Cary Randolph writes.

We squared off...

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 22:37:04 -0400

…in front of his sister Lisa’s Celica on that slow, hot afternoon, I with the throb of a mosquito bite desperate to be scratched. Already July, the summer had settled into that eternal shuffle from bed to yard, from sofa to pool, and back again until days did not move forward or back but rather in figure-eights with the Sega console acting as crucifix. At that hour Lisa had turned us out of the house, so dire was her need for absolute silence during Days of Our Lives. Now we loitered, throwing rocks at the mailbox and dragging our Keds along the edge of the driveway where concrete collided with crabgrass. I was seven years old - more concerned with chasing sisters on my pink and yellow Huffy than chasing boys - and he, this boy, was not merely a boy but the babysitter’s kid brother. He was smarmy, and he left empty potato chip bags in the pantry, and when I dared to claim shotgun, he reaffirmed his omnipotence and the futility of my mortal dreams with tear-inducing Indian rug burns. Anthony was the bane of my summer’s existence.

“I dare you to say a bad word,” he said, leaned against the hood of the Celica, chin aloft.

I hesitated. I ran through my father’s laundry list of preferred outbursts, uttered, for the most part, in his Marlboro smoke-filled basement office or while chipping wiffle golf balls in the backyard or attempting to start the outboard motor, untangle the garden hose, replace the record player needle, reorganize his collection of 45s that I had carelessly strewn across the living room floor, scrape melted Crayola crayon off the car seat, spread fertilizer on the lawn, fix my bicycle chain, fix the screen door, beat the Dow, quit smoking, survive another church service, survive another hangover, pick up another bag of ice, unearth his cummerbund, hitch up the boat trailer, discipline my latest shenanigan. But where words should have been I only heard cicada drone. Finally I showed my cards. “Damn,” I said. I might as well have brandished a couple spades, a club, nothing adding up to 21.

“Damn?” Anthony sneered.

“Yeah, now it’s your turn.” No way he could beat my D word.

He crossed his arms and propped one foot on the fender, a nine-year-old James Dean. Somewhere down the street a lawn mower blade hit a pebble patch, and inside my house the refrigerator door opened and shut. Anthony didn’t miss a beat.

“Fucker,” he said.

“Fucker?” What kind of bullshit was that?! Oh, but now, after I’d had my turn, I could finally remember “bullshit”. A reticent rebel, this girl.

“Yeah, fucker. It’s the Worst Word.”

Lisa emerged from the living room. Days was over, and I had a coloring book to fill. “Fucker” was forgotten.

August came. My cousins clattered down the dock at Point Breeze, their fishing poles of no more use, the crab trap full, and the sun setting. There were oyster shells to dip in Day Glo colors (for necklace stringing), cookies to sneak from the pantry, string beans to snap off the vine. I had to run to keep up with my mother, who might have carried the bait box or maybe just carried my kid sister, and when I finally did catch up, I employed my preferred method of seizing her attention: I swatted her on the ass until she paid attention.

“What’s up, Noodle?” she asked.

What was up was my raging curiosity so without warning, without lowering my voice, without any regard for the significance that these few seconds and fewer syllables would have as a bookmark in my childhood and her loss of a first, an oldest, a baby, I said simply, “What does ‘fucker’ mean?”

And that, reader, is the first time I ever said the F word.

But it should...

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 14:27:29 -0400

caryrandolph:

…come as no surprise that this born Yankee with a Southern accent sometimes does not quite know where she belongs. A couple months ago I was on the phone with my mama. I asked her where in the world she is happiest. She said, “Back home. Hanging out on the deck in Irvington, [Virginia], drinking Jack Daniels, and looking out onto the water.”

“And when you are at home in Missouri?” I asked. “Because you’re only ever in Irvington a couple weeks each year.”

“Sitting by the pool,” she said. “And drinking Jack Daniels.”

My mother has spent twenty-one years searching for water.

If you pull a rubber band tightly enough it will either break or spring back, popping into the air between your fingers. So too do I feel stretched sometimes between the one and the other, the y’all-drawlin’ ruffian running barefoot through land-locked Jasper County and her Eastern seaboard-obsessed twin.

When I moved to the city a new friend took me to my first Rangers game. I told his friends upon introduction, “Well, I was raised in Missouri, but I’m technically from Connecticut.”

“Don’t tell them that,” he said. “Missouri makes you different. Own it.”

That was six months ago, and still I beat on, my boat against the current. I run and I run and I run, and I live on an island, yet I can never seem to find any water.

Four weeks into my Hamptons...

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 14:12:47 -0400

caryrandolph:

…marathon training schedule, and I have already slipped from my rah-rah enthusiasm of day one. Last week (the third for those of you who can subtract), I ran just two days out of seven. Two. I didn’t loll on the sofa all week; there was certainly a fair amount of romping and wave-diving and skateboard-shredding, but when the sun set on Sunday evening and left me to face my margarita and paperback sans sweat, I felt like a big fat loser, emphasis on the fat part.

Therefore come Monday I determined to put serious mileage behind me. I hit the Hudson River Park just as the sun touched the Jersey skyline…and just as a couple of fake-baked Abercrombie brosephs rounded the corner at 41st.

Normally when boys catch up to me on the trail I let them pass. Not all are faster, of course, but most of them breeze by, and I chalk it up to biology. However these two gents, if gents they be, jogged at such a pace that if you had pushed your baby stroller in the opposite direction, you’d have rightfully assumed that I in my 2004 frat tee and these Hollister models were running together, like we were friends or some other nonsense. Bitches, please.

So I did what I always do when girls close in on my heels. I dropped a cinder block on my mental gas pedal and crept past Bill and Ted. Read this bullshit! They picked up the pace! They tried to keep up with me! And for a while they almost had me beat. One would sneak ahead and then glance over his shoulder at his manpatriot with this look of complete disdain, like, who does this girl think she is but maybe I should ask for her digits, and then I’d pull in front as if to say, Ask me out, I dare you. We’ll go to TGIFriday’s, and then he would pass me, and back and forth, and I don’t even remember what I was blasting on the iPod at the moment that helped me run so fast, but I’m pretty sure it was Akon, which makes sense because Akon always makes me hustle due to its aural equivalency of a Bacardi and Coke, and then finally - finally! - I stopped feeling their brosephness in such close and sweaty proximity, and I looked deep into the recesses of my periph. Once again and happily, I was running alone.

I've had this experience only...

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 14:11:47 -0400

caryrandolph:

…once or twice in my adulthood: full awareness in a small, private moment, that my heart, once thought full, has gained capacity. It feels most like those last few seconds before welling tears become a real cry, but this is not the feeling of catharsis (as a good cry should be), not the feeling of letting something go. It is literally the sensation that your heart has become enlarged, has taken on the blessing (never a burden) of heavier weight, of greater responsibility, of space where there had previously been none, of matter - once thought to be neither created nor destroyed - now existing, now expanding, now rushing fast in what is literally a cage, but defying that cage, bursting past it, becoming more, more, when you had long since grown comfortable with whatever you had. What you had, of course, was plenty, was fine. But what you have now, in this moment and ever after until it happens again, is even better.

Cary Randolph: Live from New York

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 14:11:23 -0400

Cary Randolph: Live from New York:

caryrandolph:

After twenty-four years of scribbing, dreaming, and drafting my Great American Novel in covert at-work emails, I can finally call myself a professional writer. As of today I am my hometown newspaper’s freshest blogger-at-large, reporting from the trenches of Murray Hill, Midtown, and Madison Square (among other frequently frequented ‘hoods). Although the material is definitely penned with my fellow Missourians in mind, feel free to peruse more of my Manhattan musings and find out (finally) where [Hometown] really is and the hard truth about my last name. (Hint: it isn’t Randolph.) Mazel tov to me, and cross your fingers for a book deal!

caryrandolph: I had not planned to go out on January 27, 2005,...

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 14:10:51 -0400

caryrandolph:

I had not planned to go out on January 27, 2005, but of course those nights always take a turn for the most memorable. I wore a black Lacoste polo, Seven jeans, and red lipstick. I stepped back from the mirror, that sparkling, never smudged Delta Gamma bathroom looking glass, and decided that my look needed something. Kick. So I took my comb, and I staked out the point smack dab between my eyebrows and a couple inches above, and I raked the comb back, plowing a line a la Moses between the creative and analytical sides of my cranium. Thus was born my unconditional, oft-volatile love affair with the center part.

The bash, by the way, was a phenomenal affair hosted by several strapping young varsity baseball players. We ripped hot pink Bacardi shots and snapped many incriminating photos, a few of which you see above. One dude remarked (inaccurately) that I looked like Nicole Kidman, and I obviously never forgot it (having been flattered of course; remember that this was four years ago and her face didn’t resemble a wax replica of a balloon puppy).

Aside: When these were taken, I was twenty pounds lighter. Fuck you, metabolism. I can run and run and run till I bleed and eat lettuce till I sprout rabbit ears, and my ass still expands. This is bullshit.

Anyway over the next two years my part moved back and forth across the top of my head, forming a follicular barometer for my mood at any given moment. A far right part complete with swishing bang suggested fraternal convention; didn’t I want to look like every other gal in Greektown? I shifted to the left upon reading that one should always place her part on the side of the face she’d like to look thinner; the line created an optical illusion. But by senior year I was convinced of the center part’s cool factor and determined to make it part of my “mystique.” A trademark, much as my red and hot pink lipstick (and pill-popping crazy) had been in the DG house. And when I cut my bangs on January 12, 2008, I cast a controversial die: as they grew out and in my attempts to hide the regrettable chop, my part would have to fall squarely down the middle, and it was then that the familial squawking began.

My mother to this day literally corners me and shove her hands in my face, mussing the perfectly Chi-ed locks, brushing the bangs to the side. When she lined us up on the dock at Irvington for the annual family Christmas card ninth ring of hell, she actually paid me to forgo the center part. At the dinner table even Daddy chimed in. The family took a vote: lose the Red Sea tress divide. But there was no budging for that line.

Until Sunday when I, hungover and bloated from two weekends of straight beach boozing, scrutinized MAM’s photo documentation of our exceptionally awesome Fourth of July and realized, finally, that while the center part looks cool to me in the mirror, it’s awesomeness, its edginess, its incredible transformative power of elevating me from “just another blonde with her Southern sororal side swoop” to icon of individual style on par with CZ Guest (center) and Jackie O (center), was all - literally - in my head. Standing in front of his mirror, Hall and Oates blasting from the iPhone speakers, blow dryer in one hand, nose beginning to peel, heart as full as my chipmunk cheeks, I stuck a thumb in my hairline just above the iris of my left eye and raked it back.

caryrandolph: Surely some meaning can be derived from my...

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 14:10:08 -0400

caryrandolph:

Surely some meaning can be derived from my chronology of chronographs. When first infatuated with timepieces my wrist looked vaguely similar to the one above, laden with silver bangles and my mother’s charms and a Swiss Army knock-off found deep in the bowels of Chinatown. High school graduation brought the Tag Heuer I wear now - a spartan stainless steel affair that perfectly marries the masculine and feminine and is currently married to my grandmother’s sterling I.D., a gift from her naval lieutenant brother Jack.

Every time I go home I take off my Tag at the dinner table. My father asks, “Is your ticker ticking?” and shakes it, holds it to his ear, rebukes me for its most recent scrapes, and then expounds on the merits of wearing men’s watches. I’ve heard it since I was old enough to read an analog, Daddy’s lecture that no daughter of his should wear a lady watch, if only because those prissy bracelets lose their value with time. At seventeen, standing over that glass case, in love with an automatic, not even Papa Randolph could deter me.

But oh, I see how I was mistaken! How only a man’s watch is good enough, how even that fake Canal Street chrono (because it always goes back to New York now, doesn’t it?) is more my speed, how they appreciate more with time, how I appreciate more my father’s advice, six years later, and how I’d give anything to dig up all that old silver jewelry and stack it wrist to elbow and remember being sixteen and getting drunk off two Zimas and falling down the stairs. Which is how, since you asked, I lost the birdcage charm and possibly the anchor, and why, although they have since been retrieved, they now rest unappreciated in my grandmother’s old jewelry box, stamped in gold with her initials on top.

Thus I plan to wrap up 2009 with my wrist wrapped in metal, reviving in some small detail my youth and all the family ghosts and all the good advice, and I will start, in part, with this purchase, the Timex military, at least until Christmas brings me chance to pilfer my pop’s top drawer.

(Photo, as usual, via Tea & Strumpets.)

Over salty bisque and...

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 14:09:21 -0400

caryrandolph:

…saltier risotto Sweet Baby Jane told me a Sunday story. In June she flew to Cudjoe Key to visit her boy MFB, a beach bum who spends his days spear-fishing, snorkeling, and being otherwise phenomenal. (Sounds vaguely familiar.) She had not seen him in a month so she expected, upon arrival at Miami International, a vast bouquet of fresh Dutch tulips or, at the very least, a single wilted gas station carnation. He met her at baggage claim empty-handed.

As they pulled onto the highway, though, M. brandished a plate wrapped in tin foil. “Most guys would get their girlfriends flowers,” he said. “But I think you’ll like this better.” She unwrapped the aluminum parcel to find inside a lobster, steamed and peeled and drowning in butter. He had speared it for her that afternoon off the blinding Florida coast.

The boy gave my sister a lobster.

And as we drained the pinot gris, as we polished off the last bites of bisque, Jane said to me, “Falling in love isn’t all about the man, you know. It’s about who you are when you fall in love with him, and where, and the season. It’s about the time of year and the stupid shit you do together. He taught me how to gut the mahi-mahi. And eventually I’ll take him hiking. And then, you know, it’s about the seasons changing and still loving him in spite of it.”

And the crustaceans! Oh my God, it’s about the crustaceans.

Hark back to those golden years...

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 14:08:58 -0400

caryrandolph:

…before iPods, before Gmail, somewhere between AOL and AIM, at the height of Carson Daly and Total Request Live, and remember, will you. Take this voyage with me down memory lane, this journey to transcend your Wednesday malaise, remember what it was like to be all of thirteen or fourteen or fifteen and without cell phone.

Remember, please, calling your varsity Lotharios after dinner, after homework had been fucked with and doodled on and stuffed back in the Trapper Keeper, and just hanging out on the phone. Remember your daddy picking up another receiver somewhere in the house and hitting speed dial without first checking for a dial tone, remember your kid brother eavesdropping on yet another line as you mumbled those confidential utterances of undying lunch room lust and longing and Oh my God, can you believe Crystal made out with Travis IN THE PARKING LOT? What a slut. I heard she can’t even afford Lucky jeans. Remember the first hour or so of lively conversation seguing into something less energetic though not at all half-hearted. Nay! You waited all day for this phone call! You saw him but twice in the hall between classes and the first time didn’t even count because he was hauling ass to the cafeteria to beat the line because it was, after all, pizza day…

All day you waited to hear him breathe on the other end of the phone while he wrapped up his latest round of Halo to then dissect the goings-on at last Friday’s keg party and hopefully, hopefully! casually! mention the upcoming semi-formal, which will not be semi-formal at all but will involve you wearing floor-length sequins and him in a royal blue button-down with a Hanes tee peaking out from beneath, only to be exposed when, on the dance floor, he and his buddies all unbutton their royal blue button-downs, oh God, it happens every single time, but you don’t care, because you and your girls are too busy doing the Electric Slide…

Remember cradling that hot cordless phone under your chin as you threw the next day’s outfit onto your window seat and then brushing your teeth and - hold, please! - washing your face with Noxzema and cleaning the gunk off your retainers and sorry, sweetie, this thing gives me a lisp. Remember then getting into bed and - my bad, just one second, GOOD NIGHT, MOM!, and turning out the lights and turning on your new Dave Matthews CD ever so softly…

And this is where the magic happens, this is where the conversation with your one true love takes a turn for the glorious, this is where you start in on the real soul-search conversation. Remember the top-five lists, the favorite bands of all time, the Let’s go to a concert together, maybe make it a double date, and I really like frappucinos; don’t you like frappucinos? and I think Shawna and Tyler are having sex, can you believe it? But they’re really in love, they’ve been together all semester, and so what do boys think is the difference between talking and dating and going out? and lots of heavy breathing, oh my God, so much heavy breathing and also, Are you tired? No, are you tired? No, what are you doing? Nothing, what are you doing? and What are you listening to? “Stairway to Heaven”; what are you listening to? Oh, just that mix CD you gave me last Saturday when we were hanging out in your parents’ basement, you know the one with all the Matchbox 20 on it, the one that starts with that P. Diddy slow jam I like, the one we swayed to at that farm party…

And before you know it, your clock-radio reads four a.m., and you’re not even talking anymore! You’re just listening to each other sigh and roll over and maybe whisper What? Huh? Oh, nothing, until finally you say in that meek, exhausted half-whisper, Well, I guess I should go to sleep, I’ll see you at the student council meeting, and don’t forget to bring duct tape for that triangle-trade project (y’all, tell me you remember the triangle trade), God, our teacher is such a bitch making us do this group effing project, I mean spring break starts in THREE DAYS. Anyway, you hang up first. You hang up first! No, you hang up first! I love you! I love you more! No, I love you more! And then the battery dies.

We visited the house in Gloucester...

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 14:06:22 -0400

caryrandolph:

…every summer, the house that faced the water, the house at the end of the long dirt road, and I remember it as a vast rambling affair with hallways that stretched forever and secret rooms behind paneled doors. It was my grandfather’s summer home, and it was a bucolic place where cigarette smoke formed the only clouds, where everyone arrived by boat, and where not even strains of Motown on the stereo could drown out the cicadas’ drone. Gloucester, Virginia, locked forever in a salt-water snowglobe, is my summer standard.

But it wasn’t perfect. My mother tells me this. The house was not a refuge at all but a stage on which so much dysfunction came to life. The kitchen was cramped and rainy afternoons eternal when she had nothing to entertain ten crying children but a single television station. The messy politics of a Southern family and the ghosts of heartbreaks past stirred in the ceiling fans like fog blowing off the Severn River. Point Breeze was wonderful, too; she assures me of this, and photo albums stuffed full with three-by-fives serve as proof that there was in fact far more fun had on that long river lawn than her memories suggest.

Somewhere, then, we are both right, and we are both wrong. My Gloucester was not flawless, and hers was more so. Dinners could be long, dramatic affairs - and they could also be peaceful. My father always arrived late, having traveled the twelve hundred miles on his BMW motorcycle. It happened only once, but in my mind it was the rule. Perception has been distorted faster than a Polaroid in a fire.

But we both remember, my mother and I, the wet bar, tucked in a bottleneck between kitchen and dining room, and the sight of her father slicing limes on the counter. Lime after lime after lime and a few lemons, cut and squeezed over Tom Collinses and carried three at a time to cousins spinning tales or spinning into and out of one another’s arms on that wide, essential wrap-around porch, a porch that, should we visit it today, would surely be just as wide as we both remember it then.

***

About Gloucester my mother says this:

The porch was wide, as wide as we both remember it. Do you remember the heat? You cannot write about summer in the South without talking about the heat. And they didn’t want to run the inefficient air conditioning because it cost too much.

I remember: it’s the middle of the night; I’m not kidding, maybe 2:30 a.m., and your aunt and I meet in the hallways and on the porch downstairs. She’s holding your cousin N, and I’m holding you, and you’re probably six weeks old and N three weeks old. And we have to keep you quiet because your grandparents are asleep, and God knows we don’t want to wake them up. So we’re walking and pacing and exhausted, and we don’t even talk. We just look at each other as we pass in the hallways and sigh. It’s so hot. We’re tired. We miss my mom.

"The first thing you must remember: an editor does not add to a book. At best he serves as a..."

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 17:03:13 -0400

““The first thing you must remember: an editor does not add to a book. At best he serves as a handmaiden to an author. Don’t ever get to feeling important about yourself, because an editor at most releases energy. He creates nothing…A writer’s best work comes entirely from himself.””

- Maxwell Evarts Perkins, March 1946

For three summers in a row we...

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 17:02:31 -0400

kept a house on 68th Street in Virginia Beach. With brown clapboard siding it won no beauty contests, but it boasted a wide screened-in front porch and room enough for all twelve of us. A lot of hilarity took place within those salt-beaten walls. There was the night that our parents got so startlingly shit-faced at the dinner table that my mother (I’m pretty sure) passed out face-down in the lamb chops, and even our grandfather, knee-deep in a bottle of bourbon, couldn’t rise from his chair for fear of tipping into the centerpiece. We were in junior high and high school then and spent a lot of time outdoors, of course, untangling board cords and fighting about who wanted to wear what spaghetti strapped crop top to the boardwalk and whether Sister had really shoplifted all those key chains or was just blowing smoke. (Full disclosure: We both lifted the plastic dolphin chains.)

Before 68th Street came the blue house closer to the Atlantic Avenue strip. I remember nothing about it except the first night we stayed there in summer of 1998. NMC and I shared a bedroom with a big picture window facing the street (onto which we stared one night, rapt, as a drunk homeless man berated and eventually tried to physically subdue a telephone pole). On the second night, exhausted after a day in the sun, we climbed into bed, turned out the lights, giggled for a minute about boys or some other nonsense, and then were silent.

Minutes passed. Suddenly at the same moment each of us leaped in the air and onto the floor. We tore off our sheets and began beating the mattresses with our pillows.

“SAND!” we shouted. Down the hall in the other children’s rooms, one could hear the muffled laughter of cousins trying desperately to empty their beds of oceanside evidence.

I remember only that first burst of energy. How long did it last? How long did we giggle and scream before a mother or aunt banged on the wall for us to be quiet? How much time passed before we gave in to the night and crawled back under the covers, sand or no sand?

I’ll never remember. There are few photos from that summer. But ever after, when I head home from a beach and rinse my bikini under cold water and call my mother to tell her exactly how big the waves were, after I pull on the ratty old tee shirt and turn out the light, I think of that night and the sandy twin bed, and I think that if only I’d known at thirteen how badly I’d want it at 23, I would never, ever have tried to rid those sheets of the very thing that keep me alive in winter - the thought, the feel, the memory of sun and summer and beach sand everywhere.

Following a party in an...

Sun, 24 May 2009 15:48:50 -0400

caryrandolph:

…abandoned warehouse (heavy with half-pipes and red graffiti), we drove south to Oak Pointe where JK’s parents were in Europe and the house was just absolutely rocking. Beyond the Jersey-esque front gate emblazoned with his family crest, around the north wing and down a hill, we found the lawn filled with kids and booze. A fiberglass canoe, pushed, somehow, into the pool, now braved white-capped waves of briny beer foam. This party, I knew even then, was epic and monumental and destined for the annals of [Hometown] lore.

She took off in search of her boy, and I wandered the wrap-around balcony, replete with Doric columns and railings designed perfectly for Juliet swooning, searching, perhaps, for a boy of my own. I don’t remember. The clock chimed midnight; I saw no pumpkins. I cracked a fourth Keystone Light and spied him shooting pool. We toured the manse together - first wandering to the “French Country” kitchen then south a quarter of a mile to a master bedroom overflowing with chintz. Our exploration was chaste, a game of hide-and-seek behind taffeta and French doors. Below and outside two hundred of our high school’s finest cavorted on a clipped lawn; inside we ran fingers over wainscoting and traded June plans - I’ll go here with you if you do this with me. The ink on my diploma had not yet dried; we were sunburned and sleepy and drunk with the endless, eternal promise of summer.

At three-thirty she reappeared. “My mother is going to kill me,” she said through clenched teeth as she dragged me across the cobbled driveway. “Do you really care?” I asked. “We’re in college now, and anyway, it’s summer! We do what we want!”

Last night over calamari and...

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 15:53:07 -0400

…chardonnay, everything changed. But you know how it feels when some small shift in tone becomes the catalyst that disbands an entire cocktail party. A finger runs around the rim of a lowball glass. An eye slides, only just perceptibly, to the grandfather clock by the library door. We were talking about the differences between boys and girls (or men and women, or gentlemen and ladies), and the talk moved to depression, namely mine, and the effect it has on writing. To write about it, he said, one has to have experienced it, but to have experienced and be able to write about it is a very rare thing indeed.

I recovered from my depression sometime in 2006. To affix a precise date would be inaccurate; I look back now and remember not a clear awareness that I felt better, but a satisfaction that on one of those 365 days the sun rose and flowers bloomed, and I took notice.

Until very recently, however, I could not write about it. I could not look back on my disease and see it objectively and without pain or resentment or the taint of victimization. There was a block on my heart and the hand that held the pen, and for three years I discussed it only in terms of how the disease had waylaid all my plans. But depression has no regard for plans or for the glass breakables that stand in its way. Depression is the worst tornado, sucking up lives and depositing whole houses where there had previously been flower gardens. For three years I had to rebuild silently.

Something happened in March to blow the lid off my imagination, and all the old feeling came rushing back. First I read William Styron’s memoir Darkness Visible twice in one day, and then in a South Street Seaport bar heard those words that plow most deeply into the heart, spoken slowly, quietly, with enormous clarity. We must all hear them sooner or later. So I began to write. The vestiges of my depression became a life preserver, where before they had dragged me under water.

In these four weeks I have begun an enormous excavation project, turning over each stone that had begun to erode in my already windswept mind. And I have found in me a completely new calling, a new purpose, a new passion. I am gifted with an incredible talent: translating on paper, on screen, the indescribable torment of melancholia. And if I can create with my writing some portal through which the world (or even one other person) can better glimpse the hailstorm that pounds the mind of the depressed, if by affixing my face and my experience to an illness which has waylaid ten percent of the global population, then all the heartbreaks, the silences, the million daydreams I had of ending it all with one leap or one swallow or one sharp turn of the steering wheel, will not only be worth it but will be a point in my life about which I can be proud.

"Somebody will write the biography of William Styron. Somebody certainly needs to. But it has to be a..."

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 15:52:27 -0400

“Somebody will write the biography of William Styron. Somebody certainly needs to. But it has to be a writer who has been where he has been, who has experienced depression, because Styron’s torment was at the center of all that he wrote. I couldn’t do it; I haven’t been there. But you could, Cary, and you should. You would have to objectify yourself, though, and become a face of depression.”

- D.D., my friend and mentor
(via caryrandolph)

We all know what a...

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 15:52:16 -0400

caryrandolph:

…pet peeve is. It’s the “worst thing”. The nail on the chalk board, the banana noise, the smell of burnt pumpkin seeds, whatever. It’s your own worst case scenario bottled up in a dripping faucet or the hum of a housefly. But what about the “best thing”? What’s the name for that? Anti-peeve?

My best thing is very specific so to ensure that everyone gets a fair shake at making me shake with unexpected joy, I thought I’d share it. After all, “best thing season” is right around the corner.

You know that feeling when you step onto the beach, and you’re schlepping so much crap that you think at any moment a finger might slip and send the whole pile tumbling? And it’s super hot - the air and the sand and the sun - and you’re already thirsty and tired, and you start to wonder if the struggle is at all worth it. This beach is endless. Didn’t it take you an hour just to park and find the boardwalk? But this is the longest hundred feet you’ve ever traversed. Factor in the beach blanket real estate game (Where are all the boys?!), and you might as well have stayed home and aimed the hose at your face.

Then you stake out your territory, and you start to walk faster lest someone else encroach upon your diamond sand acreage. Maybe you trip, and you come very close to catapulting your Corona-packed cooler into a nearby pop-up cabana. You start to sweat. You walk, you walk. And then there you are, inches from high tide, exactly where you want to spend the next six salty hours.

Here’s where the best thing happens:

You drop everything. You don’t set down the cooler or the towels or the folding chairs. You don’t throw them either; you release the weight from your grip and let everything fall at your sides. And you start running toward the water. You don’t stop to think about your hair or how tightly your bikini strings are tied or whether you remembered to take off your Ray-Bans. You just kick off your flip flops and book it waveward. You run at top speed, arms akimbo, hair flying, knees to chest, feet kicking up sand, and you CRASH into the water and dive head first, and it is so fucking cold and gritty and salty, and —-

YES, THIS IS THE BEST THING IN THE ENTIRE WORLD.

I am spending this weekend in the...

Sun, 26 Apr 2009 18:43:35 -0400

caryrandolph:

…land of lawns, and I cannot imagine what it would be like to grow up in New York City and not have a screen door to slam on the way outside. No matter how many summer homes one’s parents cart one off to, season in, season out, it simply is not the same. I grew up with a tree swing and a forest and a creek and a cul-de-sac, and I knew every crack in the sidewalk, and we would clatter down the deck stairs early in the morning and not return until the street lamps turned on. How do you do that as a child in Manhattan? How do you turn a spontaneous cartwheel without first having to travel? How do you make the monumental upgrade from mere two-wheeler to ten-speed bike? How do you explore for hours the inner depths of the overgrown garden without ever once telling your mother that you left the house at all?

I have a very vivid memory of my...

Sun, 26 Apr 2009 18:41:20 -0400

caryrandolph:

…depression, and not a day goes by that I do not replay it in my mind. Nearly four years later the details are as clear as if I had dreamed them last night, but this dream was a nightmare.

I was twenty years old and a third year transfer at the University of Virginia. The decision to leave [Alma Mater] for Thomas Jefferson’s academical village was as much a product of my insanity (and that’s what clinical depression is, if you don’t want to mince words) as it was a rational decision to better my education and fulfill previously unattained goals. On this particular day I remember being very aware that autumn was closing in. Rain fell nearly every day. My once religious runs dwindled to twice a week, and I skipped class constantly. At about three o’clock in the afternoon, sunlight hovering at the Smoky Mountain tree line, I got in my Jeep and began the drive to Monticello. I do not remember what day it was. I probably didn’t know then, either.

I am a descendant of Jefferson’s, and that August I obtained a key to the family gravesite so that I could put flowers on my grandmother’s grave. It was a routine I enjoyed because it got me out of my Rugby Road apartment, and I received some satisfaction spending small minutes with a grandmother I never knew but whom I did know spent many of her own days locked in a stupefying but never diagnosed depression. We shared more than the name Cary Randolph and an affinity for cigarette pants; we shared a hideous gene.

Music has always been important to me but then it was an aural manifestation of my torture. I listened repeatedly to Coldplay’s X and Y album and a small handful of other equally miserable songs, most memorably “For a Dancer” by Jackson Browne, written about his wife’s suicide in the late 1960s. I remember winding the car up and up the mountainside, “For a Dancer” playing an endless loop, and I felt panic encroaching, at which point I would have to pull the car over and wait for it to pass. I should not have been driving at that point in my illness. Every highway overpass became an escape. All I would have to do was turn the steering wheel a little too sharply. I had stopped wearing my seatbelt, willing oncoming semi trucks to swerve in my direction. And that afternoon, with the sky turning gray and gold, I felt the sun swell and my eyes were filled with light. Noise from the speakers seemed to be getting louder, blaring, but I hadn’t touched the dial. I couldn’t breathe. The only apt metaphor for the physical affects of depression is “drowning”. No other word comes close to describing what this immense pain resembles.

I don’t remember how I got home that day. I don’t remember making it to Monticello, although I would have had to reach the parking lot in order to turn around. All I can remember is light exploding and noise, noise, noise, and the absolute certainty that I had to leave this place, that I had to go home.

The worst mistake in the world that a friend or family member can make when trying to help a sufferer of depression is to suggest that her illness is a weakness of character. Don’t ever list for her all her wonderful friends or the beautiful weather or her great job. Don’t remind her of all the love in her life. She knows. It isn’t the knowing that is problematic, but the total inability to feel anything but sadness; the panic, the horrifying realization, that nobody around her has any idea what tempests rage inside her unwell mind; and the fear that perhaps they know something she doesn’t. Perhaps it is all her fault.

In 2004 and 2005, I was held under...

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 10:23:31 -0400

…a veritable lock and key of clinical depression. Unlike so many “lucky” victims of the disease, neither pharmacology nor cognative therapy abated my suffering. But running did.

In running I found a single window of time to which I could look forward every day. Whether it was a quick three miler down Providence Road or a long slow trek up the Virginia mountainside, my daily run pulled me out of bed and above the misery. Say what you will about runner’s high; I felt an endorphin rush that no pill cocktail ever matched.

Running saved my life.

I remember running up Sargent Street in [Hometown] one summer night. It was much too late to be out by myself. It was nearly midnight. I had convinced myself just days prior that I would not survive my depression, that at some point soon I would have to deliver myself from what I saw would be a lifetime wasted doing battle against a darkness I could never match. By then I could barely drive my car, and I did not trust myself alone. But that night I ran, and I ran, and I ran in the middle of the street through the worst projects in town. I stopped on the train track that bisected Jackson Street, and I looked up at the stars, and I shook and cried. I had hit the absolute bottom, and yet I feared that there would be no bottom, that I was born to be depressed (and, genetically speaking, I was and I am), and my entire life would be spent sliding, sliding, with no end in sight. I felt at that moment that I had nothing. But I kept running. It was all I could do. I turned and I ran home, faster then, and I went to bed still sweating, and I woke up the next morning, and I was alive.

"The tendinous part of the mind, so to speak, is more developed in winter; the fleshy, in summer. I..."

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 15:25:37 -0500

“The tendinous part of the mind, so to speak, is more developed in winter; the fleshy, in summer. I should say winter had given the bone and sinew to literature, summer the tissues and the blood.”

- John Burroughs