our bodies our hells
I have this pair of jeans. I have two pairs. They’re the same pair. These are two pairs of the same jeans. They’re from the same store, same style, same size. The blue jeans are loose and easy, not quite Rachel McAdams in Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret 70s perfect but a proud true blue I hadn’t worn in years and long and shapely and close enough to get a lot of compliments from not only my girlfriend. The blue jeans are great and the black ones look nice too but the waist is a cage. A vise! The legs are wide and the hips do not squeeze but the waistband is tighter than the waistband on the other pair that is the same size and same style from the same store. More small less open enclosing caving in flanking the border has been breeched. Not so dramatically. I can still wear them. They look okay. They look good. Only they’re wrong. No new ground is broken in pointing out that mass produced garments are often sized in a way which, at very best, only approximates the size on the tag. We all know this. It’s different dyes reacting with different fabrics or it’s a mistake or they use a totally different kind of denim for each or they don’t care or they are playing a little joke on me. I have no idea. I have this pair of jeans. I have these two pairs.
The experience is common and it’s unimportant. I’m sure that’s true. It seems like what I should say and even feel. There are worse things. Am I displacing the agony I feel over weightier causes onto this small issue I can hold in my hand or rather between a thumb and index finger on either side of my stomach, tugging? I don’t really think so. I think I hate feeling pinched. And what’s more is, well, wouldn’t that be fucking annoying. Were I counted in the number of the bloodied or dying in this world today, as one day I may be, the last thing I’d want is some spoiled bitch deluding herself to think my suffering makes her petty complaints poignant, knowing. To tie my body to hers. But then it's not for me to say. So I’m shallow and I’m obsessed and it’s not important. This is my body, which has been given up for you. (the black jeans). Still the black jeans and the circles and circling of me. Watching myself, I fall through the glass of my modern girl’s terrarium. Whose pants are these?
A sun-bit man in Rite Aid with a shirt that says “pain is weakness leaving the body” on the back. He’s getting Snapple. I’ve bought mints. Pain is weakness leaving the body. For all my life a crazy-making adage as it could not be less true. Pain is weakness leaving the body. I am familiar with these words in this order yet while I walk out the automatic door that often doesn’t go so must be pushed and I sidestep a shit-type substance on the asphalt outside I play cut and paste poetry again in my mind. Pain is body / Weakness, the leaving ; Body is leaving the weakness, pain. ; Is leaving the body weakness? Pain? ; No, that’s not anything. I walk another block.
During the years when I was a self-styled distance runner– a lifestyle and pathology–I could go til I my ankles turned over, legs giving out, til my vision blurred, and I slipped beneath a wave of blue fire. Then, weak as a kitten, I’d gasp and choke and suck my way back. Even vomit, fall over and skin my knees. Totally happy, like, almost drunk. Better than that. Flayed. I was not a good runner. Not naturally fast or even close, never patient enough to properly train and recover, to build efficient, dependable endurance. It took a high school track coach months just to get me to run without my fists wrenched shut tight. “Pretend you’re holding two eggs,” he would say, in the tone of practiced calm hard-won by decades spent around teenagers desperate to move their bodies as fast and far as possible, and for a long time I could not do this and then I could not do anything else. Body tight as a scream but for the hands cupping, featherlight. I was not a good runner. What I had that worked was wanting it to hurt. I won breath holding contests cross-legged at the bottom of the YMCA pool. I would beat kids who swam better than me, had more actual breath control, little boys with six packs. Competitive swimming is so weird. If my ears popped and my nose burned and my lungs felt like someone was working them over with sandpaper it did not matter and I would not move. This is what I’m up against.
I retired. I give money to LA Fitness every month and I do not go. I fell in love. I am busy although not with anything I could itemize. I touch my toes. I have always touched my toes. I imagine myself going to the gym in the morning. I wake up and she’s there and I don’t leave. I have tight hips. I let them be that way if it’s what they like. I do not run. I sleep now. I dream more. I healed my shin splints through lethargy. I dabble here and there in Yoga with Adrienne but get up in the middle having decided suddenly I need a larger glass of water. I note that boutique fitness establishments keep opening in our neighborhood and I think they do not really make sense here and I consider the long march of gentrification of which I am a part although I make almost no money at all really given what it costs now to be alive. I toy with signing up. I ride the bus standing and imagine myself wakeboarding which I have never done or alternately operating some skeleton bobsled-cum-skateboard which I have entirely made up but in the story that I tell myself while barreling down Sunset it’s an Olympic event. (fuck the Olympics) I’m on 30-day push-up challenge day 6.
My only relationship to wrestling is that in high school my least favorite people to babysit for were my uncle’s neighbors whose blond sons with ungendered names would dive off their bunkbed onto one another’s rubber band ribs shouting, “FROM THE TOP ROPE!!!!!!!!”, in those bright, animal tones only children can make. The Iron Claw did nothing to persuade me into giving the sport further consideration, though the film’s true villain is not wrestling but family. Family, the first great bear trap (or claw). As a piece of cinema, The Iron Claw is determinedly medium; the body of standards wherein it skyrockets straight to the top 10/10 five stars run don’t walk would be “thing which can make a person clench and heave and sob while almost screaming out at the screen.” I cannot recall an instance where I felt more visceral distress watching a movie. We have to abolish dads. Not all are guilty, but the danger is too great to pick and choose. If a family is a place to reproduce violence we have known onto the closest facsimiles of ourselves then it is a place we can do without. The failures of the father should not bend the necks of the son and yet!!!!! I guess that’s close to the oldest story ever told, though it does not always have so much spandex, or such a weird skull squeezing move. Those poor boys.
At lunch after the screening Megan and I couldn’t help but scroll Wikipedia slack-jawed with horror. There’s another brother who also died by suicide that didn’t even make it into the movie. The father clearly should have been put down like a dog that’s drawn blood and is only a danger to anyone now but even that seems insufficient. The house would need to be razed. A fitting atonement for this massacre in miniature would shake the earth. Who is so hungry for success?? For a world championship TV show title. To want anything so stupid so badly you’d destroy all your kids is incomprehensible. It feels so wholly wrong that it should not be allowed, which is as far as possible from the world works, clearly, but the impulse to rush forward and slice up the screen until none of this was true, to smash it out of existence, ran through me several times before the movie concluded. At eleven in our old driveway, I thought it was weird that my dad even cared about my weak left-hand layup.
So fine then I was hunched and furious and wet at The Americana AMC but that was appropriate. The Iron Claw is about the family and so it is about love and betrayal and violence and wanting and pain and terror and hoping and failing and secrets and soaring and play and death and love but! ! Also! The Iron Claw is about the body and so it is about love and betrayal and violence and wanting and pain and terror and hoping and failing and secrets and soaring and play and death and love. However tenderly wrought, and though the script sort of disintegrates in the third act, this is a film which emanates care for its subject, this is body horror. It would not do to sit there at ease.
There IS, I have to say, a moment where they flash Kevin Von Erich’s height as 6’2” on the screen as that heartbreaking side of beef Zac Efron prepares to enter the ring and many people in the theater did laugh and so did I but it did nothing to distract from my suffering and all of those little guys did a nice job.
In conclusion:
consider: Is the song “Addicted” by Simple Plan, like, really good? It came to me of its own volition one morning as I sat diligently typing up my little emails at work and I think possibly it’s really good. ** Genuinely.. ..replacing your second coffee with an herbal tea. The fact is that it works. Please understand I am in tatters over this. ** Emmylou Harris’ 1978 album Quarter Moon in a Ten Cent Town, always but again. Top to bottom magic but “Easy From Now On” is the most romantic breakup song ever made, flushed with steely self-love and the certainty–sometimes called wildness when found in women–that there is no real choice but to do what you want. ** I’m in a completely sick and perverted Francophile frenzy right now because we’ve booked our hotels for Paris this spring–no easy feat as the villain Taylor Swift will have a concert there during our stay (don’t worry–we are skipping town for Amsterdam that weekend!!) and has, in advance of her presence, exponentially increased the competition for central, cute, basic-adjacent places to stay. Anyway we are set and now the fevered Googlemapsing can commence. When we arrive, I may muster up some futile attempt to play it cool but today I will confess I am very, very excited. Travelers and French people: send me your advice! ** Traitors season 2, a program featuring a shocking variety and quantity of reality tv personalities whom I have been psychosexually obsessed with over the years is available on Peacock today!!!!!!!!!! Or the first three episodes, I think. Unavoidably, there will be more on this soon. ** Joining me in buying some handwarmers off this wish list to be distributed directly to Angelenos in need. It’s hard out here.