AWARDS OF THE HEART

For someone who is as anti-nostalgia as I am, I dip into the past a lot when it comes to writing.

I didn't post yesterday because I had nothing new to say. Everything I wanted to write about was old news. Without my Archives, I could easily get away with rehashing something I wrote a while back, but my newfound paucity of past posts has me straining to concentrate on the new.

The New, I find increasingly, is always the Old, repackaged and passed off as the New.

I think my beef with nostalgia is that you learn nothing from reveling in past glories/tragedies. The one thing I always do when I look backward on my life is to try and wring a new meaning from familiar territories that I have traversed. I have no desire to relive my youth-- rather, I try my best to look at it objectively, to see if I can learn from the past, so as not to repeat it in the future.

Sometimes, I discover things about me that have been hidden, things that I forgot, things that eerily reflect where I am today.

Lately my trip has been drawing, and how I've always treated it as the redheaded step-child of all my modest talents. I never took it seriously. I always saw it as something I could only ever be half-ass committed to, something beyond my reach in terms of mastery. I have always been content to just be able to doodle and that's about it.

About five hours ago, I was sitting in The Garage, supervising the animation process. Peter, Paulie's brother, has been bringing my creations to life. He's very good at it. He makes the arms and mouths move, the eyes blink, the eyebrows quiver, and it looks better than I could have ever imagined it.

Captain Capsule and Harvey Ray, two of Paulie's friends, were drawing dirty pics in the dust layer covering a 4x4 truck windshield. Paulie laughed and looked over at me and said, "We could get a class going. A seminar. 'How To Draw', a course taught by Dr. Sex McGinty..."

I laughed. Associations filled my stoned mind. I thought about when I was five, when my uncle showed me how to draw Popeye on a chalkboard in my grandfather's garage. That association segued into another, and I ended up recalling out loud an Expository presentation that I had to deliver in my Theater Arts class in high school.

Just to pass the class, each student had to have a presentation to give at one Speech & Debate/Drama tournament. I procrastinated, of course, confident that my then-formidable bullshit abilities would kick into overtime at the last minute.

A week before the major tournament, I was entered in a few debate rounds, but I hadn't come up with an Expository presentation yet. For those who need to be filled in, an Expository piece is like a tutorial, often utilizing an easel for charts, graphs, pictures, and whatnot. You had to come off as educational, I guess. I didn't have a clue.

Our Drama coach asked me if I had anything to offer. I got up in front of the class and made up something on the spot. I took some markers and started giving lessons on drawing cartoons. My Drama coach was delighted-- according to her, it was original, it was entertaining, and I was a good enough bullshitter to get away with it. She urged me to write something down, to spruce up my presentation, but I wasn't too enthusiastic about it. As long as I passed the class, I was happy. I didn't expect to win any honors.

Anyway, the tourney came, and I was "ready". During the times when I wasn't competing, I went to check out other presentations, to add my support. But I had an agenda: I had just met Eve a few weeks prior, and she was already done with her boyfriend, a classmate named Craig who was (and still is) a good actor. I was thinking of moving in on his vacated turf, because I was totally in love with Eve and she was extremely talented. I had seen her rehearsing her Thematic Interpretation piece-- a sampling of "Taming of the Shrew", "Pygmalion" and "My Fair Lady". She was not only physically beautiful but masterful when it came to acting out the multiple roles. She had ensnared my heart and didn't even know it.

Eve was friendly to me, and said she wanted to see me perform my Expository piece at one point during the day. "I like your style of drawing-- you have a lot of talent."

"Thanks," I said. "And you too-- you're very talented."

She smiled and said, "Whatever."

My first round went okay-- I was ballsy enough to get a little ridiculous with my presentation. "The fine art of the caricature, believe it or not, can be directly traced to the hieroglyph drawings of Ancient Egypt..." I drew a pyramid, and then I drew a pharoah, complete with one-eyed profile and awkward walk. People in the audience were smiling, and I think I garnered some extra points for daring to caricature one of the judges. People came up to me afterwards and patted me on the back, telling me that I must've had no fear, to be drawing the judges like that. If I'd cared one bit about winning a trophy, drawing my judges would surely have been tournament suicide.

My second round-- Eve showed up and sat with me in the back. Suddenly I was nervous, suddenly there was pressure. Fuck the judges, what would Eve think?

As the other participants performed, giving deadly dull demonstrations that were sure to win awards but were also potent remedies for insomnia, I passed notes with Eve. At one point, I threatened to draw her. She wrote to me, "No! I don't want to know what I look like!" It didn't stop me from drawing a cartoon version of her lovely face. She liked it-- she wrote to me and said she wanted to keep the note.

I was happy.

I didn't care about anyone else in that room. I did that presentation for Eve and Eve alone. I broke every rule, I straddled every line, I bullshitted and bullshitted and drew funny cartoons and made jokes and got good reactions. Too bad I was getting marked down for my sloppy, barely-there preparation. But like I said, I just didn't care.

The award I wanted to win that day was Eve's heart.

She and I were inseparable for the rest of that day. She complimented me on my bullshitting abilities. "How do you know all of this random, usless knowledge?" she asked. "I mean, I know it sounds bad to say it like that, but I think what you did was great. I say 'random' and 'useless' because it all seems so unrelated, like you had too many tangents to choose from."

"Thank you, " I said.

She revealed to me that she was an artist herself. She also happened to have some drawings on her. I demanded to see them, and she showed me. They were great-- she had a more realistic style, not cartoon-y at all. It was very detailed and shaded and feminine, done in muted colored pastels and delicate pencil sketches. We kept trading compliments, humbly dodging them as they came at us from the other. We talked and talked. We got real deep, asking probing questions and meditating about life.

It was at that tournament, hosted by Granada Hills High, where I learned about how her parents were divorced, and that they used her and her brother as bartering tools against each other in their post-marital dealings. I related my own broken-home status, and we sat there and comiserated and let time pass by like cars on the street. We snuck off campus to buy cigarettes. We hung out with Sharky and Meg, and afterwards, when the competition was done, we all went back to our Drama coach's house for a victory party... all of us, save for Eve, who wasn't allowed by her dad and stepmom to spend any time outside of school with the Drama folk.

Ironically, I placed third in a lesser category, Spontaneous Argument. I didn't place anywhere with my Expository piece, but I was the talk of the tourney anyway. The year after that, I learned that students from other high schools who had seen or heard about my presentation stole the basic premise and improved upon it, which didn't make me mad at all.

This entire memory took less than a minute to process in my head, as I sat in Paulie's Garage, watching Capsule and Harvey and Paulie use their fingers to draw in the caked-upon dirt. I wondered why it had been so long since I dwelled upon that day, which was really the first day of my courtship of Eve-- shortly after that day, I invited her to my Senior Prom, to be my date, and the rest is old hat.

I guess I have had no reason to reflect upon it, since I have spent the last decade concentrating on playing music and writing. But it's funny how, aside from a few moments when I was paid to draw caricatures for theater productions in and outside of high school, I pretty much downplayed the art and kept my focus on music and literature.

It was the art that persuaded Eve to consider me as a possible love interest, not the bullshit or the jokes or the devil-may-care attitude. She never got as excited about my songs or my words as she did over my images.

I look back now, and if there was one mistake I made (besides getting together with a girl as troubled as Eve to begin with) it was that I switched gears on her. The art faded into the background, and the desire to be a musician and a writer won out over something that I already possessed a knack for, something that didn't need too much extra work to polish. I mean, it wasn't the reason why we broke up eventually, but I wonder if it had something to do with why her affectionate attention waned.

Anyway, now I feel like I've come full circle, reclaiming this birthright that is my visual acumen. Right now, this is where I belong, this is where I want to be. And if one day soon I should happen to run into Eve on the street and we are not at each other's throats, she might be surprised to learn that I am returning to my roots.

She has returned to her roots-- she didn't act for years after high school, because the new guy she was with didn't like it. But I found out, through her mother, that she was acting again. I have found her online in actor/model registries and on some websites devoted to the projects she has been involved with, and it makes me happy to know that she is in the grind once again.

I'm a fucking detective-- somehow I found out where she is working now. It's a dentist's office. That's what she has been doing for a day-job for over a decade now, working the reception desks at dentist offices. When she and I were on speaking terms, she gave me mad discounts on my cleanings.

I'm overdue for a check-up.

Oh, that's soooo bad. I can't see her again, even if she would be proud to see me drawing again. I just can't. She drives me crazy. She haunts me everywhere I go. I saw her face instead of Holly's, and that's what kept me fascinated with Ms. Golightly for so long. Whenever I was with Holly I felt like Jimmy Stweart in Vertigo, holding the double of my lost love in my arms again.

A week ago I drove by the office. I saw her outside, puffing on a cigarette. I felt like a stalker, but if she had not been out there I wouldn't have cared. It seemed like she was waiting for me. But I get this vibe like she doesn't want to see me.

Even if she did want to see me, it's better that I don't see her again. There's some things on my chest that I will unload on her, and I just can't do that shit anymore. It's not right.

If there's one thing I learned from looking at the past five hours ago, it's that I represented something sublime to her at one time in our shared lives, and now that time is gone, and there's no sense in trying to put closure on it. It will not close that way-- it will only open up more questions, if I elect to check up on her again. I'm too wounded and angry to be civil, and it might get ugly. I'm too wrapped up in what I have going on right now to unravel all of the progress I've made.

I feel a lump of dread in my gut, because I have a feeling that, whether I like it or not, she and I will meet up once again, very soon. It seems like Fate is decreeing this, and I am hoping to avoid being caught up in that business again for as long as I can.

That means, I can't see her right now. I know where she is, I know how to reach her (she never changed her phone number) and I know what she is up to... but I cant see her.

If I want to see her again that badly, I can just remember those good times from the past, and she can live inside my head for a spell, and then she can be erased with the flick of a Bic and a cloud of white smoke barreling through a tobacco pipe straight to my lungs.

I shouldn't go looking for her.

No, I shouldn't.

I'm not going to crack.

I promise.