and ultimately untrue.  

I tried to establish a link with an impressive individual I met. The best way to do that, I thought, was to relay whatever information I had about his hometown, Dublin, Ireland. I mentioned that I read most of Ulysses, and I added the joke, “I’ve probably read as much of that book as anyone has.” That joke played on the Larry King quote, “Everyone I know owns Ulysses, but no one I know has finished it.” The impressive individual looked confused, but I didn’t realize how confused he was, until he said:  

“Is that a book?” 

“Well, yeah,” I said completely thrown off, “by James Joyce?”  

“Never heard of him,” he said. 

“The author,” I said. He shrugged. “You’ve never heard of James Joyce?! I thought he was the most famous Dubliner this side of Bono. Don’t they have statues built for him in the town square?” Nothing.

This lifelong resident of Dublin had never heard of someone I considered one of his city’s top five most famous residents. After all my reading on Joyce, I considered it impossible that a Dubliner had never heard of him. I considered it the cultural equivalent of an American never hearing the name Babe Ruth. I realized that I fell prey to cultural insiders writing to impress fellow insiders. I love reading Klosterman, but this, too, is his motif. 

To Klosterman’s credit, he does qualify his superlatives at the beginning of the essay, writing, “The songs on Nirvana’s Nevermind did not tangibly change the world. There are limits to what art can do, to what a record can do, to what sound can do.”  

After submitting that qualifier, he writes, “Nevermind changed everything.” (Perhaps in an intangible way?) He focuses this thesis on advertising, specifically an ad that involved Subaru’s introduction of the Impreza. Klosterman concludes that Subaru’s spokesman in the ad had to “talk about Nirvana without talking about Nirvana,” because “Nirvana would have never participated in a car advertisement.” Klosterman basically admits that the pairing would’ve been disastrous if it happened, but he doesn’t explain why. He simply contributes to the narrative Cobain parlayed with the “corporate magazines still suck” T-shirt he wore on a Rolling Stone cover.  

I have no doubt that if Subaru approached Cobain, he would’ve laughed it off. Cobain gave us no reason to believe he was into the whole corporate sphere, and for the most part, he never wavered from the punk ethos. (Though he did force his bandmates to sign over most of the writing credits for Nirvana’s music. We should have no problem with that, since by all accounts Cobain wrote the lyrics and most of the music, but that action doesn’t align with the “One for all and all for one” Three Musketeers, punk ethos.)       

What if the Subaru proposal hit Cobain’s desk at Nirvana Inc., and Cobain was all about it. “Punk ethos be damned, look what they’re offering to pay me for a couple hours of work.” His business partners would’ve informed him that this move would not only irreparably damage Cobain’s image, but everyone involved and the legacy they were creating. “This will force your fans to defend the Subaru ad for the rest of time,” a member of his management team, probably named Todd, would say, “and I don’t care how much they’re paying you, your bottom line will be affected long-term.”  

Klosterman does admit that Nirvana (without singling Cobain out) made “conscious choices in order to become the most popular band in the world,” but Klosterman still feels the need to write “Nirvana would have never participated in a car advertisement.”    

One particularly obnoxious and useless complaint I have is Klosterman repeating the line, [Kurt Cobain] “didn’t know” about a company putting out a deodorant called Smells Like Teen Spirit. By writing this open-ended line, Chuck Klosterman contributes to a fable on par with “I cannot tell a lie. I did chop down that cherry tree” or every president in the last thirty years telling a reporter, “I haven’t read the report in question.” 

Klosterman relays the story of how a girlfriend (Kathleen Hanna) of one of Kurt’s girlfriends wrote, “Kurt smells like teen spirit” on his wall in lipstick. This was her note to Kurt and the girlfriend that informed them she was onto the fact that they were involved romantically. Now, it’s plausible that Kurt thought the lipstick message referred to the general smells of sex, but Kurt was a writer, and her message obviously inspired him. If he was so inspired to write a song about it, wouldn’t he say, “That’s hilarious, but what did you mean by it?” to Kathleen Hanna. If that didn’t happen, wouldn’t his friends ask him what it was about? If he told them what he thought it meant, wouldn’t they correct him, if he thought it was about the smell of sex? “No, what Kathleen Hanna was saying was your girlfriend uses a deodorant with the brand name Smells Like Teen Spirit, and the fact that you smell like that deodorant means she knows you’re having sex with her friend.”

If the origin of the message managed to escape his friends, family, and all of the small venues he played in to test the material out, wouldn’t someone in his band or any of the teams of people involved in the production process of the album inform him of the name of the deodorant before they released it?

Michael Azzarad writes Cobain claimed that he thought Kathleen Hanna’s message was in reference to “the conversation we were having, but … I didn’t know the deodorant spray existed until months after the single came out.” I’ve never been involved in the process of a song, granular to final press, but I can only guess that in the 90’s, a song passed through hundreds to thousands of ears before final production.

My thoughts, for what they’re worth, are that so many people hit Cobain from so many quarters that he asked for help. I imagine Cobain saying something like. “I love the name of the song so much, and I’ve tried to come up with other titles, but none of them feel as right. How do we escape this unfortunate tie-in that everyone goes on and on about? I can’t play it anywhere without someone telling me about that damned spray.”  

To which, a friend or a management type, probably said, “Just feign ignorance.” 

“But they’re not going to stop asking about it.”  

“They’re not, but when they do, just maintain that you didn’t know. Don’t include a timeframe. Just leave that comment open-ended, because it’s true, you didn’t know for a time. No one is going to ask a “What did he know, and when did he know it?” question about the name of a song. Nobody’s going to care that much.” 

Did George Washington chop down a cherry tree, did Led Zeppelin sell their souls to the devil, did Kurt Cobain know about the similarities between the name of his most famous song and a deodorant’s brand name, and did he seek fame and fortune?

On the latter, I suspect that Cobain wanted to make the best album possible, and he allowed some corporate guys to do whatever they had to do to make Nevermind as great as it could possibly be. Some, including Cobain, say that something was lost in the mixing process. So, why did he do it? Why did Cobain succumb to the pressure from label execs and permit Andy Wallace to master it with what some call an “airplay-inviting varnish”? I’ve read that many in his inner circle were against it, and Cobain later regretted it. To understand why he did it, we probably need sort through some deep psychoanalysis of Kurt’s past and present, but that would likely be so far off base that it’s not even worth trying. Some of those who were close to Kurt in the present tense of Nevermind’s pre-production and production, suggest he wanted it more than they will ever tell you. What is it? We don’t know, but I believe Kurt when he said he never wanted to be famous, and I don’t think he ever strove to be rich beyond his wildest dreams, but I have to imagine that he wanted greatness bestowed upon him by his peers first and foremost, rock critics and journalists, and us. I don’t think he necessarily wanted or needed the spoils that come with it however. 

All theory and analysis is autobiographical, as I wrote, and most of it is probably wrong, but the one thing we do know is Kurt Cobain, and Nirvana, wrote one hell of an album. Did the iconography of Kurt Cobain lead to rock critics, like Chuck Klosterman, using so many superlatives that Nevermind is now overrated? Perhaps. If Cobain’s worldview didn’t align so well with most of the rock critic world, they might have had a different take on his music. If the timing of the release of Nevermind was different, and it didn’t change the face of music (allegedly, single-handedly), would it have been regarded with such superlatives? Ifs and what if are for children, however, and when we wipe away all of it, and the myths, the narratives, and iconographic worship of Kurt Cobain, we still have to admit he and Nirvana wrote one hell of an album. On that note, Chuck Klosterman wrote one hell of a book, containing essays on Nirvana, 911, and other matters. His book on The Nineties is chock full of deep, entertaining insight into what made that decade what it was, and the reverberations that the decade sent down (or up?) to the modern era.

Misty “The Witch” vs. Michelle “The Cyclops”

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“I’m a witch,” Misty said to throw a big old matzo ball on the restaurant table between us. She didn’t throw that into her intro, but I learned that she was a witch before I learned that she was an Anderson, a Smith, or a Jones. If she mentioned her last name, I don’t remember it. I remember that she was a witch, however, because I never met a witch before, self-proclaimed or otherwise. It was also such a noteworthy characteristic to me, because it was to her. Being a witch was more important to her than being an Anderson, Smith or whatever her last name was. When I asked her what she did for a living, she answered, and when I asked her who her friends were, she answered that too, but she didn’t answer any of those questions with the same passion, spirit, or animated enthusiasm she had for her decision to become a witch. When I told friends, family, and co-workers about my date, I referred to Misty as Misty “The Witch”. When they found that characterization so entertaining, I kind of dropped back. I felt a little guilty for characterizing such a nice woman in such a manner, but when I dropped further back and put some thought into it, I realized that’s probably how she would’ve wanted it. 

Misty didn’t list this particular nugget of information on her online, dating profile. Who would? Green people who wear pointy hats probably don’t get asked out very often, but she wasn’t one of those typer of witches. “I’m a Wiccan,” she explained. “It’s a modern, nature-based pagan religion. I have a twenty-four quart, deep cooking pot, but I don’t own a cauldron. I own my own home, but there’s no candy plastered on the outside to lure unsuspecting children, and I don’t think I’ve ever cackled,” she said to try to put me at ease. 

I don’t know if it’s based on the shows we watch, but when we meet someone who thinks so different, 180 degrees different from us, we expect to learn that they made calculated, well-informed decisions in life, especially when it concerns spiritual and mystical pursuits. In my experience, most of them are like most of us. They drift around searching for something meaningful in life, to give their live meaning, until they find something. Some try to find something that aligns with their personal beliefs, others align their personal beliefs with something they found. In my brief interrogation of Misty, I found that she was a little of both. She decided to become a Wiccan for some of the same reasons I played Donkey Kong when I was a kid. She thought it sounded fun and cool. She was as uninformed, insecure, and vulnerable as the rest of us at one point in her life, then she joined that group. Did find a part of herself that she never knew in that group, and she loved being that in front of other like-minded people, or did she stay so long that she either conformed to group thought and became who they wanted her to be? Regardless, she developed strong bonds with her fellow Wiccans that lasted years.

As with most insecure and vulnerable people, Misty put her best foot forward on our first (and as it turned out our only) date. She threw that big old matzo ball out there with some conviction framing it. ‘I’m a witch, deal it!’ her expression said, and deal with it I did, in my own obsessively curious way. I don’t know what was on my face, but her smile told me she knew she struck a chord. 

“And now for something completely different,” I thought, recalling that old Monty Python line. I was so fascinated that I dove right in. I asked superficial questions, in-depth questions, and then questions that made her so uncomfortable that she laughed before answering them.  

Most of my questions were self-serving. I didn’t really care that Misty chose what I considered an alternative religion, but I did want to know why. I wanted to know why she joined, how her views changed over the years, and I wanted to see if her beliefs could challenge mine. The questions I asked weren’t the polite type everyone asks, and I didn’t ask leading questions to have her view me as compassionate or open-minded. I wanted answers to this curious, life-altering decision of hers, and I went for the jugular, asking questions that we’re not supposed to ask.

Most people refrain from asking uncomfortable questions, because they don’t enjoy watching other people squirm, but Misty made it quite clear she wasn’t a squirmer. She might have been squirming, uncomfortable, and vulnerable when we first met, but who isn’t? By the time I worked my way past the obligatory, nice questions and worked my way into the questions we’re not supposed to ask, Misty was chuckling (as opposed to cackling). Some of the questions I ask offend some recipients, and that’s fine with me, unless they offer me a specific reason for why the question hurt their feelings. It’s happened, and when it does I back off and apologize when warranted and without excuses or qualifiers. Most of the people who intrigue me enough to work past the initial questions, prove to me that they enjoy questions that test their meddle.   

“I don’t know how you get away with asking such things,” a witness to some of my questions said. 

“I think they know I’m just curious,” I said. 

Due to the fact that Misty loved talking about her decision, and I was absolutely obsessed with wanting to know what drove her to that decision, the idea she was a witch dominated our conversations. I was so excited by this conversation topic that Misty couldn’t tell if I was more interested in joining her religion or her, so she asked me if I wanted to join her religion. I said no. I told her I was just curious. She smiled at that. I didn’t know why she smiled at first, as I thought it should’ve disappointed her that I had no desire to become a warlock, but I realized that she thought she had her answer. It was an excited smile, until I eventually informed her that I wasn’t interested in her either. 

The Real Eye 

Michelle had no secret potions, magical spells, or natural elixirs to help me, but she did have “friends in the industry” who she thought might be able to help end my desperate search for a quality apartment at a reasonable rate. She said she knew people in real estate who specialize in helping prospective clients find quality apartments at below market rents. “My friend can not only help you find a top-of-the-line apartment,” she said, “but she will haggle with the landlord over rent, and her fee for doing so will be paid by a landlord who will be grateful that she found a tenant for them.” That made total sense to me. Who wouldn’t jump at such an offer, I thought, until Michelle brought up her finder’s fee. 

“Your finder’s fee?” I asked. “What are you doing here? You’re not helping me find an apartment. You’re pointing me to someone who can. How much do you want for your ability to point?” 

“I tell you what,” she said with a grin. “You take me to lunch, and we’ll call it square.” 

In the space of fifteen seconds mired in uncomfortable silence, I developed about three different attack strategies to illustrate the absurdity of her proposal. These attacks would’ve also informed her that I wasn’t as naive as she thought I was, but I also knew that one of the only reasons she wanted to help me was that she appeared to have something of a crush on me. I ended that silent stand off with one word: “Fine!” 

Moments after we sat at the restaurant, Michelle wet her eye with a bottled solution, and that bottle was generic except for a small prescription tag. No big deal, I thought, until she put the solution in two more times before the server could take our drink orders. If she needs to water her eye once in such a short time span that’s a thing, because I don’t know when she watered it last, twice might suggest she’s experiencing a particular dryness, but three times is a big old matzo ball to put in the space between us.

“Why do you keep doing that?” I asked. I could’ve, and probably should’ve just ignored it, but I live by the rule that it’s better to ask questions, even embarrassing “I don’t want to talk about it” questions, than it is to remain silent about the elephant in the room, or a big, old matzo ball hovering atop a table. A matzo ball isn’t an ugly thing, and it isn’t beautiful. It’s also not a stand alone meal. It is what we make it, when we surround it with tasty items. Until we do that, it’s just a bunch of ground up crackers and eggs. If we avoid asking about it, or we purposefully avoid talking about it, it amasses its power through silence, until it’s the only thing we want to talk about, and it influences every conversation we have, until one of us develops the fortitude to address it. It gathers a life of its own in our conversations, until both parties are so uncomfortable that someone has to put a pin in it.  

“I have to. It’s what they call an ocular prosthesis,” she said, using the compassionate, sympathetic term for an artificial eye, “and if I don’t keep it wet, it gets irritated, it burns, and there’s a possibility that I could lose it.” 

As if to bolster her contention, she wet it a fourth time. I don’t know much about an ocular prosthesis, but I understand that we probably don’t have the technology at this point to have them produce their own liquid. I also understand why a sufferer needs to keep it wet, but I don’t know how often their physician directs them to wet it, but Michelle was dousing it at such regular intervals that it was obvious that she wanted us to address the matter before we moved on. 

“What happened?” I asked. 

“It was … a car accident,” she replied. She swallowed those words, as if they were so weighted with trauma that I should just drop it. My obsessive need to ask questions people are afraid to ask weren’t applicable here, because she did not choose a lifestyle, an alternative way of thinking, or a different religion. This injury was the result of an accident that obviously still haunted her and damaged her quality of life. She made it clear any questions would not be appreciated, except the look on her face suggested she did want to talk about it, but she wouldn’t answer any questions. It was so confusing that the tension couldn’t have been more weighted if she body slammed the carcass of her dead aunt on our table, wet and festooned with seaweed and added, “And I don’t want to talk about it.” She hit me from so many corners so quickly that I didn’t know how to approach this matter. I felt trapped between what I wanted to do, what she apparently wanted me to do, and what she apparently didn’t want me to do. I was so cautious that my sense of caution obviously spoke volumes, and it appeared to wound her.

Those of us who have been in life-altering, soul-crushing accidents know that the only cure is to relive an accident so many times, over so many years, that you’re eventually desensitized to it. The vein-straightening daymares and nightmares I had actually helped me drain the shock, but that took decades. Back when I was sitting in this restaurant with Michelle, I was still a mess of emotions on the topic car accidents. I developed my own I-don’t-want-to-talk-about-it phobia of car accidents. Even with all that, the idea that a car accident robbed Michelle of an eyeball rattled me.

I was a wreck mentally, on the topic, but she was physically impaired. What’s worse, I asked myself while she spoke. I still had all my appendages and organs in working order, but her impairment reminded me how easily our situations could be reversed. It wasn’t fate, I decided as she spoke, and it didn’t have anything to do with skills, smarts, or stupidity. The reason she sat on one side of the table without an eye, and I sat with two full functional ones, was luck. The officer at the scene of my accident told me that. “You’re lucky,” he said, “You could’ve and should’ve been hurt much worse.” Lucky, I thought, how could I be lucky? My mom died in this car accident. What’s the definition of lucky? Michelle, and her ocular prosthesis, gave me a definition of lucky.

Anything can happen in a car accident, could turn out to be an excellent, working title for the first chapter of my autobiography, and the exploration of the aftermath would’ve littered the next three to four chapters that followed. A driver can hit someone from behind, at a relatively slow speed, and both drivers could incur once-in-a-lifetime, freak injuries. It happens. It happens every day. It happened to Genie. Genie was a co-worker who became a good friend over time and through numerous conversations. Genie and I spoke at least once a day for about a decade. We became such good friends that I finally broke her down one day and asked her a question we’re not supposed to ask, “What happened to you?” 

“I got into a car accident.” Her words didn’t contain Michelle’s foreboding drama and trauma. Genie was a “just the facts” kind of gal. “I don’t remember anything about it, mercifully,” she added. “All I can tell you is what the policemen told my parents. I can tell you that I never sped. I memorized the speed limits of every street I traveled on. I never rolled through a stop sign, and I always turned on my blinker, even when it was obvious which way I was turning. The police say it was a simple fender bender that happens every day, but the force of the impact caused my head to hit in the windshield just so.” Genie didn’t add that the definition of “just so” would leave her with a lifelong mental impairment, but it wasn’t necessary for her to complete those dots. 

I thought about the terrifying car accident I was involved in that took my mother’s life. “You are so lucky you lived through this?” the one-scene officer said to presumably distract me from the fact that I just lost my mother. I also thought about Genie, and Genie’s lifelong mental impairment based on the fact that she hit her head on the windshield “just so”, and as those terrifying thoughts left my brain, I accidentally looked into Michelle’s fake eye. The trauma I experienced when someone said those words car accident my empathy went beyond anxiety to phobia.

“It was almost as if he intended to drive into me,” an elderly woman told the police officer, responding to the call of our accident. It was the elderly woman’s fault, as she crossed the centerline into my lane of traffic, but I could’ve avoided it. I, of course, did not intend to drive into her, but I choked, froze, or whatever you want to call it when I saw her headed toward me. My anxiety/phobia incapacitated me so much that I was not mentally capable of twisting the wrist in such a way that I would’ve avoided that accident, so I could see how she would come to that conclusion that I intended to drive into her. I remembered freezing, and I didn’t at the same time, as if I subconsciously edited that portion of that fender bender out to avoid me having to ask those questions about myself. A simple twist of the wrist would’ve avoided the accident. I wasn’t drunk, or in anyway impaired. I was just terrified. To my lifelong embarrassment, I choked, froze up, or however one wants to put it.  

Freezing up like that is so weird, and so embarrassing that we never talk about it. How does one talk about deep psychological scars that lead to an embarrassing silent scream that can cause it to appear that we’re intending to drive into another car? It’s so confusing that we choose not to deal with it or talk about it, until someone says something we’re not supposed to say, like, “There’s something wrong with you my man.” That’s something the careless say if we ever are dumb enough to reveal our wounds to them. “There’s something fundamentally wrong with you, something deep in your layers that you might want to seek counseling to rectify that before it’s too late.” 

Most good friends and family don’t say such things, but if we offer them our vulnerabilities, they duck into a hole and come out with eyes that say so much more. We all know that look. Michelle knew that look too, and she saw it when I looked into her artificial eye. 

Once I got over the daymare, Michelle started dotting her eye with the bottled solution again. I tried to be sympathetic, or empathetic regarding the nature of her injury, but I obviously couldn’t keep “the look” off my face. I don’t know what look I had on my face, but “the look” appeared to either disappoint or insult Michelle. I tried to get the look off my face, and I succeeded, then I failed. I tried talking over the the look, around it, with it, and through it with various conversation topics, but she just kept dotting. I could see her ingesting each look, and I knew that my looks meant more to her than any words I said. 

I knew Michelle had romantic aspirations long before our lunch, and I knew the looks I gave her put an end to that, but she wouldn’t stop dotting, and I couldn’t stop looking. 

After our lunch was over, I drove Michelle to the location of the cherry apartment she promised to help me find, and the real estate agent was there with her pitch. It was a cherry apartment, but I hesitated. I didn’t want to rent the first apartment on the agent’s list. I wanted a menu of options from which to choose, and these two women had me all hopped up on the idea that this real estate agent was something of a Helen Keller type miracle worker for those seeking quality apartments. I made a mistake believing that I might have a menu of options, and Michelle eventually seized on my hesitation. 

In the aftermath of the afternoon, I don’t think I devoted a half-hour of thought to any events that occurred that day. When I did think about it, I didn’t think good thoughts or bad thoughts. It was just something that happened. 

It wasn’t until about a week later, when I ran into Michelle, “Hey, whatever happened to that apartment?” I asked.

“Apartment?” 

“The one your real estate agent showed me,” I said. “If it’s still available, I think I’ll take it. Tell your friend.”

“I took it already,” she said. “I moved in yesterday. I’m living there now.” She searched my face for a look. I might be mischaracterizing it for my own narrative, but I think she was searching for a look of pain that matched the pain she presumably felt from my looks. I think she took the cherry apartment to spite me and the looks I accidentally gave her and her fake eye.    

Did Michelle sign that lease to be vindictive, I don’t know, but we’ve all had loads of people do some of the oddest things to “getevenwithem”. What was she getting even with, I wondered, because the worst charge you could make against me was that I unintentionally gave her looks I couldn’t control that she could interpret as condescending compassion. The funny thing about spiteful intent is that it rarely hits in the ways we dream up in vindictive daydreams. We dream up “When he finds out … Oh, it will be delicious” theatrical reactions. 

Michelle and her friend found me an apartment that I considered a cherry location. When she took it, I found another one. She basically forced me to do my own homework, which I started before she brought up her friend. Women have broken my heart more than once, two put a dent in my heart that might never heal, but Michelle did not accomplish either of those feats. I didn’t think about this moment for decades, until I sat down to write this. Now that I am thinking about it, I wonder if Michelle ever thinks back on her attempt to create this big, old matzo ball to place between us and deliciously alter our relationship in her favor. I wonder if she celebrates this moment as her victory now, or did that rational wisdom that only comes with age catch up to her to re-characterize her actions as a little pointless and pretty petty?