Thwonk (2 page)

“Maybe you should try sitting on the intensity,”
Mom suggests, “just until your feelings catch up with reality.”

“We could chain you to the water heater,” Dad offers, “until these little moments pass.”

You see what I’m up against.

I’ve tried expressing my love life photographically—the smashed Orange Crush can lying in the middle of an empty playground is my favorite. I’ll be thinking I’m doing fine and then I see a couple float down the street, massively in love, and I remember being that way, even though it was fleeting. I remember feeling wanted and desirable and important and then the sadness comes crashing in and I review every guy who dumped me, all the way back to Marty Michler who laughed at the cupid Valentine I gave him in fourth grade and showed it to everyone at recess.

If you want to really know me you have to look at my photography, because my art and I are intrinsically tied. I was seven years old when photography and I collided in Italy. I looked through the viewfinder of my father’s Leica at the Leaning Tower of Pisa, tilted the camera until the Tower stood razor straight, and snapped. When the prints came back I was hooked by the power of a small machine that could fix a falling building. Dad bought me my own used 35mm, and I set out to capture all of life honestly through my lens.

Guys don’t understand great art. They don’t care that sometimes the camera has power beyond the photographer
to record emotion that only the heart can see. They’re threatened when the camera jumps ahead of me. Todd Kovich was ripped when I brought my F2 to the prom, but I’d missed too many transcendent shots over the years to ever take a chance of missing one again. A prom, I told him, had a boundless supply of photogenic bozos who could be counted on to do something base.

Few males appreciate the role of the artist in a crumbling world. But I held out great hope for Peter Terris.

I was standing at the kitchen door watching my father work. Dad was in another world, holding two boxes of ChocoMallowChunks cereal—the cherished new product of his biggest client, ChocoChunks International—holding them like a weary father would cradle newborn twins. He was carving out a new ad campaign and reaching into the core of his creative volcano to find something important to say about a children’s breakfast cereal that contained enough refined sugar to seriously alter a generation’s SAT scores. I thought about clearing my voice to let him know I was there. I thought about the hurt of the last few months that kept crashing in around us.

I leaned against the door silently as Dad gripped the cereal boxes and exhaled slowly, bonding with the product. This was how he taught me to approach photography:
“Entwine yourself with the subject,” Dad often said, “until its essence floods your being.” This was not always easy, but when I connected it was magic and I have the awards to prove it. I won the “Most Textural” ribbon at the Crestport Arts and Oyster Festival with my searing still life “Bowl of Bean Dip”; I cinched the coveted Northeast FotoFast Youth Photography Contest with “Tootsies,” my socko close-up of Betsy Manero’s brother’s toes.

Dad slapped the counter. “We’re going full bore!” he announced to the air. “Major PR all across America to announce the new cereal flavor. ChocoMallowChunks awards to young athletes. We’ll put their pictures on the box, highlight their families, how their parents got up before dawn for eight years to get them to the pool, ice rink, whatever. Poor slobs. We’ll get contests going in schools—the winners get parties with rock groups, the kids become local heroes. T-shirts, visors, chocolate iridescent scratch-and-smell stickers. We’ll saturate America with coupon madness!”

Dad stepped back, satisfied, as the kitchen clock tolled. He was a smidgen over six feet tall, dark and swarthy with an on-again, off-again mustache. Advertising is Dad’s second incarnation. He’d struggled as an independent filmmaker and sometime photographer for eleven cash-poor years, and came
so close
to making it. But each project went bust—budgets were obliterated, minds were changed, his photos almost sold. “Almost,”
as Dad says, “doesn’t pay the rent.” He cut bait on my sixth birthday, bought a suit, and “went commercial.” I hated that suit. He wore it like it was heavy armor for fighting dragons. I think he was battling more than he knew.

Dad took what he knew about filmmaking and went into advertising, where he has been very successful. He’s made Topper’s toiletbowl brushes dance with soul, turned Sparky’s toothbrushes into jet-propelled purple lasers, pitted Zitslayer acne gel against vampire pimples, and coaxed a chorus of EasyOn panty hose to sing like they really meant it. This is a person who can squeeze meaning from a stone.

He can also be obtuse.

When I made my ultimate announcement last November that I was going to be an artist, go to arts college, make my name in photography, Dad hit the roof. “A career in the arts has no security, A.J.,” he barked. “You will walk the streets alone, be kicked in the stomach time and again by cretins who have no clue as to what you’re trying to say. No daughter of mine is going to throw her life away!”

He stormed off with me shouting that we needed to discuss it and him shouting back that there was nothing to discuss. Mom tried to step in and make peace like she always does, but the battle lines had been drawn. That’s when the Wall went up between us—part silence, part pain. We’ve been like two porcupines passing in a narrow hallway ever since.

So I sent my college applications off to the “right schools,” the ones according to Dad that would give me the “right education,” praying they’d all hate me. And with my mother’s guarded permission I sent my finest photographic work off to several superior arts schools, not knowing what would happen if they accepted me. One night I saw Dad slumped in the family room staring at my first self-portrait (I was twelve) like he was hypnotized. I so wanted to ask him, “Do you think I have enough talent to make it, Dad?”

I didn’t ask him though.

Dad said when I got my first camera I arranged my shots with the controlling passion of a football coach calling the plays. I categorically deny this. Okay, so once or twice I pulled my parents apart when they were having one of their epic fights that happened after we first moved to Connecticut when Mom had to leave her catering business behind in Chicago because Dad had taken a big-muck advertising position in Manhattan and wasn’t around very much.

“All right, Mommy and Daddy,” I announced. “Hug each other and smile at the camera.”

Hugging didn’t help. What really helped was when I fell out of the big oak tree in the front yard and broke my arm. Mom and Dad were in marriage counseling then trying to rechannel their anger, but they stopped being angry quick at the pitiful sight of me screaming for mercy in the emergency room. I am allergic to pain. By the time the cast came off they were
cuddling and listening to jazz like the old days. I took a photograph of the cast (my first still life) and gave it to them on their anniversary. Mom cried when she saw it; Dad sniffed proudly and said it stood for brokenness and remembering what was important. It just goes to show you the eternal power of capturing a moment in time.

My biggest fear in life, along with drying up romantically, is not making it with my photography. When Dad and I used to take our cameras and go looking for pictures together, like we did over the summer—pounding the streets of New York City, shooting roll after roll of Fifth Avenue shoppers and broken-down taxis—I wanted to hug him and tell him how sorry I am that his passion can’t be his career.

“It’s my hobby now,” Dad insisted, “and that’s enough.”

If that happens to me, if I can’t make the world listen to what I have to say through my art, I think I’ll die.

Dad was staring at the boxes of ChocoMallowChunks cereal like they held the secrets to the universe. His phone rang; that’s when he noticed me.

I coughed. “Hi…”

Dad looked down and shoved his hands in his pockets. “I need to get the phone,” he muttered.

“Right.”

I flopped on the overstuffed kitchen couch and watched him go. I wondered what would happen to all
his films and photographs in the upstairs closet—the documentaries on homelessness and drug addiction, the funny short subjects, the half-finished romantic comedy, the boxes of slice-of-life photographs that speak volumes about the human condition. I wondered how you stop caring about what you’ve ached over, sweated over. I wondered if my father would ever trust me as an artist. I wondered if Peter Terris even knew I was alive.

I focused my F2 on a Valentine candy heart lying forlornly by the sink; warm light washed over it. I ate half the heart to add brokenhearted realism, and was standing on a stool for an aerial view when the phone rang, the answering machine clicked on.

“I hope,” said Pearly Shoemaker’s voice, “that you’re working on the Valentine cover shot, A.J….” She paused here for effect. Pearly was the angst-ridden editor of the Benjamin Franklin High School
Oracle
, the school paper where I toiled day and night as the principal photographer for absolutely no money. “Since,” she continued, “the rest of the edition can’t go to press without it! An edition I’ve been slaving over for six months!” I closed my eyes; I knew she wasn’t done. “If you’re
not
working on it, A.J.,
we’re all finished!
”

I moved in close with my macro lens for a broad, cartoon feel and clicked off three fast shots of the Valentine heart with half its life gone.

“
I’m working on it!
” I growled.

“
I know you’re there, A.J.!
” She said this snarling and hung up.

I should have known better than to ever get involved in this lame assignment. The Valentine edition was to be the biggest thing to hit love and high-school journalism since graffiti.

“I can see it!” Pearly had shouted, when she first approached me with the idea. “An entire edition about love and those tumultuous teenage years. It’ll be hundreds of pages, we’ll market it to local businesses—everyone will buy an ad, A.J., because who can say no to love? I’ll…I mean,
we’ll
be famous!” She went on to say that the
Oracle
, normally free, would be selling on Valentine’s Day for two dollars, cold cash, no credit, and for that the A. J. McCreary cover shot had to be perfect.

I groaned.

“Just do it, A.J.!” she snarled.

I’ve shot weird scenes through dark, murky filters, teenage couples hugging out of focus, a boy and girl kissing outside Petrocelli’s Poultry as Mr. Petrocelli hung two seven-pound roasters in the window. Pearly wanted something advertisers could relate to.

“Think Valentine’s Day, A.J.! Hearts, cupids…!”

“I don’t do cupids, Pearly. They’re trite.”

“Couples holding hands…”

“Primitive…”

“
Nothing weird!
” she shrieked. “
Nothing depressing! And absolutely nothing oblique or obscure!
”

“
What’s left?
” I yelled it.

“
Normal
, A.J.
Normal
is left!”

I don’t do normal. I have a reputation to uphold.

So I kept combing the streets of Crestport, Connecticut, looking for the essence of love to shoot when my own heart was ground into farina. I saw gray slushy sidewalks and February skies. I saw a little boy punch his sister in the stomach. I saw irritated shoppers, perfectly sculpted evergreens, and then I saw my worst nightmare—Peter Terris and Julia Hart walking hand in hand across Mariah Boulevard looking positively photogenic, oblivious to the winter muck clinging to their designer shoes. Peter brushed a strand of hair off Julia’s face and kissed her pink nose. Julia nuzzled his shoulder like a lovesick kitten. They floated past me, the Perfect Teenage Couple, oozing Valentine’s Day passion and
Oracle
cover potential.

I turned from the hated scene drowning in waves of sadness and sank behind an evergreen in epic despair.

“
What
,” I whispered to my mother, “
could possibly happen in forty-eight hours?
”

Mom gave me a we’ll-talk-about-this-later-but-since-you-asked,
a-lot
-could-happen look from behind the counter at the Emotional Gourmet. We’d been back and forth for weeks about whether I could survive alone in the house for forty-eight hours while my parents went to a gourmet convention in New Orleans. The fact that I was going to be eighteen in thirty-six days, moments away from consummate adulthood, had no impact.
They were leaving tonight and from all the angst, you would have thought they were dropping me and Stieglitz from a biplane onto an ice floe to survive by our wits until they returned. Mom adjusted the red satin Valentine heart above the cash register that matched the hanging heartlettes over the door, and nudged me forward to wait on the next customer. It was Saturday morning and the shop was packed, as usual.