Velma, Scraps and My Online Journal Creation Myth

Yesterday was just the greyest, bleakest day imaginable.

However! Since I am virtuous and pure, I forced myself to go exercising anyway.

The Garden is in its autumnal deshabille. They have drained the fountain at the base of the Goddess of the Cellphone. They have put the exotic flowers to bed. They’ve removed the goat enclosures – that one gave me a pang; I do love the goats.

The view from the Hudson River overlook is a frame from the last scene in the movie about the Sudden Disappearance of All Humankind from the Planet:



Three Stories:

Story One: Scraps

I once saw a photo of Scraps when he was still Tom. He was very skinny, very young, very earnest-looking.

By the time I kinda-sorta knew Scraps, he was burly, pierced, and shaved his head. There was a kind of disjointed paradoxism to all his utterances: I could never quite figure out what the hell he was talking about. Except when he was talking about bands; he retained his youthful earnestness about bands. But when I tracked down those bands, I couldn’t hear anything special about them. Scraps was cool; I am not cool. No doubt, other adjectives may apply to my singularity, but cool was never one of them.

###

Scraps is the reason I’m on LiveJournal.

Scraps was one of the Well people; the Well was possibly the earliest experiment in social media.

I never really meshed with the Well: Narratives fascinate me, but opinions per se don’t interest me very much, and the Well was all about opinions. The Well was also about a mental connection that enthusiastic participants called “community,” but I had a hard time with that, too. I’d read The Machine Stops; I knew exactly where sitting alone in a room interacting with imaginary playmates who live inside of your computer got you.

Of course, the theory was that you would meet the imaginary playmates in real time. And I met quite a few people on the Well. Slept with many of them! It was kind of like a counterculture equivalent of sleeping with someone you’d read about in People Magazine – which I went on to work at solely because of my Well connections. Tom Mandel – one of the most infamous Well participants – became my best friend, seeing me through the end of one marriage and into the beginning of a new one.

Tom Mandel was the person Philip DeWitt Elmer had tapped to launch Time Inc’s publications’ fledgling websites.

“You read tabloids, don’t you?” Tom asked me one day.

“Every chance I get!” I said.

Six months later, I was in New York City! Interviewing in front of a bunch of white guys in expensive suits.

I rattled on and on and on and on about my theory of pop culture. About how pop culture is all about archetypes: Susan Smith was really Medea! Liz Taylor was Helen of Troy! Pop culture as embodied in the pages of People Magazine, I argued, was actually far more profound than haute culture, which was merely a reflection of the watered down thoughts of old, white, intellectual men.

Well. I may not have said “old, white, intellectual men.” But I certainly thought it.

When I finally paused for breath, one of the suits – whom I later learned was Walt Isaacson, biographer presumptive of Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, and Leonardo DaVinci – turned to another suit – whom I later learned was Dan Okrent who went on to write the definitive history of Prohibition – and said, “Oh my God! She actually reads the magazine!”

And I was hired on the spot.

###

By that time, Tom was dead. The Well people were hideous, vitriolic, and mean about Tom’s death because he was a political conservative while they were all aging hippies with a very inadequate understanding of economics.

So, after Tom’s death, I never had much use for the Well.

Though I am a dues-paying member to this day.

I owe the Well a lot. And I try to be conscientious about my debts.

###

Anyway, when I was still enthusiastic about the Well, I used to muck around through people’s opinions trying to figure out the narratives behind them. And I mucked around through Scraps’ opinions because, as I say, he was cool, and I was not.

Thus, I found the link to Scraps’ LiveJournal.

I’ve been keeping a journal since I was 12 years old, so this was very exciting to me.

What if I start keeping my journal online? I wondered.

And so, I did.

I must say, LiveJournal is a much better fit for me than the Well ever was.

###

So, what happened to Scraps?

Well, he met a girl. Velma. She was also on LiveJournal.

I read both their LiveJournals. Velma’s in particular fascinated me. She was such a snob about the way she bestowed her good opinion! How does one retain an opinion of oneself sufficient to build walls that tower so high? I wondered. Given that life is a process in which the walls one builds are knocked down. Repeatedly.

Velma and Scraps lived in Brooklyn. They were so passionately enmeshed in one another that they combined their last names. (In addition to dropping “Tom,” Scraps had also dropped the last name he was born with, had replaced it with a surname that made him sound as though he went out drinking regularly with Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley.)

By day, Velma worked for a nonprofit. But by night, she went to sing and drink in this magical piano bar called Rose’s Place, which was filled with the most fascinating people! She had magical adventures! I loved reading about them.

Then Rose’s Place closed. And Scraps had a stroke.

Or was it the other way around?

I have such a shitty memory for chronology.

###

At the time of his stroke, Scraps would have been in his late 30s. Who knows what could have precipitated a neurological event of that magnitude in a man so young? An aneurism? Untreated high blood pressure?

The stroke was quite devastating and basically turned Scraps nonfunctional.

Though enough of his mental capacity remained so that he was still Scraps.

Velma would never have dreamed of leaving him.

###

In nursing school, I had a friend, Lisa, who was just the most interesting, fascinating person imaginable, and who – like me – intended to use nursing to subsidize her other interests.

One winter on a whim, Lisa bought a ticket for Warsaw! And spent ten days there.

“Why’d you do that?” I asked Lisa upon her return.

Lisa shrugged. “The ticket was cheap. And I’d never been to Poland.”

Lisa had a boyfriend who was handsome and dynamic. A jazz musician! No, really! People paid him!

Lisa and the jazz musician were in love!

Then one day, the jazz musician got diagnosed with MS.

And Lisa dropped him. Just like that.

“How could you do that?” I asked her. “I mean, I know it’s none of my business. And I’m not asking because I blame you or anything. It’s just… You loved him.”

Lisa looked at me matter-of-factly. “Patrizia, you’re going to be a nurse. You know the progression of MS. I know myself. I would not be happy committing myself to a lifetime of caretaking. And life is about making choices to be happy, no?”

###

Velma was the very opposite of Lisa.

She was never going to leave Scraps.

###

When Ben was sick with hepatitis, and everyone thought he was going to die, he said to me, “See, the thing is that for the first six months or so, everybody cares. But then, you don’t get better. And they stop caring. Except that by that point, you’ve come to depend upon their caring. It’s easier just to ignore them in the first place when they care.”

###

But Velma never stopped caring.

###

Eventually, Velma and Scraps were forced to leave Brooklyn and move to Seattle where Scraps had family who through the obligations of blood could be forced to care even if they didn’t really. (Although what do I know? Maybe they did.)

Velma couldn’t find a job in Seattle, and their living situation there sounded dicey although Velma continued to chronicle their life together in her dreamy, ornamental, selective style.

And then Velma got cancer.

And died.

Very suddenly.

I went to her memorial service.

She’s still on my LJ friends list.

###

Scraps popped back into my mind after a long absence last week when Gerard – another Well acquaintance with his own narrative, no doubt interesting only to me – made a plaintive FB posting: Does anybody know what happened to… ?

So, I did some sleuthing.

Scraps had continued keeping a blog of sorts. Mostly band critiques. It was very difficult for him to write. He couldn’t command his body to do the necessary things with a keyboard and thinking was exhausting for him, he noted.

But in one blog entry, he’d written sadly that it was looking as though he was going to have to be institutionalized. After I met Velma, my life became Velma, and I let all my close connections to friends and family fall away so that now there’s no one who cares very much about me, he wrote. Well. Words to that effect.

If I win Lotto in the next two weeks, I’m thinking I’ll buy a house for Scraps and set up a little trust fund with an amount sufficient to allow him to spend the rest of his life in comfort writing elliptical, paradoxical things about cool bands.

But since I never buy Lotto tickets, it’s unlikely that I will win Lotto.

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You just never, ever know, do you?

You never fucking know.

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And writing that one story has taken me so much longer than I thought it would that the other two stories will have to wait to be written for another day.

If I remember them.