lifestyles of the poor and ignominious (written in july, just now posted!)
Sunday 11 November 2007 | someone left a cookie
Here we be, living large at “the poker ranch,” wandering around its green and pleasant land in a daze and looking for the extras and the canteen tent and the makeup trailer. Because we are on a movie production set, right? It’s a Cormac McCarthy adaptation? Or Larry McMurtry? And any second now we’ll bump into Tommy Lee Jones on a big bay gelding, or Robert Duvall on a little roan mare, or John Wayne on a palomino?
No one super-famous seems to be here, though, other than our screenwriter hosts, the Brujo’s poker buddies and their various wives and kids and dogs (plus eight working ranch canines, mostly blue heeler mixes). We’ve been put up in “Nancy’s Little House,” which is really not that little and is besides incredibly swank, anyway to us. It and the ranch manager’s quarters seem to have been rebuilt around some original New Mexican farm house, because the floors are nineteenth-century hardwood and the whitewashed wall and ceiling boards look about the same age—either that or someone has gone to phenomenal expense to make everything look über-rustic, which is also entirely possible. The bed’s wearing handsewn cotton quilts (again, either vintage or carefully distressed and weathered to seem so) and I find myself shaking my head over how an aesthetic of sheer necessity can become so sought-after, so gentrified. If the Ricketts family had only known that someday ill-fitting floorboards and tattered quilts would be fashionable! Of course there are limits to coopting sharecropper interior design; the mattress is free from vermin and we have a flush toilet. While the B. unpacks our life savings, the better to gamble them away, I take a luxurious shower, rinsing away all the newsprint and cardboard-box dust, and washing my hair with the guest bathroom’s stash of Bumble and Bumble seaweed shampoo. As frantic as the ramp-up was to get out here—and as much as I hope Pyewacket isn’t moping around the house yowling with loneliness—it’s totally worth it.
When we’d pulled up to the big iron gate, I automatically jumped out of the car to open and close it, laughing at how well-trained I am. The ranch is situated in the hollow of a dreamy, misty valley, unbelievably lush and green, surrounded by pine-covered mountains on all sides. Indian paintbrushes and black-eyed susans bloom in the grass, while the ranch houses are surrounded by meticulously groomed rock-walled gardens, filled with lavender, asters, zinnias, daisies, delphiniums and dozens more. Feisty-looking little horned goats clamber on rock piles and a single hairy pink pig noses in the weeds. Thyme creeps across the walkways, covered in tiny purple flowers. The B. and I walk the half-mile to the Big House for dinner, gazing in city-dwelling wonder at everything. It’s deeply quiet. Why is Nancy not here? Why are we staying in her Little House, with her heritage quilts and oil paintings of livestock?
“If I lived here, I’d never leave!”
“I may never leave anyway.”
The screenwriters feast us on nachos and guacamole, caprese, grilled shrimp (with barbecued chicken and hamburgers for the carnivores), gold-and-white corn on the cob and a salad which shouldn’t be anything extraordinary but somehow is, with garlic/parmesan/lemon juice dressing. Twenty-some-odd of us almost fit along the long, long wooden table. Kids all zanting around, throwing balls, racing scooters and walking on stilts. Dogs of every size and color seem to be everywhere, attentive lest an entire chicken perhaps should accidentally fall to the floor. One entire wall of the room is floor-to-very-high-ceiling with black-and-white photographs, many of which we recognize, and there’s a grand piano off which the Brujo can barely take his eyes, even though it’s a Baldwin. We’re both feeling introverted and shy around so many people, so much gracious living. Nonetheless, recently divorced poker buddy R. and I joke around and flirt as we did on the Fourth of July, playing out some instinctive shtick where I’m the straight man, naive and giggly, and he’s morose and cynical and ill-tempered. The B. goes outside to smoke and be overwhelmed by scenic beauty, while I eat chocolate-chip cookies and then try all the kids’ toys myself, falling off the stilts laughing, bouncing on a giant blue rubber ball and gamely maneuvering around the furniture on a little scooter, my knees up to my chin.
Finally dinner’s cleared away, the whirring margarita blender pauses momentarily from its labors, and our host makes a little speech, giving out commemorative Frisbees to mark the third annual Ranch Poker weekend. The Brujo and his comrades head off to wager the night away (R. trailing behind and disconsolately throwing gravel at me, making glum little speeches to which no one pays any attention), while I retire gratefully to bed and the laptop.
Ouais, the laptop—how yuppie am I. Well, so much so that tomorrow while everyone else is playing Frisbee golf and getting a head start on the margaritas, I’m going to hole up and finish the goddamned book. If I waver in my resolve, there’s actually Herself’s last disastrously received tome on the shelf here in the guest room (along with Mary Higgins Clark, Sue Grafton, Faulkner, and a Harlequin, the last ten pages of which I read standing up in a damp towel, wondering how I ever used to plow through them when I was a teenager), to remind me of how little I want to drag the Dying Book to Arizona with me.
How is it that two shabby people such as we, living perversely and frivolously and deliberately on the edge of destitution, have such generous friends? Of course, as we’ve discussed, if we were somehow to earn as much fortune as they have, we’d be throwing it at our friends like maniacs. One of the Brujo’s dreams has long been to win the NM $100+ million lottery, use the proceeds to buy as many $1 million vacation homes in Santa Fe as possible, and turn them into affordable artist housing, thereby also destabilizing the real estate market and driving prices down.
Then there’s the Sponsor, who’s now convinced we’ll both make squillions off his self-help book, though I told him not to expect more than a five grand advance and maybe a couple hundred bucks a year from sales. He claims he can see us having tea by the ocean (!) with our publisher (!!), celebrating the book’s glorious success. Me, I think we’ll be lucky to get a phone call from our publisher. But then lately he’s into manifesting wealth, visualizing success—while I’m apparently into manifesting cardboard boxes, a cranky cat, way too many books and a mushrooming, if modest, credit debt.
Not only is the ranch beautiful, but the conversation’s good too. The Director and I had the second installment of our rushed, clipped, shorthand movie talk.
“The Squid and the Whale?“
“No, Junebug.”
“I didn’t see that. But did you see—?”
“Oh yeah, definitely. Noah Baumbach. And I’m a freak for Laura Linney. Strange last scene, though.”
“Didn’t work for you?” She maneuvered a pan of nachos out of the oven.
“At the time I didn’t think so, but that image has stayed in my head, of him running to the museum and staring at the whale, so I guess—”
“And that was the only place where it could go, the only place it was ever going. But I felt the same way when I first saw it.”
Probably the best thing about Squid, though, is the performance its script extracts from Jeff Daniels. So beautifully wooden and unyielding, such a lyrical total failure. Like Saul Bellows’ incompetent, talentless cousin. He out-Tenenbaums Gene Hackman, though they’re also very different divorced-husband New-Yorker one-hit-wonder characters. Maybe I’ll remember to mention this tomorrow morning over bagels, before I withdraw to my chambers and chapters four through twenty.
Outside my real house this morning, as I was strewing old barley and oats from the pantry onto the ground for ants or mice or birds, a petsitting acquaintance passed by walking the neighbor’s dog. We stood there talking for a while, me holding my Mason jars and her hanging onto the leash as the collie tugged it intently toward Pye (who was, I could have sworn, taunting her), and then she said the nicest thing: That her friend Robert, whoever he is, had always loved my reviews, said I was far and away the best thing about the weekly, quit reading it when I quit writing, and thought I should be syndicated. I blinked in astonishment and pleasure. Thus a second-hand compliment from a stranger has kept me going while packing all day, through many water glasses wrapped in pages from the same weekly, and tedious repetitive Mercury-in-retrograde phone calls which seem deceptively productive but apparently accomplish nothing. (”But I already faxed that. Oh. But I thought….oh. Okay. So I need to fax it again with the other thing and then call back? Okay. Okay, I can do that on Monday.”)
And now it’s midnight, my eyes are bleary from Burt’s Bees primrose oil and my hands sticky with lemon cream hand salve and goat milk lotion with honey. To sleep, though probably (hopefully) to be awakened by the B. when he slithers in, warm and silken-skinned, next to me underneath the quilts, whispering about how bright the stars are, and how cold and black the night. Through the kindness of others, we seem lately to live a charmed, though at times also plenty damn kooky, life.
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Of course you could be syndicated. How does one make that happen? When you’re done with grad school I’ll talk to my close personal friend Dan Savage…