“Sorry about the wait,” I say to Zekria, the Afghanistan immigrant whose Lexus is taking me home from a wedding at Fort Baker in Sausalito, “there’s a wedding going on up there,” I indicate the glowing second story of the beautiful coastal mansion I’ve just exited, “and we’re all in the adorable idiot phase of drunk.”
“Not a worry,” Zekria tells me. “I like an excuse to drive over The Bridge.”
As the car glides smoothly into the autumn night (it’s not even 8 pm yet) I register that I am much more sauvignon blanked than I’d realized, probably due to have downed one last glass while hastily making my goodbyes to the groom, the bride, and the various strangers I’d chatted with over the course of the afternoon. Seated at dinner between the wedding singer (in from New York) and the head bridesmaid’s plus one (her sister) in from Seattle, I’d morphed into the kind of Jovial Gay ™ that I usually only become for intelligent, beautiful women at parties because I’m too old to give these pearls to swine, and the only people I knew at this wedding were busy getting married. Making my exit before the general rush and while things were still going strong, I reflect that while juggling both conversation partners had ultimately resulted in several moments of unexpectedly sincere connection, what got me to dinner was an ongoing text exchange with my Two Man Movie Club partner, and an initial courageous encounter with two other guests, both named Katie, who I watched selfie one another on the balcony while I sweated through my Pierre Cardin dress shirt/sweater combo and waited for the sun to dip behind the mountains of Marin.
“It’s bad form to leave when they have my name on a table, right?” I had texted at one point shortly after the ceremony, only on my second glass of Eos and already feeling like everyone else could tell I was there alone. In my peripheral vision the Katies were getting shots of themselves with the Bay in the background, laughing at an ongoing discourse that clearly predated this moment by two or more decades. Both women were elegantly dressed in one-piece black evening gowns, at once chic and just a little blousy, like a pair of matching tornadoes disguised as Halloween witches. “The Bay looks like a painting,” I added, as sailboats dotted the turquoise waves, serenely undulating under a blue sky, the afternoon surprisingly hot though only an hour from sunset and two weeks from Thanksgiving.
“We certainly live in a beautiful place,” I was texted back, and the jet stream from a passing airplane sliced the sky with silver.
So “Our lives are kind of amazing,” I had agreed, “They have stories, which is kind of all there is,” and my mind returned to what, exactly, would be the content of this very post, which I had been planning but avoiding all week. Having turned 45 on Tuesday, I knew I was obligated to have something like coherent thoughts about it all, but so far they had largely escaped me. Probably because I had spent every night of the three days before and since then engaged in social activity. Also, drunk.
Sometimes, it’s hard to know the difference between Really Living and just a very full calendar played out against generally good scenery and lighting. Especially in Northern California.
Inside the house, the string quartet was playing “Beauty and the Beast” when I had texted, “There are these two women here who I think also don’t know anyone else, because they keep taking photos of just each other. I’m trying to work up the courage to friend them,”
Saturday to Saturday, my Seven Days Of Celebrating began with hosting a couple of friends over a bottle of wine at my place before heading down to the SF Symphony to see Augustin Hadelich perform a Dvořák concerto and everyone else play Mussorgsky as illustrated by two local artists, Liz Hernandez and Fernando Escartiz. Sunday saw me back to work, ticket taking for the SF Opera’s opening of OMAR, which was followed by a dinner thrown for the entire staff by the board. With the opening being a matinee this meant I had dinner relatively early and thus was low-key delirious when, at 1:40 PM on Monday, I finally got my birthday physical’s blood tests done and was able to cease fasting. Walking into the Victoria Pastry, just a few blocks north of my phlebotomist, I was so pale from having not eaten or drunk anything but water for over twenty hours that the woman at the counter immediately sat me down with a coffee, a complimentary croissant, and an order not to move until the color returned to my cheeks. She even charged my phone, which had gone dead, and which I needed to summon a car to transport myself and the birthday cake for 40 that I was supposed to be picking up.
When the Lyft arrived the driver was a young man named Alexander, fresh from Brazil but slated for a short stay in San Francisco. A boxer, he was hoping to find a home in Scandinavia when he goes there next month for a fight. “I just don’t want to live in America, anymore,” he told me as the car climbed Nob Hill to the crest of Huntington Park, “Any part of it. North or South. Really, this whole side of the world. It’s just too impossible.” And thus was he living by his wits for a month, just trying to make enough to get anywhere but here. Still he was curious about my own accommodations, which lead to me mentioning that while I was a couple hundred short of rent (something I’d figured out that morning), I had also just picked up a $160 birthday cake.
“Why are you spending money on cake,” Alexander snorted, “when you can’t afford rent?”
And though I could have told him that normally I could afford rent, it was just everything else that kept costing me money I didn’t have, or that debt was where the bulk of my paychecks went and the real problem was that I couldn’t afford my debt (which is America in a nutshell), what I replied was both Truth and Wit: “I’m only going to turn 45 once, but I’ll be short on rent many times in my life.” Then, in a moment of self-actualization, I posted on Facebook that if folks were considering buying a paid subscription to my Substack, now was definitely the time. Almost immediately, two paid subscriptions came through. Then a third and a fourth, so that by the time I headed over to the Royale that evening, I’d suddenly sold eleven subscriptions. “Merry Stuartmas!” a handsome actor proclaimed when he arrived at the party, where the black and white cake vanished as well-wishers came and went. For a Monday night the event was very much a success, and ended shortly after ten when I was walked across the street holding leftovers by an actress who had most recently played an Empress I’d written for her. On Tuesday she joined myself and three other friends for dinner at BAIA before we attended OMAR and eventually ended up on stage, after the performance, champagne glasses in hand, staring together at that giant golden chandelier gloriating against the azure dome of the ceiling. Standing before 3000 empty chairs, unable to deny that for all my challenges my life is pretty blessed, I had once again found myself thinking of the task before me, and wondering if it was impossible.
Because after all, paid subscribers or not, what am I trying to do here? Not just on this week, where a milestone birthday necessitates some kind of reflection (right?), but with my writing in general, which seems to be stumbling farther and farther from theatrical toward some kind of memoire/culture statement, not counting all the poetry you’re not seeing (and yes, two poems were crafted, with divergent success, meditating on the gravitas of being 45). Well, if we’re going to ask that we might as well ask what am I trying to do with my whole life, I suppose, as that seems to have become, unapologetically, my direct source material. Certainly a prime motivation is to make sense of it all, to try and turn those constant ups and downs into something that feels like they’re a path towards something and not just the convulsions of a rollercoaster caught in a doom loop. As I explained to My Favorite Ex while we sit over drinks at the Pilsner on Thursday, some part of me believes what I write will come to be True, if I can just figure out the exact words and the right combination of contemplation and reportage to render that spiral down the drain into a fountain of rejuvenation.
“You’re looking for a spell,” he told me, “But you’re a little dubious of magic these days,” the street lights spilling onto the window seat we filled, “Including your own.”
Back at the wedding, now past dinner, I was standing at a cocktail table with the singer, her husband, and two of the groomsmen, when we all started trading tales of financial hardship while watching three dozen forty-somethings dance to “Don’t You Want Me Baby?” like there was prize money for whoever cast off the shackles of suburban parenthood farthest. The stories, most of which concern what budget had to be pillaged to create the budget to attend this wedding, what favors called in from friends and families, are less about money woes than they are about uncertainty. Admitted within them is the fear that if we’re not failing yet, we will be soon, whether that’s reflected in bank accounts or other aspects of an adult life that we are no worse at managing than our predecessors, but infamously more anxious about. And yet, within each of these yarns, there is a spark of defiance, of determination to live while we can, to live now, to live happy, and most of all to be there, for one another and ourselves. Weddings, birthdays, funerals: each is rendered an act of defiance against meaninglessness, each an assertion that we are here, were here, will be here. Too old to not have some kind of baggage, it is in the comparison that our universal quest reveals itself and forms bonds between us even if just for a single celebratory night.
Sigh. I think there’s a line about that in RENT.
When I step outside to enjoy that last glass of wine one of the Katies approaches to “check in” on me and before I know it we’re deep into a conversation about change, about friendship, about the sorority sisters she and the other Katie were hoping would show up, just as they have, to support the bride on her special day, but for various reasons, it’s just the two of them. Still, they have been fully committed to having a good time in spite of whatever shadows linger over the other days of their lives, and it’s true that they’ve sort of swept the wedding, becoming temporary celebrities, charming all who cross their paths, including the sister of the head bridesmaid. I’d secretly already ordered my Lyft but had forgotten about it until he’s on the street below, flashing his lights while he texts me, wondering where I am. As I start to pull away, the other Katie arrives and insists we do a selfie, especially after I read them the exchange on my phone between myself and Movie Man #2. Photo taken, I bolt down the stairs to the car waiting below.
As the Lyft pulls up in front of my home, I tell Zekria, with whom I have chatted the whole way across the bridge and through The Presidio, “I’m going to write about you,” and he laughs and asks me how he’ll ever be able to read it. “I’m very Googleable,” I tell him, “and I’ll use your real name,” before stepping out of the car, into a blast of wintry wind that makes me think the dress shirt/sweater combo was, in fact, the right choice after all.
And then it hits me that thirty years ago, I was fifteen. Thirty years ago, I was almost a man. Thirty years later, I am one. And thirty years from now?
I open the front gate of my building, and defy
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Hello!
Thank you for reading!
So, in a moment of just, fuck it, I'll give it a try, I am finally doing that thing people keep saying I should do and giving you the chance to support my writing.
If you liked what you read today and would like to show that gratitude in cash money, you can help keep this middle-aged single writer turned food equity coordinator/usher/online content creator/social media manager in the black. I accept Zelle (it's my phone number), PayPal (@stuartbousel), or CashAp ($Bousel) and I leave it up to you to decide what to give. You can also get a paid subscription to my Substack. I offer multiple options- two year, one year, and month to month subscriptions. All of them help.
Obviously, I'm not going to put anything behind a paywall and I'm honored you read anything I write at all. I'm going to try to write something here every Sunday/Monday, around this time, and if you have thoughts or feelings you'd like to share with me to write about I'd love that.
Be well. Reach out. You are a light.
Stuart
Haha, Stuart, there's a line about that in a bunch of things so thanks for yours. Glad you had a defiant happy birthday and I may borrow some while I face mine with a bigger number this week.
Lovely writing, as always. And I’m pleased to hear the Pilsner is still around!