Tuesday, June 22, 2010

The Naked Cape

Looking back, as I am overwont to do, I see that certain moments of my life were more significant than I’d contemporaneously believed them to be.  Even when, in the present experiencing of them, I got a sense that something big was going on, there was sometimes a bigness behind the bigness, of which I was at the time quite unaware.  A really important moment might slip almost entirely past me, barely triggering my most cursory notice but initiating a psychological resonance that would build over time until I ultimately came to realize that that episode, that incident, was one of those that had so intimately and profoundly shaped my essential self-identity that, in retrospect, I remembered it much more - or at least, more often - from a distance than I had done in its immediate aftermath.

Of these, one seems ripe for reconsideration now, for reasons I had trouble figuring out at first, are still rather vague to me, and which I therefore, incredibly, choose to leave unstated.  But, lacking that, let me start with a confusing diversion.

There is something inherently uncool about blogging, especially in the rambling, unfocused, autobiographical way which I embrace here at the Hut of Chuckletude.  The charisma I embody when writing up some incisive vignette evaporates utterly when I go back and review my archives, stuffed as they are with self-important blather; the power that surges from my fingertips as I type my trenchant screeds is dissipated into tenebrous echoes when my stat counter lingers on single digits and my comments hover equidistant between positive and negative values.  It’s easy, on-line, to lose track of the extent to which I actually impact (or fail to impact) the world that I like to think of as my oyster.  If I write something, then I have created it, and thereby become a creator, Godlike in my genius - or so my authorial impulse suggests to me.  It’s only in confronting my statistically verified irrelevance that I venture to question that hypothesis.

This tension between creative power and social irrelevance, between my dual identities as nerd and God, is at the heart of my recollection of a party I attended long ago.  How long ago, in fact, I am not entirely sure, but I can hazard a guess based on a few key details: I was reliant on others for my transportation, suggesting to me that I couldn’t yet drive; I was in the company of a young man I’d met in a theater workshop, and he lived up in the northern part of the valley, far from precincts familiar to me.  All this points to circa the summer of 1979, when I was fifteen years old and very much unsure of myself, a manchild in every sense of the word - rumble-voiced and hirsute, but naive to the point of embarrassment and as much inclined to idle amusement as anything else.

This young man I’d met at this workshop seemed in some ways a kindred spirit - smart but with much yet to learn, taut with frolics and questings, clearly as unsure of himself as I was of me but equally ready to find out.  He listened to antique LPs of baroque organ music, favored the wearing of full capes in the SoCal summer sun, and took nothing seriously, especially seriousness.  He entertained me and challenged me.  I had certain doubts about him, honestly, but none so many or so specific as to deprive myself of his company.  At the time I didn’t have enough friends to make any snap judgments.  I certainly didn’t think he was that much weirder than I was.  Then again, I thought I was pretty weird.  Then again, again, I guess I hadn’t really been around very much yet.

This kid - I have been struggling to remember his name, but have let these memories slide for so long that all I can say for sure is that it reminds me of “Vincent” (and not “Vince") so that’s what I’ll call him from here out - Vincent and I had enjoyed a few afternoons of conversation and wandering around various malls.  The time had come to move our friendship forward or to let it fade away.  The opportunity to make this decision came on a warm smoggy night: Vincent had been invited to a party some of his older friends were throwing, and invited me along to meet them.

This was big for me, a kid who’d barely made three friends throughout grade school: if things went as well as they might, I could wind up doubling that number or better in a single evening.  I remember excitement and anticipation.  Beyond that, I’m no longer sure - if I ever was sure at all.  I think I knew that it was a party of people who played Dungeons and Dragons but that they wouldn’t be gaming at the party itself, which was fine with me since I myself was not a D&Devotee.  I knew enough to expect that a lot of the attendees would be older than I, grown-ups in their late teens or even their twenties.  Role playing types, I think I thought.  Whatever I knew to expect, I was primed to see what awaited me.

My actual recollection of the party itself is spotty at best. I remember a cozy woodframe home in the foothills, a deck in the dusk perfumed with a few small blazes, a kitchen table liberally littered with flagons - flagons! - of ale and mead.  I remember a hostess of relatively mature years arrayed fetchingly in an elfish gown, and a stocky bearded host with leather pouches strung across his jerkin-clad chest.  I remember nice people who presented themselves first and foremost as characters - thieves and wizards and assassins - but who then spoke feelingly of quotidian matters like school, girlfriends, and where to shop for pewter figurines and dodecahedral dice.  As far as all that went, it was fine.

I remember not seeing too much of Vincent at the party, but that was fine too.  He wasn’t Vincent there, he was some fictive entity distinguished by hit points, mystical powers, and imaginary exploits in fantastical lands.  He was part of a crowd of which, over the course of the evening, I came increasingly to realize I was not a part myself.  I don’t recall anyone’s name, the ride home, or ever getting in touch with Vincent again.  The party was the end of all that for me.  The leggings most of the guests wore seemed too confining; the mead they drank, too cloying.  I had no actual objection to anyone I met there or how they spent their time, but once I got back home I could just tell it hadn’t been my scene. 

I felt a small disappointment to discover that I’d invested myself in a friendship that lacked at its core that ineffable consanguinity that would have made it a new and continuing part of my life’s path, but also a counterbalancing relief to have come to this realization when I did.  It occurred to me that I’d visited a shopping mall with a man who wore a lined satin cape in the summer in Los Angeles, and his friends had had a get-together where their actual personalities were essentially party-crashers.  I decided that I wanted friends who were front and center, and who didn’t hide behind costumes any more than was absolutely necessary.  I also recognized that I myself might not meet this lofty standard, but I had the audacity to seek aspirational examples.

Now I find myself looking back thirty years to that night, and the natural questions arise in my mind.  Not whether I’d made the right choice, but just - what if I’d chosen differently?  Whom would I have been, which manner of me would have evolved, had I made that night a moment of turning toward, rather than away?  What would today look like, had yesterday been different?

In the face of such inquiries, I first need to assess what today has brought me, and I to it.  I’m a man of some modest accomplishment, a diligent servant to my colleagues, a devoted dad and a heartfelt husband.  I have wrought a career and an identity from countless rough drafts and tenuous ventures.  I have made my path the path of action, and live each day of my life in a world which, so far as I’m able, I actively engage with and make my own.  In doing so I believe that I make it better.  I can’t know what any other life would have meant, whether I’d have been so dedicated to making a difference - though god knows I don’t make much of one as it is.  But so far as I do make an impact on my world at all, minuscule though it may be, it’s because I choose to dress in my own clothes and to act as myself.  I opted, a lifetime ago, to forgo costumes for transparency.  I admit I wavered sometimes in this resolve, but mostly I stuck with it.  It has often not been an easy choice or a comfortable one, but it has set me on a path which now brings me much quiet satisfaction.  A costume cape can hide a lot of nakedness, but ultimately, the nakedness makes for a more robust performance.