Tristan in America
This is how you make friends: Attend your thoughts.
This will show on your face, furrowed in a knoll,
and people will eventually get curious about what’s going on in there.
Be open and playful in your responses to their questions,
mostly with your visor.
Soon you will have a job, some drinking buddies,
and a girl with wide green eyes to drive you to the swimming hole
and watch you jump off the rocks and feed you medjool dates on the hot slabs.
Then she’ll say “what are you thinking about?”
and you’ll knowat that moment that the whole maniacal summer
is still to come.
I looked around me one day and all my friends were 40 years older than me.
There had to be another serum to take.
This is how college was: hand hued beams,
a girl on a mattress on the floor with no bed frame.
-
Once I worked at a theater surrounded by winding grassy trails.
I would sneak away from my desk to go for mental health walks
and let the grass feather against my ankles.
The Catskill Mountains were far off,
the river skirted their sunken bases unseen, babbling.
In the shallow of the slope the florets from the dandelions
hung still like flecks on a photograph.
In the swallow the air was markedly colder
like a ghost had just passed through me.
I unchained the barn, heaving open the sliding wooden door and sat,
gazing out at the silhouette of the trees on the crest of the hill.
All tangled up, the branches embraced
in a sad dance throughout all the seasons,
blown this way and that by the wind.
I lay on the bed wrapped in string lights
and gazed at the cobwebs under the shelf above me.
This was the barn at the convergence of the trails where I made my hideout,
where I went for that special kind of aloneness.
I had no friends and all was just so.
I slept. The wind whistled through the gaps in the boards,
the same gaps where mice scurried in.
And in town, the one pub on Main Street gradually filled up but my favorite seat,
the one looking out onto the sidewalk in the shadow of the green-brick rowhouse
was never taken.
The boldgreen monolith replaced parts of the blue sky with its viridescence.
I fantasized about living there, in the emerald in the sapphire.
I would have lived all my life like that, just imagining a thin chipped glass on the windowsill, half full of tart white wine.
But something had to end and I moved somewhere larger and friends came to me
from many different places and circles.
-
On the first day of college we played this icebreaker game where we’d put an adjective starting with the first letter of our names before we said them, thereby alliterating them.
There was Atrocious Adam, Nasty Nat, Kinky Kate. For some reason the only adjectives I could think of that began with the first letter of my name, T, were tame and tyrannical.
It was almost my turn. I decided to go with Tame Tristan as to get laid in those days one would be wise to act obsequiously towards women. I think that decision colored the rest of my time at college, a time of withdrawal and timidity. Nasty Nat and Kinky Kate were called that for the next four years. Others, like Atrocious Adam and myself, were not. I could have gone with Terrible Tristan.
Tall, tipsy, trustworthy, troublesome, torn. I could have been tenderhearted.
One October night after four beers Pat was pulling into his driveway at the end of Montgomery street. Reaching the end of the gravel he killed the engine and flipped the headlights off. 50 pairs of eyes glinted at him through the darkness.
That was when I worked in a pub and carried three pint glasses in a triangle between my fingers, all suspended via the pressure they exerted on each other as well as my right pinky finger cradling them from underneath. The crisp beer cut through the sticky air. I strode around the yard in one swooping arc, then, bending from the knees, placed the pints down on the slatted garden table, for I had no free hand to pluck them from their triangle formation.
It was June and I wore a shirt with downward stripes with one small stain from the sloshed beer. Seeping through, I felt a refreshing pinprick above my navel. And I remember, but I could be wrong, that there was no fight in anything I said or did.
Shortly after, at the muddied edge of a Chatham field, I found the house of mirrors.
I remember being eight, running head first into the plexiglass.Navigating the hallways, my reflection, cast dozens of times,was like how a spider would see me if I were to trap it in a glass against the wall, covering the mouth with the torn page of a magazine.
Children scurried around my feet, running into the mirrors at full pelt and flying to the ground, only to bounce back up again laughing and slam into another.
May your castles be never-ending and have many stone statues to hide behind.
Outside, the lights of the ferris wheel shone like Christmas, 2007.
I’ve never been somewhere from the beginning.
I’m always joining, the one being introduced, the fng.
When I go to a party I slide onto the living room floor with the others.
But there’s never enough space for me, so I’m pretzeled around the doorjamb, with one leg protruding into the hall, bending forward awkwardly while someone steps over me to get more ice from the freezer.
How do you be in something from the start?
I probed the way out with my big toe.
The slide at the end of the house of mirrors would’ve spat me back out into the field, but my thighs were too big for it so I had to use my heels to dig into the plastic and shimmy my butt down the narrow strip of slide while a line of kids formed behind me and laughed. So I sort of squirmed back into the pretzel world. I went straight back in.
Eva advised me that “everything you want is closer than you think,” and she is clearly right. For as well as tending to your thoughts, you must also tend to them in the right place, and at the right time. Because once I appear at your front door with my printed resume before you’ve left for work, you’ll be convinced of my fortuitous presence in your life.
This is why I would never ask Eva what she is thinking.She makes me feel like I’m going through something important.
Eva and I talk about how at the end of your life everything you’ve ever said and experienced will be documented in a Wikipedia page. Some seconds will have entire paragraphs devoted to them, the ones that you click to expand. In other sections years will go by, mentioned only in half a sentence under the heading “I saw every moonrise.”
-
I remember my first time in New York. I was eleven, standing outside the Wellington Hotel, struggling to get a good deep breath through the hot dog water air, viscous and sweet, like the powdered sugar that dusted the wainscotting of every hotel room. And each big breath was just a hurricane of delicious exhaust. I looked south down Seventh Avenue and it was so long I saw it curve with the earth. People were fat like I had heard about, but in the way that made you love them as they rocked up to the curb and ducked into cabs. And I have been to New York dozens of times since, and each time it's less like a fisheye lens and
more like — I’m setting my backpack down on a pissstained bathroom floor
more like — flipping my credit card over to read the CVV
more like — I surrender to the air conditioned world
more like — I’m walking down the street
And I think, as pickle juice spills down my chin, of course, that’s what getting older is. But sometimes I think there really was a time before when things were truly sweeter.
there was a time there was a time there was a time there was a time there was a time there was a time there was a time there was a time there was a time there was a time there was a time there was a time there was a time there was a time there was a time there was a time there was a time there wa
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