We sat in a corner of the room for the next hour or so, drinking white wine out of plastic cups, and talking about stories. Albert Maysles and his brother David are fathers of American documentary filmmaking. In person, Albert is extremely gracious. He’s still at work on a variety of projects (he described to me with infectious enthusiasm a series he’s developing, in which he makes conversation with random travelers on trains). He told me about the early part of his career, transitioning out of psychology and into filmmaking, and he talked with candor about his family. We had a memorable conversation about positivity: Albert thinks that the stories that are told in America lean overly towards the negative. We talked about how to tell positive stories in an interesting way; he gave me a few ideas that I’d still like to do something with. And he’s interested in other peoples’ projects. He listened to me talk for a while about 400 Words and not only said he wanted to contribute a piece, but actually followed through. I haven’t been as great about my end of the bargain. I wanted to wait until the 400 Words website was better-looking, until the next issue was about to come out, etc., etc.

Well, no more waiting. Here’s a 400-word autobiography by an American treasure. —KS

Albert (right) with David Maysles on the set of ‘Grey Gardens’

by Albert Maysles—Age 82—New York, NY

“It’s been a code in my family of origin to give notice and care to the outsider—the underprivileged, the scapegoat, the handicapped, the social outcast, or the downright eccentric. Examples are so many.   My father couldn’t bring himself to collect the three dollars a month rent due from his tenant, too poor to afford it. At first my mother complained to him, but then came to me to praise him for being so thoughtful. My brother and I shared a love for all three of our uncle Sams—one an artist in his nineties, another a talented violinist, but a special love for our uncle Sam the egg salesman, a man whom no one (especially his wife) but us brothers cared for. He was coarse and uneducated—all the more he needed to be appreciated by us.   In an exclusively white neighborhood my sister had no problem bringing black friends home for dinner. Once grown up my brother and I made two of our best films where it was the main character (in ‘Salesman’ it was Paul Brennan) who was constantly rejected and (in ‘Grey Gardens’) a mother and daughter who were reclusive non-conformists.   In both films our subjects count on us telling the truth and with a loving care for them.   Some 30 years ago as my mother lay dying she asked the following be put on her gravestone:   “Count on me as one who loved her fellow man.”

And the tradition goes on in my immediate family. I like telling the story of how when I moved in with my wife-to-be’s apartment, I soon noticed a woman moving aimlessly about the apartment. When I questioned my wife she explained she was her housekeeper and totally blind. “You have a totally blind housekeeper?,” I asked. “Yes,” she replied. “If I let her go, who’s going to hire her?” My son is a very talented artist obsessed with the plight of the disadvantaged. In our living room hang, side-by-side, two of his portraits in oil: one of Frederick Douglass, the other of John Brown. My youngest daughter spent two years between high school and college in Nepal working with refugee children. And my oldest daughter, she is always coming to people’s rescue.

Filming real people with love, understanding, and a special care for outsiders—it’s my way of making a better world.”

(Image: Maysles brothers portrait from DV.com; ‘Grey Gardens’ image from lestercat)

As a baby I was never aware of my toes. I might have sucked on them but I don’t know. If someone sits down and cares to tell you, you have babyhood. Even that is impossible if no one noticed. No one counted my toes out for me so I learnt my numbers even later than most kids.

I always thought I had two toes.

As a child I became painfully aware of my ten toes. I had to cut out the fronts of cast off shoes because I had to make them fit, had to make them work.

I amused myself at school feeling around with my toes and in summer I could tell how hot the day was going to be by how the ground felt the second my toes landed on them. I would touch the surface of the ice on the lake with my toes and I would know when the snow would melt, would know how many days to fall, how many days to wait.

As a young woman, while courting I hid the calluses under my toes and eventually settled for someone. I have never let him touch my feet, not consciously anyway. He loved every part of me but he never knew my feet, never knew my toes. I always wore stockings to bed.

As my marriage limped along, from time to time I would not be able to see my toes however much I bent over. Those were the nice parts. As days went by I would see less and less of my toes till I saw them no longer and a day would come when I even would not care. This happened three times.

I have three beautiful children.

I began to see my toes again but then I began to sit longer and longer in front of a circle. That circle, my plate, became my refuge. Now unfortunately I can’t see my toes again.

When no one is around, I will sometimes take off my stockings and walk on surfaces, wood, concrete, linoleum, carpet, and tile and sometimes in a rare moment I will walk on the hard ground and she will receive me like a mother.

(Image: kygp)

I was born a Jew. My brother was born a gay Jew. A dog lived with our family. I have a sister. I don’t know anything about her. I do not care. In first grade I kicked a classmate. He said, “Owen, I like you, but you can be such an asshole.” In middle school I went out with this girl named Emily. It didn’t last. I decided to try this girl name Leah. That didn’t last either. I hadn’t learned what love was yet. In high school I was a baby punk. I went to punk rock shows in my friend’s grandmother’s church’s basement. Sometimes I drove my parent’s Ford Expedition. They are well-to-do people. My mother writes children’s books. My father is a lawyer. Sometimes he rides a bike. They weren’t happy with my grades. I was sent away to prep school. I lost my virginity to a girl named Amy. I loved her. She bought me a parakeet. I don’t love her anymore. I don’t know what happened to her. I started a band while at prep school. We were called Trombonium Pandemonium. We don’t exist anywhere besides in the mind. Somehow I got into college. I went to Boston University. I met a kid name Greg. He said, “Yo! My name is Greg.” Greg sang in a band. He helped me make a band. We were called Jaguarz. I liked to sing about jungles and eating other animals. About this time I fucked two more girls. One was named Olendorf. The other was named Grindmadderas. Just kidding. Their names were Laura and Wendy. Laura was you’re average party girl college chick. Wendy was a little more unique. Her father was a great trumpeter. By the time senior year rolled around I had begun drinking and doing drugs. I also met this good looking girl named Kalisha. We made babies without the nine-month responsibility. After graduation I said goodbye to her and hitchhiked to California with a friend. When I returned home I couldn’t get a decent job, ended up working in a wine shop, and fell in love with a girl name Estefania. She didn’t like me. Now I live in New York. A girl let me shave her head yesterday. I’m in love with her.

Age 0:
29 January, 1980.

5:
Find dead body at Cedar Creek Lake, Texas.
Teach myself to do headstand.

7-9:
Win 13 trophies in every handstand contest at gymnastics. (Mom eventually chucks trophies.)

9:
Dad shaves beard, I faint.

12:
Form “Dumb Penis Gang” (DPG) with best lady friends:
Cassandra
Lynn
Anne
Courtney

13:
Quit gymnastics, start diving.

14:
Discover bands Sebedoh, Dinosaur Jr.
Fall in love with Lou Barlow.
Take acid.

15:
Cassandra inherits orange VW van.
Spend many hours in it smoking weed, driving around Dallas.

15:
Move to Austin.
Love being away from Dallas.
End up missing Dallas rest of life.

16:
Learn inward 2 ½ from 3-meter diving board.
Read Camus, Nietzsche.

17:
Have poor judgment, quit diving.
Listen to much Grateful Dead”–actually think this is cool.

18:
Graduate from Catholic high school.
Take peyote; run away with “Jesus.” (Disillusioned hippie-boy who hitchhikes everywhere.)

19:
Hitchhike from Redwoods to Florida.
Anne dies in car accident.
Move back to Texas.

20:
Discover Coltrane, ginger beer.
Start to play drums.

20-21:
Take up improvisational comedy.
Move to L.A.
Discover Black Sabbath, Basquiat (20 years too late).
Finally start to hate hippies.

22:
Begin heavy use of cocaine while also taking yoga classes. (Irony.)
Meditate outside a lot, cut self frequently. (Not ready for nothingness.)
Quack doctor prescribes odd drugs for manic depression, including 2 anti-psychotics.
Attempt suicide.
Move back to Texas.

23:
Meet Dale.

24:
Dad has emergency brain surgery, lives, memory affected forever.

25:
Start dating Dale.
Discover French food, Foucault, Jolie Holland.
Meet Kim.

26:
Graduate college with degree in writing.
Kim/I get tattoos together; she becomes favorite lady friend.
Travel to Thailand and Cambodia with Dale.
Discover hoppy beer.

27:
Grandma dies.
Dale and I move in.
Inherit chickens.
Listen to a lot of old country music.
Eat much meat.
Discover bone marrow.

28 (Now):
Illustrate using pen, ink, crayon.
Teach yoga.
Play tambourine in garage rock band.
Write everything in form of lists.
Abstain from correct punctuation, pronouns.
Rediscover folk rock, love for eagles.
Discover dead chickens in backyard—freak dog attack.
(Will) write masterpiece with Kim.

29 (Future):
Will buy 2 new chickens and name:
Cheech
Chong

Will buy 1 rooster and name:
Rocky

Will buy ’86 Chevy Silverado.
Will discover something else.

by Andrew—Age 26—Orlando, FL

This guy, see, or should we say a boy then, was born already distracted. With bright eyes and a quiet mouth, he watched and watched. Leaves made good friends, which unnerved his parents such that they made him do things like play baseball. He was forced to stand in the outfield, which unnerved him such that he couldn’t stop anxiously biting his nails. He looked around at everybody in caps and cleats, clueless to their fascination. His dreams were about how amazing it was to feel the spongy the wood chips underfoot, not about a day at the plate.

Even as a child he never cared for reading about himself very much. Diaries were abandoned and lost; pictures crumpled; and later, e-mails deleted. His biography would be no visual patchwork, but he was labeled “artistic.” Memories were smells and sounds, small triggers. He struggled with remembering as he imagined regular people did, and floundered in school. His talent was a nigh-useless cycle of absorption, imagination, and obsession, tragically detached from his environment. If you gave him a glass of water, he’d have a good idea how to swim in the ocean. He flunked French without an ounce of grace for lack of conjugation.

It was discovered his mother passed down to him a strange empathy fused with perceptive retardation. It lay unrecognized for years—who wants to be sincere when they’re eighteen? But this talent-curse ran so deeply, was so ingrained that he couldn’t pin down the impetus that hurtled him about. He went to the sea, but it wasn’t much like he imagined—too large and cold, frightening, remote. Leaves rotted and were covered by layers of ice and snow in the New England winter.

He became hopelessly confused. Often words were too much, sights too much, and feeling too little. Nothing gelled. Adult work was tolerable only for the newness of each situation, and he was left to wander. He still bit his nails and was scared of “now.” He couldn’t stop his course for the world, until he found somebody to describe him in a single word. She knew how he heard cicadas in winter and the crunch of frost in the summer. The couch smelled musty, and her breath gave dust in the air new motion when she told him, whispering in his ear as a dry snow fell outside. He promptly forgot it and was happy.

by Mary—Age 46—Olympia, WA

I was born into a sad person’s middle class white home of angry people and miserable immigrant grandparents who loved me more than my own weird mother did. Always a feminist before I could clearly say the letter “˜f,’ I started seriously writing in second grade when the authorities pronounced me a child genius because I could write a simple poem and draw a perfect Christmas tree.

In the fifth grade I wrote a poem about Halloween so amazing that my mother insisted I didn’t write it, and chastised me for copying someone else’s work. So much for being a child genius. Between eleven and twenty-four I filled 41 notebooks with loopy poetry that today I can proudly say embarrasses even me when I read it. Just what was the point?

I spent the next ten years earning four educational degrees, including one doctorate from Syracuse University. Along the way I became a special education teacher in upstate New York. One year I spent working with K-6 kids in Johnstown, well known for its belching tanneries. That was in 1983-1984. I liked leather, so I thought it would be a fun place to live. It was nearly a Superfund site all by itself! I was lonely, had no friends since all of the other teachers were married, and my face was so stressed with acne that I looked like a pizza. So, I became a Big Sister to a little girl who had just learned that her real father was not her father after all. I also did community theatre in a former take-out fried chicken joint. I cried a lot.

In 1986 I got married to a fairy tale guy in a fairy tale place under fairy tale conditions. Five years later I wore the new label of divorced battered woman. I drew closer to my religion—Christian Science—which was the best thing that has ever happened to me. I gave up meat totally in 1994, my last holdout being twice-cooked pork.

I don’t smoke, drink, use drugs, or engage in self-analysis. I avoid TV, and read and walk every day. I spend my time teaching future teachers how to teach. I also do freelance writing for a neighborhood newspaper, volunteer as a BookPals classroom reader, and hang out with my humongous doggies. I sleep easy, have endless energy, procrastinate occasionally—OK, a lot. Life’s good. And I’m happy.

Mom was a conceptual artist and Dad a drummer in punk bands. Once he played a gig dressed only in boxers and tinfoil, which fell off as he played. He stopped playing when I was two, and started taking me to social work school with him on the Green Line. Mom stopped doing art before I was born. When I was two she got chronic fatigue syndrome and spent much of the next four years sleeping. Other times she threw coffee cups, forgot me at school in the snow, loved me, painted with me, was scary and unpredictable. We had the same first grade teacher; both of us were her favorites.

Sister born when I was five and a half; Mom’s immune system revived, cured by pregnancy. A symbiotic relationship was formed. On being parted one time, sister said enigmatically of herself/mom, “Bubba doesn’t want Bubba to go!”

Dad and I were allies and best friends. There are no words for it. We moved to a boarding school and lived in an apartment in one of the dorms. Dad worked too much. Mom cut herself with razors and wouldn’t cook for me. One Thanksgiving she left the family because I had worn my new slippers out in the dorm hallway. She came back five hours later and we all went to my dad’s brother’s house for dinner.

Dad’s family were “hard core New Englanders.” The family business is psychiatry; until a hundred years ago it was the Calvinist ministry. Mom’s family were from the South. In 1900 her granddaddy was living off squirrel meat on a farm in South Carolina. That same year Dad’s great-grandmother was giving tea parties for the glitterati in her Boston salon. She would always invite in her brother when he would ride into the Harbor on his yacht, manic, shooting off a pistol; he spent half his life in a hospital and the other half teaching at Harvard. Mom’s granddaddy was illiterate. In 2003 I went to South Carolina and stood on his land and shot his pistol at a log.

When I was 19 I moved to Scotland and studied history at university. My boyfriend is from Mexico City. I’m not sure I ever want to live in the United States again, but maybe I will. I miss my family.

I now reside in Portland, Oregon. I arrived here two years ago in a beat-up truck with everything I owned crammed into the bed and cab. I was fleeing Lee’s Summit, Missouri, where I had worked for a shady sub-contractor for the Justice Department—blowing the whistle led to my termination. I lived with a woman in Blue Springs who was 15 years older than me for a while before that. We ended up having an affair (she had a boyfriend), things ended badly, and I moved out. See, I didn’t even want to go to Missouri, but I needed to attend the main campus of Park University to finish my bachelor’s degree, which I did. But before I could do that I had to travel from North Carolina on four bald tires, after I quit my job working for a strange electrician. I spent hours crawling under houses pulling wires for him because I needed the money to keep from losing my house. See, I’d quit my high-paying job at the cryogenic plant, and times were tough. I was a cryogenics mechanic in the Marines a couple years before, that’s how I landed the job; those were some strange days, especially the six months I spent in Italy. I blame my decision to enlist on the poor job market in Waterville, Maine (the geographical opposite of where I live now). I learned how to wire houses at a tech college in a neighboring town just a few months after graduating high school; I still had long hair and wore an earring. I was what many considered a “˜strange bird’ in those days. They should have seen me as a small boy, acting out scenes in the back yard by myself, playing with small cars and talking to myself, kissing a girl on the mouth when I was only two years old. Maybe it’s not so strange. But when I was born, the doctor did tell my mom, “This one’s a whole other breed of cats.”

From 400 Words, Issue 1

Eons ago, someone named Matteo picked out a woman near one of the seven hills of what later became Rome and started a family by becoming a First Father, kind of like Adam and Eve. His many boys and girls all belonged to Matteo—until the girls married. Boys, you keep. Anyway, just as it is in the Bible, Matteo had only a first name—like Moses or Noah. “Who’s that?” somebody might ask, and the answer would be, “Oh, that’s Lucia who belongs to Matteo.” From there, as more and more people were born and raised families that belonged to Matteo, words like “that’s” and “who” got dropped and it became “Lucia belongs to Matteo”, or Lucia Di Matteo. That simple. For Americans, “Di” means “of” or, well, you get it. You had to behave—never shame the name of your people.

By the time all this family-making got to me, around mid-20th century, my parents lived near Lake Ontario, New York State, United States of America, way across the ocean and then some from Rome. No other Di Matteos around, only my dad, his brother, and their parents. What a lonely thing that must have been. In Italy, I bet there would be Di Matteos all over the place, but I’ve never been there so I don’t know. Thank God that before long, my parents made sure there were five more Di Matteos, and my uncle (who married a saint) added another fourteen. Unfortunately my uncle broke my grandpa’s heart by doing all that family-making across the country in California, so actually, we—my dad’s family—were it. Every Sunday, we all had dinner together, then Dad and Grandpa watched The News with Walter Cronkite brought to you by Prudential Insurance and the Rock of Gibraltar. The living room air was so full of cigarette smoke for us to enjoy second hand that by the time I was thirteen, I was all ready to smoke my own. Like most people, I’ve been trying to quit ever since.

Today I live in California with my son, at least for now. No big thing. His name is Taylor—must be at least a bazillion Taylors all over America . And he might be having too much fun to make a family, I don’t know. Things have changed, that’s for sure.

It was like this; it was fast. There was a marriage, a birth, a divorce and a move. Then, before I knew anything, I was a Miamian, living the single parent/child life—day care until six, quality-time-packed weekends. My mother dated half-heartedly, deftly keeping me away from all potential dads.

Eventually, she found one, and he gave me two stepsisters and a stepbrother too. But I still lived mostly in the quiet world of only children, except during summer, and every other Christmas.
I never learned, not really, how to be a sister, how to whisper secrets late at night, how to share a childhood. I looked with longing at my friends who had the easy knowledge of another, someone with whom they shared almost everything, including DNA. As much as I read, as much as I watched, it was the one thing I would never know.

And now, thirty-four years later, I am a mother of three, three who share not only their genes but also the history of thirty-six weeks, five days in my uterus. They began sharing secrets before I even knew them; there are things they will always know that I never will.

One of the many jobs of a parent, I am learning, is to fill in all the empty spaces from your own past while fortifying the places which are whole. Figuring out where those spots are is the work; watching them smooth over is the joy. By the virtue of my struggle to have them, the four years of unwanted blood and spilled hope, I made three. As one of my students said, “G-d was making up for lost time.” More than lost time—so many things were lost. But now, so many others were found.

And now it’s like this; it is fast. They are four and a half, they tell jokes, they read books, they watch. In the half-light of their nighttime, I watch them sleep against each other. They are living the life I dreamt.