Jill Rapaport: One Summer

One Summer Night, ca. 1939
Museum of the City of NY
New York City WPA Art Project
(http://collections.mcny.org/Collection/One-Summer-Night-2F3HRG13OZQ.html)
no copyright infringement intended

One summer I felt things closing in. Felt I'm old, dying, over.

That summer was marked by things as various as the dissolute woman walking down Eighth Avenue speaking into a disconnected red phone.

It was marked by proofreading at night, by perfect weather, by great products, from mood sticks to cheap blenders.

Marked by long shadows, the western sun, gold parapets, 14th Street, a church sale.

By Drunk & so what? spray painted on the side of a coffeeshop.

That summer was characterized, too, by the group of women I glimpsed in the Galaxy Diner as I passed. They wore heavy makeup and moved their lips slowly.

It was characterized by museums, by tomatoes.

It was characterized by a lot of crying in early August, then remembering that every August I cried a lot, in what must have been deep depressions that I refused to term depressions until that summer.

Isolation, dread, an unexplained incident.

By raw vegetables, by paralysis.

That summer was the summer my mother had to get an eye operation. For the first time she would be able to read without tiring quickly.

The end of smoking cigarettes, the beginning of a monastic good health I could not enjoy. I felt underdressed, vulnerable, emasculated without my cigarettes.

That particular summer I asked myself why in any case I would have wanted to go on living. I said maybe I should have gone back to smoking cigarettes, died of lung cancer, maybe I should have accepted what I was, a degenerate who lacked moral integrity, lacked the simple will to be human. A drifter, somebody who didn't matter, among many other drifters and nobodies who didn't matter.

That particular summer I watched The Maltese Falcon colorized and though, as a film student, I should have understood long before, I understood only now why black and white was not just the absence of color. I understood why tough-guy talk had pertinence for us all, and that the tough guy would in fact send all of us over.

That summer I could not stop dreaming and that summer I found all dreams ominous.

I realized the song Hot Blooded was by Foreigner, not Bad Company.

An aunt died.

The street became so strange that on the curb in front of the donut shop one saw sterile alcohol swab wrappers lying pristinely.

The famous serial killer was caught on Long Island. His face stared at me from magazine covers I passed on my way to the store.

I developed a passion for cucumbers and black coffee which helped when all I wanted if I thought about it was to die, and a cigarette.

One summer, on one of many sultry, lonely, despondent, transcendent days, I made the authentic discovery that there was nothing I wanted.

The verbs to be, to do, and to have brimmed with personal significance.

One summer the quality of summer itself seemed to have been rendered liquid. The memories of old summers imposed themselves. There were books, clothes, machines, and perfumes. These fell into my lap as if in a dream of gratification.

One summer there was a lot of water, a lot of sunshine. The country was submerged in one thing or another.

A few buildings fell. One old cup broke after fifteen years.

I bought a navy blue silk jacket for twenty dollars, took it home, forgot about it. A bottle leaked in a cabinet.

One summer I came into money and bought an island and an airplane, a fleet of horses, a redwood forest. I became the latest in a long line of persons to learn that money did not buy happiness.

Then I woke up, without the money or the possessions, fucked up and feverish as ever.

I was overstimulated and at the same time paralyzed. I was not fun to be around. I lacked focus and ran like a decapitated bird in one direction and then another.

One didn't automatically get better.

I had it all and lost it all. The two conditions undulated, alternated.

There was nothing to hate, nothing to love. The great serial killers always turned out to have been children.

I snapped the cord of my existence to date and got rid of the ulcerated wrinkle, only to find that, without the wrinkle, I was back where I had been at eighteen, when my father was still two years from untimely death and nothing was more important than caloric starvation.

That was the summer that I stared at pencils in the hands of blind panhandlers. I searched for the smallest and most random square of existence with which to begin, relearning perception the way stroke victims relearned kindergarten speech.

That summer I was everything and nothing, the air and earth yielded a cruel blend of manic abundance and staggering deprivation.

Beholden to the tiniest and the greatest, I moved through that summer under a spotlight of dim gold.

That summer I lost myself, the summer didn't end, it continued and continued aberrantly, without ever seeming like summer.

And then, that summer, when it seemed I would die in the height of it for the sheer inability to see any other way out, the nights grew suddenly cooler, and I slept for a long time, dreaming of what lay underneath the summer sky, and of what, if anything, I'd be like when summer ended.

(Jill Rapaport)