Get Your Core Temperature UP!

You know it’s going to be a different kind of day when you find yourself in a bathtub before 9 am. This is happening to me lately as I often awaken plain pissed off for no discernible reason, save the pressure in odd parts of my body. I am with child, nearly six months on, and the little rascal’s exponential growth is causing aches and pains and grunts every time I bend down, sounds I don’t really recognize in a body that is being colonized by a metastasizing parasite, who I love in a way I can’t quite comprehend and who makes me laugh every time he flips over because it feels like being tickled from the inside, which is a very strange sensation indeed. THANKS KID. I could go on about my fears of how I will die in childbirth like a pioneer woman with only a bucket of hot water and the doleful gazes of livestock to help me, except that it will go down on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, with commuters insouciantly stepping over me, irritated I’ve disrupted their stride. But I’ll spare you all that and just say the only solution is to take to the bath.
 
One needn’t be pregnant to enjoy the virtues of soaking in broad daylight. Baths are typically associated with winding down at the end of the day, lighting candles and enchanting the water with lavender before slipping into bed. It feels wildly decadent to do a thing out of  order, like eating ice cream as an amuse-bouche and pancakes for dinner. A friend once asked, “What’s in your fuck-it bucket?” and I responded “excusez-moi?” and she explained, “You know, on a day when you’ve just had it and you say, ‘fuck it!’ What do you do?’” The nuclear option in my bucket is to get in the bath while Steve Inskeep is still on the air.
 
I was first introduced to the morning bath by my great good friend Eric.  We met in middle school, united by a pugnacious repulsion toward all manner of authority and a baroque sense of pubescent comedy.  In eighth grade, we were in tandem elected to the superlative “Most Original,” code for “Most Obnoxious” or perhaps “Most Confusing/ed.” In the black-and-white yearbook picture, Eric is unsmiling, his close-cropped curly hair perfectly gelled, a whisper of a mustache above his lip, wearing his trademark buttondown shirt and sweater vest, which prompted the inevitable comparison with Carlton Banks. But Eric loathed both capitalism and Tom Jones.  I am in some unfortunate knock-off JNCO jeans, my arms wrapped around him, smiling widely. In 7^th grade, he ended a rhetorical question lobbed at our social studies teacher with “pray tell?,” and even the teacher made fun of him. We memorized all the U.S. presidents in order and would shout out a number, to have our opponent Name That President. When that got too easy, we memorized the Vice Presidents (#19 William A. Wheeler 4eva). In high school, we made an Old Western Wanted poster with the visage of a guidance counselor, accusing him of being “the hoary establishment” and “public enemy of learning,” for some injustice, which escapes me now. Eric read Napoleonic history for fun and make Etch-a-Sketch “paraphrases,” as he called them, of El Greco self-portraits. He was always getting on something and not letting it go. Once it was the fact that he used the word “without” on a biology quiz to signify that the plasmodesmata lived outside the cell wall, which our teacher deemed incorrect. He plastered Xeroxes from the dictionary on the classroom walls of the secondary definition of “without,” as the opposite of “within.” And when the temperatures would drop sometime around November, he would go on lengthy disquisitions about the benefits of a morning bath: “You’ve got to get your CORE TEMPERATURE UP! A shower just won’t do it! You’ve got to soak the warmth into your bones!!!” It’s still a funny image, a teenage boy passionately championing bath time.
 
I’m writing this from Whidbey Island, at a residency for lady writers, that is outfitted with a giant soaking tub. I arrived a few days ago and the first morning it was still dark when I woke up as my eastern seaboard body clock hadn’t yet caught up and the damp of the Pacific Northwest confused my seasonal clock even more. Those tiny nascent limbs stretched the outer reaches of my abdomen, and I went for a soak. Whenever I find myself in a bathtub in the morning, my mind inevitably turns to Eric.  
 
I was at a residency in Nebraska six years ago when I got the news that Eric had killed himself. An Ethernet cable was plugged into my laptop and a friend from high school g-chatted me, sending the link to his obituary. The picture was from our high school graduation, when he still had the same tight curls and faint mustache. A more recent picture would’ve shown the long afro he’d grown out, channeling his hero Fredrick Douglass, and the haphazard scraggly beard. After high school, Eric got a full ride to Dartmouth. I believe he started out studying European history, then switched to Economics. I’m not exactly sure what happened in the years between him turning 18-21ish, but something did. He took a leave of absence, which started out as a semester, then turned into a year, then two, then many more. In a long email exchange, he wrote,
 
i am yet in limbo in life, my labor still as yet "alienated" as marx put it. i said limbo; ought to have said 'inferno' as worcester is stale as ever and i'll have to get out of here at length if my soul isn't to be suffocated; there's a placard over the entrance of this city saying "abandon all hope, ye who enter..." would i'd heeded that fact before i stepped carelessly back into this tar pit...










 
We still talked, in long phone conversations every few weeks and wrote letters. His grew increasingly more unhinged, writing in all caps in black sharpie. But they were always hilarious, a collage of esoterica and rant, often accompanied by an Etch-a-Sketch of a classical work of art replicated in painstaking exactitude, the knobs cemented with superglue.
 
We hadn’t talked for some months when I got the news. Our phone calls had become sparser. I’d see his name pop up on my screen and ignore the call, because his rants had turned from funny to incomprehensible.  He’d alienated our other friends, as he’d make scenes in public, which he had always done, but now with a meaner, darker edge than ever before.
 
The last letter he wrote me I received just before my 30^th birthday.
 
write me a letter as well: you seem to have been born to write. and i mean real books: not the sort of shite that william gladstone always told his maid to burn straight away because it was utter eyewash and not worth the time of day. you shall someday have your opus in the crosshairs... and you will probably leave better work than the hyper-catholic harvard legacy we went to school with and the other chick who went to brown...










 
We still compared ourselves to rivals from to high school with, tinged with that unshakable middle-class grasping that the endorsement of the Ivy League actually means something. I never wrote back. I remember starting to, getting as far as “Dear Friend,” and not being able to access a point of connection or topic of conversation that would seem authentic or meaningful. The trajectory of our lives had cleaved in a way where it was hard to find common ground, if we weren’t recounting the idiocy we were steeped in as children, or rehashing our old tropes. I never wrote back, and he died two months later.
 
It’s a funny thing about genius unrealized, or at least unrecognized. Eric never had an art show of his Etch-a-Sketch paraphrases, or penned a new take on the Little Corsican, or finished college. It’s so much easier when you can simply spout off a list of accomplishments rather than try to convey the whole messy brilliance of someone like Eric, without reducing him to some broad Joe Gould caricature. “A Real Character.” There’s nothing poetic I can find to say about Eric’s death. It’s just a tragedy, for the people who loved him, at least. For him, who can say. But that unsent letter is something for which I will never forgive myself. You can drive yourself crazy thinking about all the letters unsent. It’s probably not too good a thing to dwell on it. But it’s also a disservice to future letters yet to be written not to go through that file of the mind once in a while.
 
I think about him a lot. Every July, I think about him all the time. July seems like such a strange time to off yourself (not like there’s ever a good time), but it’s one of the only good months in Massachusetts. I can see him walking up to the gate of the public pool where I lifeguarded in the summers, his hands in his pockets, the air smelling like chlorine drying on concrete, his faced fixed in a scowl that easily and often dissolved into a grin.
 
So today, every day, when you can summon the bravery to do it, even when it’s awkward, and maybe won’t even be rightly received, I recommend: Write the letter. Make the phone call. Take the morning bath.

(last night's bird bath )