Careful What You Wish For
It was a scorching day and the rhythmic clanking of hammers hitting chisels rang out. As I pounded I thought of Michaelangelo’s David, black shards flew through the air and I remembered the feeling of awe as I stood at the base of that magnificent sculpture. As the afternoon sun beat down on my back and the joints in my hands ached from the repeated smack, smack, smacking of metal on metal, I couldn’t help question the logic of my decision to pursue a life of art, as I wasn’t carving Italian marble, I was chipping old tar off a roof.
The decision to pursue a life of art wasn’t so much a choice as a calling, a calling I continue to hear loudly and from several directions at once. I am cursed with the blessing of passion and wide eyes. For me the world is a perpetually full plate always waiting to offer up the next helping of inspiration. I write books that sometimes get read, and screenplays no one makes. I write articles that sometimes find homes. I paint and dance. My life is the humanities department of a small university.
There is no lack of inspiration in my life, but in my rush to immerse myself in all things interesting, I have developed just about as many unmarketable skills as possible, a situation which sometimes leaves me in questionable circumstances, such as serial bouts of financial destitution and the occasional rooftop construction site.
Creativity by nature is unpredictable, stories swerve in unplanned directions, paintings end up purple instead of chartreuse. Sometimes the end result is miles better than your original vision, other times really great ideas can mutate into unsalvageable messes. I’m afraid this may be what has happened to my life. My original plan was to become a famous artist. I figured that while I was busy developing this mighty career I would take the odd job here and there, thus allowing professionalism never to derail creative inspiration. I was half right, professionalism has rarely interfered with my creative process, but teetering on the brink of destitution has. My brilliant flashes of inspiration are more often than not, quickly doused by waves of panic and foreboding. My nights are often disturbed by wakeful moments of worry. My fear of getting locked into a mind numbing career has been replaced by my fear of being locked out of my house by an angry landlord to whom I owe three months of back rent. The reality is, between working odd jobs and chewing on the constant threat of financial ruin, I’m pleased if I can find the time to scratch a few clever lines on a post it note.
So far I’ve managed to stay a few steps away from the cat food isle by working an endless stream of odd jobs, some very odd. While writing a screenplay, I worked at a needle point store, painting custom needle point patterns of dogs and pansies for bored rich women. I wrote my first novel while working as a sculptor’s assistant, installing neon, cutting plastic and grinding metal. The day my first novel was published I was delivering plumbing parts to a fish restaurant. While writing my second book I worked as a waitress serving brunch to hung over couples on Sunday mornings. Right now I’m fixing the roof on a friends studio. Over the years I’ve designed CD covers, bought 1000 pieces of second hand luggage for a sculpture project, photographed bands, built architectural models, refinished furniture, and made hats for the Pillsbury Dough Boy.
Throughout the years the mainstay of my income has come from the administrative work I do for artists. Strangely enough there is a group of people who rely on my services to develop their careers. Luckily I’m much better at developing other people’s careers, than my own. As evidenced by the fact that while many of my clients have gone on to receive enormous commissions, I continue to work for just over three cents an hour. Aside from the generally bad business sense that caused me to think it was a good idea to work for a client base which is devoid of income, I have personnel problems to deal with; I’ve often thought the best business strategy I could embrace would be to fire myself.
I’m well aware that there are people would find the freedom built into my life, enviable and on good days, when paint is gliding and words are flowing, it is. But as time goes on, the romance of walking on the edge has worn thin and I find myself envying people who were born with a deep passion for investment banking, or international law. People with a single profitable focus instead of an orchestra of poorly paying passions. Lately I’ve found myself fanaticizing about walking to work with a bagged lunch tucked under my arm. I suppose we all choose our poison; financial security and no time, or time and no security – I seem to have ended up with both.
Often I look around my life and ask "do empty pockets and obsessive worry constitute failure?" Sometimes the answer is yes, other times it’s no. I’ve learned to sleep knowing I owe half the world money. I’ve learned to write when I’m not sure where rent is coming from. On occasion defeat gets the better of me. At more optimistic moments I employ creativity, my only fully functioning attribute, to choose a yardstick for which to measure my success. I’ve worked hard to bend everything I have ever learned so that in my world success comes from the process, the doing, rather than the consumption of my product.
When I first felt that giddy rush as I looked at Michaelangelo’s mesmerizing handiwork, I never thought that the emotions that swept through me would translate to a life time of Top Ramen. At desperate moments I comfort myself with the fantasy of a paint smudged Michaelangelo slurping a bowl of twenty-nine cent noodles. Then I remind myself that my plan wasn’t such a bad one, I just hadn’t planned on the "famous" part taking so long.
A Good Theory
Today my daughter turns seventeen and I’m letting her have a party. I’m letting her have a party at our house because in theory I would rather she and her friends do what they’re going to do under my roof than in a parking lot somewhere.
My husband Denzil and I went to a dinner party, but taunted by the imaginary party hells we both privately envisioned, we ran out before dessert was served. As we climb the stairs and weave through the gauntlet of inebriated kids, our imaginary hells lost out to something more clearly defined: a 6’5”, 250lb kid staggering across the dining room as if he’s crossing the deck of a rocking ship.
"He’s a freshman," my daughter Cara explains, "he’s not my responsibility, he wasn’t supposed to be here," then wanders off. Whether or not he’s supposed to be here, he is here, and the way he’s swaying back and forth next to our china cabinets clearly makes him my responsibility.
I try coaxing the kid into sitting down before he topples over. He misses the chair and slides down the wall. "You don’t need to worry about me, really I’m fine, I’ll just sit here for a minute." He beams up at me and I realize I know his mother from Cara’s elementary school. I remember him as a baby in a backpack and it’s hard to believe anyone could grow this much in thirteen years.
"Give him more water, make him eat some bread." Teenage folk wisdom swirls through the room. I find it slightly amusing that these kids think there’s an antidote for drunkenness. I know this sort of staggering and sliding down walls leads to two things: throwing up and passing out. Neither of which I want to have happen in my house. All I can think is that if this kid passes out, he’ll be here for the next twelve hours, and I really don’t want to have to call his mother and explain.
Of Muse and Men
It’s Sunday night and I’m ready to go to sleep but the bed is covered with clothing. Neat piles of white undershirts folded like origami, suit jackets still on their hangers splayed out across the comforter. Khaki slacks with razor-sharp creases drape over the edge of the bed. A gaping suitcase sits on the floor. I lift the covers on the far side of the bed and slip in. My husband, stands at the edge of the bed holding a wooden box filled with rolled-up neckties.
“How do you like this?” he asks, laying a brown and blue tie on top of a blue check shirt. I tilt my head from side to side like a confused puppy. “I guess that looks alright,” I say unconvincingly.
Denzil slips the shirt and tie combo into the shoulder of a dark gray sport jacket.
“No, I’m not crazy about it,” I say.
“It’s Armani,” he defends.
“So,” I say.
“You’re useless.”
“I know,” I say and laugh.
Though I think men look sexy all put together in suits and ties, how they arrive at that place is beyond me. My father is a plumber. My brothers and uncles are all plumbers. They wear shirts with their names embroidered above the left pocket. On their off hours my brothers are Hawaiian shirt guys and my father sports that unfortunate golf sensibility, peculiar to overweight American men his age. Suits hang in their closets waiting for someone to get married or die.
This is only a test
If it’s true that we sleep with everyone our partners have slept with, the entire population of San Francisco has probably woken up together at least once. It’s a small world, with a really big bedroom, and the viral possibilities are too depressing to think about. Except in the middle of the night when you’re waiting for your test results and that’s all there is to think about.
Living in San Francisco, ground zero of the AIDS epidemic, one would think that a relatively well-informed, single woman would be careful to protect herself. One would think. Like most people, I practice safe sex, except when I don’t. Even the word “practice” implies that there is room for improvement, imperfection, the possibility of failure.
Being a mother, I am no stranger to the side effects of unprotected sex. If the responsibility of motherhood wasn’t enough to prompt me to behave rationally, then the reality of living with an adolescent girl should, at the very least, have solidified my commitment to birth control. Of course, entertaining thoughts of another life is a far more pleasant task than contemplating one’s own death. (more…)
It’s my party and I’ll dance if I want to!
It’s seven-thirty, I’m driving down Fell Street, the harsh evening sun illuminates a layer dust and a graveyard of bug carcasses on the cracked windshield. I eat rice cakes one after another, I don’t really like rice cakes but I am nervous and find the soft crunching sound strangely comforting. This is our biggest show yet and we’ve neglected to rehearse. I stop to get gas and pry open the gas cap cover with a twelve inch screw driver. People look at me and smile. I’m wearing a short leather dress, it’s purple with white stitching and a thick white belt. I have on tall white platform go-go boots. My hair is freshly hennaed bright red. I look like a character from a children’s book. It’s my birthday and I can do what I like. Today I’m turning 38, and tonight I am go-go dancing with Tom Jonesing, a Tom Jones tribute band.
Like all good things, this go-go venture started out as a joke, a lark, a one night goof. Things got a little out of hand. Now this thing has become a thing.
I try to run through the moves to ‘She’s a Lady’ in my head while waiting at a stoplight – I come up blank. I’m even more nervous, I chomp a few more rice cakes and turn left onto Gough Street. The front wheels make a disturbing grinding sound and the car shutters a little. I’m driving my mechanics car, mine has been in the shop for over a month. My mechanic took mercy and lent me his car for a couple of days. The car is big and American, the paint is oxidized and a glob of something white is fused to the hood. The license plate is hanging by one bolt, a large rock is stuck in the cup holder, the tail light lenses are made of red tape. He made me promise I wouldn’t eat or smoke in it. He insisted I fill it with supreme. Driving it, I look like an alcoholic real estate agent. (more…)
night garden excerpt
The morning traffic crept along, winding through the city like termites. As Dawn drove across town from her daughter’s school in Pacific Heights to her first client in Noe Valley, she watched the styles transform. Like indigenous cultures where the weave of the cloth changes from village to village, signifying who belongs to which tribe, San Francisco residents exhibited a fashion solidarity that marked them as being from one neighborhood or the other.
Dawn drove past the women in Pacific Heights, clicking their way to the bus stop in pointy heals and ponchos. Through the Fillmore where the boys looked like Ewoks in hooded sweatshirts and beltless jeans four sizes to large, held up by a fist full of denim as they walked liked they needed a diaper change. She drove down Divisidero until it crossed Market and turned into Castro, the queer mecca, where currency is measured in muscle mass. Dawn passed through the Mission that hosted the unlikely combination of Latino gang-land chic and lesbians camouflaged as twelve-year-old boys.
It was easy to spot someone who had wondered out of their jurisdiction. Like the tourists who’d escaped Fisherman’s Wharf, the city’s tourist containment area, standing on windblown street corners across the city wearing khaki shorts and sweatshirts they’d bought from street vendors when they realized their California destination was inhospitably freezing.
Swirling red and blue lights marked an accident on Dolores Street and offered an explanation for the knot of cars that had slowed to a crawl. As Dawn rolled past the chaos she craned her neck to get a glimpse of someone having a worse day than she was. A car had run up onto the grassy median that divided the road and buckled against the trunk of one of the thirty-foot palm trees that had lorded over the street for generations. An orange haired woman leaned against a police car looking stunned and confused.
Dawn feared she had been wearing that same expression a lot these days. There was nothing particularly tragic about her life, but while others seemed to stay on the road toward their destination, she kept ending up sideways on the embankment, facing oncoming traffic, or leaning against the guardrail stunned, and confused.
Life had always held an accidental quality for Dawn, unfolding in a series of surprises rather than plans coming to fruition. Breaking up with David was one her few measured decisions, but now, in the throes of her descent back to single life, the whole thing felt as accidental as any shipwreck she’d ever swam away from.
David was a large man, large in stature and attitude. He took up space, he filled rooms, he filled whole houses in the same way he filled his studio with paintings. David stood over six feet tall and could easily carry the extra sixty pounds that hugged his frame. He smoked, he drank. He spoke with a booming voice that annihilated conversations. David’s convictions were immutable, bold, often offensive, and he had no inclination to edit them or soften his delivery. Yet people were drawn to him, and in the light of their adoration he grew even larger.
During the course of their relationship, Dawn had watched her friendships, one after the next, suffer at the hands of David’s blanket statements and brutish comments until her world had been whittled down to a small collection of thick-skinned people who were taken by David’s charisma and now disapproved of her decision to leave him.
There had been no choice. Dawn had felt herself collapsing under David’s weight for years. Her desires swallowed, dwarfed. Still, Dawn found it difficult to reconcile the fact that the man she loved was simply too much. She had a history of leaving men who weren’t enough but had no reference point for leaving someone because they were too much.
Dawn’s Acme Pest Control truck slowly rolled past the accident. She would be ten minutes late for her first appointment but hoped they wouldn’t mind; people were generally forgiving when they found a tall woman with raven hair standing on their doorstep dressed in white and loaded down with poison.
A woman with salt and pepper hair that framed her face like a librarian led Dawn to the kitchen while complaining about the stench of mice. When Dawn opened the cabinet, a flurry of mice dashed in all directions. It was easy for her to imagine how her clients could have let things get to this point. She’d seen it over and over, people seduced into inaction by their intruders’ twitchy noses and translucent ears, the soft gray down of their fur and their slender flicking tails. It was easy to be lulled into passivity by their monumental cuteness, a survival technique Dawn suspected worked only in mouse to human contact.
She’d grown up with the cartoons too and could effortlessly spin elaborate tales about mice that use wooden thread spools for tables and sleep in tiny matchbox beds, and when humans aren’t looking they dress up in clothes and speak with French accents. People were hard-pressed to admit the small rodents were three-dimensional, let alone consider them a problem until it was too late and the stench of mouse piss permeated the house. It was usually at this point that compassion failed them and the exterminator was summoned.
“You’ve got a few choices here,” Dawn explained while closing the cabinet door. “The easiest would be to get a cat.”
“I’m allergic to cats,” the librarian answered flatly.
“Okay then, I can lay some sticky traps.”
“How does that work?”
“They capture the mice,” Dawn said. “Then we come back and exchange the traps for new ones.” The twelve by twelve inch trays of glue in which mice become lodged, then dislocated their limbs and eventually starved to death, were never worth fully explaining to clients. Sticky traps, sounded much kinder.
“Or I can set out some poison. The problem with poison is the mice tend to die just out of arm’s reach so the house might smell a bit gamy for a while.”
The librarian squished up her nose like a rabbit.
“The most humane thing to do is set up a few have-a-heart traps. They catch the mice but don’t kill them. Every day you empty the trap outside and hope they don’t find their way back in.”
The woman listened intently and nodded.
“If we go with the humane plan we need to find where the mice are getting in and seal it off. What’s on the other side of this wall?” Dawn asked.
“The backyard.”
“Let’s take a look.”
They stepped into the backyard, a beautifully manicured oasis of deep greens and browns. Dawn crouched down beneath the kitchen window and bent a tangle of weeds out of the way. “This looks like it,” Dawn said, pointing to a gap between the sidewall and the foundation. She pulled some steel wool from her pocket and shoved it into the small hole. The back of Dawn’s hand brushed against something prickly. “Ouch.” She yanked her hand away quickly and rubbed it as white mounds erupted on her skin.
“Stinging nettles,” the librarian said, “It’s a tenacious weed, and hard to get rid of because the consequences of getting near it are so unpleasant.” She bent down and sifted through the weeds. “But nature is very kind,” she said, plucking a fuzzy leaf off its stem and rubbing it across the welts on Dawn’s hand. “She never gives you a problem without a leaving a solution close at hand.”
“That’s encouraging,” Dawn said, watching the hives retreat. She looked around the yard. Everything was lush and tidy, a deep green fortress hidden from the city traffic that whooshed by beyond the fence. Pink flowers clung like corsages to the waxy leaves of a tree. Brilliant ground cover grew in a soft bed around silvery bushes. A path meandered toward the corner of the yard where a waterfall trickled down stones and into a pond. Dawn thought of her own yard and started to form the vaguest vision of how to tame the unruly mess. “Your yard is beautiful,” Dawn said, walking toward the flowering tree.
“What’s this?” Dawn pointed to a low tree loaded with drooping trumpets the color of butter.
“That’s called brugmansia, or angel trumpet the flowers are very poisonous. In Haiti they use them to turn people into zombies.”
“Really?” Dawn tipped a flower so she could see inside.
“They’re pollinated by bats.”
Dawn let go of the blossom quickly, as if she’d had a bat’s wing in her hand. “I thought prettier things did that work.”
“In the daytime they do, but nighttime plants are the domain of bats and moths.”
“My garden’s such a mess I doubt that even bats and moths would have anything to do with it. I wouldn’t know where to start.”
“You get yourself a pair of leather gloves and go at it a little at a time,” the librarian advised. “I did most of this while my husband was in chemotherapy.
“Is he all right?”
“No, he didn’t make it. But I did,” she said with a mix of sadness and triumph.
Dawn wrote out an invoice and left with a gardening catalog tucked into her bag.
The Night Garden
A story of love, lust, and pest control set against the changing seasons of San Francisco.
“If only Dawn had one more room for rent – I’d move in tomorrow…These characters make for wonderful company and a wild ride into unexplored territory of the human heart. Holm writes with wit, compassion and grace.”
– Ellen Sussman, author of On A Night Like This
“Reading The Night Garden is like getting to hear your close friends share their intimate love troubles – and by this I mean the good stuff – which Pamela Holm relates with sprightly wit and radiant warmth.”
– Paul Mandelbaum, author of Garrett in Wedlock
“A lesser writer could never have achieved these intimate character portraits while at the same time infusing the story with such wisdom. Pamela Holm broke my heart and two hundred pages later, she pieced it back together again.”
– Wendy Dale, author of Avoiding Prison and Other Noble Vacation Goals
When Dawn leaves her boyfriend of five years she leaves behind their comfortable home, their rose garden, and their life of couplehood. With her nine-year-old daughter, Jewel, in tow, Dawn struggles to forge a new life in the shadow of the old one. While her days are spent exterminating bugs and her evenings spent painting them, Dawn struggles to balance work, art, single motherhood, and love.
The difficulty of starting over is leavened by Dawn’s nine year-old daughter Jewel, a charmingly morbid daredevil who dreams of having a pet rat and plants a scent garden in case they happen to go blind.
Dawn and Jewel rent a home with a small apartment downstairs, and set out to find a tenant. They soon hear from Harlan, a frustrated documentary filmmaker whose world is quietly crashing down on him too. After years of domestic bliss, he and his wife, Macie, have become consumed by their quest to have a baby. He doesn’t realize how far this mission has driven them apart until he meets Sophia, a birdcage dancer who lives in an ancient firehouse full of mirrors and candles, and whose postmodern views on life and love seduce Harlan into reevaluating his own.
Over the course of a year Dawn, Jewel, and Harlan’s worlds become intertwined as they transform their lives and bring the neglected garden of their new home back to life.
The Toaster Broke, So We’re Getting Married
The Toaster Broke, So We’re Getting Married, is a hilarious and heartwarming look at one woman’s odyssey from divorced single mom with a rebellious streak and a string of soured relationships to blushing bride, shamelessly seduced by the kind of satin-and-lace fantasies that short-circuit logic, practicality, and self-control.
“Humorous and Touching” -– The New York Times Book Review
“Holm’s TOASTER is a comical commentary on how brides often get caught up in the trimmings of the wedding, while ignoring the larger issues of the marriage ahead.”– Bookreporter
“Artfully captures life’s bittersweet details…funny, tender, endearing, and always entertaining.” – Jill A. Davis, bestselling author of Girl’s Poker Night.
How my husband killed Liz Phair
Until now all of my long-term relationships have been with men who have deep passions for contemporary pop music and extensive music collections to match. Each of them seduced me in their own way with mixed tapes filled with gems that never failed to usher me into new musical territory.
Denzil was different. One of our first dates was to see the avant-garde musician Terry Riley where I politely suffered through the seemly endless concert of tedious melodies that cycled in loops that crossed over each other until my head was tied in knots. A few months later I counted the lights above the stage while the symphony played Stravinsky. Not long after that later I slept through a Merce Cunningham dance concert. It was then that I knew if this relationship was going to work I was going that have to fire the current cultural attaché and take over the post myself.
(more…)
The Most Tedious Compliment
“What did she call you?” the shoe salesman asks, looking from me to my beautiful eighteen-year old daughter, Cara, who is trying on prom shoes.
“Mom,” I say. “It’s a little game we play, I pay all the bills and she calls me mom.” He looks at my back daughter, then back at me and I can tell he thinks I’m joking. For the duration of the sales transaction he shakes his head and mumbles, “I can’t believe it,” and “you’re kidding right?” He gets giddy and forgets to give us the shoes after we’ve paid for them.
(more…)
Ex Files
I am standing in line at Ross, anxiously scanning the store for familiar faces, fearful I’ll be caught in the act of discount shopping. While my financial circumstances land me squarely in the discount shopper’s demographic, I’m not crazy about publicly acknowledging the fact. In my mind discount shopping has implications, far-reaching implications that include Chevy Novas and welfare fraud. It’s a downward spiral, starting with a six-dollar skirt and ending with government cheese.
(more…)
New Wings
Every evening, my daughter Cara sits at her desk working on her college applications. Billie Holiday music leaks out her bedroom, thick paperbacks on philosophy and world religion tumble out of her backpack. She’s putting together her resume of extracurricular activities, making notes for her college essay, gluing feathers on her wings, preparing to fly away.
(more…)
