Fake This Marriage

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A lot of people in my life exist between “my favorite person” and “my enemy.” Tons. Most of the people I know. Some teeter more towards “favorite person” and they include “people I admire,” “people who’ve nicely told me I have something in my teeth,” and “fellow fans of Dolly Parton.” Then there are people on the other end of the spectrum, like the woman on twitter who keeps following me so I follow her back and then she unfollows me, which I suspect is a weird power-ratio thing she has going for her. The point is is that people span the spectrum and 98% of those people, the ones in the middle don’t need you to detail where exactly they fall.

And in not disclosing exactly where they fall, you have taken the first step in mastering the art of fake friendship. Congratulations. Have some cucumber mint water and relax. First of all, dispel from your mind that fake friendships are bad. They aren’t! You’re confusing them with performative friendships which live on Instagram and in the way-too-loud-for-how-funny-that-joke-was laughs of two supposed BFFs. Performative friendships let onlookers know the individuals are doing alright, great in fact, incredible actually. They’re an outward display. Fake friendships however are private contracts you enter into with another person where you both agree to just be civil. Historically fake friendships are what we often just call “being nice.”

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If you know me, and chances are you do not, you’ve probably heard me say “I’m from the ’90s.” This one statement encompasses all you need to hear to get to the center of who I am. Of course, you need to know what I mean, which is not at all clear from that statement, but, being from the ’90s, I’m also often averse to explaining myself. Allow me to explain.

“I’m from the ’90s” is a blanket statement of authenticity, as opposed to being, well, not from the ’90s. It’s a joke insofar as everything I say is, but it also tells you a lot about me. It’s not ironic, so much as it is both a point of pride (I am authentic) and a point of self-deprecation (authenticity is bullshit). I am self-deprecating not because I am from the ’90s but because I am from Pittsburgh.

A general observation: people from Pittsburgh and from the ’90s (meaning the 25 people I know and grew up with) are so focused on “being themselves” that we often are stubborn about things like success. Being successful must, in some way, be evidence of having sold out, of having diluted your essence, of having well, failed yourself in some way. I never bought into this observation all the way, even though it is, in fact, my own observation, but I have known plenty of people just like this: smart, artistic characters who never try too hard because trying too hard is evidence that you care, and caring is like, whatever, man.

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The end of the year is a time for family, and, therefore, a time for family stories. You know the type—the stories trotted out every year by the same relatives; the stories with punchlines as rote as the dishes served at the family dinner table. Remember your uncle, who owned the candy store, or your Aunt’s trip to Switzerland, or the cousin who almost went pro? These are the stories told and retold, the stories families slip into and envelop themselves in. They are also, often, fake—or at least loose with the truth.

This process happens naturally, stretched over time and obscured by generational shifts. Something happens to someone, something worthy of telling others, which officially makes it a story. The story of that something spreads, first laterally among contemporaries, then longitudinally, from old to young. The process repeats until the principals are dead and only the story, and the next generation, remain.

That the facts of the matter get displaced in this process is understandable, and reflective of our faculties. We are all aware, thanks to true-crime podcasts, of human-memory’s unfortunate fallibility. And we have all been guilty, regarding both our own stories and those we hear secondhand, of embellishment for narrative affect. The passage of time makes a story’s truth harder to confirm, but so does the nature of stories themselves. Who would want to ruin a good redemptive arch, or forgo a metaphorically rich detail, due to the pesky interference of reality?

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Is pretend fake? I thought so, but now I’m not so sure. It depends, I think, on whether you believe that what lives inside our heads is fake. Lots of people do; that’s part of why some people don’t think of things like depression as Real illnesses. “It’s just in your head,” we’re told, of stress-related illness. Just. That’s it. Only in the most complex, least understood part of you.

In college, I had a painful rash across my face for nearly a year. I went to private doctors and research hospitals, desperate to be rid of it. No one could diagnose its cause, so many of them decided it wasn’t Real, despite it being undeniably there, on my face. “It’s just in your head.”

Then I found a beautiful dermatologist on the North Side of Chicago, who handed me a small tube of cream and told me, “Why would it mean any less if the cause is in your head? Your head is part of your body.” I used the tiny tube of cream from the beautiful woman who did not dismiss what she could not immediately understand and the rash disappeared.

The rash was not pretend—my roommates who watched the pain with which I washed my face that year can attest to that. But when I set out to write about my relationship to pretend over the course of my life, I realized that maybe I was wrong to think pretend synonymous with Fake, just because it lives in our heads. Maybe pretend belongs in a different category, somewhere more tangential to Real than to Fake. Somewhere between, say, a human-made lake and an oasis that turns out to be a mirage, or even a hallucination.

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“But am I teaching them anything?” This was the refrain, all fall, in the basement of the English department where we graduate students had been shunted into a series of shared offices. Coming back from class, slumping into an uncomfortable chair, dumping papers on a nondescript desk, getting the question, inevitable, “How’d it go?” and saying fine, and then pausing. Starting again: “But am I teaching them anything?” It wasn’t just that we were teaching Fiction I—or Poetry I, or Creative Nonfiction I—for the first time. It was that so few of us had any teaching experience. (Mine amounted to a single year, directly after college, when I was inflicted on two sections of Freshman English and one section of Sophomore English at a high school in South Texas. The most important lesson communicated in that classroom was the one I learned: don’t cry in front of your students.) It was the fact that I’d never taken an undergraduate fiction workshop and so was unfamiliar with the very class I was now leading. It was the fact that we weren’t sure, actually, that it was possible. Teaching fiction, teaching poetry—could it be done? It was right there in my syllabus: “There is no trick to writing fiction.” How had we learned, we wondered. Had that learning involved any worksheets to which we could now refer?

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I finally understand why people used to say television rots your brain. It’s because it does!

As President “My Brain Is Good, Actually” Trump ably demonstrates, it’s possible to watch so much filmed media that one loses the ability to distinguish between a camera-ready reality and the other one, the one we inhabit when we’re not staring (or glaring) at a screen. As citizens of a nominal democracy, if President Brainworms believes something it necessarily affects us, whether it’s real or simply a specter conjured by the demons who run cable news; and because Mr. “Actually, My Wife Doesn’t Hate Every Single Second She Spends In My Miserable Presence” can’t parse reality, or even read, it seems this has been the year we’ve collectively lost our ability to, just, like, can, even.

That’s why I picked this year to spend time on something I’d never really spent time on before: I picked up a remote and, goddamnit, I tried to consume movies and television. Results were mixed. While I now understand approximately 30% more of what people talk about, I really do feel like I’ve entered the sunken place. It’s not because film/TV is intrinsically bad, or anything—just that things there are so neatly organized that it’s numbing, like a good narcotic. Sometimes, like when I’m watching “Twin Peaks,” it’s hard to come up for air. To look at the push notifications—no, I don’t know why I keep them on either, although I guess I always wanted a front-row seat to the apocalypse—and return to a place (mental, emotional) where it’s not possible to see where this all leads, or how it ends.

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Just like pizza or bagels, coffee is a spectrum. There is no “best bagel” or “best pizza” or “best coffee” because there are so many ways to make them, so many styles and executions. Okay, you think, so there are different categories: Neapolitan pizza, Domino’s (hell yeah), single origin peaberry, Dunkin…Can’t there be a best in each sub-category? What if I just prefer watery cart coffee because it’s comforting? That is somewhat the function of De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum: to each his own—a choice, a preference. You pick yours, I pick mine. We may disagree on the methods of preparation and the quality of the ingredients therein, but ultimately your personal, subjective favorite that you like to label the “best” comes down to an alchemy of factors, including your family history, your net worth, and whether you were breastfed (just kidding!!!!).

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I remember my mother’s last Christmas tree. I was eleven, and she was converting to Judaism the following summer: abandoning her native Catholicism to become a fully fledged member of the tribe in time to stand on the bima with me (and my Jewish father) at my Bat Mitzvah.

At that point, it had been a while since we’d bothered to put up a tree in the house—usually, we celebrated Hanukkah at home in Los Angeles and then went to do Christmas with her relatives in Phoenix, evading the question of a so-called Hanukkah bush entirely. We had friends who did that kind of thing, liberal, Reform Jews who didn’t see the harm in helping themselves to what they saw as a charming and basically secular tradition, but my mother felt strongly about it. For her, deciding to become a Jew meant being willing to give up what everyone else does.

Iconoclasm and insularity run deep in Jewish culture. I mean, we call ourselves The Chosen People. The Hebrew word for holiness is kadosh, which comes from the concept of separation. Long before pseudo-spiritual white people co-opted the word to describe folks who share their particular wellness predilections, we were a tribe. We are a minority almost everywhere we live. We have a long history of being persecuted, and we feel safer when the windows are closed and doors are locked, and no one but us is in the room.

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A few years back, I spent a summer in Houston acting like I had money. Then I fell in with some white kids who came from money. I guess you could call it a scene. All gallery openings and coffee bars and stage-dives. We’d flit from club to concert to loft to bed, occasionally stopping to take stock of the time. Or at least I did. Because that shit was brand new to me, very nearly alien, a reality so divorced from mine (black, Caribbean, Baptist, middle class), that I couldn’t help feeling threatened by it, and enticed by it, very nearly always wondering exactly how far it could go.

A few things had to happen for any of that to work. Mostly, I worked the parking lots at NRG Stadium. Made no dollars an hour. I said, Sir, Ma’am, you can’t park that here. Sometimes folks spat at me from their trucks, and my buddy Manny gave them the finger, and I’d up-charge them on their way out. When I wasn’t working, I read novels that were entirely divorced from my life, The Line of Beauty and The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Gatsby—books where boys, occasionally queer, acquired reams of splendor out of chance and circumstance.

Also, the guy I’d been dating left the States for Busan. We’d found a situation house-sitting for a friend across town. It was our way out of rent. We figured we’d fake playing married, but after a few days of quietly throwing furniture at each other we decided that tapping out was, in the end, the best for us both. So the house I was now sleeping in, alone, was a solid reminder of my social ceiling: no one in my family had ever owned property as nice. Very few people in my family owned property. I was pretty sure I never would. The neighbors cocked their heads at me whenever I mowed the lawn, and I told myself I wouldn’t wave. But usually I did.

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Watching “Antiques Roadshow” is a background holiday tradition—one of those activities that’s never remarked upon but happens every year at my grandmother’s place. Without those hours spent with PBS, I’m convinced the real traditions would fall apart. At the dinner table, Nana holds forth like the show’s host Mark L. Walberg, or better yet, like executive producer Marsha Bemko. Around the table, we’re alternately experts and students who’ve stumbled upon something someone else can help explain.

Well, that’s bullshit, but still. The holiday season means basic cable, which means “Antiques Roadshow,” which means a few hours spent guessing if heirlooms and flea market gems are fake and, if they aren’t, how their authenticity translates into value, at auction or for insurance purposes. This is the drama of “Antiques Roadshow”: experts litigate authenticity, then turn personal stories and provenance and wear and tear into cash. At the end of each segment there’s the same question, whether it’s asked outright or not. Will they sell it?