Wednesday, January 2, 2013

Who Do You Think You Are?

(Is it at all funny that here, on exactly the second day of my self-announced daily writing challenge, I nearly forgot... to write anything at all?  Maybe it's a little like the experience at the gym today -- really the first workout day possible, after the New Year's festivities.  I try to schedule my time there between the lunch-hour, office guy crush, and the after high school teen surge, but when I arrived today, at the usually blissfully empty time, there were more guys in the last locker row alone than I've ever seen at once in the entire men's dressing area.  I joked, after my workout, with someone I recognized, about this January high tide of resolutioneers, quietly feeling superior, because I've been there before.  While, at the same time, I was forgetting my own New Year's resolution.  I'm nothing if not ironic)

But really, is there someone else that you really are, at least some of the time? 

For a while, when I was a boy, on some level, I was Marilyn Monroe.  Not out of some fit of sexual confusion, or because I had unusually blond hair, but because of something I'd read about her, in some purloined teen fan monthly.  In breathless prose, the article explained Marilyn's humble, unpromising beginnings, that certainly didn't portend anything like international stardom.  In fact, when she was a young girl, the writer confided, Norma Jean had actually lived in an orphanage for a while. 

I was in an orphanage, and in the fifth grade, when I read that.  It was like an electric shock to me.  I think I kept that magazine article hidden in my underwear drawer for as long as possible, along with the Mexican tiger moths I was trying to breed, using my socks for food.  That casual tidbit of tawdry detail, combed out of a cheap magazine, was like a talisman for me.  It seemed to be a ticket to freedom, or a get-out-of-perdition-free card -- if someone like Marilyn Monroe could survive after having the same kind of life I was having, and go on to be famous, could I do the same thing? 

Maybe, could it even be possible -- given the weird way the world seemed to work -- that this stint in the Home might give me extra points, or a kind of invisible advantage?  Might the life-scales tilt a little more my way, because I had this special badge of shame in my wallet?  And often, in the next few years, I often thought of this tiny thing I had in common with a star, and I could escape temporarily from... whatever disagreeable thing was unfolding at the moment.  Screaming, bullying, taunting, sneering -- the kinds of things stars don't have to put up with. 

I remember the day she died.  I think it was a Sunday, or maybe it was just that the Sunday paper was strewn all over the floor of my sisters' new bedroom, that my father and I were painting, when our neighbor from across the street, Jack, came into the house and ran up the front stairs, just to tell us that Marilyn Monroe was dead.  Suicide, they said.  She was naked, he said, with a dirty smirk on his face, and a kind of sideways look at my dad, who looked at the floor and grinned.  I was looking down too, at the comic section under our feet, blobs of the lavender paint my sisters wanted, spotting the simpler colors of Blondie and Dagwood, and Pogo, and Charlie Brown, and I was dizzy and confused.  I think this was the first time in my life that a famous person -- that I felt some kind of connection with -- had died.  It threw me off.  I thought we were supposed to be protected, if not by obvious things like fame and beauty and wealth, then at least by odd things, like being in an orphanage when you're a kid.  It was also the only time Jack ever came into our house. and after delivering his news, he seemed unsure of what to do.  My dad told me we had to get back to work.  Jack left.  I never liked him anyway.

Now, of course, decades later, don't I still see Marilyn everywhere?  Books of course, or calendars and greeting cards, rediscovered photographs, lost movie footage.  Even showing up in a glamorous new perfume commercial, thanks to computer magic.  Now of course, I've mostly lost the idea of special protection -- of some special credit you pick up, just because your folks get divorced and you get dumped in an institution for a while.  The cosmic cause-and-effect mechanisms seem to be a lot more complex than that, I think.  I wonder if Marilyn knows how it all works by now.  I know I don't.                 

1 comment:

  1. January Resolutioneers - at the gym we call them "tourists" . . . always glad to see them, but it creates a little congestion in the parking lot and locker rooms.

    I haven't read your blog in some time,Walter, realizing now how much I missed it.

    You are such a wonderful writer.
    Happy New Year !

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