Llorando

NYC is known for having like, two public restrooms in the entire city, one of which is in Bryant Park and the other is the bathroom at Times Square McDonald’s. So, it’s not unusual to see bottles of urine on the streets. But sometimes I see pee bottles and I really worry about the person they came from—some of these pees (pee?) are not looking well. Turns out a lot of people out there have undiagnosed kidney infections! Or at the very least, super dehydrated. If this could be you, please reach out and I’ll confirm your pee looks weird, free of charge.

Thing 1: How did it take me so long?

To discover Los Microwaves?

Thing 2: Pigeon Report

Your intrepid pigeon reporter has been covering the dark underbelly of pigeon-life in NYC and beyond for many years now. If a pigeon has done something, I mean ANYTHING, ANYWHERE in the world, I am aware of it. I’ve heard about truly foul dark things from the pigeon world.

But I’ve been experiencing a sort of “dark night of the soul” the last few weeks, because I’ve been feeling bad for pigeons lately. A few weeks back there was a pigeon on our block that was maybe injured, or something happened where their stupid pigeon brain was rattled, and it had forgotten how to fly. Anyways, suddenly I was confronted with a pigeon that needed help, and who was I to say no? We are all god’s children. Or at least everyone save for the serial killers, the current administration, and all the runaway nazi grandmas and grandpas still alive in the mountains of Argentina. Also, pandas (don’t have time to explain that one right now.)

I’m so steeped in pigeon facts I could even tell this was someone’s pet pigeon, so I did my best to help. I threw bread at it, and I tried to get close enough to catch it—but no dice. He hopped away and hid. I worried all week that he had died because I hadn’t tried hard enough to save him. Maybe this was my punishment for besmirching pigeons for half a decade.

But then I check my daily pigeon news updates and hear about how pigeons have harassed an old couple in Brighton Beach and turned their home into a toxic hellhole, I’m reminded that, yeah, pigeons kind of are the worst.

Grade: No grade this week, this is just a confessional. Pigeons aren’t evil—just really really dumb. Except for the evil ones, of which there are a lot of.

Thing 3: Llorando

Grief is a weird thing as time goes on. I’ve written in the past in Cracks about a friend of mine who died a decade ago. He was more than my best friend. I feel like the connection we had was something special, one of those precious relationships that can transform you, make you more yourself, bring out the best in you.

When he died, one of my greatest fears was forgetting him, and an even deeper fear of knowing I would grow older, and he would always be young. I hated the feeling of living to be old and knowing so much time has passed, that maybe I’m no longer the person he knew. Where once so much of my life was tied directly to this person, I worried that when I was old it would just be a shadow or an empty space, not the feeling that he was with me and influencing who I am as a person.

But the funny thing about loss is that as time goes by—it’s not quite like that. You do forget some things and every time you realize you’ve lost knowledge about that person it feels like you are losing them all over again. I can’t remember some of our jokes anymore—there’s a time I remember us dying laughing in high school biology class and I can only remember half of what set us off (I know the phrase “turkey trouble” was involved.) I distinctly remember crying so hard from laughing that my teacher was genuinely concerned. I suppose that’s what’s important. It could have been a really good joke? But I can’t remember it. If I forgot that, what else have I forgotten I’m not even aware of? Synapses crack and there goes someone you love.

The other strange thing about grief and memories is that sometimes I feel like I’m still making them with him, even after his death. During the pandemic I watched “Mulholland Drive” for the first time which is a) a terrible idea to do during a global pandemic and you’re stuck at home 24/7, and b) a bit surprising because I’ve been a Lynch fan for a long time, and this film is always considered one of his “classics.” Of course, I loved it and immediately became obsessed.

One of my favorite scenes in the movie would take 678 pages to explain and a degree in psychology, so I’ll give you the gist of the scene, don’t worry about the plot, literally no one (and I mean NO ONE) understands the plot of “Mulholland Drive.” Betty (Naomi Watts) and Rita (Laura Harring) are two lost women in LA, trying to solve the mystery of Rita’s lost identity, all the meanwhile falling for each other. One night they end up at the mysterious “Club Silencio” which in typical Lynch fashion is this creepy-weird-very red/dark theater where a woman performs an acapella Spanish version of Roy Orbison’s “Crying,” The two women cry and the performance is so haunting and sad and beautiful and weird. It really does tear your heart up. It’s also campy and a little ridiculous.

Since watching the film, I listen to that song all the time, years on. However, it is undeniably a kind of ridiculous rendition in the context of the film, so I also find myself making silly references to it or singing it loudly in my house to annoy my boyfriend. At this point it’s an inside joke, but only with me. Or is it? After I saw “Mulholland Drive” I have thought often that this is a movie my friend I lost would have loved. Or did he love it? He very likely had seen it, he was a big cinephile, liked Lynch, and although I can’t remember if we ever talked about “Mulholland Drive”, everything about that movie just screams to me that it’s something he would have become obsessed with just like I did.

When I sing “Llorando” now, I imagine the two of us joking about it, joking about the movie, the way we often did with other similar films (we had…approx. 1000 inside jokes about “Picnic at Hanging Rock” which I am pretty sure are only funny to he and I.) I feel like it’s one of the only new memories I’ve made with him since he died.

It’s not even special, it’s just something where I know he’s the only one who would be equally obsessed with Llorando and find my dumb jokes funny. I think he’s the only one who would laugh at my periodic refrain of “Mentally, I’m at Club Silencio.”

And it’s very likely tied to the plot of “Mulholland Drive” too (again, no one actually knows what it’s about, and if you say you do you’re lying,) and the theme that we can maybe, through dreams, or our own delusions imagine an alternate universe, one where we get the things we want. Where heartbreak and loss never happened.

It feels a little dumb writing this, admitting that an imagined interaction, an imagined shared joke, means so much to me. But it brings me a little bit of hope that new memories, even imagined, are possible with the people we’ve lost.

It’s not like I forget he’s gone when I share “Llorando” with him. When I think of how we would joke about it, I mostly feel happy—but the undercurrent is that the shared feeling is with his memory, and he isn’t here the way he was. But it’s nice to say hello to him, even in small ways. Not to be corny, but it’s really put best in the original song:

I was alright for a while
I could smile for a while
But I saw you last night
You held my hand so tight
As you stopped to say hello
You wished me well
You couldn’t tell that
I’d been crying over you