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Passing Notes with Alex
January 12, 2006
Alex (a.k.a. "Grimes") is one of my dearest high school friends—in
fact, my grandma still asks about him—and we recently began
corresponding again, after more than a decade of not. He now lives in
Oakland, working as a warehouse manager and making documentaries with
his wife, Eerie, their wee dog Cello and the ghosts that dwell in their
flat. This is a sampling of some of the emails he's sent me over the
past year…
Dear Sam, Ahhhh, the wonderful trap of Nostaglia. You lived in the desert, you know about mirages...
Okay so I am itching to write, and I am overbooked as always, and I
am waaaaaay behind at work, and I don't want to be here I would rather
be at home unpacking so I can get my life back to where I can write but
before I do that I just want to be with my "roomie"—who I see
seldom—and my doggie who is freaked out by the move and though it is
great that she is developing intonations that sound a lot like "Grimes
stay" when I am trying to leave it breaks my tiny black heart to have
to come to this place where I find myself itching to write and I am so
overbooked and waaaay behind at work and why did I agree to be in this
wedding this weekend anyways? I have no time to go to my friend's
birthday party because I am going to my other friend's going-away party
and the whole time I am going to try to duck out early of both 'cause
my puppy with the Ewokian pout is scratching at the front door
wondering when the hairless ape with the treats and the food will be
returning... and I do miss you and I wish that I had a better sense of
self when I was young and you were around and less an emotional spaz
but not so unemotional as I am today and how's that for nostalgia and
anxiety all in one?
And I was listening to Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me last night as Eerie
played it on the record player and sang along, and I thought of how
much time was lost because I was so overbooked, and itching to write
and waaaay behind... and I thought of the people that I made cry and I
felt like a star snuffing black and I thought of what terrible and
wonderful people we can be. And I thought I understood for a second but
there was so much distracting me that I was pulled back into the
desert.
"You and I will meet again one day, under a night sky lit by soft black stars"
This world is not for us... Love, Alex
Ms. Campos, I have been thinking a lot about how men and women are
wired so differently. It is remarkable to me and the more I ponder it,
the wider the gulf becomes and the bottom sinks deeper still. It's
wild! I realize that I know even less than I thought I did about
people. This gives me that horrible feeling you had as a kid at the
start of the school year when you were overrun with people you are
forced to interact with. It's awful... too much to ponder... back to my
tea. Deep thought is not only self-indulgent, it's downright
introspectively dangerous.
Yours, Alex
Dearest Sam, I have the wandering death booked and have contacted
the appropriate hookers in Paris to find me. I will need to borrow a
manuscript or two—something juicy from your erotic collection that you
are working on—so as to have people think I wrote it and then have it
published posthumously. Then you can contest it and it will create more
of a buzz about the work and me and you, and then you can make up
stories about us and publish that. Turn it into a movie. Then
Eerie can sue you. You both write a book about yourselves, me, us and
that then gets turned into a movie of the week on Fox where Lou Diamond
Phillips will play all three of us. You two get together to sue Fox and
Lou. My name is back in the paper and somewhere in Springfield, IL, a
16-year-old will go to a Hot Topic and buy a T-shirt with a quote
wrongfully attributed to me and a bad picture of me in Paris with some
hooker taken just a few hours before I am found with your manuscript
that is attributed to me that makes you sue... and she will remove the
size label from the Hot Topic T-shirt and use it to light her cigarette
that she will eventually put out using her arm.
Having a terrible day... You? Signed, Me
Samantha Campos raises a glass to all her friends, in every dive bar she's in. MTW