Airmail, page 3
Thanks pal,
Kirsten
Dear last moment of letter thing,
This is the first time that I don’t drown out – give myself the benefit of the doubt that my value is getting muddled by my well-meaning bossy brain – that I don’t push that certain voice of mine into the dark water and hear it for a second whisper, Hey, hey, dummy (and I mean that in the nicest way), you are a rocket, you are the rocket, you are the coming that has came and come and will cream all over everything – hey, you are the best ever of this universe you sit in. For really real. And so are they, and so is she, and him and it, and him and you, so no wonder you want to eat her/him/them. But you don’t have to kill him to do it.
Try something.
Dear my first time,
You have made a true shapeshifter out of me, transcending way beyond anywhere LSD could ever bring me, or any musical performance has ever dared to go. What’s so magical and mystical about this is it is for real. A creation made from inside my body, not just metaphorically inside my mind and heart. Created inside, out of love and a desire to expand. Bringing me in line with the universal truth of creation and in step with all female mammals who have walked this earth before us. This is life.
As I write this letter, I am beginning to realise that in this first time with you lives a connection to most other significant first times in my life. There also seem to be many ties to Los Angeles. It may be because I am sitting at a table in a funny coffee shop on Sunset Boulevard near where I used to live fifteen years ago, so the memories are all flooding back to me, and it’s also because I spent some formative coming-of-age years here.
The first and only time I moved away from the North East, where I grew up, I moved to Los Angeles in 1996. I was twenty-four years old and playing bass in a female-dominated rock band. A chapter that defined who I am today. Your mother. It was before the internet, when all my friendships and romances were built on landlines and postcards. Real things. Connected-in physical things, just like you and me.
The first time a friend I loved and trusted shot heroin in a house that I lived in was here in Los Angeles. It was a terrible turn for this woman I loved, which led to a tragic period in her life and a decade of a fractured friendship between us. This week I am staying at her house and you will shyly play with her daughter. It’s healing. We are women and girlfriends on the mend . . .
This is not my first time writing to you. When I was six months pregnant with you, my friends threw me a baby shower. I Scotch-taped a black-and-white ultrasound photo of you inside me to the outside of a diary notebook and titled it ‘Messages for Future Her’. I asked our guests to write you a message. I continue to take notes about your first steps, the return of my period and other significant happenings between us in this notebook. It will be yours to read in the future, and I will include a copy of this letter in there too.
The first time I went to a meditation retreat was when I lived here in Los Angeles. My father was dying; I was flying back to the North East regularly and doing my best to keep grounded back on the weird West Coast. Shortly after the retreat I had my first, and only, experience of losing a parent. I sat with him and was with him till the end. I rubbed his forehead to sleep, like I do with you. Within twenty-four hours of his death, I recognised his death as a gift. A freeing of my heart, an opportunity to expand in my ability to love and in my faith in love. My father’s untimely death during the formative years of my womanhood affected my course dramatically. I am certain I would not have fallen in love with your father the way I did and continue to do today.
I am a product of a one-night stand between my mother and father. I believe you do choose your parents from ‘up above’. My opportunity for human life was only an hour gateway. My father didn’t know I existed before I was three, but he fell in love with my mother on the spot when she broke the news to him and stayed in my life from there on out. Weekends, take-out food, TV, fun games. Although a non-traditional love connection between us all, we really loved each other.
It was love at first sight between your father and me. Something I had not believed in much since I was a teenager. Within an hour of meeting him, I suspected he was my life partner. Within forty-eight hours I held his hand and told him so. He didn’t flinch and seemed to agree. Within a month I had moved in. This month we are celebrating seven years since that day.
I took my first acid trip at the age of twelve. The trip was very simple. I remember hallucinating some odd shapes and movements in the wood-panelled walls of the basement riding camp quarters, and that the dark of night outside seemed quite bright, but my clearest memory of the trip is rocking a baby doll with blinking eyes back and forth for most of the night. I haven’t asked a doctor, but I think young minds are naturally prone to hallucinations and in a sense it is easier for them than it is for an older person set in their ways to adjust to the shift of consciousness. I aim to keep this flexibility of consciousness for the rest of my life. Please tell me if I don’t. You can call me on it. I may need you to. Although it’s only been sixteen months, I can feel that motherhood could trick one into too much structure, rigidity and routine. I don’t want to get stuck, for your sake and mine.
I was not the young girl who promised the universe that I would do this. In fact, I took all precautions to be sure this did not happen before you. In my ‘days of wild’ and coming into womanhood, I was a great advocate of making out with as many people, as often, as you like, but I was, and still am, adamant about safe sex. Not only for the obvious STD reasons, but I was not going to face the need to abort anyone arriving inside too soon. I knew I would wait until later in life to be a mother and only if the circumstances called for it poetically and perfectly. So many friends having babies before me said, ‘You can’t plan it’ or ‘It will never be the right time.’ I still don’t agree with that thinking. At least, for me, I did wait and I did plan. Right man, right place, right time. Got pregnant the first week of opening the floodgates. We three were very lucky.
In 2003 I signed to Capitol Records. It was the first time I was signed to a record label for my own work. The president of the label brought me to see Radiohead at the Hollywood Bowl. As he drove me back to my hotel in his fancy sports car, I explained to him that the reason I make music is to become a better person, to become a fulfilled person, so that I can love better and be a better girlfriend to someone one day, so that I can be a good mother to someone some day. He said he had worked with many musicians for many years and he had never heard that reasoning before. I was not trying to prove or impress; I was simply trying to share with him what my motives were, since we were in business together and he appeared to be the man who had control over just how far my voice would be heard. This was after the internet had stepped into play, but it was not what it is today. There was MySpace and bands had websites, but that’s about it. This man and the sports car held the cards and purse strings.
The first time I believed that there was a true beauty or ‘higher collective power’ to a thing like Twitter was when I was introduced to Amanda Palmer on it. We were both stranded by the Icelandic volcano dust cloud. I was in Finland and she in Iceland, both trying to get to London. We were introduced by mutual followers on Twitter. We tweeted back and forth and hatched a plan to meet for the first time when we reached London. The hotels were all a mess due to the thousands of grounded travellers. We had a sleepover in a single bed at the house where she was staying. We stayed up to 6 a.m. talking about music, love and life directions. We agreed we could have it all: a career, a profound love and a child one day. She is why I was invited here tonight and why I have been diligently sculpting this letter to you. She inspires me to make more music, to be a person of action and to fulfil my dreams, all of which will make me a better mother.
Dear River Eve Auf der Maur Stone,
You are my first child. You have the most beautiful smile I have ever experienced. Your eyes are wolf blue. The house we live in was built in 1850. It is the first house I’ve lived in for longer than one year since I moved out of my mother’s house over twenty years ago. The kitchen we cook in is the first one that I’ve made more than a dozen meals in. I’ve never cleaned so much or done so many terribly domestic things since arriving there. It has changed me. It prepared me for you. It is also the house I gave birth to you in . . . It happened in our upstairs living room, overlooking the Hudson River and the Catskill Mountains. I love cats, but it would seem, at this early stage of your life, you prefer dogs. Woof Woof!
Dear summer camp,
I was nineteen years old. It was the year 2000. According to every science-fiction movie we had officially arrived at ‘the future’. Across the world, we were still pretending we hadn’t cared about the Y2K Bug in the first place. And for the first time in history Prince’s song ‘1999’ had lost its sense of hope.
I saw an advertisement seeking camp counsellors in the US of A. I had camped and counselled. I had heard very positive things about American summer camps: ‘Dude, you just sit around the lake, and like sneak off and party at night, and because all the kids are rich, you get mad tips from their parents at the end of the encampment!’ I thought, I like mad tips. I like working lakeside. I like sneaking and partying. It sounded perfect.
The application form was straightforward enough. I applied for the position of drama teacher, obviously. I had been to a performing arts high school, after all, so my confidence was sky high, while my qualifications were gutter low, but such is the ego of the performing arts student that I wasn’t going to let ‘aptitude’ stand in the way of my opportunity to be an inspiration to children.
I had to specify in which types of camps I wouldn’t be willing to work. I was probably going to be placed at some rich camp in Colorado anyway. I was probably going to be looking after the president’s kids. They were probably going to invent an award for me, I’d be so good at this job, so this all felt like a mere formality. I didn’t tick a box. I didn’t need to.
My letter of acceptance (obviously) came about a month later. I opened it: Camp Mariah! I’d nailed it! I was going to be at Mariah Carey’s camp. I put on ‘Hero’, recognised myself in the song and read on. My title: general camp counsellor. They hadn’t even used capital letters. ‘General? Like, everyone else general? Like, not promoted above anyone, and no specific role general?’ All right. That’s all right. I like being with the common folk. I mean, they were still going to be celebrity children, so I’d still be in the presence of the upper class. I’d never met an upper class before. I’m from a town of 800 people, our family stove needed ‘stoking’ and we had an outside, non-flushing toilet until 1991. It’s probably called a ‘colonial retro outhouse’ these days, but back then it was called ‘disgusting’.
I then saw that Camp Mariah was not, in fact, a celebrity camp. It was designed for disadvantaged kids from New York. Mostly for kids whose parents couldn’t afford to have them at home for the summer.
Well, at least I’d be paid in sweet Americano dollars! But back then the Australian dollar was as weak as a nanna’s ankle, and after some incredulous calculations I figured I’d be earning a whopping US$20 a day. That’s not even $1 an hour. You can’t find parking that cheap! What kind of slave labour bullshit had I signed myself on for? Here, the fantasy got real.
To break down an average day at camp:
From 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. I was the swimming teacher’s assistant. They didn’t even give me a cape or a tutu. What’s the point in being an assistant if you can’t make it feel like Vegas? Then lunch. Then I was the music teacher’s assistant from 2 to 5 p.m. Then from 5 p.m. at night until 9 a.m. the next day I was personally responsible for putting to bed, feeding, waking, dressing and organising six 11-year-old boys. And no disrespect to those little darlings, but they stank. That’s what happens when you’re about to go through puberty: you stink. You stink for about seven years, and you don’t know it. You smell like growing, and awkwardness, and poor personal hygiene, and hormones, and social over-compensation. And I had six of them in one wood cabin in a town in upstate New York called Fishkill. How appropriate. They accidentally forgot to hire enough male counsellors, so they had to select a handful of strong women, hoping that the inmates, or ‘campers’, wouldn’t notice the difference. Well, they did. How do I know this? Hmm, it was probably those three times I caught the same one masturbating under the sheets as the lights went out. I lay terrified behind my secure partition about 2 feet away.
‘Guys! I can hear something. What’s going on?’
‘Yo, my leg’s just itchy.’
‘Well, scratch it and go to sleep, please!’
Pause.
‘Guys! I can hear footsteps. Is someone out of bed?’
‘Yo, I need some lotion for my bites.’
If there’s anyone not following, the lotion was not for his bites.
We had our tea and coffee downgraded to decaf, because the kids shared the same breakfast area and they were developing a habit. We had our sugar taken away from us. There was a fish in the lake that bit one of the kids on the nipple. I was comfort-eating a full packet of chocolate chip biscuits as often as I could – you’ve got to put the sadness somewhere (a-yum-yum-yum – sure, kids, that doesn’t hurt my feelings at all – yum-yum-yum).
But as much as I wanted to hate on this place, the kids were fucking hilarious. Is there any greater challenge than when you’re trying to discipline a child and what they’ve said is so funny you can’t keep a straight face?
Once I said we were all going to learn a four-part harmony, and before I had time to start my next sentence one of the kids yelled out, ‘What’s this “we” business? Why you speaking French on me?’
Somebody get a talent scout down there. I was taking notes.
Another time a twelve-year-old camper named Star got in a fight with fifteen-year-old boy. As she was being pulled off him, she turned back around and said, ‘You wanna fight, my pussy’s over here.’ I admired the confidence, if I’m honest. I didn’t have the nerve to call it a pussy until I was about twenty-eight.
But after three months, an emotional breakdown and a 20-pound weight gain, there was a light at the end of my chubby tunnel. That sounds gross and I’m sorry. A camera crew was coming to the camp on the day that Mariah would visit. Our music class would sing an Aboriginal song I had taught them, and it would be broadcast on the local news.
We drilled these kids. When they were parched and raspy as they sung the final verse for the trillionth time I’d say, ‘Well, we can stop now . . . if that’s how you want to sing it in front of Mariah?’ Passive aggression is an incredible motivational tool.
And then the big day came.
I shoe-horned myself into the few remaining clothes that fit me. I tried to create some sort of follicular distraction from the 3-inch black roots that were founding my platinum-blonde hair. Don’t judge me; it was the new millennium. I was trying something else.
The camera crew turned up. I looked casual. I asked about Mariah Carey, or MarCar, as I’d abbreviated it to. She was running late. But I wanted her to see this. She needed to see this. After all I’d been through. I tried to busy the crew, telling them the story of the nipple fish and other riveting tales. But they had to film. So we sang. And those little legends did me proud. And it aired the week after camp had finished.
Mariah never did turn up. She had a breakdown or something. Bit selfish. But after the camp was finished, I and two other Australian camp counsellors sat in a hotel room and watched as the song came on. And they heard it. And they looked at me. And they said, ‘You taught them the wrong words.’
Not only did I not meet Mariah or earn enough money to cover my flight, not only did I break a personal best in weight gain, but I was, in essence, a televised racist.
They never asked me back to that camp. It was indeed my first and last time.
So I don’t necessarily miss you, summer camp, but I will never forget you and those brilliant, hilarious kids.
Yours sincerely,
Felicity Ward
Dear national anthem,
Hello. I am writing because, to be blunt about it, you could use some work, and I wish I had written you. I know, I know, millions of Americans get misty-eyed when they hear you sung – I’ve used the phenomenon to close scenes in a couple screenplays I’ve written. But people also get misty-eyed when they hear Lynyrd Skynyrd’s ‘Free Bird’, a very good anthem in its own right, but ineligible for national purposes until the invention of the electric guitar. Now, I know you’ve got a bit of an inferiority complex because people prefer ‘America the Beautiful’, and some even think it is our national anthem, but let’s face it – you are too fucking hard to sing. A national anthem should be something that the people – the caterwauling, tone-deaf, karaoke-after-three-drinks masses – can hit all the notes of without being Beyoncé or Placido Domingo. And even when it’s a solo, people at public events wait for those high notes like they’re watching daredevil Evel Knievel try to jump his motorcycle over twenty-five burning pickup trucks in a Las Vegas parking lot – will he make it this time or will he wipe out? I’ve heard those notes screeched or swallowed too many times, and yes, it’s thrilling when somebody nails their landing, but we want to sing along.
