I plan to use DICK FANCY to deposit writing and, potentially, drawing-things that don't have a proper home. Not to say that this home will be proper in any traditional sense, whatever "proper" even means. DICK FANCY will be home to us all. Or, we can hope for as much. All we can do sometimes is hope. Hope until our eyes start shooting rainbows, and I don't aim to disappoint MY PUBLIC. My hapless, admiring public. God, I hope my eyes start shooting rainbows. Wouldn't that be the dreamiest? Or, potentially quite alarming. Let's just wait it out before we decide what some hypothetical ocular rainbow-projection might really feel like.
This one is a few years old, I'm guessing from 2010, when I was living in Baltimore after I'd come home from walking the Camino. It's sort of silly. But discovering it got my dick-brain a little hard, thinking, well, maybe I should start one of these new-fangled blog-things as means to inspire more writing, without the pressure of wondering "what it will become" or "where it will go" or "what I'm doing with my life." Without further ado (adieu?):
OPEN LETTER TO A WOMAN NAMED NANCY WHO
I AM NOT AND WHO IS NOT ME:
Dear Nancy,
A man in a baseball cap that wasn't
actually a baseball cap but was, more accurately, nondescript
headwear with a protrusive bill, mistook me yesterday for you.
I was sipping tea from a ceramic mug at
that vegetarian cafe on Charles Street, and he waved as he walked in
the door and said, hi Nancy. He was smiling; his teeth were showing.
He was thrilled that you were there, believe me; he was clapping his
hands together lightly beneath his chin. Is it possible the two of
you haven't spoken in some time, though not because of any kind of
tiff or lingering sourness between you? Maybe you're second cousins
who came up in different parts of the state or country and provided
each other much comfort as children and so to see you here, now, at
this difficult time in his life, is the one single thing that he
needed without realizing he needed it until the moment he saw you? I
don't know. I didn't have the heart to tell him I wasn't you.
You're lucky, Nancy. There's someone
out there, someone who wears nondescript caps and frequents
vegetarian restaurants in Baltimore, who is, really, just
out-of-his-mind thrilled about you. That being said, he wouldn't be
my first choice of friend, seeing as--with full confidence--he
waved at a person who wasn't you at all, as though he just didn't
care enough to be discerning. An honest mistake, sure, but can we
really call it that? I mean, as adults who've experienced a
reasonable amount of social interaction and maintain at least an
on-par if not above-average understanding of the workings of
humankind, can't we just lift this veil of “uncertainty,” and
live in the blaring, albeit devastating, realities of this situation?
A person you call your friend, Nancy, a man who wouldn't
hesitate for even a second to raise hand in air and call to you
across a room full of people doing painfully quiet studying-type
things--which leads me to believe the two of you are quite close—has
no idea what you look like.
Let me ask you this, Nancy: when the
two of you meet at a bar, or at that Indian restaurant on St. Paul
that's apparently pretty good, or when he comes over to your place to
enjoy a salad you've thrown together last-minute, and only after
you've plated the bland thing do you think to yourself, well, why
glum it tonight alone, again, with another pale bowl of dewy old
lettuce when I can have my good friend/second cousin ________ over?
Why, I bet he'll even bring a crusty baguette with him if I mention
it, and wouldn't something like crusty baguette be nice to dip into left-over salad dressing? So,
well, when he comes over--baguette tucked casually under arm, some
hip German-made manbag slung over his other shoulder, and he sits
down across from you and touches your elbow in thanks and begins to
shovel the stuff past his greasy lips--does he look you in the eye?
During any of this? Any of this time? Has he ever looked, I mean
really looked, at you? At Nancy, the Woman, the Human Being? Or do
his eyes seem to glaze and go bad-TV-signal-wavy at the exact moment
you think to really bring up something big—like how you're thinking
that you'd like to have a baby in the next three years and you don't
actually know why you've selected three years but you had to pick
some number and three felt right, or how some days seem to stretch so terrifyingly long and each passing minute serves as a reminder of
how you continue to contribute nothing of value to the world or to
anyone in it, and this'll bring you back to the baby thing because
part of you thinks that if you brought a kid into the world you could
just make that your really important thing, but, then, what if
your failure is just this permanent, impenetrable feature, like skin,
and even if you're shedding parts of it all the time there are new
parts, maybe worse or more alarming parts, lurking just beneath? And
he just sits there--doesn't he? Is there saliva bubbling at his
lips? Little sinews of it, collecting in the corners? Disgusting little pockets of hot spit you'd like to smack clean from his mouth? Is that going on right now?
Nancy, what I'm trying to do here is
simple: I'm urging you to reexamine the people whose company you
keep. Because I know you've got a power in you that you haven't
realized yet, but, oh, when you do, Nancy--Watch Out World! You may
laugh now, or maybe you feel a twinge of resentment or displaced
maliciousness or something creeping in, thinking that someone like Me
has got the nerve to express feelings of great confidence in You. And
who am I anyway? You don't know me. But, might I remind you, Nancy: I
also don't know you. But the way I see it, someone's got to,
someone's got to take those initial steps toward exploring who or
what you might be; otherwise, what you'll be left with--what we'll
all be left with--is men walking into cafes in nondescript caps
waving at anyone at all and thinking they're you, because there will
be no You. Not even You will be You. You
will have no meaning anymore. Nancy, your Identity is sliding
quickly into the sphere of the collective. You're losing yourself,
your essential You-ness, and,
soon enough, we'll all be infected with this confusion of self, this
(may I dub a new term?) “Nancying.”
We'll look down at our pale
legs in winter and think Nancy.
I'm
Nancy; of course I've got legs pale as snow. But, we won't really
know why, or how, or what it means to be this thing that's been
foisted upon us, mysteriously and without warning. This
self-nullifying, formless, blank thing.
You'll
look at your own face in the mirror, Nancy, and think
Nancy-- the word will be
there-- but you won't be sure why. You'll think: who is
Nancy?
It's a valid
question, indeed, Nancy. And we'd all like to know.
Who
are you?
Best,
Kate
Kate
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