| | | Plus Chirlane McCray, and Super Heroine Fights | | | | | | | | | |  | | | | July 12, 2016 | Letter No. 42 | | | | | | | | | | | | Hi Lennys,
I feel like I usually write "Hi Lennys!," but that feels weird right now. I don't think anyone could possibly be feeling OK, or feeling like using exclamation points right now, except to say "What the fuck!" or something like that. A horrible thing about horrors is that we witness them, experience them, survive them — and then we have to live with them. Not only that, we need to protect our brothers and sisters and do all we can to stop the horrors and the injustices, and that can feel like an insurmountable problem that we just throw anger and grief at and nothing ever changes.
There are two kinds of things that help me in times like this, and I will share them with you. I show up to the rallies. I go and I scream and I shout and I march and I feel a connection with all my activist friends and those who are outraged along with me. I hope that everyone "watching at home" will realize that there is a fight they can join. I support Black Lives Matter in every way I can. As a straight, cis, white person, I shut up on social media and support the voices of those being targeted and those whose lived experiences should be heard.
The other thing I do is connect with my neighborhood. I went down to the community garden to sign up for a plot and got to talking with a lady who also has a bad back and helped her out with her weeds. Just working side by side, not talking, was incredibly hopeful. I'm also joining our local Copwatch Patrol Unit, a group that teaches people their rights in police interactions — as well as techniques to survive those interactions. Cop Watch Patrol Unit documents police interactions with civilians and holds the police accountable for their actions. I've worked with them before, when the police were harassing the black students at a high school nearby. Honestly, I am not in much danger of being shot by a cop, but I do have the ability to support people and movements, and there is no better place to do it than in your own community. If you want more ideas, writer Ijeoma Oluo has strong suggestions on what those who feel helpless should be doing — give her impassioned list a read and some thought.
Many of our stories today are about comfort and healing and self-care. Pearl Gabel, herself an adult thumb-sucker, spoke to others who practice the same self-soothing technique long past childhood. Just realizing she was not the only one was a healing moment. Lenny contributing writer Kaitlyn Greenidge spoke to Chirlane McCray, the First Lady of New York City, about McCray's efforts to destigmatize mental-health issues and make access to mental-health care simple and affordable for all New Yorkers.
Emily Rapp Black's relationship with her grad-school mentor began as a professional one, but it grew into an ecosystem of mutual nurturing, especially when Black's son died at age three. Black writes of mentors: "They observe and accompany the darkest despair, the wildest sorrow, and the most unexpected joy." We all need that in our lives.
We also have the story of Gillian McCain, the co-author of Please Kill Me — and a woman who got very little credit for her work on this widely known, influential book. Restoring lost history rights wrongs we didn't even know were there. Finally, feel the power of the women in Jenn Woodall's Fight! zine — superheroines who are ready to throw down for what they believe in. I'm ready to do that, in all the ways that work for me. I hope you find your way as well.
Love,
Mikki, editor at large | | | | | | | | | | | | Thumb-Suckers Anonymous | | | | By Pearl Gabel | | |
The patron saint of adult thumb-suckers is a 65-year-old Long Island salesman who looks strikingly like Hunter S. Thompson, down to the tinted aviator sunglasses and bald spot.
He's asked that I call him by his middle name, Lazur. He doesn't want to use his first name because he imagines his professional clients may stop doing business with a grown man who sucks his thumb.
On a Sunday night in early spring, Lazur sat in a booth at his favorite Nassau County diner sipping a chocolate milk ("light on the chocolate with a side of chocolate syrup"), his calloused thumb pressed against the sweating glass.
He sucks his thumb an average of two hours a day: in bed, on the couch, at his desk, and especially while driving. His most important prerequisite for a new truck is an armrest at just the right height for resting an elbow in thumb-to-mouth position.
Aside from his interests in business, astronomy, historical events, and bicycling, Lazur's real passion is the website he founded in 1999 — thumbsuckingadults.com.
The site is crude and rudimentary. It's written in garish neon greens, yellows, and pinks and looks like it hasn't been updated since it launched. But its message is a salve for anyone who has tentatively typed queries like "thumb-sucking" and "adult" and "Am I the only thumb-sucking adult in the universe" into a search engine.
"And Then Thumb," the frequently trafficked content page, shares statistics, surveys, articles, and thumb-sucking instances in mass media. The bulletin board and chat room had around 1,700 members worldwide when he closed them down years ago.
Lazur's aim is to legitimize thumb-sucking in a world that infantilizes or shuns adults who do it. And after more than fifteen years online, he is trying to figure out how to gather adult thumb-suckers ("ATS") for real-life meetings. His MeetUp group has encountered a hitch though: almost all the members continue to keep their habit a deep secret.
I began hiding my thumb-sucking around the age of five — under covers, in closets, in bathroom stalls. I would press the ball of my right thumb against the roof of my mouth, keeping it balanced while I rubbed my upper lip with my middle finger, not exactly sucking my thumb as much as just leaving it there and breathing around it. This was most comfortable while lying on my side with my knees pulled toward my chest, but I could settle with being perched on a chair leaning forward. I imagine it all began in utero: around twenty weeks before being born, a fetus can suck her thumb. It's our earliest form of self-soothing.
The shame and loathing began later — in kindergarten and first grade in a well-heeled New Jersey suburb. I was a chubby little girl in hiding, squeezing in her stomach, thumb in her mouth whenever and wherever she could take cover. Was it the thumb-sucking that made me retreat into young alienation and rebellion? Or was it my own alienation that caused me to continue sucking my thumb, a way of comforting myself through the awkwardness of elementary school, the solitude of middle school, the angst of high-school years? As a teenager, my favorite activity was curling up with a book, facing a wall, thumb in. A quick cure for any sadness or despair was finding a private place to get in position. I never spoke about it to friends or family. It was my shame and denial.
All of a sudden I was twenty. An adult thumb-sucker.
"You stopped sucking your thumb around eight or nine," recalled my father when I asked him about it. He gently tried to curb my habit in elementary school by taking my hand away from my face and saying, "Stop."
"But then I think I saw you suck your thumb a few times around seventeen or eighteen years old, watching TV. I thought I saw you, but I wasn't sure."
Not all thumb-suckers are alike.
Some thumbs hang loose, with the remaining fingers playing with the upper lip, ear, nose. Some cup their fingers in a loose fist under their nose. ("The classic," Lazur noted.) Some cock their wrists to the side, the front, straight on. Some hold a blanket or a stuffed animal.
Lazur remembers every adult thumb-sucker he's ever seen.
Once, in Queens, he saw an NYPD officer in his 30s, in uniform, waiting at a stoplight in his patrol car, thumb plugged in mouth.
On Astoria Boulevard one afternoon, he saw a brunette in the back of a cab, her forehead pressed against the window, right thumb in her mouth, a finger running against her nose, in another classic position.
For a few years, coincidentally, he dated a woman who sucked her thumb and had a child from a previous marriage who also sucked her thumb.
The three of them would sometimes find themselves on the couch watching TV together; a middle-aged couple and a teenage girl in the wood-paneled living room of a vinyl-sided Long Island ranch, sucking their thumbs through the "Late Show."
Though thumb-sucking may be human's earliest addiction, "There is no formal clinical diagnosis for children or adults who thumb-suck," said Dr. Justin Misurell, the clinical director of the Child Study Center at NYU Langone Medical Center's New Jersey office. "It can be considered a compulsive habit, similar to nail-biting, hair-pulling, and skin-picking."
Misurell has never treated a patient for thumb-sucking, but his protocol for treating similar kinds of compulsions is called habit-reversal training (HRT). HRT involves finding what triggers the compulsion and developing other physical responses to occupy a patient's hands.
Dentists tend to become concerned around the age of seven, with the emergence of permanent teeth. Letting a child suck their thumb beyond that — when adult teeth grow in — can cause an overbite or deformed jaw. Or it can have no effect at all.
Orthodontists can install violent-looking devices in children's mouths to make thumb-sucking as uncomfortable as possible. The "rake" or the "hay rake" is a series of short metal spikes just behind the front teeth. The "fence," "palatal crib," or "vertical cage" is when the spikes are replaced by metal rings or bars. Some caregivers buy their children "thumbguards," a wristband that covers the thumb in a plastic sheath. Others try coating the thumb in foul-tasting nail polishes or vinegar. Still others try to deter thumb-suckers with spanking, humiliation, rewards.
"The rakes do work. But if someone really wants to, they can find a way around it — bend the thumb, bend the rake, stick the thumb into the corner of their mouths," said Dr. Richard Bloomstein, vice chairman of the orthodontics department at Rutgers School of Dental Medicine. "You can't force someone to stop sucking their thumb."
"For all those years you thought you were the only person on the planet thumb-sucking at your age," thumbsuckingadults.com reads, under a GIF of grown men and women sucking their thumbs. "Forget the past and all those bad thoughts you've had about yourself … there are probably millions of adults thumb-sucking worldwide."
I certainly felt like I was the only one when I discovered Lazur's site a decade ago, in college. I had never seen or heard of another adult who did it. I had still never told my friends. Once, in a particularly vulnerable moment, I mentioned it to a college girlfriend as if I had stopped already.
"I sucked my thumb until I was in high school," I lied.
"Wow, that's insane," she said.
"Yeah, I know," I laughed. As if.
And then later, under cloak of darkness, I must have turned toward the dorm-room wall, careful not to squeak a box spring. I lifted that thumb to my mouth like a stealth bomber, finger on that upper lip, three … two … one … and felt the torpedoes of relief rain down.
That semester I found the site that would change me. It eased my fear that I was so different then the rest of the world, and comforted me even more than my thumb could.
Back then it was one of few resources online, though in 2016 there are thousands more search results for adult thumb-suckers. There are emotional confessions on YouTube videos and in blog posts. There's a thumb-sucking reddit page with threads like "trying to quit," "not just a bunch of babies," and "have you ever seen/met another thumb-sucker?"
One 2015 post reads, "Does anyone know what happened to the admin of thumbsuckingadults.com?"
The first reply is from a user named lazurm. "I'm the administrator of that web site."
It may have been thanks to him that I was able to finally stop.
Lazur was wearing a brown flannel shirt, jeans, a black beret, and rose-tinted glasses when I saw him at the diner.
He looked closely at both my thumbs as I held a coffee mug.
"No scars," he said. "Lucky."
"Still have the shame though," I said.
He described his youth in Brooklyn and Queens (Brownsville to Rosedale to Woodmere). He was the son of a lawyer and a housewife who enjoyed the American Dream and had no idea that their son continued his thumb-sucking habit past toddlerhood. One night in the summer of 1965 or '66, when Lazur was a teenager, tossing and turning on a camp bunk bed, his eyes caught another camper asleep in the next bunk, sucking his thumb. That's when he realized he wasn't alone.
The night I met Lazur, I also spoke to Janice Erlbaum, a 46-year-old novelist who has explored her thumb-sucking habit in writing and kicked it with hypnosis.
Until her mid-twenties, she carried a piece of blanket in her bra, and when she was stressed, she would take it out and hold it between her index finger and upper lip as she sucked her thumb.
She had spent time in a homeless shelter as a teenager and recalled that it was common to see other wayward kids on the couch in the common room sucking their thumbs.
"The thumb, I think, is a replacement for nurture that you didn't get," she said. "I know that the at-risk community is more likely to thumb-suck. It's a great amount of relief from anxiety. It made me feel a little safer, more self-contained."
Lazur noticed the same thing. In communities of poverty and instability, thumb-sucking seemed more common and sometimes more widely accepted.
Orthodontist Dr. Bloomstein, who has treated thumb-suckers in upscale and impoverished areas, thinks the habit is a psychological safety blanket independent of social status. "I think it could have a lot to do with anything that increases the stress level," he said. "Not enough money, too much money, absent parents, sibling rivalry, bullying at school…"
Bloomstein admits that he has had patients whom he attempted to treat as child thumb-suckers who have turned into adult thumb-suckers. But he's never had an adult reveal their habit. By the time they're adolescents, they begin to deny it, and it becomes more difficult to treat.
A few weeks after we meet at the diner, I arrange to visit Lazur at his home. We sit in the front living room on couches divided by a coffee table. He lives in a Nassau County suburb with matching two- and three-bedroom homes lining cul-de-sacs named after various flora. On the walls: family photographs, nature paintings. Various bicycles, bike parts, books, and Native American artwork are scattered throughout the first floor.
As we conversed, he put his thumb in his mouth. Which emboldened me: I sucked my own thumb for the first time in years. Tentatively at first.
The feeling: a loosening of all muscles, a mother's embrace. He compares it to the natural motion of crossing one's legs — the fingers went into position as if I had never stopped. And then I was that young girl again, hiding in the bathroom stall during class, right thumb resting in my mouth, picking at my upper lip with my index finger, eyes closed. Everything that felt bad — being bullied and alienated, having trouble with schoolwork, feelings of isolation — would disappear into this tent of calm that the thumb created around me.
On his website, Lazur writes on the benefits of thumb-sucking: "It's legal, free, instantly calming, aids in sleep and concentration, is quiet, drug- and calorie-free, non-intrusive, has benefits similar to meditation, and more." And I would add, for me, it tends to stop time.
But our visit had been quick.
We sat and sucked our thumbs for a few more minutes. It wasn't until I got up to leave that I realized I was crying.
I walked to my car disoriented, sat down, turned on the engine, and cracked a window. I sat for a few minutes before starting to drive. I passed through the quaint roads and highways not unlike those where I grew up, shivering as the cool air hit my face.
If Lazur had been driving that afternoon, he would have been studying everyone he passed, as he always does. He would have looked over at the blue car riding slow down the Long Island Expressway and seen the driver, a young woman with fresh tear lines on her cheeks, brown hair dancing in the wind. Her right thumb would be in her mouth, ring finger tracing lines on her upper lip in a way that seemed too familiar. Perhaps she didn't care about being seen anymore, she wasn't embarrassed, even as the traffic turned heavy with hundreds of prying eyes as she neared the Midtown Tunnel.
Pearl Gabel is a writer, photojournalist, and video producer for a variety of news and nonprofit organizations. Previously, she was a staff photographer at the New York Daily News, where she covered national and local news, documentary, and features. She is working on a variety of projects, including an essay collection titled "The Wood." You can find her @pearlgabel on Twitter. | | | | | | | | | | | | The First Lady of New York Wants You to Be a Mental-Health Healer | | | | By Kaitlyn Greenidge | | |
Chirlane McCray is one of those public figures whose life stories seem almost designed to fascinate us. She is a poet, a social-justice advocate, a founding member of the iconic black feminist group the Combahee River Collective, and once identified as a radical lesbian, writing fearlessly about homosexuality in Essence magazine at a time when many mainstream publications, black and white, erased LGBTQ people of color. She is also a wife and mother and, currently, First Lady of New York City while her husband, Bill de Blasio, is in office as mayor. I wondered how someone who has clearly taken her own path in life is managing to fill this public role that is practically defined by the expectations of other people.
One way that Chirlane has remained Chirlane is that her work as an advocate for others has never stopped. In 2014, McCray and de Blasio's daughter, Chiara, went public with her struggles with depression, anxiety, and addiction. It's a topic that many other political families would have hidden away and refused to discuss, but the de Blasios were open and dignified about it, in part because they wanted to reduce the stigma around mental health.
It's that stigma that prevents many people facing mental-health challenges from talking about what's going on or accessing services that could help. More and more, cities and states are taking this on as a public-health issue. McCray has launched a program — ThriveNYC— that functions as a "Mental Health Roadmap" for the city, with goals like closing treatment gaps, early intervention, and expanding treatment for maternal depression. A cornerstone of the roadmap is training New Yorkers in what's called "mental-health first aid." The one-day workshop provides participants with expanded knowledge about mental health and, importantly, gives them skills to help others who may be facing a mental-health crisis. The program is free and open to the public. A typical class might consist of community members, city workers, religious leaders, correction officers, and anyone else who wants to sign up. Thrive will also establish lasting resource centers in schools, community centers, homeless shelters, and places of worship in the city.
When Chirlane McCray speaks to you, she looks you in the eye the whole time and carefully smiles. Sometimes, when she is excited, she rushes to explain things with her hands and wrists, or traces her fingers across the expanse of the table.
Kaitlyn Greenidge: Why is the issue of mental health, and access to mental-health care, so important to you?
Chirlane McCray: Mental-health challenges have been a part of my life since I was a child. My parents both suffered from depression at different times in their lives, which greatly affected me, even though I didn't realize it until I was older. I also had a very good friend in high school who took her own life, and many other episodes with extended family members that affected me. These things were happening, and I didn't have the words to explain them or understand them. Because of that, I've been fascinated with the life of the mind and with emotions for a long, long time.
My most recent experience was with our daughter. She is well into recovery now, but she suffered from depression, addiction, and anxiety. These personal experiences have made me sensitive to what so many other people go through, especially in terms of our children. More than anything I want to make sure our children get a better start to life. There are many things in life beyond our control, but I know that if we can just lay a good foundation for our young people, it will help.
KG: You've set up a "Mental Health Roadmap" with ambitious goals. One of the greatest challenges surrounding this issue is, of course, stigma. People don't feel comfortable talking about these issues, so they go untreated and can escalate to a crisis when they don't have to. Do you think you can make a difference?
CM: I think we actually are changing culture. To me that is probably the most important thing we can do, because if we don't change the culture people won't feel comfortable talking about it. Right? And that means they won't take steps to seek treatment. It means they won't try to expand their education, or have tools to help others who might need it. Visiting neighborhoods and talking about it, it is clear that people are receptive and hungry for more information. I think that is huge. They begin to recognize how deeply this issue affects every aspect of our life, from education to criminal justice.
KG: I'm wondering if you can talk a little about involving communities of color in this initiative?
CM: It is very important to me that when we started taking on this issue that we were able to address all communities and especially communities that have the most need. It's interesting because the black community, the Bangladeshi community, the Latino community, the Korean community, and the Chinese community all say "This really affects us, and there is a huge stigma." And it's insular, contained within each group. No one is really talking about it outside of the community they belong to.
KG: How have religious leaders been responding to the program?
CM: We have had many leaders of faith-based communities take the mental-health first-aid training. They're first responders just as much as our police officers and our fire officers are. Our goal is to train a quarter of a million New Yorkers. And we are targeting different communities to make sure we get representatives from as many different communities that we feel are not necessarily represented. During this past weekend I went to a synagogue, a mosque, two nondenominational churches, a Catholic church, and a Baptist church and asked them all to get training.
KG: One of the things that I was also really struck by is that this campaign takes the view that there's something that a layperson can do to help when a loved one is having a mental-health crisis. The response is oftentimes "I'm supposed to step away. This is not the place for me. An expert is needed." There's a sense of hopelessness and helplessness. It seems like it's important to you for everyone to know that there's something they can do for a loved one or even a stranger with mental-health issues.
CM: I really want people to understand that anyone and everyone can be a healer. It's so important, especially for your friends and family members, to be conscious and aware of that. Who knows a loved one dealing with mental illness better than their family, right? You know what that person is capable of. You know how to calm them. If you have an understanding of what the challenge is, you can begin to help heal. That's why mental-health first aid is so important. Everyone can be a healer, but you do have to have some basic understanding of how someone might be afflicted.
And I think that by taking mental-health first-aid classes, people become less prejudiced. They see people differently, and they have a better understanding of their own health as well. We become more cognizant of issues like anxiety or the ability to regulate your behavior. And that's important because life is tough. It might only be a matter of time before something happens and you need to fall back on those skills.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Kaitlyn Greenidge is Lenny's contributing writer. Her book We Love You, Charlie Freeman was published by Algonquin in 2016. | | | | | | | | | | | | The Feminist Heroes of Fight! Zine | | | | By Jackie Snow | | | Comic-book artist and gamer Jenn Woodall was sick of how women were presented in comics and video games, so she decided to use Tumblr to invite artists from around the world to draw their own original female fighting characters, then had them square off in the first issue of Fight! zine. The next issue is due out soon, and we are presenting some of our favorite fighters here — head to our site to read an interview with Jenn!
| (All images courtesy of Jeanne Woodall and Fight! Zine) |
| (Left: Jeanne D'Angelo. Right: Andrea Kalfas.) |
| (Left: Dilraj Mann. Right: Ze Burnay.) |
| (Left: Jenny Zych. Right: Kat Verhoeven.) |
| (Left: Baptiste Pagani. Right: Kali Ciesemier.) |
| (Left: Babs Tarr. Right: Sam Bosma.) |
| | | | | | | | | | | | Mentor, Equal, Solace | | | | By Emily Rapp Black | | | |
During my first year in college, I was silent. I never skipped class and read every page assigned to me, but I didn't speak, even though I was in a program called the Great Conversation. I was too afraid of saying something wrong. This period of silence neatly coincided with three years of starving — a task that focused all my energies on physical hunger in order to ignore intellectual (and sexual) desires that frightened me.
I declared a religion major as a sophomore and took a class from Barbara, a young theologian. Although I'd grown up in the Protestant church and was the child of a pastor, I didn't have a clue what feminist theology was about, but the class fit with my schedule, and I'm so glad it did. My mind was split open by a range of new thinkers and writers and by the quality of Barbara's questions. I finally had something to say and the energy to say it. I started talking, and then I couldn't stop. I started eating, and I felt better. I was a frequent visitor during Barbara's office hours, a rocket of words. She listened, calmly responded, her peaceful exterior a perfect counterpoint to my manic ramblings, and helped me organize my erratic thoughts.
I loved what she saw in me, which was a range of abilities I had never seen in myself. The discovery of the quality of my interior life was a love affair I have never stopped pursuing, and it never gets old.
I spent my junior year in Dublin, and that spring Barbara sent me an email announcing the birth of her daughter, Maggie. I hadn't stopped to think that my favorite professor had a life of her own that was progressing simultaneously to mine, but in a very different way. I quickly typed a note of congratulations and wandered to a nearby coffee shop, feeling strangely weepy. I realized that I loved Barbara for the ways in which she reflected an ideal version of who I wanted to be. But what did I know about her life?
Gradually, I learned more. During my senior year, when Barbara was my thesis adviser, I was Maggie's babysitter. When she cried as her mother left to teach her class, Barbara's voice trembled as she said "I love you" to her little girl. I sang her lullabies, fed her tiny cheese cubes and hot milk. That year, when I was awarded a Fulbright scholarship, I sprinted to Barbara's office in the basement of the school chapel. We whooped loudly, our voices echoing scandalously out of tune with the choir practicing upstairs.
In the years after I completed my program I visited Barbara in Palo Alto when she and her husband took teaching jobs at Stanford. I watched Maggie fall in love with sharks and Disney and, later, Dance Dance Revolution. I met the pet bunny and the black Labrador. Barbara had a boy, and one afternoon when he was about six years old Barbara and I watched him shoot baskets at his school, blond hair falling in his eyes. Our relationship gradually deepened, but I was always conscious of a teacher-student dynamic. We were both a bit guarded, a rarity for me, but I wanted to impress her.
This changed fundamentally when I became a parent.
When I had my son in March 2010, Barbara was one of the first to congratulate me. When my child was diagnosed with Tay-Sachs disease nine months later, a rare and always terminal illness with no treatment and no cure, she wrote me a letter — handwritten, on a white legal pad. For the next two and a half years, Barbara wrote me regular, sometimes weekly, letters, remarkable letters that are revealing, loving, and kind. Honest. Full of rage and searching.
When I began writing about my son and my grief experience in a very public blog format, beavering away on essays long into the night, Barbara responded to each one. Her husband was worried, she wrote, that reading my posts and peering so deeply into another's despair would upset her. "How does one negotiate the relationship between that which we know and that which we choose to tell?" she wondered. But, she went on, "reading for me is just sitting and listening and silently just being there."
She talked about the biblical Job and the way his friends were helpful to him in his great trials until they opened their mouths and tried to explain and rationalize his despair. "It all seems a terrible mistake, all this darkness," she continued. "It must be; but here I'm in danger of starting to question, to rationalize, and that won't help. Just know that I am thinking of you, sitting, and listening." She promised to keep doing so, and she kept that promise.
Barbara's letters were not just about my work and what was happening with my son but about her life as well. At first she worried about discussing the family vacation and the events of her daily life because she didn't want to bore me, or hurt me, or make me feel rage. But I wanted to know, I wrote back. I wanted to peer into the life of someone whose family wasn't falling apart, whose children weren't dying, in part because I knew she didn't pity me, she was walking with me, accompanying me in the age-old tradition of Ruth and Naomi, although we shared no familial tie.
She sent me book reviews, reports about her latest theological interests, the copy of an old check she had written me for babysitting services ($54.86, dated May 1996 — "We were so cheap!"), and one rollicking discussion from "a summer in full swing," about what the nineteenth-century Protestant theologian John Calvin might say about luck. "Death won't be the end," she wrote, and I sensed in her a desire to believe this, even if she didn't, not quite. Another was written with visibly shaky handwriting during a turbulent plane ride.
Through our back and forths, I began to realize that I hadn't really known her at all — not until now — when she revealed more about herself than she ever had. Last summer she wrote, "I'm sending you lots of love and positive thoughts. Hope you feel it." I did, and I do. Yes, we had decades of shared history behind us, but now we had truly gotten to know and love one another as women, thinkers, and mothers. Equals. This switch from youthful adoration to a more nuanced relationship included an element of loss. I was no longer young, foolishly believing that possibilities were endless. Our correspondence signaled an adult awareness of mortality, that death is always closer than we think.
The last letter, written right before my son died when he was three, was the most personal and perhaps the most profound. I realized, reading it, that this exchange of ideas had altered us both, earned us one another's trust in a new and radical way. She told me the story about Maggie's birth, one that would never have been included in a mass email announcement. After Maggie was born, she was taken away, and a nurse arrived to take care of Barbara, to wash and comfort her. "Time seemed to stop," she wrote, "and this moment in which the flow of time seemed to be completely suspended, my thought was this: this is a baptism, and this is the moment when I become a parent, this is the anointing."
Barbara went on to say that she believed my experience of parenting a terminally ill child had made me a better person, not in a superficial, moralistic sense. "I think he's made you better by opening up the great fire of your love," she wrote, with his "small but magnificent existence." I have never in my life read a more deeply comforting sentence, one that spoke to my grandest hopes, my deepest fears, and the only faith that remains to me, which is a belief in chaos. Our love had bloomed and deepened from a guarded mutual respect to a richer, deeper friendship.
Mentors are meant to usher those in their charge into fresh understanding, help them sort and filter new experiences, assist in the project of making sense out of the chaos that is human life, or at least doggedly ask questions that dig deeply toward those difficult and nuanced answers. It is a sacred relationship with ancient roots; I envision it as a mutual anointing, a loving recognition, a way of saying "I see you; I'm here." Unlike Job's friends, who want to sort and solve, mentors witness. They observe and accompany the darkest despair, the wildest sorrow, and the most unexpected joy. My mentor, who first taught me to love my mind, and later, when the life of the mind she had helped me develop was the only way to withstand and survive the thunderous days with my dying child, she wrote me letters that stood witness to my life, in all its wretchedness and joy, in all its terrible beauty. Nobody did it quite so well as she did.
Emily Rapp Black is the author of Poster Child: A Memoir, and The Still Point of the Turning World, which was a New York Times best-seller. Visit her at emilyrappblack.com | | | | | | | | | | | | Gillian McCain: The Female Bard of Punk | | | | By Ilana Kaplan | | |
| (All Images by Mayan Toldedano) |
Please Kill Me is the punk-history Bible, and poet Gillian McCain is the woman behind it. McCain coauthored the influential book, which was published in 1996, with music critic Legs McNeil. The first time I read the oral history compilation, which includes testimony from Iggy Pop, the Ramones, Jim Carroll, and many more, I felt like I was actually a part of the original punk scene. Gillian and Legs met through a coffeehouse reading series called The Poetry Project and their shared interest in the souls of punk pioneers became the basis for their friendship.
While Gillian and Legs worked on the book fifty-fifty, Gillian was often erased from its media narrative. Sure, Legs was older and had been a staple in the punk scene (he is a renowned music critic and one of the people responsible for giving "punk" its name). But despite the genre's anti-establishment roots, punk has a well-documented women problem. While Legs was seen as a celebrity and almost a hero, Gillian often fell into the background.
As the twentieth anniversary of Please Kill Me approaches, we spoke with Gillian about her enduring friendship with Legs, how she became part of the punk scene, and the punk-icon story that intrigued her the most.
Ilana Kaplan: How did you and Legs meet?
Gillian McCain: We met through the late poet Maggie Estep. I had just started working at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church. She was like, "Do you want to go watch a movie with Legs?" I had known his writing from Spin. We became fast friends.
IK: How did you first become interested in punk?
GM: I grew up in New Brunswick, Canada, right across the border from Maine in a really rural place. I had four older brothers and sisters who went away to college in Europe and all over. They'd come back and bring punk records. I went from listening to the Kinks to Led Zeppelin. They brought back the Velvet Underground's Live at Max's Kansas City, and I remember thinking, Why did they have such a cool club in Kansas City? I didn't listen to Patti Smith until college. I thought she was a hippie because of the Easter cover.
IK: Recently Joseph Corré, the son of Sex Pistols' manager and punk impresario Malcolm McLaren, wanted to burn a bunch of punk memorabilia for the 40th anniversary of the Sex Pistols' first album, saying that punk was lame now in comparison to what it used to be. Do you think that the punk scene now has become lame and tame?
GM: No, I think it's a publicity stunt for himself. It's just rude. If he had any respect for his parents, he'd give it to a museum or a college. That sounds so bourgeois, but it's history, how can you burn that stuff? It's just kind of pathetic.
IK: Totally agree. What can we expect in the twentieth-anniversary edition of Please Kill Me?
GM: There are three new chapters. After Please Kill Me came out, Legs interviewed Johnny Ramone, so there's a lot of Johnny Ramone. One of the most interesting new interviews is James Williamson from The Stooges. A few years ago, we heard that James was mad he wasn't in the book. I reached out to him, but James was like, "I'm too busy, I'm too busy." Then my husband, Jim Marshall, wrote a piece on the Stooges, and James contacted him saying, "I'd like to give you the opportunity to interview me." I was like, "That's so cool."
They did it on Skype, and the first thing James said was, "I don't know why I should bother doing this for this piece-of-shit book," which I thought was hilarious. They did a great interview. It's really made the book fuller. Then the three of us went on a wine-tasting tour. It was so fun. James became a Silicon Valley guy — he went from the Stooges to Silicon Valley!
IK: That wine tour was super-punk. Did you ever feel like Legs McNeil's presence overshadowed yours? Like it discounted the work you put into the book?
GM: Well, I wasn't a speaking voice in the book, but Legs was. My name was sliced out all the time — just "Legs McNeil," though some conscientious journalists would put my name in their stories. Legs felt bad about it, but it wasn't his fault. I think it was semi-sexist, but I think it was about fame. People knew his name and they didn't know mine.
I felt really discouraged sometimes. We'd go to a reading, and only Legs's name would be on the billboard. Then I just got used to it and started laughing about it. Early on, Legs and I were being interviewed for Canadian TV, and the interviewer kept stepping on me. She was putting her back to me. Legs kept pulling me out and being like, "This is Gillian," and she was like, "Who are you? I've never heard of you." I said, "Well, there's a six-foot-tall cover rendition of the book behind you with my name on it. You should do your homework. It's right behind you." And she said, "Well, I've never heard of you."
One time, it was Joey Ramone's birthday party, and Legs said, "Has everyone come up to you and told you they loved the book and asked you for your autograph?" I was like, "No." He was like, "Girls have asked me to autograph their breasts." I was like, "You're having a different experience than I am."
IK: With the reissue of Please Kill Me, do you think you're going to get the credit you deserve?
GM: Well, [Legs] and I put out this young-adult book, Dear Nobody: The True Diary of Mary Rose, and my name was first, so ever since then some people are printing my name first with Please Kill Me. So that's helped a lot.
IK: Out of all the oral histories in this book, which story was most interesting to you?
GM: It's the answer you'd expect: Iggy Pop. He was such a good interview. He was so articulate and concise. He's funny and intelligent. Every time he's in the book, the page just brightens.
IK: What did you think about his posing for the nude-portrait series?
GM: Oh, we have a nude portrait on the back of the Please Kill Me hardcover. We put a sticker on him that says "Made in the USA." Those classes he was posing for looked really fun.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Ilana Kaplan is a freelance writer and editor living in Brooklyn. She loves anything that involves music and cats. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | The email newsletter where there's no such thing as too much information.
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