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)

by Katherine—Age 29—New York City

The embarrassing, complete list:

Kindergarten:
Great artist. Great philosopher. Write treatises about things. Composer (later realized do not comprehend music)

Second grade:
Scientist, like Louis Pasteur or Marie Curie (classroom had book nook with career series); Margaret Mead (did not totally understand what she’d done, but liked her style as represented in book-nook career books); chicken farmer (eggs not meat, of course); paleontologist; designer of fountains

Fourth grade:
Conceptual artist; director of music videos; choreographer (am inspired by Paula Abdul videos watched at friend’s house); makeup artist; interior decorator; inventor (save world with clean energy from perpetual motion. Invent flying machine); architect

Seventh grade:
Movie director; writer (with a bullet! Possibilities included: Virginia Woolf, eminent playwright, publish memoirs and become instantly famous, Sylvia Plath. Victor Hugo, for some reason); shaman-esque figure; successful child actress; manufacturer, with friend Ellie, of line of natural cosmetics

Ninth grade:
Creative writing teacher; visionary administrator of new, perfect school; rock star, or famous punk-rock muse; itinerant music journalist like Cameron Crowe; playwright; coffee shop or art-house movie theater owner; work at Sassy magazine; Stewart Brand; vintage clothing finder/buyer

Rest of high school:
Set designer; travel writer; science writer; film critic; founder and editor in chief of magazine; photographer, preferably for National Geographic; writer of experimental fiction; combiner of photography and experimental fiction; EIC of The New Yorker (snert)

College:
Field anthropologist; professional academic feminist; landlord; buyer and renovator of old houses; self-sufficient hippie (geodesic dome, garden, animals, boyfriend); endless bohemian; famous literary critic; New Yorker staff writer; glam, long-format journalist; producer, ‘This American Life’; PA on films; maker of documentaries; long-haul trucker; endocrinologist; college professor (w/ reservations); building caretaker; writer of polemical books about what’s wrong with society and why; fire lookout on remote mountain, á la Jack Kerouac in Dharma Bums; seller of things on eBay, fuck everything

Postcollege:
Most of the above, plus: hospital bioethics board (for a month, right after graduation); doctor (for a week, same time period); editor of book review section at a magazine; therapist; science writer; mother, all of a sudden

Things I never wanted to be:
President, kindergarten teacher, elected office of any kind, crime scene investigator, lawyer (okay, maybe for a few minutes), middle manager, anything at a Fortune 500 Company, ever; statistician, news reporter, topologist, school psychologist, professional chef

(Image: Justin Cormack)

by Katherine—Age 28—New York City

Like most Americans, I wanted to get rich quick. This was around age eight or nine; I bursted with schemes, like starting a henhouse in our suburban backyard and selling eggs. My mother smiled noncommittally and I went back to the drawing board, dreaming of self-sufficiency and doing things my way. Several years later, hepped up on Babysitter’s Club books, I found a couple local mothers looking for cheap childcare. The responsibility caused panic attacks, worse than the time mom gave me twenty dollars to keep and I lost it under the gumball machine at Food Star. Ashamed of myself, I stayed out of the workforce till age 15, when I got a gig doing data entry after school at a family-owned health food store. Mind-numbing. Working at the coffee shop was better: customers, co-workers, interaction, the rich smell of beans in my clothes, good clean post-work exhaustion. College, my parents told me, was job number one, and I listened; the summer jobs (a museum, a restaurant, some desperate stabs at temping almost as panic-inducing as babysitting) hardly counted. One winter I worked for my father putting up oak siding outdoors. And I fretted about the future. I’d never wanted a job, not the kind where you apply and there’s a boss and you go and, my god, the panic again. Paid work felt like an ocean wave, something that was going to swallow me whole. I interned for a newspaper, a magazine. They were all right but I was still waiting to feel at home, the way I had in art studios and theaters, which always felt both fertile and safe. I was hoping to flail into something I cared about, a calling, a tribe. After according every job under the sun its fifteen minutes inside my head, I went to the best graduate program in English I could get into. The monastic commitment seemingly required of academics frightened me; furthermore, grad school didn’t feel like college. I’m out now, masters degreed, with a knowledge-worker job that pays the bills and oscillates between oppressive and interesting. I left with a feeling I was looking for something, looking to make good on something, a long-time dream. Be a creative person who lives in the city. Balance panic and desire, independence and worthwhileness. Know interesting people, do interesting things, and make ends meet. Is it too much to ask?

Image: wheany

by Mark—Age 30—Astoria, OR

The bridge I see from my window rises quickly from Oregon and crosses a river so wide it could be confused for the ocean it feeds.

Bridges occupy a piece of real estate in Sarah’s brain. She’ll spot them on trips and make me pull over. Covered bridges, short steel trussed spans bridging creeks and the Art Deco jobs with turquoise lights.

“Take my picture,” she’d say. “But make sure to get the bridge.”

I remember, years ago, leaving my first girlfriend for a family trip during the summer. I thought about the nights we had spent under the shadow of the rusting water tower near my house.

Her name was Natalie, and she didn’t care about bridges.

She had that sixteen-year-old skin. Her vanilla perfume would hover near her collarbones like a necklace.

When we were apart, I carved a piece of her out of the air and looked at it too long. When I returned, she was just a stranger walking through the high school halls.

Years later, relationships later, I met Sarah. She has tide pool hazel eyes with purple and blue anemone speckles clinging to the edges of her pupils.

We’d make love in the morning and nap. After a while, I’d look up, and she’d be gazing at me with those eyes.

We’d drive over the mountains and past the jagged lava fields or west to the coast, the dunes and the juniper trees. She was always scanning the road ahead or searching the side roads for a river or creek. Water meant a bridge was close by.

And now, Sarah and I are separated by work and geography. There’s a thousand rivers and a hundred bridges between us.

The hulking bridge framed by my window runs four miles across the river bar and ends in a different state. The land on the other side is similar, but if you look close, you can see differences. The ponderosas seem flatter, just as the bridge is flat after its aerial leap from the south bank of the river.

I wonder if Sarah will still be looking for bridges if we ever reunite. Maybe she has tired of them. Or maybe, tonight, when the lights of town boil out toward the middle of the river, I’ll reach out the window, grab the dust-green steel tresses of the bridge before me and crush them with my bare hands.

(Photo: Estherase)

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)

by Maureen—Age 23—New Haven, CT

Five weeks into my third semester at my second attempt at college, I padded down three flights of stairs on a Sunday morning in my slippers and PJs. In one hand I carried a coffee press, full and hot, as well as a coffee mug with a carton of half-and-half precariously balanced inside of it. My other hand clutched a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, and a copy of Imperfect Science: Gender Ideology in Molecular Biology, by Bonnie Spanier.

Once outside in the gazebo 50 feet away from the back door of the dorm reserved for smokers and other degenerates, I settled myself into something of a routine, quietly sipping my coffee, absorbing myself in this treatise by Spanier on her trials as a molecular biologist. Barely noticing the other kids that came and went, I sat in the gazebo until my ass was numb and the leftover coffee started to get cold. This routine had been repeated on other mornings, in other locales, with the inevitable results that I started a day relaxed, informed and appropriately caffeinated.

In middle school my friends and I would trade off, reading in tandem and racing to the ends of books simply to show that we could. I became the fast reader, finishing the complete unabridged Les Miserables in record time despite having it confiscated for a day for whacking someone in the head with it. In my later years books moved away from being my actual weapons to being figurative ones. My bookshelves, once simply repositories for the weekly “pick up the books off the floor and dig them out of the mattress” sweep, became my allies in the war to be cool, intellectual and attractive. Shakespeare, Plato, Burroughs and Lakoff took the ultra-visible top-shelf positions, proving to the world at large that I was, all at the same time, intellectual, artsy, ultra cool, and politically active.

In public, while I sit outside with my coffee or discuss politics in my living room with the intellectuals that New Haven seems to be constantly teeming with, I am super reading woman. I read Shakespeare, and long complicated political histories. I quote Burroughs in witty bar conversations and coyly reminded guys that I flirt with that I read In Cold Blood before Philip Seymour Hoffman was up for an Oscar. My top shelf is full of books that I feel I should be reading, or am proud of having read, and signify my ever-present devotion to bettering myself, to expanding my mind and vocabulary, and, let’s not forget, to looking cool.

(Image: Steve Keys)

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.

I do this thing my friends call “folding corners.” I didn’t name it. It’s when I take a piece of fabric, usually the edge of a sleeve or that lovely little stitching right where a zipper is sewn on to the coat, or maybe even, OK, I’ll take the tip of the collar if I’m wearing one. So I take it and I gently fold it in half so the fabric has a nice bend, a bend I can feel, something substantial, a crease, a bend, and my fingers begin to itch a little. Then I take the crease, the bend, and I roll it slowly between my fingers, back and forth, rolling, and then fold it the other way and do the same until the whole area feels supple, softer, and then I fold it in half again until I can’t fold it anymore, until the fabric bunches too tight and I let it unravel. I can’t tell you how satisfying this is. The first thing I do when I get a new piece of clothing, sometimes even before I wear it, is find the best corner on it to fold. Some of them are hard to find. Sometimes it takes a while but I find it, I find it, even before I snip off the tag I’ll know the best corner, the crease, and given it a little roll. I have a pair of pants, this one pair of pants, and most of the fabric is too soft already and it doesn’t have many good corners but there’s one, there’s one that’s right exactly in the crotch and I don’t get to fold it much except when I’m sitting on the toilet and then it’s right there and so right as I sit down I’m at it, I’m kneading the stiff seem where the legs come together and rolling it against my thumb and index finger, pinching it gently, and pressing it more firmly, then bending it back. Folding corners. I’ve stopped writing twice to fold the corner of my sleeve; I’m wearing my favorite green shirt; it has so many wonderful corners to fold, it has so many, I’m never going to give this shirt up. Never.

(Repost)

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.