The Paris Review's Blog, page 50

August 1–7: What We’re Doing Next Week

. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Licensed under CCO 3.0.

Soon it will be August in New York City, a period when everyone is theoretically out of town—they’re always saying this, anyway, in books like August by Judith Rossner. This is mostly a fiction, that everyone’s at their country house and everything is shutting down, but it’s sort of fun to imagine; who doesn’t secretly enjoy having fun while others are away? For the month of August, the Review is trying a little experiment—highlighting some things that are going on during this supposedly quiet month. Every week, we’ll be compiling roundups of cultural events and miscellany that the Review’s staff and friends are excited about around town. (And maybe, occasionally, out of town.) We can promise only that these lists will be uncomprehensive, totally random, and fun.

F. W. Murnau’s Faust, introduced by Mary Gaitskill at Light Industry, August 1: Gaitskill, who was interviewed for the Spring issue of the Review, will be introducing this 1926 silent film, which, like many flops, is now a cult classic. Gaitskill saw a clip of the film online years before she had read Goethe’s novel, though she knew the basic outlines of the story of the scholar who made a pact with the devil. “That was enough for me to understand and to feel, to believe, the reality of the segment: the flailing despair, the futile vanity, the experience of running through a live, tactile murk of demons and uncomprehending humans, moving slo-mo through their own fates, trying to undo something that can’t be undone,” she told Light Industry.

Heji Shin’s “The Big Nudes” at 52 Walker, open all August: “The Big Nudes” is the photographer Heji Shin’s first solo exhibition in New York since the 2020 show “Big Cocks.” The cocks in question, by the way, were a series of roosters photographed in shocking detail. “The Big Nudes,” meanwhile, will include photographs of pigs posed to evoke fashion models. This show comes recommended by our contributing editor Matthew Higgs, who says, “This relatively rare gallery presentation promises to be something of a midsummer event.” It opened recently and will be up through October 7.

“Live Jerry Garcia Band Set Lists” by the Garcia Project at Brooklyn Bowl, August 5: Recommended by friend of the Review and occasional Review softball first baseman Adam Wilson, this will be an attempt to faithfully re-create actual set lists played by the Jerry Garcia Band between 1976 and 1995. If you never had a chance to see Jerry’s soulful side project live, this is probably the closest you will ever come to it, and real Deadheads will tell you—at great length, if you’d like—that JGB is actually, sometimes, even better than the Dead.

New York City Estate Auction at Auctions at Showplace, preview beginning July 26, auction on August 6: A Jasper Johns lithograph? An Edwardian platinum diamond necklace? An unspeakably tacky oil painting of a blue butterfly? All listed for prices so low they’re unbelievable, which is true, because they’re likely to climb exponentially over the course of the auction. (Or will they?) There’s really nothing like an auction for a dose of randomness, serendipity, and pure gambling thrill; this one collects objects from private estates all over New York City. At the very least, it’s worth a stop by the preview showing, just in case …

Bargemusic: Complete Beethoven Violin and Piano Sonatas on the East River, August 5: An idea from site contributor Elena Saavedra Buckley that is third-date-worthy: go see music at the barge-turned-floating-concert-hall moored in Brooklyn Bridge Park and then go to Sunny’s, the best summer bar in Brooklyn, where there is also likely to be music on a Saturday night. Be on guard, however, if you are seasick or faint of heart, warns the Bargemusic website: “Please be aware that although we are permanently moored, the Barge is in navigable waters and sways with the movement of the East River.”

, Manhattan Beach, August 6: This is, of course, in Manhattan Beach, but for those who happen to be in Los Angeles, our engagement editor Cami Jacobson’s dad will be playing in this legendary annual tournament. Manhattan Beach is apparently “the home of beach volleyball”; this annual tournament is apparently a mix of Very Serious players and people in pink trucker hats who are there for a good time. Jacobson describes the vibe as “very crowded, everyone you have ever met is there, like your whole high school class.”

Triple feature: The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, and The Godfather Coda at Metrograph, August 6: Very rarely can you watch all three Godfather films in one place in a single day. Perhaps not that many people have ever even done this, anywhere. But on a Sunday in early August, Metrograph is showing all three, with a merciful break between parts two and three for dinner. Our web editor, Sophie Haigney, will be there, hiding from the heat.

Also recommended by editors and friends of the Review for this week: Free admission at the Noguchi Museum on August 4 (Lori Dorr); free Indigo de Souza concert in Prospect Park on August 4 (Amanda Gersten and Alejandra Quintana Arocho); Patrick Carroll’s show “Commonplacing” at Bill Cournoyer through August 5 (Spencer Quong); stop by “Visual Volumes: Contemporary Explorations in Book Arts,” all month at the Center for Book Arts (Alejandra Quintana Arocho); Mingus Big Band will be playing two sets every Monday in August at The Dom (Lexy Benaim); fireworks at the Coney Island boardwalk every Friday of August (Lori Dorr); Carly Rae Jepsen on the roof at Pier 17 on August 7 (Amanda Gersten).

View more on The Paris Review's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on July 27, 2023 09:04

Cooking with Elizabeth David

Photograph by Erica MacLean.

Elizabeth David considered herself “not a writer really you know, but only a self-made one”—primarily a cook. And she wasn’t a typical writer, even within her chosen genre of food writing. David abhorred the arty and artificial, kept her private life to herself, and made concessions to her audience only when it suited her values. Her voice, especially in her journalism, is acerbic—she was a woman who liked to eat well, and didn’t care what you thought of that. And yet she has been England’s most influential food writer since the peak of her career in the fifties, and she remains a household name in the UK. Her groundbreaking works, A Book of Mediterranean Food, French Country Cooking, and simply Italian Food, all published just after World War II, introduced the English to those cuisines. And her prose has the kind of precision and shimmering energy that makes one want to cook. I recently read the NYRB Classics edition of David’s Summer Cooking. I wanted to cook from David, and to understand the secret of her lasting appeal.

Summer Cooking is considered David’s most casual, personal, and playful work. It was written after the intense, yearslong labor of Italian Food and contains many of her perennial themes: fresh, seasonal ingredients, bright flavor, and simplicity. In the postwar England in which she launched her career, food was still rationed. People rarely saw meat and couldn’t get eggs or cream. Cans, powders, and substitutes were common. It was neither practical nor socially acceptable to be interested in what you ate. David drew on her experiences traveling and living abroad during the war, in France, Greece, and Egypt, where even basic meals were flavorful and fresh, to effect a massive shift in this thinking. In Greece, Artemis Cooper writes, David lived on “bread, olive oil, olives, salt fish, hard white cheese, dried figs, tomato paste, rice, dried beans, sugar, coffee and wine” and knew their intense joys. In Summer Cooking she applied the lessons she’d learned abroad to what was available in the English countryside, during its brief, wonderful production of “new peas,” “fresh little carrots,” “delicate courgettes,” “fresh green chives, chervil, tarragon, parsley,” “purple sprouting broccoli,” “tender little string beans,” crabs, trout, Cornish lobsters, damson plums, blackberries, gooseberries, and more.

Much of David’s genius was in knowing when to stop. The best ingredients need little enhancement. Photograph by Erica MacLean.

I decided to make a picnic-themed David menu from such seasonal farmer’s-market ingredients. Summer Cooking’s last chapter is devoted to picnics, which David loved, and it represents her work at its most discursive and delightful. She thought picnics could be accomplished two ways—by loading up at the market and having something impromptu, especially on vacation somewhere markets are good, or by bringing food cooked at home. A picnic combines David’s love of food with her ethos of the casual and situational, though her idea of casual was somewhat different from what ours might be today: when possible, she recommends an old-fashioned Edwardian picnic hamper stocked with real plates and cutlery. (She was writing against a backdrop of stuffy picnics that might be carried and plated by servants or involve an advance visit to the picnic spot to bury the champagne.) The chapter suggests various sandwiches, including smoked trout, and concludes with a smattering of quotations from literary texts and other historical sources, which always served as rich inspiration for David. One passage, written by a Col. Kenney Herbert in 1885, recounts a meal he enjoyed on “long days out surveying” for his garrison, of “a small foul, boned and rolled, with a block of tongue and some forcemeat introduced to the center,” which David says makes a great lunch on the go.

“Rabbits and pigeons are not exactly party food,” David warns, but “make first class terrines and pâtés.” Photograph by Erica MacLean.

I was going to enjoy my David-inflected picnic with Kassia Oset and Dylan Cuellar, who had recently read Summer Cooking as part of their quest to read through the entire NYRB Classics backlist for their podcast, Unburied Books. Oset and Cuellar had recently relocated to New York City from Albuquerque, New Mexico, and they came with me to the Union Square Greenmarket for the fresh ingredients for our picnic. We began with those for the recipe that sets the tone for Summer Cooking, titled “A Summer Hors d’Oeuvre.” The recipe is not a recipe at all but a suggestion to get market ingredients such as “long, red radishes” and “raw, round, small, whole tomatoes,” and serve them in little dishes with bread, olive oil, salt, and butter. We’d follow this course with a cool pale green and white lettuce-wedge salad of utmost simplicity and a cold smoked-trout soup. Aspics and terrines are prominent features of Summer Cooking, though the former might melt in the heat and so are not recommended for a picnic. We channeled the old-fashioned spirit of Col. Herbert and planned a rabbit terrine to be served in slices on sandwiches (though we ran out of chilling time and later ate it plain). For dessert, we were intrigued by the focus on cream cheese in the section of the book devoted to sweets. It wasn’t clear precisely what cheese David meant, since she specified Isigny or Chambourcy, neither of which was available in supermarkets nor defined on the internet, but a recipe using one to make a “geranium cream” served with blackberries sounded too tempting to pass up.

Eggs, to hard-boil and garnish with parsley. “Not very original, perhaps,” David writes, “but how often does one meet with a really fresh and unmessed hors d’oeuvre?” Photograph by Erica MacLean.

Most people involved in contemporary food culture agree that casual, fresh, and seasonal is a wonderful way to eat. The items on our list for a David picnic sounded to me like they could be found on many a contemporary restaurant menu. I thought of Cafe Mutton in Hudson, New York, as an example: the exact kind of place that would have something similar to a small foul, boned and rolled and stuffed with forcemeat and tongue. (Forcemeat is any kind of meat or fish ground and mixed with fats and seasonings.) David was a pioneer, but much of what she championed has become mainstream or even cliché. Yet to me David’s writing has a quality that resists this tiredness—an ability to identify the important part and strip away the rest. Her mission is the simple but vital one of suggesting we eat this wonderful food because of its essential goodness, and explaining how.

Summer Cooking is precisely and evocatively written but surprisingly bare of prose flourishes for such a vivid book, and surprisingly full of advice on source, method, tools, and economy. There’s a chapter on something so basic it is rarely addressed: how to approach fresh herbs. The eggs section opens with the observation that eggs provide “perhaps the best and most nourishing quickly prepared meal in the world,” and admonishes the reader to not add too many other ingredients when you’re cooking with them. Even the personal anecdotes in the picnic section serve to illustrate the spirit of the meal. She refers to a potluck picnic she had while she was “staying with friends in Marseille,” when she brought casual packets of olives, anchovies, “salame sausages,” and so on, purchased at that morning’s market. Her friends overdid it with a hatchet, a frying pan, cutlets, and a thermos of ice cream, causing David embarrassment for her “wilted” little packets and ruining the mood. She concludes the story with a quote from Henry James—that a picnic should be “not so good as to fail of an amusing disorder, nor yet so bad as to defeat the proper function of repasts.”

Soups, David writes, should be “very good, attractive, light, well seasoned, promising even more delicious things to come.” Photograph by Erica MacLean.

David was prickly and notoriously private, despite being a star of English arts and letters. Much of her camouflage was protective. As the truth emerges in her authorized biography Writing at the Kitchen Table, by Artemis Cooper, she’d endured the lonely, nursery-isolated childhood of the English upper classes (and ate the execrable stewed prunes and mushes served therein, to her lasting horror). At the outbreak of World War II she was twenty-six years old and adrift, sailing the Mediterranean with a lover, a working-class writer of whom her family did not approve. The two were arrested, mistaken for spies in Italy, spent a hungry and terrifying stint in prison, and eventually washed up in the Greek islands, safe but dependent on local peasant foodstuff. Later during the war, she married a man she didn’t love “for the Mrs.” The two eventually separated, but David hid behind the appellation in writing for all her life. As it emerges, David knew hunger both in the sense of food insecurity and in the much greater one of emotional privation, and this knowledge informed her work. Cooper recounts that in her successful but sad late-middle age, after the end of her life’s great love affair, she went to visit a friend in Valencia, the photographer Anthony Denney, and found some renewed will to live from a nameless dish that the locals called simply ensalada. “The enormous ridged tomatoes were cored with a little sharp knife, cut round roughly into sections, thrown into a shallow bowl, mixed with thickly sliced raw onions, mild and very sweet. Salt, a sprinkling of olive oil and wine vinegar were the only seasonings,” David writes in a piece from that period.

David’s school of picnicking called for fresh market ingredients, “cheap red wine,” and “stopping now and again for a drink” on the way to the destination. Photograph by Erica MacLean.

David’s talents, plus the keenness of vision inspired by her experiences of privation, have resulted in a uniquely powerful and lasting body of work that’s distinct from the contemporary food writing it might seem to thematically resemble. When Oset and Cuellar and I tried her food, we also found it to be different from what we’d expected, and different from food we’d had before. First, David’s promise of simplicity in putting the dishes together was borne out. There were small mysteries. She did not explain the answers to questions that were assumed knowledge, such as why the smoked fish for our soup needed to be cooked in milk. (Plus: How much fish, and for how long?) But even so, the dishes came together quickly. Even the intimidating-sounding rabbit terrine was a fairly hands-off matter of simmering the rabbit, pulling the meat, and putting it through a grinder with an equal amount of pork belly and some spices. Most of the dish’s time was in baking and chilling. The three of us were at the table, ready to dine, before we knew it. We did not picnic outdoors, but we discussed the plusses and minutes of the picnicking lifestyle, especially in summer—Oset and Cuellar had recently brought sandwiches to Valles Caldera National Preserve in New Mexico; our photographer for the evening, Erica MacLean, had tried to go to a park in Brooklyn, but got too hot and ended up drinking raspberry lemonade and watching Call Me By Your Name at home.

For picnics, David recommends a “stout” red wine like a Chianti. This Fanciulle wine made from the same grape (Sangiovese) in the same region (Tuscany) tasted intensely of summer fruit. Photograph by Erica MacLean.

Even indoors, our food had a crispness, cleanness, and lightness we’d rarely encountered before. We buttered our radishes and dusted them with salt, popped sweet little cherry tomatoes into our mouths, and dipped bread in olive oil. The minimalist salad, served unsalted and decorated only with a creamy white dressing and chopped egg white, was particularly delicate and unusual. The cold fish soup tasted like a soup version of a bagel with lox in the best possible way. Our terrine was well seasoned, and rich but light. David was a wine enthusiast (rough or fine, she drank it all)—and one collection of her journalism in publications including Vogue, Punch, The Spectator and the Sunday Times is even called An Omelette and a Glass of Wine. For summer dining she often recommended “cheap,” “coarse,” “stout” stuff, and Chianti in particular. Sangiovese, the grape Chianti is made from, makes for a rich, full-bodied red wine that tastes intensely of cherries, and didn’t sound like a natural match for raw vegetables and a hot day. But I followed David’s advice, and my spirits collaborator, Hank Zona, recommended a bottle of Sangiovese from the small-batch Tuscan producer Fanciulle—not a Chianti but from the same grape. The wine, a 2019 Villaggio, was neither cheap nor coarse, but it was made from grapes from a single vineyard and tasted like the hyperlocal equivalent of David’s best meals. It went well with the earthy bread and the smoky flavor of the rabbit terrine, and tasted intensely of cherries, blackberries, and spice.

My favorite element of the meal was the subtle geranium cream with blackberries. For that exquisitely simple dish, you steep geranium leaves in sweetened cream overnight, then mix in the cream cheese and dollop the combined mixture on a plate of blackberries as a topping. I tried both mascarpone and ordinary Philadelphia cream cheese in the recipe and preferred the latter, which had just enough sour tang to cut the sweetness of the cream. The dish had five ingredients, nothing more, nothing less, and was emblematic of David’s simplicity, restraint, and unerring taste. The geranium leaves added the faintest and most delicate perfume—a source of difference that was difficult to pinpoint, but tasted like summer.

A Summer Hors D’Oeuvre

Radishes, cleaned “but with a little of the green leaves left on”

Mixed green and black olives

Cherry tomatoes

Hard boiled eggs (“not too hard”-boiled)

Parsley

Pepper and salt, in mills

Lemons

Olive oil

Butter

Fresh bread

Place the radishes, olives, and cherry tomatoes in separate dishes. Cut the eggs lengthwise, garnish with parsley, and plate. Put these plates on the table with the pepper, salt, lemons (possibly cut into wedges), butter, and fresh bread. Directions elsewhere suggest that the bread be “cubed.” Allow guests to freely nosh while drinking wine.

Photograph by Erica MacLean.

Laitue à la Creme

½ tsp mustard

1 tsp sugar

2 tsp tarragon vinegar

¼ clove garlic, pounded into a paste

1 hard-boiled egg, separated into yolk and white

Tarragon, to taste

Chives, to taste

Teacup’s worth fresh cream

Romaine lettuce hearts

Salt and pepper, to taste

Photograph by Erica MacLean.

To make the dressing, mix together the mustard, sugar, vinegar, garlic, and cream. Chop the tarragon and garlic and mix them in to taste. Chill. Cut the lettuce into wedges. Just before serving, pour the dressing over the wedges and sprinkle over the chopped white of the egg. Season to taste.

Photograph by Erica MacLean.

Iced Haddock Soup

David’s recipe calls for smoked haddock; I used smoked trout, which is more widely available.

¾ cup of smoked fish, haddock, or trout, divided

1 ¼ cup milk

1 cup yogurt

1/3 cup “cucumber in dill” (pickles, not sweetened), chopped

1 cup good tomato, chopped

Handful of parsley, chopped

2 small pickled onions, sliced

½ fresh cucumber, chopped

1 tbsp capers, chopped

1 tbsp chives, minced

Black pepper, to taste

Simmer half a cup of the fish in the milk for five minutes, then turn off the heat and leave to cool. Strain, then mix one cup of the milk together all the remaining ingredients. Season with pepper and add a few drops of the pickling liquid from the cucumbers. Chill and serve.

Terrine of Rabbit

1 lb rabbit pieces, skinned and cleaned

1 lb pork belly, diced

“A good sprinkling” fresh thyme

8 juniper berries, pounded

Zest of 1 lemon

3 cloves of garlic, roughly chopped

Salt

Pepper

Mace

2 tbsp brandy

¼ lb good-quality bacon in strips

3 bay leaves

Pork fat to seal

Photograph by Erica MacLean.

Preheat the oven to 300 degrees Fahrenheit.

Simmer the rabbit on the stove in a little water, about forty-five minutes, until the meat is cooked through and separates easily from the bone. Drain, reserving the stock for another usage, and let cool. Pull the meat from the bones. In a bowl, combine the rabbit, pork belly, thyme, juniper, lemon zest, and garlic, and put through a meat grinder. Season “fairly highly” with salt, pepper, and mace. Add brandy and stir.

Layer a loaf dish (or several small terrines, if you have them) with bacon. Add the meat mixture, pat down firmly and top with bay leaves and another layer of bacon. Bake for two and a half hours, covered. When finished, cool, cover the dish with tinfoil, place on top the heaviest weight you can devise, and refrigerate for twenty-four hours. The next day, the terrine can be sealed with pork fat, sliced, and served.

Photograph by Erica MacLean.

Geranium Cream

1 cup fresh cream

¼ cup sugar

2 large sweet-scented geranium leaves

4 oz cream cheese, room temperature

Blackberries

Put the cream into a saucepan, add the sugar and the geranium leaves, and steam gently, letting the cream get “thoroughly hot” but not bringing it to a boil. Cool and chill overnight. The next day, add the cream cheese and stir thoroughly to combine. Serve a dollop as a topping on a small dish of blackberries.

Photograph by Erica MacLean.

Valerie Stivers is a writer based in New York. Read earlier installments of Eat Your Words. She discusses Elizabeth David further on the Unburied Books podcast.

View more on The Paris Review's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on July 26, 2023 09:43

Friendship

Illustration by Na Kim.

He texted me something during staff meeting. I didn’t answer until it was over and I had closed my computer and wasn’t looking at him anymore, and then I told him not to text me, please, for these weeks, like we had said. Then I was upset, and I drove to the other side of the lake, where I parked outside a trailer. It was for work: my job required me to interview people, usually showing up unannounced to where it was possible they lived, or didn’t.

A teenage girl opened the door. She was wearing a hot pink sweatshirt with purple sleeves, and her dog was black or dark gray with white on its face. It didn’t make noise as it went around her legs in the doorframe. I turned around, and it bit into the back of my calf. I yelled for a while, and then I was on the ground. Nothing hurt. I put my finger in its mouth to get it to let go, but it bit it. I screamed louder until I realized there wasn’t a point to screaming, because the girl was already hitting the dog with something, maybe a chair, and there was no one else to alert.

Then I was free, and the door to their trailer was open, and then I was inside, and I had closed the door behind me. Then I was leaning on the arm of their green couch, and then I was sitting on the seat of another, whose color I don’t know, because I was looking at the small lakes of blood on the floor. They were already congealing, and inside the pools were small flecks of white. I realized they were my fat when I saw similar pieces on the thighs of my jeans.

I called him. I told him where I was and that I had been attacked by a dog. He said, “Mm-hmm,” in a light tone, the way he talked to his neighbor when he helped him with his taxes, or to me if I needed help with my computer. There was another girl inside the trailer then, maybe the same girl, and she was looking at me with her hand over her mouth. She asked me what to do, and I told her to call 911. She was upset but she did it.

On the phone I asked him if he was still there. He said he was, and I started crying a little, then stopped, I think. I asked him if he could meet me at the hospital. He said he would, still in the same tone.

He stayed on with me while the medics came, two firefighters. They started cutting off my pants. They said, “I hope you didn’t care about these pants!” The one with scissors kept cutting, surprised, because more and more turned out to be missing from my legs. Another EMT came in after a while, and the fire chief, and a police officer. He stayed on and listened to me talk to the firefighters wrapping my legs in white pads.

He said he was going to start driving to me. Yes, he would stay on the phone. He was going to call our boss, actually, but then he was going to call me back.

The EMT gave me shots for pain; she said I was getting fentanyl, and also other things. The ambulance driver said, “She keeps laughing.” I know I was trying to be polite. He was standing outside the hospital when we showed up. We waved at each other as they carried me in on the stretcher.

In the room he held my hand while I lay on the bed and they asked me questions about pain and medications. It was possible he already knew the answers, but not the specifics: my approximate weight, and what I took for hormonal acne and for mood and to not be pregnant. The nurse looked at me when she needed me to put on a hospital gown, but I said, “He already knows, it’s fine.” He took my bloody shirt from me and put it in a bag.

He came with us when they wheeled me to the room before the OR, which was an unnatural frosty green, like fluoride treatment. There my bed was lower, and he could sit next to me. Sometimes he put his hands in my hair. I felt no need to entertain him. Our boss showed up there, too, and sat on the other side of my body, across from him. We let her see us holding hands. He kept moving his thumb and fingers around my palm, so I always felt the touch, and so it soothed me, or both of us, I don’t know.

Our boss asked me if I wanted to call my mom. I told her no, I would call her in the morning, when we would know more, so she would be less worried. I know he was there when I got out of the first surgery, but I don’t know anything else. I went to sleep.

He tried to come on time the next morning—the hospital was an hour from his house, visiting hours started at eight—but he got a flat tire and was there at nine. It was okay. He came with oatmeal he had made the way he knew I liked it, and with other things, grapes in a cooler, some books from my house. I remembered I had given him my key the night before.

I told him how this was making me think of my mom and stepdad, when he was in the hospital and she stayed, too. I told him the thing about them in bed together, and how the nurses called them the newlyweds even though they were older and had by then been married a while. I guess this gave him some ideas because soon he was sliding into bed with me, placing the IV cord over his lap. We learned how to turn off the IV monitor when it started beeping and said OCCLUDED, which just meant the cord was twisted and it was fine. He used his hand on my hair like one of those claws in the arcade game with the glass case full of stuffed animals, in and out on the top of my head. He told me my hair had been looking so lovely when he came in, and that he had made it all greasy. I told him it was okay and put my head in his armpit.

There was a question: Should I go to another hospital? It would be hard, because the hurricane was coming. I stayed, and he stayed with me until my second surgery. He tried to stay until after, but they kicked him out, so that he’d make it home before the storm. I remember two things about the post-op room: I thought the two nurses, a man and a woman, were the kindest, most wonderful people I had ever met. And the woman asked me,

“Who was that guy waiting for you?”

I told her something.

“Well, he seemed like he really loved you,” she said. Her eyebrows were raised. “A lot.” As though to say, Did I realize? I should know.

He was the primary visitor, the only one technically allowed, with COVID. He was back the next morning even though there was no power in his house. When there was nothing to talk about, we read to each other from the books he had placed in a pile on the table beside my elbow. When I had to go to the bathroom, he aligned my walker in front of me and unclipped my wound VAC from the edge of the bed, carried it behind me like a train, turned around when I peed. I liked to watch him, legs straight and spread, wound VAC between them. He brought me my facial cleansers and moisturizers from home and arranged them by the mirror. When I wanted to wash my face he held me from behind and I bent into the sink. I laughed, because it was the same but different. My hospital gown was only loosely tied behind me, and it hung in flaps when I moved. It felt more funny than romantic, which to me felt romantic.

He was there when the doctor came and removed my bandages and looked at my wounds. He and I looked together, not sure what to expect. They were a spectacle, Frankensteinian, all black insects of stitches and some spaces in my flesh the doctor told me they “couldn’t rearrange” during the second surgery, so they remained, uncovered and raw. We turned my legs over, marveling. He had once told me my thighs were so lovely.

When he left, he kissed my face: not my mouth but both its corners.

My mom came to stay with me for a few days. I learned to recognize when he mouthed “I love you” in his mask, from across the room, when my mom was there—by the rhythm of his cheeks pushing up and the shape of his eyes. He often said it more than once, looking at my legs, then at me. “I love you. I love you.”

I first wrote this while I sat in bed in the months after, once he wasn’t there anymore and I was upset. Initially it was very long, maybe a hundred pages, or more than that. It had a part where we were friends, and a part where we dated, and a part where we stopped, and then the attack. When I read it a few months later, I saw that the part after the attack was very short, probably because it hadn’t happened yet, and I didn’t know how things were going to go. But then I guess at some point I changed it, or added to it, because when I read it again after a year there was an ending about how I left New Orleans and we don’t talk anymore.

It was still very long, and I didn’t like it. First I took out the part where we dated, because I couldn’t remember what had really happened and what I had made up, and because I didn’t like reading it and didn’t want him to read it, either. Then I took out the part where we were friends, because that was my favorite part and not for other people. Then I took out the part where we stopped being friends, because it was short and sad and didn’t make sense if you didn’t know the other parts. I kept this part, and this description of him, which I like:

He used to get upset when I would introduce him as my coworker, rather than as my friend. Rather, he feigned being upset: he’d pull his shoulders back and lift his arms to let them fall down, hands slapping against the sides of his thighs, a pantomimed huff.

“Sorry,” I would say. “I mean, you are my coworker.”

But he was right: he was who I texted when I needed a pickup from the airport. It was always good to see him there—tall, slight belly, in some strange outfit, the strangeness a little hard to name: the linen blend of his shirt; the minor shortness of his shorts. The flavor edged on foreign, and thrifty—clothes he might have bought from a camping store or at a bazaar, but which were still originally mass-produced. Seeing him after time away was always strange, as though I were seeing someone new—his torso of a different proportion than I remembered, jeans a different wash. For a moment I could judge. I found myself uncomfortable with any negative impression, interested in any positive. We were so closely linked that I felt, in some way, observing him was observing the style of my own life. The air in the airport, too—it was always more humid than I expected, Louisiana, the only air in which I had ever known him. He would bring me food, in a bowl covered by a plate, and beside him I ate cooled ratatouille or rice and beans in the twenty-five minutes it took to get home. I ate it even if I wasn’t hungry.

Devon Geyelin lives in Nashville.

View more on The Paris Review's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on July 25, 2023 07:58

Lost Letters

Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and Auckland Museum. Licensed under COO 4.0.

My story in the Summer issue of the Review starts with a character receiving a letter from a boyfriend of twenty-five years ago, and one of the Review’s editors, in search of recommendations for this column, asked if I’d like to write about a piece of epistolary fiction that inspired me. I was pretty sure there wasn’t a particular inspiration, is the thing, and when the editor’s email arrived, I had a flu and a few degrees of fever, so I put her request aside and got back on my sofa and under my blanket, returning to The Demon Lover and Other Stories, which Elizabeth Bowen wrote during World War II. My husband gave me the book more than a decade ago, and for some reason, it was finally calling out to be read.

The first stories in the book are sketches of Londoners dislodged from their identities by aerial bombings. A recent New Yorker article about disaster care describes the small items of function and decoration in people’s lives—pencil sharpener, teakettle, photo in a frame—as the “furniture of self,” and many of Bowen’s characters find themselves feeling uncanny and disenchanted after the loss of items that once made up their context and setting. In the middle stories, Bowen goes at the problem from the other end, writing about people unsettled by the unexpected return of things that once gave them context. A woman inherits a skeleton clock that she is told she cared for passionately as a child but has no memory of. Another woman, in a nightclub on a boozy date, hears a dance tune that her father used to try to sing. And in the title story, “The Demon Lover,” a third woman, returning to her bomb-cracked, boarded-up house to rescue a few items, finds a letter from the man she was engaged to during World War I—twenty-five years prior.

The coincidental resonance/overlap with my own short story was eerie. Maybe I had read this story before and repressed it, the way Bowen’s heroine represses the memory of her skeleton clock? I don’t think so, though I’m at the age where that can’t be ruled out. Maybe twenty-five years is just a resonant interval, for me as well as for Bowen—it’s the time it takes for youth to turn into middle age. It’s also roughly the gap between World War I and II, which may be why it reappears in story after story of hers. As the reader advances through the collection, her stories turn out—more and more explicitly—to be ghost stories. A woman two-timing her husband starts to feel “disliked” by a presence in her bedroom. In perhaps the most beautiful story, “The Happy Autumn Fields,” a woman dozing in a bomb-shattered building dreams of having been another person altogether, in another century, and can’t shake the sense that her dreamed self is her real one.

In a postscript to the collection, Bowen writes about why the past seemed more vivid during World War II—why it haunted the present—and her language is weirdly evocative of what it felt like to live through COVID. “In war-time many people had strange deep intense dreams,” she writes.

I do not think that the desiccation, by war, of our day-to-day lives can be enough stressed. The outsize World War news was stupefying: headlines and broadcasts came down and down on us in hammerlike chops, with great impact but, oddly, little reverberation. The simple way to put it was: “One cannot take things in.” … All this pressure drove egotism underground, or made it whiten like grass under a stone. And self-expression in small ways stopped—the small ways had been so very small that we had not realized how much they amounted to. Planning fun, going places, choosing and buying things, dressing yourself up, and so on. All that stopped. You used to know what you were like from the things you liked, and chose. Now there was not what you liked, and you did not choose. Any little remaining choices and pleasures shot into new proportion and new value: people paid big money for little bunches of flowers.

I didn’t think this latest short story of mine was about COVID, but during the pandemic I was often reminded of the AIDS epidemic in the days before highly active antiretroviral therapy, which I lived through a bit more than twenty-five years ago. Maybe it is the case that, like Bowen, I was feeling a little haunted.

Caleb Crain is the author of Necessary Errors and Overthrow. His story “The Letter” appears in our Summer issue.

View more on The Paris Review's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on July 21, 2023 08:00

Kim Kardashian Landline Dreamscape

Yellow telephone. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CCO 2.0.

Last night I had a dream that Kim Kardashian and I were planning a lunch for a whole bunch of people. I have no idea who those people were. I just know that Kim and I had to plan a lunch together, a small one, maybe a lunch that would serve as a planning session for a second, larger lunch. It is my suspicion that in this dream I was working as a publicist, which serves me right, because I have been short with a few publicists in my life, though I do love a good publicist and appreciate that I myself would not be a good publicist. But in this dream I seemed to be holding my own.

Kim and I talked on the phone for a long time, making plans, debating salads, sandwiches, “small plates,” and the amounts of each that we needed. What would people drink? How many different canned or bottled drinks did we need? We said “uh-huh” and “mmmm” a lot. I was intensely bored but also aware that I was talking to Kim Kardashian. I could see Kim in my dream even though I was talking to her on a landline, a situation where you do not see the person you’re talking to. I was in the dream and watching it too.

I should have known I was in a dream because both of our phones were old-fashioned ones, with long coiled plastic cords. Kim’s phone was avocado green, mine bright yellow. Both of the phones in my house growing up—one attached to the kitchen wall, and one the kind you could walk around with, with an extra long cord, that was stationed in my parents’ bedroom—were white or off-white.

Kim’s “dream phone.” Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CCO 3.0.

When I am forced to recall old-fashioned phones because they appear in my dreams, I remember things like trying to dial quietly when I wasn’t supposed to be dialing, when it was past nine, and then, as I got older, past ten. I remember how this entailed not letting the dial spring back on its own—this makes a lot of noise especially in an old house where you can hear everything—but guiding it carefully with your finger, and the trick was you had to keep the dial moving steadily because sometimes if the dial did not keep up a steady movement the call would get canceled, and you’d get a dial tone again. I remember it was maddening but also a fun challenge, and I remember that when I succeeded in making a call without my parents hearing it was a sweet victory.

I remember my friend Martha and I would talk on the phone for hours while I laid on that , looking out the west windows at the inn next door, which was grandly turreted but gave off a sense of defeat. It was owned by a couple who had escaped the Holocaust. The woman was much younger than the man, and he had helped her escape. He used to put people on boats, and he put her on a boat. I think she felt she owed him her life after that, literally. She was wonderful. He was terrible. He had medical-problem-grade bad breath. She didn’t like him but she was always making him food. My mom was really good friends with the wife. She understood her plight as a woman.

I talked on the phone a lot during my prime phone-talking years, 1977 to 1987, from that perch on that bed, watching the lights go on and off in the small living quarters on the first floor of the inn. Guests were infrequent in the winter months, but in the summer, the place was full of musicians working at Tanglewood and music people attending events there.

Ours was a crowded town in summertime, so there was money to be made. We had some summer lodgers too. I don’t know if it was overflow from the inn or a separate deal. A musician, or maybe a classical music journalist, once stayed in our house, in my room. I stayed in my brother’s room and barely laid eyes on the lodger. But toward the end of his stay, he accused me of stealing his pajamas. I was maybe seven or eight. My mother told him he was crazy. We never took in a lodger again. I kept asking my mom, “Why did that guy think I took his pajamas?” I felt like there was something wrong with me that he would think this. She told me not to worry about it, that the guy was nuts.

I clearly had the dream about Kim Kardashian (who was wearing a seventies-era three-piece pantsuit with a skirt over it, exactly like the purple and pink flowered one my mom used to wear to parties with white square heels) just to bring back all that other stuff: the phones, the inn, the couple who escaped Europe on a boat, the pajama guy. I don’t particularly care about Kim Kardashian. I think she is gorgeous. She is obviously a skilled dieter or a skilled tolerator of Ozempic. I do remember that I wanted to please her. I was conscious of not boring her. My memories of the dream are hazy but I do remember saying, “How much potato salad do you think we will need, Kim?” and she didn’t reply—she acted as if I hadn’t said anything. I distinctly remember thinking, “Why would you ever mention potato salad to Kim Kardashian, you absolute fool,” and then, like her, pretending it hadn’t happened.

I figured out why Kim was in the dream, though. I hate the way she talks into her iPhone, always laying it flat and putting everyone on speaker. I think it’s how people on reality shows talk on the phone, and now everyone does this, using their hand as a big phone platter and holding out their manicures. By putting Kim on a landline in my dream, I guess I was trying to castrate her.

As for the pajama guy, a month later I found his pajamas wadded up in the living room of my dollhouse. I did not, just kidding. Really I have no idea where they ended up, if they even existed, or if they just floated around in his mind with oboe solos, the way Kim Kardashian floats around in mine.

Kim Kardashian Elle magazine beach shoot, seen from above. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CCO 3.0.

Sarah Miller is a writer who lives in California. She writes a Substack.

View more on The Paris Review's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on July 20, 2023 07:53

The Final Dead Shows: Part Three

Black-and-white Bobby. Photographs by Sophie Haigney.

Let’s start with the dark stuff. On Saturday night in San Francisco, after the second-to-last-ever Dead & Co. show, every single ATM near the ballpark was apparently out of cash, because people couldn’t stop buying balloons filled with nitrous oxide, huffing them on the street for just a few more seconds of feeling high. The bars nearby were overrun, quite literally, long after everyone should have been at home. People go down at shows—it happened right in front of us one night, the medics rushing in and carrying someone out. There are, not infrequently, overdoses. There is too much of everything, sometimes. “I’m at that point in a bender where beer isn’t really doing anything for me anymore,” I heard someone joke on day three of the three-show run.

It is not that easy to drink yourself to death, actually, which I know because I have watched a lot of people try, but I could imagine it happening to many people in the context of the long slide of years or decades spent following the band. I always think “There but for the grace of God go I,” and I really mean it. So many people are dead and gone, among them the Dead’s lead songwriter, guitarist, and singer Jerry Garcia, who was killed by his own addiction to heroin at the age of fifty-three. “Do you think of Jerry as a prophet or a saint?” my friend asked me on Sunday as we got ready for the last show ever. The mood was elegiac, though the fact of finality wasn’t really sinking in, which might be why we kept repeating it over and over. “I can’t believe it’s really the last one,” someone said, not for the first time. “What are we even going to do next summer?” my friend lamented. “Are we going to like … have to get really into Phish?” “We are NOT getting into Phish,” someone else insisted, though we all agreed we would probably go see Phish at Madison Square Garden in August.

We put on our last clean Dead T-shirts—we were all running low and trading with one another—and headed back to the ballpark. A few of us had decided last minute to upgrade our tickets so we could be on the floor. I had never been on the floor for a Dead & Co. show; we always don’t spend the extra money and regret it later, so this time, one last time, we were not going to make that mistake. I said I wanted to hear “Bertha,” and we got it, right away, and right away we knew that every single member of the band was completely on, locked in. Bobby, as my friend observed, was “really cooking.” Jeff Chimenti, Oteil Burbridge, Mickey Hart, also cooking. And Mayer—I have never seen him, perhaps, cook like that, leaning into every moment harder than I have ever seen him lean, and he always leans in hard, given that he is probably among other things one of the greatest living guitarists.

“How can I write about John Mayer’s faces?” I typed in my Notes app on the first night of shows. Unfortunately there is no other way I can describe it but to say that while he is jamming he often more or less appears to be on the verge of having an orgasm for three hours straight, and we are with him the entire time.

The thing is, the experience of a good jam-band show really does have quite a lot in common with sex. “Is jamming like edging?” I asked my friend on the first night, and we both burst out laughing, but, well, there’s a reason one of my friends is persistently yelling “Jeff Chimenti make me come!” after a really good keyboard section. With a Dead & Co. show, you sort of know how it’s going to go right from the beginning, because there is kind of a familiar script. The band is probably going to open with something upbeat (“Let the Good Times Roll” is a regular option) and then they are going to lead you through some others (a few jams, a set break, at least a couple definitive hits, an interlude for “Drums” and “Space,” the grand finale, and the inevitable return for the encore, usually slow and sweet). And all the time you are just waiting, waiting, waiting, for that climactic moment when maybe they will drop into “Morning Dew,” or make the pitch-perfect switch from “China Cat Sunflower” into “I Know You Rider.” And yet it’s still surprising, because you don’t know what they’re doing to get there or when, and maybe you will end up somewhere else entirely, like in an extended riff during “Eyes of the World,” but then you come back into yourself, called back by some familiar, beautiful line that is etched into your heart: “There comes a redeemer …” Jeff Chimenti make me come!

This is Jeff Chimenti.

That’s what it’s like for me, anyway; I can’t really say what it would be like for you. But I can say with total certainty that this final night was the best show I’ve ever seen, that everything was superlative. “Good Lovin’,” which is not even that good of a song, was somehow amazing. “Hardest ‘Good Lovin’ ’ ever?” asked a friend. Mayer played and sang “Althea” heartrendingly before a pink sunset. “Best ‘Althea’ ever?” As it got dark, drones flew above the stadium in the formation of the Steal Your Face logo and then later morphed into a skeleton that was tipping its hat to all of us, even to the thousands of people who couldn’t get tickets and were listening from outside the stadium. (Two of my friends were among them.) Thank you San Francisco! Thank you Bobby! Thank you John!

I thought about a poem by Mark Strand, the lines “We began to believe // the night would not end.” And we did begin to believe that, hoping a little desperately for a rumored third set, even though logically we knew there would be a hard stadium curfew, and as someone said last summer, sitting on a curb after the last show of that year, out of cash to buy nitrous, “All good things must come to an end.” But must they? That’s what we’re always wondering and testing, and maybe in part why the ends of these nights can tip toward extremes. The band played the ballad “Brokedown Palace”—“Fare you well, fare you well / I love you more than words can tell”—and then in a moment of surprise, something no one saw coming, one last encore, another version of “Not Fade Away.” They had started the first San Francisco show with that song, and they came back to it, and it was both upbeat and tender, all of us pledging, “You know our love will not fade away!” And the perfect thing is that it won’t.

Steal your face above the stadium.

Sophie Haigney is the web editor of The Paris Review.

View more on The Paris Review's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on July 19, 2023 09:06

The Final Dead Shows: Part Two

A very cool van. Photographs by Sophie Haigney.

We went to the lot. The lot, my younger brother observed—he was a first-time Dead & Co. show attendee—was “literally just a parking lot.” In fact it was a parking lot adjacent to the Port of San Francisco and near the SFPD headquarters, where I used to go for press conferences when I was a crime reporter. It was a vast parking lot, not far from the stadium where the second-to-last Dead & Co. show was going to start in two hours, and it was full of Deadheads.

The lot is the scene outside every show, known colloquially as Shakedown Street. It’s more or less an open-air drug market, that phrase that gets thrown around a lot to describe other parts of San Francisco; it is also the locus of the vestiges of real hippie culture. There is nothing like it anywhere else. There are vans that have been on the road for months, vans painted with psychedelic mushrooms, vans covered in stickers that say “Make America Grateful Again” and “Thank you Bobby.” People sell T-shirts, an endless array of T-shirts in every imaginable version of tie-dye. People sell quesadillas. People sell nitrous oxide—lots of it; in fact, the unmistakable hiss of nitrous and the constant popping of balloons is one of the most disconcerting features of being outside a Dead show. People sell funny hats. People sell, confusingly, a lot of rocks. I saw a sign next to a big box of rocks that said BUY 1 GET 1 FREE.

Being on the lot is basically just about wandering around and looking at stuff, so that’s what we did. One of my friends wanted to get a new Online Ceramics Dead T-shirt; another one wanted to buy a tiny ceramic mushroom to hold during the concert. My brother and I weaved in and out of some stalls, looking at shirts and stickers that said things like “Not like other girls” and “5-8-1977 was an inside job.”

“There was this apple last night that I was eating and I couldn’t stop eating it, I even ground up the seeds and then I think I was worried that I had arsenic in my body, so I got a bit disturbed during ‘Space,’ ” I heard one guy telling his friend, bent over a camping stove where he was frying some onions and nursing a beer.

I waited in line for a porta-potty, but the man in front of me came out and said, “That’s really bad … really not good for women.” So I did not go in. Another guy assured his friend, in a thick Boston accent, “You could piss in there bro.”

“Time to go see my FIRST husband,” yelled a woman in a long tie-dye dress who looked like she was twenty-five.

The lot, which is a parking lot.

Someone nearby was shaking a tambourine.

“You’re so fucking cool, man,” said an older hippie to a young woman he was splitting a watermelon with. “You should keep this.”

“No way,” she said. “You never know when you’re gonna need a watermelon.” They exchanged Facebook information.

“We have enough acid to kill an elephant,” a tall guy in a “Jack Straw” shirt reassured his buddy, who had been worried that they’d need to get more.

I shared my location with my aunt, who was also supposed to be at the show that night; she and I are always trying and failing to meet up at Dead shows, because it is very hard to meet up in a crowd of forty thousand people. It’s often all you can do not to lose your friends. In fact I had lost track of my brother, so I texted him “You good?” and he hearted the message. He was on his own journey now.

I marveled at some T-shirts. “The thing that sucks is I always want to buy a Dead shirt at a show, but then I’m already wearing a Dead shirt, so it’s not a good time to buy a Dead shirt,” someone said, and I agreed.

My friend was not having much luck finding her tiny ceramic mushroom. “You would think this would be the perfect market for tiny ceramic mushrooms,” our other friend lamented with her.

“They’re giving away free hot dogs on wook beach,” another friend texted, referring to the strip of rocks off the lot that extended into the bay. (Wook, if you’re not familiar, is a derogatory term that derives from the Star Wars movies and refers to dirty long-haired guys who follow jam bands around. We love wooks.) I went down to wook beach, though I declined the hot dog.

Wook beach.

It was really the most beautiful place in the world. San Francisco, where I am from, is a breathtakingly beautiful city, and it was at its best that day, cool and sunny down by the water. San Francisco is where it all began—the Dead, of course, in 1965, and also my own life, thirty years later. I thought about this while I sunned myself on the rocks with my friends, and started to get a little sentimental, but then it was time to go to the show.

There was a massive bottleneck on the way into the stadium, people coming from all directions and trying to form a line and squeezing up against each other. “If you walk sideways, you’ll be half your size,” someone observed, and we all tried walking sideways for a bit. All around us people were raising one finger in the air, which is the sign that means “I need a miracle,” or, one ticket to the show tonight. A girl with long armpit hair was holding up a sign that said, “Tired of smelling my stinky pits? Sell me your extra.”

My friends and I lost each other and then found each other again, near the gate. We waited for our last friend, who had texted to say she’d fallen behind. When she caught up with us she was beaming. “I found my tiny mushroom!” She held up a translucent green mushroom about the size of a thimble, and she proceeded to hold it all night long, all through the show.

Sophie Haigney is the web editor of The Paris Review.

View more on The Paris Review's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on July 18, 2023 09:51

The Final Dead Shows: Part One

John Mayer looking good.

Walking into a Dead & Company show is more or less how you imagine it would be: there are nearly forty thousand people converging on a baseball stadium wearing some of the worst outfits you have ever seen in your life. “This is really a lot of different types of white people, huh?” a first-time attendee said as we walked into the show at San Francisco’s Oracle Park (formerly AT&T Park, SBC Global Park, and PacBell Park.) On the street, a white guy with dreadlocks offered us mushrooms. Another white guy with dreadlocks held up a sign that said, “Cash, grass, or ass—I’ll take it all.” A friend, stunned by the famous Northern California fog, bought an ugly tie-dye sweatshirt at a makeshift stand outside the stadium for seventy-eight dollars.

It was the first night of a three-night run of the final shows for this iteration of the Grateful Dead—the last tour ever, the last shows ever, though, as everyone knows, the Grateful Dead has been ending for nearly twenty years. When Jerry Garcia died in 1995, everyone thought that was the end. In 2015, many of the original band members played a tour that was literally called “Fare Thee Well.” And yet, miraculously, it continued. But this time: Bob Weir is seventy-five, and John Mayer, the unlikely force behind this version of the band, has other things to get on to. At the very least, this is probably the last time they’ll ever sell out huge stadiums. So this was a major event that I had flown out from New York to see with five friends. I had been hearing for days that SFO was “like Bonnaroo for Deadheads.” On another friend’s flight in, the pilot told them they were flying over a wildfire in Colorado. “Wow, it’s literally ‘Fire on the Mountain,’ ” someone behind her said.

In line, everyone checked out the scene, craning their necks to see how good other people’s tie-dyes were. One guy was wearing a cape.

“Is that Andy Cohen?” someone asked.

“That’s Andy Cohen. We literally locked eyes.”

I didn’t see him, but we are all grateful for Andy Cohen’s support of the cause. Inside the stadium, the queue for tour merchandise snaked up flights of stairs, because everyone needs a T-shirt that says something like DEAD & CO., THE FINAL TOUR with an emblem of a rose or a dancing bear.

In another line, this one for beer, I stood behind some clean-cut guys in Dead & Company shirts from last summer. These are the kind of guys—nicknamed Co. Bros—that Mayer has brought into the fold. They were complaining about their friend Connor, who had recently gotten a girlfriend.

“He’ll text me, ‘hey wanna hang out, I’m not free for the next four weekends,’ ” one said.

“Connor got out of his MSG jam as soon as he started getting paid what he was worth,” the other lamented. (Presumably Connor is no longer going to Phish shows at Madison Square Garden, which is fair.)

A man selling beer out of an ice bucket was yelling, “Iced cold, ice cold,” in that universal baseball-game voice. “It’s my first Dead & Company show,” he said. “Interesting vibes.”

In our seats, waiting for the show to start—Dead & Co. shows are typically quite punctual, in part because they go on forever and probably also because the oldest band member is seventy-nine and the average age of the crowd is definitely above fifty—everyone was taking the same selfie: themselves and their friends against the backdrop of the stadium, which happens to be the same baseball stadium where I went when I was a kid in early-aughts San Francisco, in the heyday of waiting for Barry Bonds to break the record, before the steroids stuff. They started with “Not Fade Away.”

There can be a little game that happens when the band starts playing a song—everyone starts guessing which one it is. “ ‘Tennessee Jed!’ ” my friend exclaimed.

“No,” I said, “it’s ‘Ramble On Rose.’ ”

“Definitely ‘Tennessee Jed,’ ” another friend insisted, moments before the chorus of “Ramble On Rose” came on. I was right, and I certainly didn’t let anyone forget.

“I want to be a spinner,” my friend said, looking down at the part of the floor near the general admission section where women in long skirts were engaged in their perpetual whirl. “Society doesn’t really make a lot of room for spinners anymore,” our other friend said. We all agreed this was true, and a shame.

In line for the bathroom, three girls and I agreed that John Mayer was looking really good tonight. John Mayer is of course famous for being handsome, and good at guitar.

“Don’t re-dose before set break,” I heard a woman with a crown of roses in her hair warning her friend by the sink.

“Oh. I already did.”

Back in my seat, I looked up at the empty part of the stands, the seats that aren’t for sale, and saw one man who had somehow gotten up there dancing alone. He looked perfect.

“Let him cook!” someone yelled, as Oteil Burbridge—possibly the most talented musician in the band—came on the jumbotron during “Fire on the Mountain.” Oteil, like Mayer, is not an original member of the Grateful Dead but adds something arguably way better. Lo-fi graphics flashed across the screen, Oteil’s face consumed in a graphic design version of flames. “Need more Oteil time,” the guy next to me said, lighting a joint.

The songs went on and on, as they do. What is anyone doing while all this jamming is happening? They take up an astounding amount of time, some of these songs, and they do especially all added together, plus so much of it is pure instrumental noodling. Everyone is dancing a little bit, bobbing, but really they are having an extended, possibly endless, interior experience. Sometimes after an eighteen-minute version of “Eyes of the World” I find myself wondering (and I quote the Dead): “Where does the time go?”

Then “Drums” started and everyone around me went to pee or get a beer. (“Drums” and “Space,” for the unfamiliar, are a portion of every show that can really only be described as the longest instrumental noodling you have ever heard.)

“It’s so dumb to pee during Space,” a woman in a Boston Red Sox–Dead crossover shirt said, and everyone in the endless bathroom line agreed. But there really is no other time.

A friend and I bought four beers in large cups, and as we headed back to our seats, a woman knocked into me, spilling an entire beer on my shorts. “Oh my God, babe, I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’ll buy you another beer!” “It’s okay,” I said, even though it wasn’t totally okay, because my Birkenstock was now full of beer that had cost $16.75 and didn’t even come in a souvenir cup. A lot of people were watching this play out. I considered the karmic nature of spills, as I am always spilling on other people and myself, while we headed back to our seats. Two minutes later, the woman rushed down to my seat and handed me a twenty-dollar bill. Everyone around us cheered. I tried to refuse it, telling her it really was okay, but she said, “Use it for something else.”

“That’s what the Dead is all about!” said some of the old guys who had been watching nearby, and gave me a high-five. In my Notes app, I wrote, “the dead is so perfect :(”

The band launched into their dirge “He’s Gone.” The line “He’s gone, he’s gone, and nothing’s gonna bring him back”—is it possible to hear that without getting chills? I thought about my favorite live version of this song, which Weir dedicated to the Irish hunger striker Bobby Sands in 1981. I marveled, as I often do, at the passage of time. I tried to say something about this to one of my friends, but it got lost in the noise. I then watched someone try to fit an entire package of Red Vines into the tiny back pocket of their jeans for what felt like five minutes.

The band made their usual move, from “China Cat Sunflower” into “I Know You Rider.” “Wow, is this the last ‘Rider’ ever?” someone asked. “Shut up,” said someone else, as everyone yelled, “I wish I were a headlight on a northbound train!” Then, even louder, “I’D SHINE MY LIGHT THROUGH THAT COOL COLORADO RAIN!” (Many people at Dead & Co. shows have spent significant time in Colorado, so that line always goes over well.)

Two of my friends, under the influence of psychedelic drugs, were passing back and forth a pair of small pink sunglasses for the majority of the night. Every time one of them put the sunglasses on, she would reexperience the amazing experience of wearing the sunglasses anew, oohing and aaahing. Finally, the man behind them—a gray-haired guy who had been swaying solo all night, sipping a beer—asked if he could “try the sunglasses.” I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anyone more disappointed. “That’s it?” he asked. You really have to wonder what it was that he expected.

Sophie Haigney is The Paris Review‘s web editor.

View more on The Paris Review's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on July 17, 2023 10:28

The Final Dead Show: Part One