Sunday In The Park With Kissinger

Despite the perennial fear of social awkwardness which almost caused me to cancel it earlier this week, my birthday party actually happened today. A good dozen or so of us assembled in the south of the Sheep Meadow in Central Park, on the kind of beautiful balmy day which brings the entire city out to sunbathe and read or play frisbee, not as a group but rather in myriad twos and threes which overlap peaceably as a giant Where's Waldo? illustration, discs gliding erratically overhead like feeding swallows.

Four of us from Pasadena were there, close friends and folks who have known each other from as long ago as first grade or before -- Casey, me, Pia, and Meredith. Our Girl Scout troop came up an inordinate number of times, for some reason -- I guess it was initially because I insisted that Girl Scouts was the reason I knew how to make a pinata, and we went from there. Meredith insisted she did not remember this; nor did she or Pia recall that our Girl Scout troop leader had revived an old badge that the Scouts had done away with that required us to wear white gloves and serve tea, the Hospitality Badge. (I swear it exists; it's the one with the steaming teacup I have sewn to the pocket of my black herringbone blazer. I'll ask Janice; she's the one with the encyclopedic memory.)

I brought the last one up because I like to emphasize the stuffy undercurrents of class and stiff gender stereotypes that ran beneath the surface of our otherwise girl-positive education. Stephan, on leave from his union organizing experiences in Detroit, grumbled that he thought that kind of thing was what Girl Scouts were for, along with political indoctrination. Meredith, meanwhile, defended hospitality as a good thing to learn.

It is a strange thing to bring so many of my liberal high school friends together with my progressive Hampshire friends. It is perhaps one of my few accomplishments of the past few years that my perception of mixed demands on my behavior in this situation didn't make me a gibbering wreck. Half the time I had the boy in the murder shirt -- not actually the murder shirt today, lately he has taken to wearing shirts inside out; this one, as far as I could tell, was camouflage -- murmuring things I couldn't quite catch but knew were either derogatory or despairing about the conversation in my ear. Totally rude, really, but I'm willing to give him some leeway these days. Had I been taking him seriously, I might have thought quite poorly of myself for being so superficial.

But no matter how trivial the conversation may seem when I am together with my oldest friends, there is something deeply nourishing to it. We can rehash the same decades-old event a million times, weigh the weaknesses and strengths of a personality of someone we knew as children still see through the lenses of teenagers, and it fills the holes dug in us by college failures and adult uncertainties.

Small and shining Pia... she formerly of the Horrible Perm, the Indian dancing techniques, the stutter aquired at age seven, the stubborn academic seriousness, now recently become a doctor and long since grown out of our shared adolescent awkwardness into a well-deserved beauty... Pia called me the other day to get directions to the party; when I told her that Meredith was coming, she said, You know, she was my arch nemesis in high school. Something I'm sure Meredith never really knew.

I laughed. For me, Meredith was The Woman Who Does Everything More Beautifully Than You Do, positively unreachable in her SAT and Harvard-acceptance perfection. Today she is something more; she has left international banking for a job assessing teaching recruitment programs in the city. And yes, she runs marathons -- actually, not just any marathons, but the original Marathon in Greece. A few days before, when she herself had called for directions, Meredith had repeated a few bits of advice on how to set up the party with an eerie echo of obsessiveness reminiscent of our prep school's stage mothers.

This is where good stories come from: the kind of human complexity which can only spring from a real sense of history. (Or, sometimes I think, twelve years in a prep-school pressure cooker and a healthy dose of reality thereafter.)

We are these things to each other. I offered to give Casey references when I told her I'd housesit for her dog, and she shrugged it off. You worked at the Humane Society, she said; I know your pets. Who else these days knows that I was That Girl Who Likes Animals? Who remembers that Pia was the Fairy Godmother in Cinderella, then recalls her struggle to get cast when the theater director arbitrarily decided to shut her out of school shows because of her speech impediment? Who but Meredith would look chagrined to know that Casey packed her Russian-English dictionary when she prepared to move to New York?

We are each other's symbols and storytelling tools, and while we have grown out of parts of our stories, I mean something among these people.

It makes me think irony goes hand in hand with professional mobility (I mean geographical, not upward) and the decay of social support networks. It's an easy form of humor when you can easily detach from social meaning, and there's nobody's toes to step on. Postmodernism, of course, is another logical conclusion. It is important for liberating us, but the balance is easily lost. I have so many friends who are hurting for lack of their roots.

* * *

But I'm sure you're not hear to listen to an aging woman get garpy. You're probably wondering what happened with Henry Kissinger.

Midnight last night found me doubled over with laughter on the floor of the kitchen as I came to grips with how ad-hoc the pinata was turning out to be. I had slacked off -- taped the signature nose on afterwards, never really provided for adequate jowls, and, as it turned out, hadn't checked my paint supplies to make sure I had something to paint his suit and head. The tempera in the basement was mostly hard. The suit turned out all right, bluer than I'd like maybe -- but the combination of the red, yellow, and white paint, after I'd inadvisably fucked some green into the mix, was more or less the color of beef jerky.

So I ended up on the subway with an armload of too-skinny, pemmican-paper-mache Kissinger which looked more like a cross between George Washington and a cigar-store Indian caricature. I applied a "HELLO -- My Name Is Henry Kissinger" nametag to its chest. A woman on the six train was trying very hard not to laugh. A handful of Spanish-speaking guys spent their train ride sounding out the nametag.

We got some looks and inquiries heading through Central Park, which was fun. People would come up to kibbitz, discussing whether his poorly-made arms were bloody stumps or whether there was just blood on his hands. There were one or two opportunities for education; Ms. Pozner and myself, ever ready to be on-message, both took the opportunity to let people know about the case against Henry Kissinger. But unfortunately, it seems, we neglected to let everyone at the party in on the joke.

Because of my nervous liberal heart, I'd like it known that I saw this coming, and did take a few precautionary sidesteps. Murder-boy got the rope first, and was working his way towards making a noose. I don't know about that, I said; I don't like the lynching connotations. (I know someone made a confused noise about that -- I mean, after all we were about to beat the man -- but by that point things seemed to be moving a little faster than real-time; we were making a lot of noise, attracting some amount of attention, and I think we were trying to get the smashing done with.)

Well, sling it under his arms, someone else said, and we did. It was a good idea anyway; this was the kind of pinata that was likely to lose its head after one round of beating anyway, so we needed a stable solution. I went first; he lost a leg. Casey snapped pictures. Jenn hollered for blood. I spun Pia and sent her after the pinata. Jeff sang, "Anything you can bomb, I can bomb better" in a comic voice. Murder-boy quietly agonized over the spectacle we were causing. And then, behind me --

"You're proud that you're doing this to a black man? That's a lynching!"

The guy hollering looked like a crank. "It's not a black man, it's Henry Kissinger," I called, still spinning people towards the pinata. "He's wanted internationally for crimes against humanity!"

Things started to fall apart; I lost track. The crank wouldn't leave. Other people in the area seemed to be taking more notice. Jenn, who perhaps had not initially recognized the connotations of the beef-jerky skin, slunk off to play frisbee, mortified. The pinata lost both arms and its head and there were a few frantic attempts to string it up by its gaping armpits.

Well before the beating was done, my friend Marquise, who is black, said a hasty goodbye.

I don't know if it was just the pinata that did it; there was an awkward moment earlier in the party when deeply-pious Marquise had found himself onstage in a game of Adverbs (it's like charades, with talking) in a church choir with Rob and with Itamar... fundamentalist-hating Itamar, who had misheard the adverb "erratically" as "radically"... and was consequently asking his fellow choir members when they were going to go beat up some faggots...

I need to do what on the front lines they call a "vibes check"... I came out of the whole thing feeling like the rest of the party was buoyant enough that it wasn't too badly marred by the incident, but Rob, the only other person of color at the party, also beat a rather quick retreat soon thereafter... I suspect my feeling of equilibrium comes from the fact that I saw this coming from the moment I realized I'd made the paint too dark (jeebus, the guy is the king of international policy geeks, honestly -- how much time does he spend outside of his mole-rat warren? gotta be as pasty as the nerdiest of them); it's not like I went into this unaware that I was likely to be called a racist.

By now the word racist doesn't hurt me much. I have unearthed many bad prejudgements within myself, examined them and worked to eliminate them; I know they are not all gone, but all I can do is continue to confront them. And I done my time. I have been one of three white people working in a black and latino school, and I understand even that amount of being singled out probably doesn't compare to what it's like being on the other side of a minority equation. Similarly, I know that while the word "racist" is a terrible word to be labeled with, I am not entitled to feel it is on the same level being the target of a racial epithet.

Still, think about it. Today, "racist" is the worst insult you can level at a person. (An educated person? A professional, a center-to-past-liberal person? I'm sure there's qualifiers. And "Nazi" is worse, certainly, but people so often use it as shorthand for "the worst thing imaginable" that it has become almost a cartoon.) It's a horrible, horrible thing to say. Not only does it mean you're bad to other people, but it also means there's something inherent in your personality and attitudes which others can see and which is stupid and backwards. What does it say about our society that this is now one of our worst insults? I guess it's not so bad a thing. (And I think it's not so universal. I know people for whom insults to their mother or deficiencies of respect shown are still worse.)

But it still foregrounds race. I think we should make something like "classist" an equally bad insult. (In the world where social engineering actually has an effect.)

* * *

On a lighter note, I got really cool presents. Pia is going to take me to see Urinetown, and Itamar gave me a teddy bear wearing a Pokey the Penguin tee-shirt. I'm happy. Getting good presents makes you feel like there's people out there who really understand you. All the birthday wishes from everyone were also very wonderful.

Posted by Gus at July 21, 2003 02:19 AM | TrackBack