Sean Beaudoin
Is it possible that this arty self-portrait was ever really me? When you close your eyes, you can almost smell the incense. This shot was taken before digital cameras existed. Back then film was expensive, complicated, and difficult to process. Remember when you got into buying old cameras at the Salvation Army and then sending away to someplace in New Jersey for obsolete types of film? It’s hard to tell if that was an inspired hobby or just the product of sheer, crushing boredom. In any case, this particular shot that I’m looking at now was taken with a 1950s Polaroid camera. (You paid three dollars for it and then ruined forty dollars’ worth of film learning how to use it.) Apparently, there’s a fine line between nerd-rock cover art and self-indulgent pretentiousness.
First, you found some “really cool lighting” in which to linger. Then you practiced getting just the right facial expression: anguished, hip, tough, and worldly (read: non-virginal). The absurdly heavy camera sat atop the tripod that you asked for (and actually got) for Christmas. There was a thumb switch at the end of a long cord that released the shutter.
Click. Flash. Genius.
You laid the exposures out on the linoleum floor like a hand of solitaire, and for some reason you decided that this one was the best. How do I know? Because now it’s the only one left. How many drawers and shoe boxes and apartment closets has it sat at the bottom of? How many moves and fires and storage-space purges did it survive? In retrospect, this shot may not be the artistic breakthrough it once seemed, but there’s no question it epitomizes your guiding internal mantra that year: Things Are So Very Difficult, But I Guess I’ll Deign to Persevere.
Also, it echoes that old Depression-era truism that “nothing truly good ever happens unless it happens under light spilled through a dirty venetian blind.”
Teen Me, all I can say is that I miss you dearly. I miss your white teeth. Your “go ahead and dare me to cut it off” ponytail. The red Yukon suit you wore all winter as an anti-fashion fashion statement. Not to mention the vampiric longing in your expression—an expression that seems to say, at one and the same time: “I want to create!” and “I want to be famous!” and “Do I look cool from this angle?” and “Deep down I know I’m a fraud.”
You may not have had a lot of self-confidence back then, but you did at least believe—truly and honestly—that art was everywhere (at least potentially): in a sculpture made out of tires, in a poem written on a napkin, in a black-and-white photograph of a dead bird, in a song written in an hour, or in a collage of supermodel heads torn from fashion magazines and glued to the cover of your never-opened Algebra II textbook. It was a liberating and exhilarating feeling to recognize that (lowercase) art was around every corner, just waiting to be made or discovered. Back then, everything was a tool, including (and especially) yourself: cameras, clay, pens, glue, crayons, your voice, or a guitar. The idea of potential practically swirled through the air—a cluster of insistent notes that made up the backbeat of almost everything connected with you at seventeen.
Teen Me, I would love to be you again, even for just an hour.
Because during that hour I would write the first fifteen chapters of a dystopian novel about a debutante vampire with a shopping addiction, bet heavily on the Super Bowl, pen an app that discourages people from using the word app in a sentence, and marry Natalie Portman.
And still have ten minutes to spare, just hanging out, you and me.
Plenty of time to knock out two or three more masterpieces.
Sean Beaudoin is the author of the novels Going Nowhere Faster (2007), Fade to Blue (2009), You Killed Wesley Payne (2011), and the forthcoming duo The Infects (fall 2012) and Wise Young Fool (spring 2013.) He can be found at SeanBeaudoin.com, and can also be Liked and Loved on Twitter and Facebook.