It only rained once all day and that was when I decided to leave the house. I got lost a bunch of times on the way to the doctor's office but I finally found it, waded through a curbside puddle, closed my purple umbrella and stomped up the steps of the sagging front porch. The office was as depressing as they come, brown wood-paneled walls installed in the 80's with a length of molding around the edge of the tiled floor that peeled toward the center of the room. The receptionist was an old woman who jabbered in a Slavic language that I couldn't reach; she spoke to me from behind an awkwardly-placed window and handed me my charts. The glass window was obscured with a collage of old photographs cut from magazines--fruit stands, pretty women, mountain town roads crossed by cowboys--and it only went up about twelve inches. To talk to each other the receptionist and I had to duck our heads beneath the glass. Luckily I didn't have much to say.
Twenty minutes later I was out. It was still raining. The doctor had not gotten up from his chair; he sat at his desk and asked me to open my mouth and say ah. He wrote a prescription and I told him I didn't want it. He recommended lozenges and multivitamins and told me to use mouthwash. It was raining impossibly hard, banging on the streets and turning the world to silver. I was grumpy that I'd left the house for the sake of a doctor who would not rise from his chair, and my head hurt and I wanted to go home. I huddled at the busstop with a cluster of other wet commuters and listened to a Russian woman pick a fight with a Caribbean woman over which of them was crazier (for the record, they were both claiming to be the craziest, not accusing the other, and I think the Russian woman was winning). My day had consisted thus far of naps on the sofa interspersed with naps in my bed and I was eager to get back down to business.
Pharyngitis, the doctor said, although his indifference was shining through and he could have been wrong. And how does one get pharyngitis in mid-August? Perhaps one got it at the museum.
PS1 Warm Up is a summer tradition and for those reading this outside of New York, I'll recap: it's an outdoor dance party hosted at an elementary school repurposed as an art museum. Big-name DJ's come to play and the crowds writhe and jump in the sunshine, ducking toward the back of the lot for an overpriced beer (insider tip: bring your own) or indoors for some culture.
This year's dose of culture was, for me, a letdown. The entire second floor was dedicated to Laurel Nakadote, a photographer and performance artist with a super hot bod, who plastered the walls of the school with photographs of herself weeping. The photos, the informative plaque said, were taken every day over the course of a year. They were gigantic and numerous and a huge fucking downer. I fled the museum and escaped to the courtyard with my friend Chris, and we danced out there forever, shaking off the weight of Laurel's tears. Instead the clouds opened and rain spattered over us, cooling the air and making my purple dress hang heavy and low. We didn't care. Nobody cared. We danced in the rain, hours of it, laughing and jumping and spinning and swiveling. There were shirtless men beside us leading obnoxious chants, and one of them had a burlap murse full of necessities. He would take out a cowbell to keep time, or sometimes a fork to scrape along the side of a cheese grater. Neither he nor his friends ever cracked a smile, deadly serious about their ole, ole, oleeees and their percussion section.
When I finally saw a mirror I laughed at my reflection; that I was out in public--and flirting!--with such a mop of damp hair was either a punchline or a sock to the gut; either way it would have been enough to set Laurel off again. I went to Chris's house to watch movies and eat Mexican food and wring out my dress. The next day I babysat and spent all the money I earned before I even got paid, and the day after that I got pharyngitis.
And there is no connecting thread to any of this because I've decided to go back to bed. So goodnight.
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