star struck
I saw Eileen Myles on the L train this morning. I saw her shoes first, actually, because I was thinking about sneakers. I was listening to Celebrity Skin and not really paying attention to the ancient, yellowing copy of The Ambassadors I had in front of me. I was thinking about sneakers because I bought some at Payless yesterday after my worishofer sandals totally gave out on me and the $15 sneakers were way more comfortable and I was feeling kind of bummed out about ever buying the sandals in the first place when they barely lasted a summer. I was thinking all these obsessive, circular thoughts about shoes and what was I even trying to prove anyway and how I should probably just stick to canvas sneakers, like those Vans, before I realized who those Vans belonged to. She looked like a total California teenage crush: worn out sneaks, cut-offs, thin t-shirt, perfect glasses, eating a banana while she slung her big backpack over her shoulder and sat right across from me.
It reminded me of how Kayla said that when she was reading Inferno she felt like she was going to run into Eileen Myles everywhere. Like being that wrapped up in a book could make the author materialize somehow, or that the intimacy of that reading experience made the line between her world and ours more permeable. She has been sort of the reigning obsession among my friends this year. We drunkenly youtubed her, we copied our favorite passages on our blogs, we wondered if we could seduce her. We wanted to learn from her and we wanted to write like her and we wanted to sleep with her but we also just wanted to be part of that world, that version of New York where you could be broke and messy and angry and it was alright to be like that. On the other hand, when my roommate was reading Inferno she pointed out that there were a lot of plays and performances that we would have just loathed, and that’s something I’ve been trying to remember.
We sat near her and her little dog when we went to her reading at Bluestockings last month but I dunno, it’s different seeing someone on your commute than it is seeing them in the hyper-specific environment of a queer reading at a feminist bookstore. We sat across from each other and fidgeted with our smart phones. A man in mismatched plaid and heavy gold chains, deeply fucked up on something, did a slow staggering dance to his headphones in the corner. A beatific, pale gray nun (of course, right?) sat next to Eileen, who had finished her banana.
The L almost always stops for awhile between 6th and 8th. Everyone gets all antsy, they wait patiently enough but you can feel the shit shit I’m so late clouding the air. I caught myself sliding into the seduction technique I perfected in early adolescence (it never once worked) of reading a book really hard in front of someone, hoping that once they noticed how serious and focused I was they’d fall totally in love with me. I didn’t read a single sentence. The train pulled into the station and we waited those long seconds for the doors to open.
