“Goodbyes are hard,” I explained to our roommate Emma, as she cradled a cardboard box under one arm and watched me cry. It was the first of May, marking the end of one lease, the start of another, and—after three-and-a-half years of living together—Emma’s departure. She was moving out. Austin and I have never lived with another person as long as we’ve lived with Emma. Besides our sisters. And she’s come to occupy a similar space, with all the intermittent affection and tension that implies. I’ve always relished the chance to describe her to people, once they get past the fact that I live in an apartment with my boyfriend and a roommate. “The coolest girl.” “The most active social life of any person I’ve ever met.” “The fourth Haim sister.” “Phenomenally gap-toothed.” She’d spent much of the last week packing up, the apartment steadily losing more and more of her good taste one day at a time, and yet I still took myself totally by surprise. Joining her out in the living room for a hug goodbye, try as I might, I couldn’t keep the tears out of my eyes. Emma is many things but a sap isn’t one of them. “Oh,” she said. “I’m—I’m honored!” There were easily two trips worth of stuff still left in the apartment but, white knuckling her belongings and just barely fitting through the door, she managed to do it in one. Blubbering, I closed the door behind her.
The first of May, it was also my mother’s birthday. Coughing so hard she had to call out sick, she wasn’t feeling well and our conversation on the phone was brief. A bracelet from some Brooklyn jeweler was technically my gift for her, but that wasn’t the only thing I planned to present. Last month, after watching something on Youtube, I noticed that Rosie O’Donnell had started uploading entire episodes of her old talk show. My heart leaping up to my throat, I gasped, verklempt with the promise of imminent discovery. And promptly left Austin to do all the work. “That was the longest shower of your life,” he said to me, as I returned from the bathroom, our TV paused on the very moment when my mother and Rosie O’Donnell were first greeting each other hello. Eureka. Family lore that had collected literal dust on a blank VHS tape, at last, has come to light.
It didn’t take Austin long to find the specific June 1999 episode of The Rosie O’Donnell Show with Donna Summer for a celebrity guest—and Kristine Burns as an audience participant for a game called “Rockin’ Reading.” In a lime green matching set, her Jersey Girl accent strawnger than any of us remember, I felt like I was watching some long lost film from my very favorite actress. After telling Rosie she loved her, my mom said she works as a seafood manager at Pathmark and—very much interrupting the cue to start the game—that she has three kids. Rosie sweetly asks how old we were and my mother says, “Jillian’s thirteen, Lindsay’s ten, and Brian is five-and-a-half.” Rosie would speak the words to a song and, if the audience member correctly completed the lyrics, they’d win a prize. Let’s just say—a certain denim jacket still hangs proudly in my parents’ cedar closet. Rosie wasn’t even halfway through saying, “Her lips are devil red and her skin’s the color mocha, she will wear you out…” when my mother just about jumped out of her base-tanned skin, drunk with victory. She’s lived the vida loca, hasn’t she. Keeping this discovery to myself until her birthday, my phone rang within minutes of posting the video. I can’t remember the first words to finally come out of my mother’s mouth, just that she was already cracking up. Totally hysterical. She could not stop laughing.
There’s this one part of this one tour at the museum where I ask my visitors if they grew up speaking multiple languages at home. Almost always, at least one person will raise their hand. And while not every visitor’s answer is something to write home about, the most uniquely powerful and devastating things I’ve ever heard have all been in response to that question. A woman who told us she’d rip up any letter from school before her parents had the chance to see it, not wanting her classmates to know these people were her mother and father. These parents, with their Yiddish accents and Old World ways, she said, were Holocaust survivors. Another woman, whose family fled Iran during the Revolution, said that her memories of that home were too dark to share with her children. But what she could share, what she wanted to share was her language. Speaking in Farsi to her American-born children—only for them to grow up into teenagers who’d respond exclusively in English. It’s a privilege, and at times a big responsibility, facilitating these conversations, but either way, I’m grateful for it. It’s also not just sob stories. That week, I had this old man say he's a fifth-generation Swedish-American, still living in the same Kansas town as his first immigrant ancestor. “They formed a Swedish colony out there,” he said. “And refused to learn English. The whole town, for generations, just speaking Swedish. But finally, their church was convinced to start leading services in English. And so they did. And then, six days later, the church was struck by lightning and it burnt to the ground.”
“Nothing’s impossible,” reads Barbra Streisand, in the very first line of the very last chapter of the 48-hour-long audiobook for her 970-page memoir. Even at one-point-three speed, it took me more than a month to finish—not that I ever wanted it to be over. Whether it’s a cliche of homosexuality, or just a prerequisite, I always liked Barbra. But what I didn’t know about her could, evidently, fill a very long book. And had I only read My Name Is Barbra, I’m sure it still would have moved me. But suddenly, having listened to it, I’m desperate to wash and dry her feet with my hair. It was hysterical and life-affirming and exhaustive—but never once exhausting. This aptly Talmudic tome about the many pursuits and obsessions of a woman’s life, and all its unanswerable questions. Returning, over and over again, to the power of truth, beauty, vision. And also McConnell’s Brazilian Coffee ice cream and nice teeth on a soulful-eyed man. Taking my walk, cleaning the apartment, waiting for the train, I’d listen to Barbra’s book, her sticky Brooklynese consonants soundtracking a month of my own life. But when only a couple minutes remained, I knew to finish it in private. Sitting on my bed, with the room to myself, I heard Barbra say “nothing’s impossible” and my chest buckled.
I’d already been crying but, now, I sobbed. Already feeling sad for that inevitable shift in pace of most any life’s story. How five young years can fill the entire middle third of a book, only for twenty old years to slip by in a couple pages. Barbra admits, near the end, how she’s accepted that her creative life is largely over. That even if she does accomplish anything else, it won’t matter as much as what she’s already done. She’s okay with this, or so she says. Because maybe she will still adapt Gypsy, or make that film about a love triangle at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, or destroy the master file of Ryan Murphy’s Normal Heart. Nothing’s impossible, right? But then again, with Barbra, even when it hurts, she only ever tells the truth.
And as fate would have it, that very next day, we already had tickets to see Funny Girl in theaters. Standing on the street corner, Austin and I waited for Sophie to join us outside Village East. I’ve come to use a kind of shorthand with Austin, whenever I’m talking about specific Educators at the museum. There’s a lot of us and I don’t expect him to remember who’s who, certainly not by name. So, instead, I’ll say “Nervous Energy Red Head” or “Straw Boat Hat” or “Lesbian Greta Gerwig Circa 2002.” And ever since Sophie told me that her mom kept a CD of The Immaculate Collection in the car, she’s been “Loved ‘Crazy for You’ When She Was Little.” She’s the best, Sophie. Remembering a conversation we’d had months before, she came up to me in the break room one day and said, “Brian, I have these Carnegie Hall tickets but I can’t make it to the show and I know you’ve never been so—they’re yours!” And that’s not the only time I’ve seen her surprise someone with something special. She greeted Austin hello with a handshake and I was so tickled by that. Surprised, even. A couple weeks earlier, walking out onto Orchard Street, I heard someone down the block shout my name. Leaving a restaurant with his boyfriend just as I was leaving the break room, it was “Gay Guy Whose First Word was ‘Rapunzel.’” Walking over for a proper introduction, I said to my coworker’s boyfriend, “I’ll shake your hand.” Walking away, I said to myself, “I’ll shake your hand”?! Just about baffled by my own formality. Not that it felt formal with Sophie. From her, it was perfectly charming. Within seconds of taking our seats, one of the old queens in the row behind us said the words “Judy Garland impersonator.” Be a person who needs people, indeed. I’d seen Funny Girl before but, somehow, Austin hadn’t. Listening to her memoir as soon as it came out, Austin was just as riveted by it and would record certain passages to play for me. Sharing these asides and turns-of-phrase he knew would make me laugh. And he was never wrong. There was this old lady ahead of us, with spiky red hair and a dozen bangles on each wrist. She was by herself. And as Barbra began to sing “My Man,” I watched this lady pull out a tissue and wipe away her tears. She cried through the entire song. And I wondered who she was thinking about.
“The resilient child is one who knows his family’s history,” wrote Austin, in the message accompanying my Ancestry membership, a present from him to me for my last birthday. It was just a six month membership, not that I’m looking that gift horse in the mouth. It only took a couple days to learn when and whence my Irish-Catholic people first arrived and that the Conways were Pennsylvania coal miners while the Burnses were Manhattan clerks. And well aware those six months were soon drawing to a close, Austin asked me if one account can make multiple family trees. I was over the moon. Something I’ve noticed about southerners is they often don’t know very much about who they came from. Or, really, that they don’t care to know. Perhaps ignorance is bliss when your great-granddaddies were white men living below the Mason-Dixon. “Say goodbye to the next three hours,” I told him, setting my computer on his lap, knowing from experience just how quickly the time whiles away once that tree starts growing. My family only’s been in the country since the 1860s or so, when our Famine-surviving kin first washed ashore. Austin, meanwhile, has a 7th-great-grandfather named James C. Cornett who was born in 1727—in “Virginia Colony.” And there’s pictures to show for it. Not from colonial times but still. Coming across so many 19th century tintypes of his ancestors who had names like “Fielden” and “Hardin” and “Thankful.” And all of them looked universally terrifying. Austin was already shielding his eyes with his hand, too spooked to look these people in the face, when I asked, “Have you ever heard of post-mortem photography?” It’s my hope, with the work I do, that I might inspire perfect strangers to consider all the people who lived and died so that they could be here and now. I won’t call it my life’s work, not while I’ve got dreams still left to come true, but getting into bed that night—mission accomplished, prophecy fulfilled—I felt a sweet and creaking ache in my heart. Finished, I laid down beside my boyfriend and all the ghosts we know by name.
I dreamed I was leading the tour where I ask that question about speaking multiple languages at home. Except we weren’t in the museum, we were in the front yard of some house in the suburbs and my visitors weren’t sitting on circa-1970 plastic-lined couches but metal folding chairs. The sun was setting. One of my visitors in this dream was a Swedish woman with short black hair and I asked her to tell us about “your favorite traditional Swedish summertime song.” She looked down at her lap, silent and serious, for what felt like minutes. And then she began to cry. If she had an answer, if there was indeed some summertime song in her heart, she didn’t say. Choking on too many sobs to speak. And as I watched her stand up and leave the group, walking off into the sunset, credits suddenly began to roll. What I thought was just a tour, in fact, was a movie. And, as I remember, my dream’s film was called And So She Said.
On a Friday morning, Austin’s niece was born. His two older sisters have three children each now, two boys and a youngest girl for them both—with another baby on the way. His oldest sister Xan is pregnant, expecting her fourth this fall. Back when we were only friends, and Xan was expecting her very first, I offered to drive Austin down to North Carolina so he could be there for the birth. It was no simple task. I’d have to take two buses, one to Boston and another to New Hampshire so I could borrow my dad’s car and turn right back around, picking up Austin from Bushwick before setting off on our 600-mile journey down to Wilmington. I was so happy to do it. And not just because we were best friends who, in recent weeks, had started making out. It was late at night by the time we pulled into our destination’s driveway. Cutting the engine, we stayed in the car long enough for the lights to turn off. Sitting there in the dark, in the south, next to this friend who, with every passing minute and mile, had become something different, something more, I heard him whisper in my ear, “Thank you.” Those words might as well have been brand new. “Thank you.” They’d never sounded like that before, and they might never sound that way again. “Thank you.” Over the next couple days, I’d meet every single member of his family, including a newborn named Murphy. I hadn’t held a baby since I was 6 years old. Talking with his sister Hannah in the hospital hallway, just before we left for a drive around town, she said to us, to both of us, “Love you.” Her “love you” was so easy, so sincere, and I really only remember it because of how much it shocked me. That was five years ago. We’ve become something different now, Austin and I, we’ve become many somethings different, but all the same—“Thank you.”
On May 13th, 1993, thirty-one years ago now, my parents got married. Six months and a couple weeks later—and not a moment premature—I was born. The bride did wear white, albeit a white suit, an acknowledgment that this was a second marriage for them both and an accommodation of the bun in her oven. When our mother got together with my father, my oldest sister Jillian was 7 years old—but only technically. Streetwise from the jump, she was never “precocious” so much as “no bullshit.” So it didn’t take long before Jillian narrowed her eyes at this new baby brother and said, “Doesn’t it take nine months to make a baby?” Fittingly, she was first to mark the occasion that morning, texting our family’s group chat, “Happy anniversary, mom and dad!” They were flying home from a Caribbean vacation that day so it took a while for our mom to respond, eventually sending us a blurry picture of the movie she’d chosen for her inflight entertainment. “Watching Bub on our way home,” she said. With a beer tankard in my hand and period costuming on my person, there I was, during my star turn as an extra in Little Women. I never bring it up, mortified that anyone might think I’m at all impressed by my three total days as background talent. But, nevertheless, I am a part of things. In the film, circa 1861, I’m over Saoirse Ronan’s shoulder. And in their wedding photos, circa 1993, I’m behind my mother’s calla lily bouquet. If you know where to look, you’ll find me.
For the first time for both of us, Austin and I watched The Apartment. I loved it, and that ending most of all. It’s New Year’s Eve and Shirley MacLaine sits across from the adulterous boss who finally left his wife for her—but only because a jilted secretary spilled the beans. Longing for another man in an apartment on West 67th Street, the crown on her head and expression on her face all askew, it’s forlornly that she says, “Ring out the old year…ring in the new…ring-a-ding-ding.” The clock strikes midnight and the bar band begins to play, what else, “Auld Lang Syne.” There’s that song again. Hardly esoteric, I know, let alone for a scene very much playing out on December 31st, but still—it’s been following me around. Anyway, she leaves. And then there’s this shot, this absolutely thrilling shot of Shirley running down the street, past the many stoops and glowing window panes of a wintry Upper West Side. But the music’s changed. This race to happily ever after, it’s all horns and strings now, clashing bombast, interrupted only by a popped champagne cork briefly mistaken for a suicide’s gunshot. And even then, “Auld Lang Syne” would’ve been all wrong. It’s not about love’s promise, that sad, old song, it’s about love lost.
“We’ve got a plumbing emergency,” said Austin, in the middle of the night, waking me up as he got back into bed. Brown water was leaking through the air vent in our bathroom ceiling with soggy patches beginning to bubble up on the walls. With a raging, burdened sigh, I squeezed my eyes shut and passed the buck, leaving Austin to notify our upstairs neighbors and the guy who runs the preschool downstairs. Let alone our landlord who—say it with me, now!—lives in Australia. Turning on the light a couple hours later, I could barely see myself in the bathroom mirror, its surface totally obscured by the grimy residue from this ongoing mystery drip. Austin was leaving for work any minute but he’d already called the plumber and booked an appointment, making sure they had my number as the contact. All I’d have to do was get them in and out of our apartment. And I was apoplectic. Don’t feel too bad for me but this was my first day off after five days in a row at the museum and I was eager to get back to my writing, to having my own time back. Nothing matters more to me. But I also had this feeling. A feeling, deep in my punished Catholic heart, that God would laugh. And indeed—ha ha ha. But just when all hope seemed lost, the preschool owner came to our rescue. “There’s a swamp up here,” he texted us from the roof of our building. “A drain was clogged. I’m cleaning it out now and hopefully the leak will stop.” I could have kissed him on the lips. That night, I apologized to Austin, telling him I was sorry for getting so worked up. “Yeah,” he said. “Made me think, ‘Wow, I’m so happy I don’t revert to anger.’” Because while I cursed that leak, huffing and puffing, all too eager to attribute God’s will itself to my briefly inconvenienced day off, Austin couldn’t be bothered. A good man in my storm, that’s who he is. I should be so lucky.
Sitting on the break room couch with Jarod, he was telling me about this upcoming birthday party where he’d have to be in the same room as another friend he, purposely, hasn’t seen in a while. Familiar enough with his social circle, and connecting some dots, I said, “This is about so-and-so’s party, I presume?” Asking me how I knew about it, his face one big furrowed brow, I told him that I got a message from So-and-so a couple days earlier with an invitation to his birthday party. Doubled over, and just about gasping for air, like this was the funniest thing he’d ever heard in all his life, Jarod began to laugh and laugh and laugh. “Why would he invite you to his party?!” he asked, baffled, clearly, by this turn of events. Granted, I had only met this boy once before, at—incidentally—Jarod’s birthday party. So-and-so was sweet with a warm and open face but, upon reading the invitation, I was less than eager for the potential self harm of attending a not-yet-24-year-old’s birthday bash. Responding to his message, I said only, “Ooooooh!” Punctuated warmly with a balloon emoji but a noncommittal no all the same. I didn’t even think to bring it up with Jarod, not seeing it as anything but a thoughtful gesture from someone I didn’t know very well who nevertheless wouldn’t mind having me at his party. That doesn’t happen to me everyday. Once he caught his breath, Jarod explained why this was so funny to him. And, of course, it didn’t really have anything to do with me. It was social politics that had Jarod in stitches, that’s all. The invitation, not the invited. I understand that. But still, hearing that laughter cutting through the break room, it almost felt violent.
“Germs don’t have ghosts,” I said to my visitors on a Saturday afternoon tour, packed into the first floor hallway of the tenement. Standing a couple steps up on the stairwell, looming higher in the air than usual, I was doing my usual opening spiel. Telling everybody that they should avoid leaning against the walls or touching any of the apartment’s furniture but, with that signature air of irony which accompanies most all my workplace yuks, I said, “But you can touch the banister on our way up.” That, almost always, gets a laugh. But then, turning on a dime to gravitas, I tell everyone that this mahogany banister is totally original to the building, and that 7,000 people lived here over 72 years, and how that means, at one time or another, all 7,000 of those people would have also touched this banister. “So,” I’ll say, back to irony, “Join that history.” That, always, gets a laugh. And on this afternoon’s tour, one of my visitors riffed about 19th century handwashing, thus my quip. “Wait, no, ghosts don’t have germs,” I said, catching my mistake. “Or, I don’t know—do germs have ghosts? Are they just like us? Haunted by their past? What do we think?”
Twice in a week, we were up on 45th Street to see Broadway shows. The Outsiders on a Thursday night, The Wiz the following Tuesday. Getting off the C train at 42nd Street, both nights I walked up 8th Avenue and passed by a hotel called The Row. It’s been repurposed to serve as an intake center for migrants as well as a shelter. But only for so long. Mayor Adams’s time limit on shelter stays is still in effect. Whether you’re a single 20something or a family of five, after 60 days, you’re out. And then what? Then where? Whether they were outside by choice, or, most likely, that there are specific hours when they’re allowed inside their rooms, I don’t know, but I couldn’t even guess the number of people I walked past. Mothers sitting on the curb, rocking somehow-sleeping babies in little strollers, back and forth, back and forth. Grown men and teenage boys who were using the scaffolding as a place to rest, or do pull-ups, or just watch New York City pass them by. I wondered what they make of it. Of all these people with their $150 show tickets, pushing past with their false idea of New York aggressiveness, off to spend the next three air-conditioned hours watching actors sing and dance. Do they resent this? Or are we a fleeting glimpse of precisely what they came for? Peering at all these people, these coddled and virginal American faces, totally ignorant to the undeserved hand-out of their predestined birthplace. Or maybe they don’t pay much attention to us at all. Too uncomfortable, too sad, too disappointed to devote the energy to yet another white boy walking on by, off to see the wizard.
Later, back out on 45th Street in the midst of the post-show throng, we were waiting for the light to change when I felt someone’s nails scratch at my arm. I turn to see a middle-aged white lady with graying blond hair tied up on top of her head, not in a bun but in a sprout. Like a toddler. She’s got her face turned away from me but, all the while, her nails continue to graze my arm, gently enough, at first, to suggest familiarity. And I’m trying desperately to recognize her. My brain searching for the features that could place her as someone I know. Figuring she was a friend’s mom or a visitor from one of my tours that week. But then, with these sudden and rabid strokes, fierce enough to draw blood, this stranger clawed her nails at my arm. “Oh,” I said. Not that I remember. It was Austin who told me, once we were on the train, how I initially turned to this woman with friendly expectation, open and available—only for the sting of shock to strike my face. “Just the most prissy possible example of assault,” I said to Austin, already cackling at the absurdity of it all. Only in New York, kids, etcetera, etcetera. But it was bizarre. Because it was only after her touch took its wild turn that, finally, she looked at me, straight in the eyes, with this dull, curled-lip grimace. We couldn’t have been face to face for any longer than a couple seconds, a lone tick-tock before we crossed the street and walked away. But looking down at my arm, it wasn’t her red scratches I noticed but my goosebumps. Head to toe, I was covered in them.
“Okay, Challengers vibes,” said Kiera, our new roommate, the Tashi to our Art and Zweig, as we all got into a car and headed off to Al’s party. It’s only because of Al that we know Kiera at all, let alone live with her, introducing us early last year at another party of his. A party that inspired me to think, for the first time, and for reasons still mostly unknown, “I’m going to be younger at 30 than I was at 20.” Tonight’s get-together was both a release party and a bon voyage, with Al performing songs from his new EP at this Red Hook record store before shuttling off to Ireland, where he’ll be working in the kitchen of an impressive restaurant in some small little seaside town. Talking on the drive there about our respective political awakenings, but in a fun way, Austin told me to show a certain picture of myself to Kiera. “I was a very radical thirteen-year-old,” I explained, searching through my camera roll and handing her my phone. It’s summer 2007 in Washington D.C. and I’m in a skintight Hollister t-shirt with shoulder-length, sun-streaked, layered hair. I’m in front of the White House but that’s not why I wanted my Aunt Patti to take the picture. Instead, I’m kneeling down next to an image of George W. Bush with a badly photoshopped turban and beard, this protestor’s poster reading, THE REAL TERRORIST. Not the most culturally sensitive way, in hindsight, of calling a war criminal a war criminal. But smiling ear to ear, I clearly didn’t know any better. She loved it. Austin and Kiera have really hit it off, these first couple weeks of living together, but I’ve been quiet. Friendly, I hope, but a little aloof, I fear. But more than once that night, spotting her across the room, watching her in conversation with some other friend of our friend, I felt that signature little quick kick of affection.
Without a cross-breeze to be found inside the record store, and only getting hotter as more people kept piling in, we were flipping through albums when Al came up behind us. “Hi, girls,” he said. Sweet, sweet Al. He once said to me, on the occasion of, at that point, our four year anniversary, “Obviously, as I see it, you and I are two apples from the same branch. But every time I’ve talked to Austin, I feel struck by what a uniquely special and amazing person he is. (Slay.)” It’s true. My other half, and I’ve been so much better because of it. It was with Al, on this one night last summer, the three of us meeting up for drinks, when something broke. Sitting at a bench in the backyard of a bar called Doris, while Austin and Al had so much to talk about, I found myself tallying the seconds before either of them looked my way, let alone spoke to me. And all my pitying refrains, those diffident old chestnuts I thought I’d let go of, just like that, sounded new again. We, eventually, got into a fight about it. A fight we’d already had too many times. Bells can’t be unrung, I’ve learned that. But it’s worse still to keep on ringing them. A sad, sad song. Something, incidentally, that Al’s rusty, plaintive voice is so perfectly suited for. Introducing enough songs that night as “Okay, this is about a guy who broke my heart” for it to become something of a running joke. But even with the aid of his banter, I struggle with lyrics. Always a challenge for me to comprehend whatever I’m hearing. To my ears, it’s just nonsense. Puzzles I couldn’t even begin to finish. But perfectly, and without catching a single word, how I understood, “I’ll hold onto you just as tight as I can/Before it all blows up in the end.”
Hi Brian--I really love reading these essays each month. They are always beautifully written, well-observed, and touching. Thank you for sharing them!!
The part about the handshake reminded me of somethin you might appreciate-- A few months ago I met David Sedaris as part of my job. When he came off the elevator I greeted him with a handshake and he told me "YOU should teach a class on how to shake hands". I've always prided myself on a firm, but not overwhelming, handshake so he was speaking right to my heart. What I couldn't say to him in the moment is that it takes two people to make a good handshake. I mostly encounter bad ones and people can be weird about them anyway. So kudos to you & Sophie -- long live the handshake :)