NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want to know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction. Click on Archives on the right.
Daisy sits beside another woman, looking at the parking lot through the decorated window wall of the Pie Shop. Red, blue, and gold Christmas balls hang above their heads. The windowsills are piled with fake snow. Her bracelets are gathered at the elbows on the sleeves of her black turtleneck. She rests her chin on the heels of both hands smiling at me through the window on my way into the shop. I pass the sign indicating that inoculated people don’t have to wear masks.
“Hi Fred, this is my half-sister, Cam.”
Daisy puts her hand on Cam’s back.
“Comment ca va?”
“Joyeux noel, Cam.”
“You going to join us, Fred?
Cam’s grey hair is short on the left side of her head where her ear supports a heavy looking gold earring. While hair falls thick from the right side, curling at the neck.
“Sure, let me get a cup of tea.”
The Pie shop seating area is remodeled. The Dragon Tables are gone and a bar with stools goes around the store facing out the window walls. There are four booths along the back of the shop and the serving bar juts out into the middle of the room dividing it in two as you come in. In house on the left and carry out on the right.
The young barista greets me from under his Afro, wearing blue framed glasses and long braids.
“Darjeeling, no problem, sir, help yourself to a teabag.”
“Do you have any whole tea?”
“What’s that?”
“I mean loose tea, not in bags.”
“No sir, sorry, just the bags.”
He points out a selection arranged in a polished wooden box to the left of the serving counter and puts a red paper cup full of steaming water in front of me. It is snowing on TV with a jazzy arrangement of Jingle Bells. The promotion for SnazE winter wear is mounted high on the wall above him. Outside, the temperature is nearly sixty.
Daisy has moved over, leaving a vacant stool between them. She turns toward me and beckons me to sit between them.
“Cam has been living in Andorra since the 70s.”
“Well, I spent some time in Spain and Germany, all over in fact.”
Daisy grabs my arm.
“She got a gig for a YouTuber.”
“Right, a few bars of Bach and some sound effects.”
“‘The ‘Sarabande’, I’ll bet!”
“Safe on that one.”
“Is it just a one-off, or what?”
“Ah, it’s like, whenever they need a cello.”
“Did you play classical in Europe?”
“Yeah, some, with different ensembles, also some acting and stuff.”
“You must have picked up a lot of languages!”
“A few words here and there. We did mime.”
“Yeah Cam, Maybe, you can take that up here?”
“No fucking way, D.”
“Why not?”
“Shit! arthritic knees, for Christ-sake!”
“Well, you can get new ones nowadays.”
“I’ll have to go wholistic. Can’t afford to feed the medical beast.”
“Welcome back to the good old USA!”
“This old bird has come home to roost, Fred.”
“Have you found a perch yet?”
“I am couch surfing here, at my sister’s, and some friends in New York.”
“Sounds like you have some options.”
“Yeah, Daisy’s broken-legged couch here and a futon on the 21st floor on Manhattan’s upper West side.”
“Didn’t you also play jazz in Andorra?”
“No, I didn’t do gigs with Feng. I did my own thing and some management for him.”
“Lot of work!”
“Yeah, too fucking much. I split when Feng started fooling around.”
“Is that why you have come back?”
“No, that was back in 2016 and I got with a group doing street performance.”
Cam pulls up her sleeve showing a tattoo on her right forearm.
A cello is rendered, opposite a Ram rampant with two hooves on the instrument’s scrolls.
“Got this in Berlin.”
“Looks pretty sharp.”
“Got my first tattoo at fifty, from a kid in our building.”
“What’s with the ram?”
“Aries, I was born on April fool’s day.”
Daisy laughs.
“You remember playing cello naked in the bathtub?”
“Sure, have you still got those drawings?”
“I sold one back in the nineties, but I still have four others.”
“I played naked a few times at a gallery in Marseilles, back when I had some shape.”
“What was the occasion?”
“Our group did a ‘Happening’.”
“What’s that?”
“You ever heard of Alan Kaprow?”
“Maybe, what’s he known for?”
“He did ‘Happenings’ in New York.”
“Okay, so what are they?”
“Well, we built an environment of shredded wallpaper and an old washing machine and odd stuff, and we also had a goat and a sheep eating out of old washbasins.”
“So, what happened?”
“It lasted a few nights, with an invited audience. I don’t remember what the event script was. I mean, I was kind of preoccupied with being naked and painted. A guy stripped off and played flute with me while another woman sawed wood. Two short strokes one long until a piece dropped on the floor. Then a new pattern was established. I think it ended when the animals finished eating, or maybe when they started shitting. Anyway, there was always someone gawping at my yellow-painted boobs.”
“Did you get paid?”
“God! I don’t remember! Probably got a meal out of it or something.”
“So, why did you do it?”
“In the name of Art!”
“That is an enormous subject.”
“Right, our group moved to Berlin, and we lived in a cooperative for a few years, until our building was demolished.”
“Goes on here too and it is called, ‘development’.”
“Development of wealth at the expense of people who need homes.”
“These new places soon fill up, you know.”
Daisy wraps on the bar.
“That is the visible part. The invisible homeless remain undeveloped.”
She gestures with her long arms, one in the air with bracelets rattling and the other behind my back.
“People are dying on the streets over here.”
She hugs me for a moment before letting her gesture go.
“We have a competitive culture here. It has gone too far!”
“What do you mean, Cam?”
Daisy looks past me into Cam’s face.
“I mean we have gone too fucking far with it!”
“Oh, marketing, and all that.”
“No, sports, TV game shows, all that shit.”
“Well, it’s entertaining.”
“Yeah, you know why?”
“Sure, people like to follow their teams.”
“Think about it, okay? There can only be one winner in competition, right?”
“I guess so, in most cases.”
“Right, so where does that leave the rest of us poor suckers?”
“Come on Cam, learning to lose is part of growing up!”
“I don’t think so D. It is part of the growing fucking distortion in people’s restricted minds.”
“Distortion? restricted, what are you talking about?”
Cam is looking out the window and doesn’t turn to me or Daisy.
“It’s about learning to lose, most of your fucking life, which means dealing with insecurity. Failing tells me I am no god damn good!”
“Yes okay.”
“So, we have a majority of people getting their rocks off winning vicariously through teams and game shows.”
“Makes up for their own losses you mean?”
“No, it doesn’t make up for any God-damn thing, it just dulls the pain with a fucking dopamine rush when your team wins.”
“Well, what is wrong with a little pleasure?”
“There is too little of it, for Christ’s sake, D.!”
“’Only connect’, said E.M. Forster!”
“Right on, Eddy Morgan! I read that one too.”
Pensive, Cam turns the paper cup in her fingers slowly over the grain of the bar’s polished oak veneer.
Guess what competition does?”
“Divides into teams”
“Isolates every individual. The winners in this culture get inflated fucking egos, as the rest of us poor shits, shrink into depression.”
“I think you exaggerate!”
“Have you noticed the suicide rate and the addiction rate over here?”
“I get it!”
“We are living in an addictive culture honey!”
“How can a culture be addictive? It isn’t a drug. It is a social thing.”
“A divisive social fucking thing. Social media operate by feeding your biases and making you feel good and if that isn’t addictive, what is? I mean why do people get strung out?”
“Because they want to feel good!”
“That’s what I am saying fucking isolation!”
“You mean isolation is the problem?”
“It is about love, for Christ’s sake! Connecting not competing,”
“Cooperation!”
“There’s is a term close to socialism, which is political dynamite. Don’t fucking go there!
“So, how do we talk about it then?”
“Damned if I know.”
Daisy puts her head back and drains her coffee.
“We are trying, aren’t we?”
