Cut from "I am having so much fun here without you"

            The very first photo was a Haddon/Bourigeaud montage. We hadn’t had a professional photographer at the wedding, and we’d forgotten to take one of our two families with the happy bride and groom. Inès was the first one to realize this, and she was also the least hungover, so she forced us all to regroup for a photo after breakfast.

            Both my mother and Anne’s thought it would be nice if we got into our wedding clothes again, but everyone else agreed that this was a bit creepy, so the photo I was looking at was a late-day assembly of heavy-lidded relatives with Anne and I, looking game, but also nauseous, together in the middle. Her family was on the right, mine was on the left. We were the bridge.  

Cut from "I am having so much fun here without you"

            Growing up, each summer us Haddons used to pack up our blue station wagon and head off to Poole-in-Dorset, where we spent about two weeks “sunbathing” beneath overcast skies and snacking on watermelon-cheese cubes concocted by a middle aged widow named Penny Hamilton who used to rent the house right next to ours.

Cut from "I am having so much fun here without you"

 “Exactly. I heard you had a show recently, too?”

            I tossed the crumpled pastry bag towards one of the useless blue trash bags the city had put into place after 9/11. With no guard around it, it shifted in the wind, turning its back on my wad of paper, which went careening to the ground.

            “Yeah, but it wasn’t a big deal, really. Actually, I have to go see about it now. Something’s sold, I guess, and—”

            “I get it,” said Patrick, slipping back on his helmet. “You were always a busy man. It’d be great to really catch up, though, hear more about what you’re up to. We could go for a coffee, or hell, our kids could have a playdate?”

            I smiled at him, weakly. “Seriously?”

            He shrugged. “If someone approached you saying, ‘Lead me to the music’ how would you respond?”

            I blinked. He blinked back at me. He shrugged. “It’s from my show.”

            “Oh,” I said, pushing a laugh out. “Cool.”

            “Okay, buddy,” he said, starting his scooter. “I’m gonna shove off, but I really would love to hear from you.”

            “Will do,” I said, watching him circle around me and ease his scooter to the pavement.

            And off he went. Godamn Patrick Madsen who was so generous and wholehearted I couldn’t even hate him and his rip-off show. Back at RISD, he’d majored in kinetic animation—for his sophomore evaluation, he’d imbued the heads of four taxidermied boars with recordings from the film version of “Roe vs. Wade” that were only activated when a woman walked past. For his thesis show, he wired and grooved a series of his German grandfather’s photographs from the Second World War so that they could actually be played on a record player. The sounds that came out of the photographs were terrifying, scratched. He won a grant award for that, which he used to study robotics and engineering in Osaka, Japan. And now he was doing performance art. If I hadn’t felt like enough of a hack for making a sell-out show of accessible oil paintings (scenes viewed through doorways? Jesus.) I certainly did, now.   

Lost paragraph from a memoir, maybe

For decades, on a daily basis I have squired myself off to some poorly insulated corner to “write,” an act that—with very few exceptions—has been requested of me by no one. Think about this for a moment, think about the phantasmagorical levels of delusion it takes to be a writer, or any creative person, really, who thinks they have a “gift.” In spite of the endless form letters and form e-mails and returned manuscripts and unreturned phone calls that signify yet another rejection, we keep on going with these stories and these novels and these long-form essays and (god help us), poetry because we tell ourselves that someone, somewhere cares whether we write.

From a secret project, different version

When you are in, you are in love with everything and everyone responds in kind. I have played to crowds of millions. In person, on the airwaves, you have thought about me at night. You have been entered from behind and scuffed your kneecaps on a carpet. I am the lit-up dashboard of your potential boyfriend’s car. I am a tight T-shirt. I am just-washed hair. I am the smell of your own sex coming to greet you after a trip downtown. I am the taxi cab you let someone else get into. I am a strawberry milkshake. You think I wouldn’t be as good as chocolate, but I am.

The other day, I played a benefit concert for the Pine Creek Fire department because a lot of houses were lost recently in a fire in my town. I didn’t have my voice back so I played guitar with a country rock band who has one Grammy to my seven. I’m not saying anything about it, I know. I understand. It’s a senseless metaphor, a singer songwriter who can’t sing. But I saw you in the front row and I want to tell you publicly that your stupid needles pierced my heart.

From a secret project

There was a time when I was beautiful. I did not move, I shined. I didn’t need food and sleep, hardly. I had electric eyes.

There was a time when I was everywhere—I mean it, divine. I was in your airspace. Your television. I was on your mind.

I was the rug that burned against your kneecaps when you let him fuck you from behind.

I was the smell of your own sex coming to greet you.

I was your first lie.

You are going to tell me that my time is over; that my music is irrelevant; that I’m out of touch; mistuned. The time has come for me to admit some things to you about the differences between how I used to see the world and how I see it now. I am going to tell you that for a long time, I ordered strawberry milkshakes when I really wanted chocolate. All of my life, I wanted to be interesting, and for many years, I was. And despite my vocal problems and my personal catastrophes, I was feeling even more interesting and I was feeling very strong, and I was feeling vulnerable and sensitive and aware and full of grace, and then I took the stage at the Pine Creek Fire Department benefit I organized for the lost homes in my new Montana town, and I saw you with your knitting needles, and your needles pierced my heart.

From an entry in progress for Emily Spivack's "Worn Stories"

My father’s vintage Ralph Lauren cardigan is age-stained and moth-nibbled, the cuffs are all stretched out. Although I don’t have any memories of him ever actually wearing it, it certainly corresponds to the type of man that he was then. In the early eighties, he had great hair and a mustache—a long-legged, rare-steak eating, tennis playing man who belonged to clubs with letter-pressed stationary in royal blue and cream. He always gave me a sip of wine at dinner, but would tell me to smell the bouquet first. This will give you the impression that my dad is cultured, snobbish. He isn’t. He pushed the wine across the table to me to piss my mother off.