Have you ever been jealous? Tell me true and I will give you a quarter.
and on the back:
Young and old - - what is jealousy?
I stuffed $6 worth of quarters into the pockets of my finest coat, a Cuban tuxedo top with black silk cloudlets stitched through its onyx sky, grabbed my battery-powered cassette tape recorder and for six hours that afternoon stood on a street corner while people spoke into my fingertips almost nonstop in an animated, ever-changing throng, in giddy whoops and whispers, formed in a neat line and craned their necks to hear or grabbed the painted boards to shout. In the few minutes I was too exhausted to keep going a bushy stranger who said his name was Larry pawed my machine and took my place because people need to confess and brag, understand, unload, pick a path across the dusky moor inside.
When each passerby said what i thought they were getting at I pressed a coin in his or her palm, a metal token that meant: your story found a home.
Many refused and wanted a hug or handshake instead. Some opened their wallets to stuff cash back at the aspiring artist with bristling neckhair and goosebump arms. Because every person walking down that street had a jealousy story more funny and harrowing than any I could invent and each gusty voice blew away the fictional contraptions writers like me take months to build.
Playing the tapes that night I typed, words streaming through my fingertips again, the faces splashed on mine again like summer rain. Walking sleepless and without sandwich board the next morning I stared afresh at everyone who passed, saw how eyes and hands framed the words that only they could say, saw love as the purpose of each human life. And the following Saturday I dismantled a new box to pose a new question:
What makes you happy?
And then:
What is the scariest thing that ever happened to you?
If you could have any power, what would it be?
Do you remember your dreams?
Have you ever been in a fight?
My guiding aesthetic was simple: put the art back where you found it. I dreamed of deputizing a legion of sandwich men and women, about placing automated story-collection booths on street corners and furnishing them with stiff curtains of bus station photo booths, the glass accordion doors of old phone kiosks and a heavy plastic receiver with bright buttons to mash, the carved lattice screens of church confessionals, a comfy chair and lamp perhaps, a pad to doodle on, toggles and dials on the scientific-seeming instrument panel that prompted follow-up questions, thought of new questions every week as the jealousy became power booths, the daydream and fistfight booths.
What is your earliest memory?
What is the hardest thing you ever had to do?
What happens after you die?
On the seventh Saturday my sandwich board asked:
Who is the most important person in your life?
This time the answers came short and flat.
My mother, followed by a silence that said, Which is obvious.
Your mother why?
Because she bore and fed and kept me safe.
My boyfriend who protects me.
My sister listens.
After a few questions every story’s center - - me, me, me - - thrust forth and every frank, emphatic face stared back with nothing more to add. Children and clear-eyed elderlies alike - - me, me, me - - as if giving an out-of-towner directions to the brick mansion atop the very hill where we stood, repeating: me, me, me.
Cold and dizzy after a few hours, drifting as through a fever dream I threw my sandwich board into my car trunk and wondered: Am I cursed to ask stupid questions? Coming down with the flu? Too weak and broken a vessel to carry a grand enterprise?
Driving home past beauty salons and bitty brick-castles girded with wrought-iron fence I let other cars jockey for position, honk and power-change lanes, let each push me, me, me through the concrete sea of self-regarding souls, heard the city as a vast tone poem - - me, me, me - - its countless songs in contrapuntal unity.
Was this the world or my echo? Do only lovers transcend selfishness as they skip across exigencies of money, time and language? Wherever I looked was a stunning truth, just not the one I bargained for.