Angelina Jolie, Marilyn Monroe, and My Night Out with 22-Year-Old Girls

I went to a concert the other night and while waiting for a friend to arrive I met two young women from Maine who’d come down to the city for the show. I try to avoid calling adults “girls.” I think there’s something creepy about mixing the terms of potential romance—a thread I admit to finding in varying intensities in all my exchanges with women–and children. I realized once I started to avoid this invisible diminutive just how common the occurrence is. In describing a night out at a bar, or party, or a first date with someone it feels too natural to describe women as girls. What was the girl like? So what did the girl say then? There’s a sexless formality in swapping out that playful noun for its more adult counterpart. It feels, for a moment, like the impulsive, improvisational levity of youth has been traded for the coffee-stained seriousness of a grownup. Girls dance and take shots of euphemism. Women need someone to help pick out faucet handles at the hardware store.

This is a distinction without any truth, but it informs the coded ways we use words, pointing towards irrational and vague aspirations without confronting them. As I talked with the two young women from Maine, I found them more girlish than anyone I’d met in a long time. They spoke in bumbling spasms, sentences punctuated with momentary snatches of eye contact that seemed to beg for affirmation, broken by stretches of ruthless disinterest staring off into he crowds. They spoke in extremes that went without question, things were either the worst of all things or the best that had ever been. In the moments where they disagreed over what should fit into which category, they’d instantly retreat to personal attacks, firing sarcastic hyperbole at each other. Arguments could never be made personally, they were always objective and irrefutable declarations with no visible seams.

I liked them both. They were sweet, and reminded me of how I must have seemed to people when I was ten years less myself–a hurricane of rhetoric and scorn shot from the talking hole of a palpably unsteady and vulnerable boy in boxy hand-me-downs. When I told them that I’m 33 they looked like I had farted or brought out some Scientology pamphlets. “What’s it like being 33?” one of them asked me.

I’d never been asked that question before and I confess it felt like an insult for a quick second, pointing to an uncrossable gap between us. What’s it like all the way over there on your side of the ravine? However uncouth it might be to openly address social differences, I realized she’d asked a valid question. I am older now and it has had some effects. It had been easy to deflect that realization by picking at the observable uncertainty I’d seen in them. But if there was something young-seeming about them there must surely have been something old-seeming about me.

When I was younger I used to fantasize about the bodily declenching of age. I imagined myself growing bald and fat, hair shooting out of corners and holes that had been glossy and smooth in my handjob-hunting years. I imagined I’d have affection for those slack decrepitudes, the speckled sag of fat drooping over my outmoded belt a symbol of survival, the compromise between body and time. You can get these extra years if you pay for it with these small bits of yourself. I thought reaching old age would be a heroic gesture of proving how much of myself I could give away and still survive, whittling away at the taut glimmer to reveal a hale and immovable urchin inside.

I could only think of two characteristics that demarcated my age: an intensification of nostalgia and a dwindling of social anxiety. The older I’ve gotten the more reverberant the world has become, the fragmentary heap of invisible memories are more regularly set into vibrational simpatico at street corners, deodorant commercials, and the way a stranger’s face seems to have been arranged from a pattern I’d once seen in some other beloved face. I find more and more of myself in the world and other people the longer I go

Indifference is the other trick of age I find in myself. I could never have said it aloud when I was younger, but every movement, thought, and uttered word was bent by an awareness of other people’s potential judgment, which left me feeling powerless—this was the hell of other people Sartre wrote about, not the commonly assumed interpretation that other people’s affects are hellish. In that sense, ageing is a soft ascension from the hell of other people’s presumptions.

Earlier this summer Angelina Jolie’s former drug dealer sold photos of her allegedly high on heroin and with black X’s of electrical tape covering her nipples. I immediately thought of my recent acquaintances from Maine when I read this story. I assumed by instinct that the pseudo-shock of these celebrity revelations was designed to bait the unsteady anxieties of these young women, pinioning back and forth between insecurity and merciless dismissal of other people in reciprocal judgment.

The belief that other people live in a world without highs and sexual curiosity must be handy for someone shameful of their instincts to wallow in chemical escape and physical experimentation. The implicit condemnation framed the entire story, the headline bleating these secret photos would bring ruin to Jolie’s relationship with Brad Pitt. All the forms of self-centric feeling become planks to paddle the filthy behinds of deviants, who, transmogrified in the grainy black and white film, become outcasts, the hidden silhouettes of our most fearful selves.

By happy coincidence Marilyn Monroe’s collection of hand-written poetry, private correspondence, and diaries were collected and published this month. Predictably, the icon of unbroken bliss–the airheaded angel who made it possible to believe that life could be lived in a strata of hygienic delight, embodied by an unbroken smile and sexless surprise—was sadly self-aware, philosophically ambitious, and disarmingly honest.

In her most private moments, Norma Jean Baker was just exactly as conflicted and shit filled as anyone, racked with insecurity and indifference, and hoping to alight on an acquisitive flight of intellectual betterment. She’d read Joyce and Proust, and fucked Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller while keeping correspondence with Saul Bellow and taking direction from Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger, and John Huston. And for all of it she was kept in orbit around the same metaphysical toilet of self-doubt and sadness that can’t help but be the recurring counterpoint to the joy of being alive without any real cause. It’s a meta-fecal fugue, the flushing wonder of a great shit, all those nerve endings thrumming with momentary stimulation, while all of the indigestible runoff plummets earthward, in holes of our own making.

All of these billions of markers pile up day after day, pointing towards the looming consternation of a nameless other, a normative ideal whose benevolent model will always make us seem like deviants in comparison. That record begins to fade with age. One discovers in other people a commonness in joyful prurience and irrational romanticism, and fewer points of separation over manners and primness. I am less inclined to feel guilty when shitting in public restrooms now. We are all regularly filled with shit that needs periodic expulsion. We poison ourselves in pretending it’s not there and we make fools of ourselves in finding dogma in our unavoidable revulsion to other people’s evacuations.

This, I suppose, is what it’s like to be 33. A half-life away from 22, and yet still wandering in the same crowds, in the same rooms, having paid money to see the same band play a familiar song, consenting to have the same temporary stamp on our inner wrists to show that we’d made good on the price of entry and now had only to wait for the band to take the stage, at which point we’d be freed of one another’s inscrutable expressions, allowed to look up at the four stars staring out over our heads, wrestling with strange contraptions that made the air vibrate sweetly. The next morning I woke up with the exhausted echo still caught in my ears. I will someday have to start wearing earplugs I think. So will they, though I’m bound to go first.

*Image via crowt59