word snob

it's small, my cringe reaction to catch-all phrases. i loathed 'it's all good' as a flipping hippie coin inclined to dispel any annoyance, large or small. it's been replaced with 'no worries' EVERYBODY says 'no worries'. who started this? how did it take hold? didn't we all hate 'don't worry be happy' as bumper sticker easy-as-pie pablum even though it originated with Meher Baba and stood on solid guru ground? the 'no worries' slight-of-hand that is a more upbeat 'whatever'? curls the hair on the back of my neck. within the last couple of years 'real quick' is all over the sidewalk - a no problem wait a sec snap your fingers instant solution to any troubling knot in the day that will be taken care of 'real quick'. it's not even the the absentee 'ly' that bothers me so much as the fact that everyone i know, friends and not friends, say it. (this may be part of the waitress hears too many verbal shortcuts syndrome.) lastly, and this is totally a waitress complaint and leaks primarily from girls, is 'thank yeeeew' - the 'eew' being drawn out in a small 'o'-shaped mouth and held onto for dear life. it is nasal and obnoxious and never ending. fingernails screech on the blackboard. why this stuff plugs me in so fiercely i cannot fathom. like the little finger beside a glass of wine that 'does it by itself', i am caught in the web of my own observation.

the tenor

the tenor

i never was but hoped to be. even as a boy soprano i looked up to these guys. i even fantasized about them in some colorless disturbing way, they are so clear of note and high of pitch. as aces in the singing game they captivated me exclusively until Aretha Franklin took over when i saw her sing Natural Woman on Johnny Carson. but that was way later. the boy who sits at the feet of the upper classman tenor disappears into that voice as he does the young guy who belts it out. i would have done anything he asked (which is safe to say as he would have undoubtedly never asked). at Yale, in the high reverberation stairwells and tiled bathrooms i'd take a stab at Jussi Bjorling, tearing my alcohol bruised vocal chords to shreds but got high on the high sound. (poor Jussi died on stage, in a chair, singing his final aria.) something there is that loves a tenor, perhaps the Narcissus of singers, squirting mist on an anxious throat. it came to a head at Yale when someone in the class ahead of mine, a Chinese scholar with a phenomenal singer, sang 'Miss Otis Regrets' at a 'rush' for those of us who wanted to join acapella singing groups (where we could drink underage and nurture 'platonic' love attachments with the like-minded). I was lost in his voice. I would visit him at Saybrook College in the dark of night. 'Excalibur' was carved on the armchair i would sit in by the fire. he would play 'Tristan und Isolde' and describe to me how he and his girlfriend would try to simultaneously climax at the peak of Wagner's arch. he went on to study voice in San Francisco with one of the supposedly great masters of voice. i lost track of him until Orchestra Luna was in the studio and i looked him up in the Manhattan phone book. i wanted him to know that i wrote songs, that i was singing in a band and that i was making a record. i wanted to see how he was doing after the Yale years. i found his apartment on the lower West Side. he opened the door in a frenzy of anxiety. the place was a chaotic pig pen of rooms littered with unwashed clothes and dishes, with sheet music scattered all over all floors. he explained that his great teacher and mentor had died and was irreplaceable. he appeared to be insane to a clinical degree. he nervously carried a chrome pitchpipe in one hand. he would blow into it for a high C and struggle to reach it. he failed again and again and a scratchy, flat, awkward sound gagged out of his mouth, his eyes aghast. i think he made a clumsy pass at me. he had become totally gay i guess. no more 'Tristan'. it was crushing to see this great person, this great voice, this precocious student fall so close to the gutter. i backed out of the apartment, took a cab to our bland hotel and left him to, i dunno, rot. maybe we can't go home again. maybe we shouldn't even try.

how do they know

dogs (and cats), when you're hurting? they do, don't they? when i was a kid we had a Standard poodle (the only one of the many dogs we had growing up that we disliked) who looked after my Granddad after he lost his wife. he slept in a tiny room (the 'maid's room') at the end of a long hallway on the 2nd floor. the poodle would trot down the hall, sit at the side of the bed and rest his chin on the mattress next to Granddad, looking mournfully up at him with big brown eyes. he knew. he gave solace in ways none of us could.

ted

i had to go. i'd been to St Particks as a teenager to honor Bobby. this was as critical a view. i dislike lines and crowds. i went to the Sox victory parade in '04 and the first one for the Pats in the snow. i was glad i went, but after waiting for hours on numb feet just to see the boats lumber by i was let down, bored wondering is-that-all-there-is-to-a-victory-parade? sure, it was good to plant my feet in honor of the hard-earned, long time coming, champs and to see the rock star athletes on display in real time. but once was enough. on the other hand i liked being in line to hear Obama speak during the campaign. the people, thousands upon thousands, psyched, inspired, happy, up and to be a part of something bigger than my routine, as if all of us were one. that was the last time i saw Teddy. he was bellowing on stage to introduce the new torch bearer. i'd also met him, years back, in a bar. shook his generous hand. 'good t meet ya, Senator...' etc. it was not that big a deal but something never forgotten. on the way to the JFK Library, on the T and looking out the window it seemed as if a lot of guys looked like him, overweight, chin up jaunty, toothy grin, with eyes on the sky and feet on the ground. but they weren't the man. no one was or ever will be. not in my lifetime. the line was as diverse racially as it could be in this ol' whitey town. there were tears wiped away under sunglasses, eyes downcast or uplifted or both and kind thoughts about strangers. i was gonna read to pass the time in the long line, but i didn't. i quietly inched towards the under sail like library with the rest. the Kennedy kids were there, thanking us for coming, for showing up to honor their grandfather, for loving the world he believed could be better even as dark forces conspired against it. inside the Smith room where i'd last seen Paul Krugman speak, lay the great man in state, surrounded by soldiers who didn't blink, by members of families who'd lost love ones on 9/11, who'd been connected to the Senator in loss and by members of the Kennedy clan who sat quietly on spindly metal chairs. we had to be there, all of us, to honor this storm of a man who outlasted so many hurricanes in his personal and public life. we need him now more than ever. every time, every time i hear the words: 'and the dream shall never die' tears fill my eyes.

ass

because you sit on it for hours, it is rarely clean or smooth or pretty. ass topography is speckled with pimply red bed-bug like dots and cuneiform hairs. a hammock of water balloon flesh hides the under-ass parenthesis and worse, a shit chunk can get caught in ass hair and dangle like a tick in the jungle. a pristine shiny clear-skinned tight ass is a rare find indeed. it doesn't survive much past 14 which is why, after a few beers, a martini or a weed hit you blur the view and make it right. you ignore the spots, the dingle berry, the saggity ass and give it a squeeze or a bite. as for your very own back porch, it is next to impossible to take in. a twist in front of a mirror can offer a 3/4 snapshot, but gives no indication of how broad of beam or distended one has become. the stand-above-the-mirror-on-the-floor approach reflects an alien ass crack high on spider legs, walnut balls with a cock tip in a peek-a-boo, sweaty bush. without a friend with a camera you'll never see your fat ass the way it really looks. a friend of mine twirling out of the shower felt a soft slap on the back of her upper thigh only to realize that it was delivered by her very own cheek, a blubbery wet buss. it made her laugh, but she was horrified. i think asses begin, unless belonging to an athlete or a ballet dancer, to find gravity in the late twenties and even if it's a tight ass, it can become a dirty ass. it's been sitting on itself long enough to accumulate a collection of creases and black heads. if you're lucky your boyfriend or girlfriend will pop and scrub and smooth you out like a soap stone. but the thing is, no matter how disturbing this part of the body might be, we're interested. we have to look. maybe face first, or tits, or crotch, but a nice shot of a nice ass in blue jeans will not be ignored. a kid walks by on the sidewalk and you turn and you look. you always will. the way an ass walks is an action miracle. male or female. a big hefty left, right, left ass-in-a-dress is a Fellini spectacle worshiped for centuries. how many tourista walk all the way around the Statue of David just to catch a glimpse of that famous forever young rear end? maybe, unless you're a total pedophile, a dirty ass, a be-zitted butt, an ass crack with pubic seaweed sprouting out like a song, is hot as hell. we all have our favorites. we all fantasize about how so and so's will look out of shorts or stepping out of the shower. we can't help it. we even watch each other watching. it gives us a snort. and there are some asses impossible to picture. on some, there's no movement whatsoever, or what appears to be no ass at all, just a plumb line from the upper back to legs, or, weirdly, an indentation, as if there's a vacant lot where on others an actual ass bounces along with a smile. i would kill to examine, like an archeologist, one of these ass negatives in the flesh.

she

came through the front door of Sorella's and was moving with short quick steps towards Ellie, the owner, who's new hair after chemotherapy had grown back with thick dark brown poodle curls. Ellie reminds me of the Basque woman from From Whom The Bell Tolls. she is a Hemingway two-by-four of a woman who is so sure of herself she's more sexy than any hot chick in the room. she stares fear in the face and scares it off the stage. her features are large - big lips, big smile, big legs, big bulk. on holidays she dresses up. she's a Gypsy. she's Ma Joad. i don't know much about her except on Sundays when most of the time she lets me take the small, one-person window seat where i can read and shovel in a Romeo omelette. the woman speaking with her today looked like a lesser version of Ellie. she was more tightly wound. the radar eyes i was sure she had even tho i couldn't see them, bore into my skull, straight through Ellie's body. she wore short shorts that hugged a middle-aged ass, too-tan legs, sandals and a brazen show-her-tits blouse. i wonder about women her age. do they stop worrying about no longer being young? do they worry about this as much as older men do? or differently? then i forgot about her. i went back to 'Gone With The Wind' and Scarlett O'hara who at 17 had been through more life than most ancients, a wicked girl with wicked thoughts who had you want to know her for real, to crank up the movie version and see those startling green eyes. i then became aware that someone had stopped at my table. it was her, that weird woman, staring at me with a curious smile. her blood red lipstick lips parted as if in her mind she could read mine. how did i look to her, eyes over glasses, fat book in my lap with the disturbed dry hair? had i been Fellini i would have cast her instantly as a drive-by wench, or madam. someone i could count on to yell at the top of her lungs in a desperate scene in a movie i would never make. she was there barely 7 seconds and then floated away in a swirl of hot afternoon air. she confirmed my New Age theory that we, as souls, are destined to meet all souls belonging to us, if only for a split second, for a glimpse or long term, but meet them we must before we die. they teach us, as we teach them back, the ineffable big book truths about everything we know nothing about.

but i think, there's something to be said for, you know, like, i mean...ah...

was the brain stall i overheard the other night at work. he was fishing around, like a hand in a jammed-to-the-gills purse, for the thought he wanted to get out of his head. as if by using catch phrases as lures he could somehow hook the evasive idea and yank it to the surface. his friend hardly seemed impatient. maybe he too had a line in the water near an algae-softened sneaker. it was hilarious to hear, to even notice. i stumbled away with a pitcher of water trying not to burst. we are so funny, we smarty-pants, when we try to stab the dark with a dull dart.

front/side

you see a face from the side, the profile and the person is a total knock out until he turns and everything looks different. his face is too wide, eyes are too small and his lower lip looks weird. and it's the same in reverse. from the front, he's scary handsome and then he turns and he's a chinless wonder with a shark fin nose. of course if we like them, they become beautiful, they 'are' beautiful. if we get bored, whatever they had in beauty stock gets lost, attraction being the great deceiver, because for most of us, classic beauty is like classic rock on classic radio - a milkshake that tastes great at first and later makes you nauseous. and then there's our very own face. we know it too well and not at all. on acid we're a Picasso, cracked across the bridge of thenose, infinitely sad and funny all at once. it's not unlike hearing our voice recorded and played back for the first time. THAT'S me? that grotesque narrow nasal embarrassing sound which can never be gotten used to? others know that voice and face and to them it's who you are. how you look. what you sound like. all these are parts of the ever impossible to put completely together and make sense of.

curtis york

led the choir, glee club and the middle school chorus where i went to school (the Episcopal Academy in Philly). he taught music appreciation and coached softball. his initials, C. R. Y., proved to be an acronym that spelled it out. his passion and his unfair downfall in my eyes. when i was 12 i auditioned for choir/chorus. i was terrified as i stood next to him at the piano. he played scales. i sang them back, the notes resonating in my small bird chest like a miniature Tibetan bell. the thrill of this new thing, this singing in a girl's soprano, ran from my heels and up my spine to the crown of my head. it wasn't really a girl's soprano. it was a boy's. there is a subtle difference. the sound is as pure as silver, ringing out of little mouths, little 'o's' on the upturned faces of cherubs. we never, at least not at our school, thought this was sissy. it was instead a huge credit to be singing there in the choir, chorus (soprano/alto) and later the glee club. it probably got me into Yale with it's diehard singing group tradition. i loved it so much, lost in a sea of voices at the spring concert (recorded onto swimming-pool blue vinyl), filing past Mr York to see if he'd give a meaningful wink. we felt special. we really truly did. to be awarded a solo was the pinnacle of the rush. one single fluted voice rising above 120 others to dove soar across the gymnasium and land in the hearts of adoring, astonished friends and parents. certainly my infatuation and eventual life obsession with music and singing began here, with Curtis York. as seniors we took his music appreciation class and covered the symphonic and opera classics with gusto. his enthusiasm was contagious and real. at the end of the school year he'd take us to his favorite Italian restaurant in downtown Philly where waiters sang opera and where we had our first inkling of a non-family dinner out with wine, song and romantic escapade. he was short and had a pencil mustache and up-combed wavy ink black hair. we worshipped him. we sought his approval. after i went off to Yale and ultimately became a Whiffenpoof (even recording at the big room at the Columbia Studios in Manhattan) i wanted to give York the result. i was proud of it. i thought he would be as well, especially my big ballsy version of 'Sit Down You're Rockin' The Boat'. i called him up and he asked me to meet him as his apartment. sure, i thought. sounds good. i was, at the time, in the cluttered closet. i'd been found out at Yale by others like myself, but none of them attracted me and to those who knew i swore i'd 'fix' myself. meanwhile i was falling in mad love with the less sure and doing nothing about it in bed. at Episcopal we had, as kids, theories about some of the teachers. who 'was' and who 'wasn't'. somehow Mr York never made the list. i guess we loved him too much to stain our sense of who he was with nasty schoolboy gossip. so it was with a naive heart that i drove to his place at school to see him, catch up, maybe have a more open conversation about art or something and of course to play the Whiff record. when i got there he'd already had a few and was red in the face, even a bit weepy. i knew it like a gun went off that Mr York was gay as a goose and damned if i was gonna tell him i was too. he seemed to like the record enough, but it was me, grown up now, 21, that he wanted to see, to talk with, as if he could come clean about all the boys over the years that he'd loved and never had. how his heart must have hurt to suppress those feelings. we'd heard that he took vacations to the west coast. maybe it was there that he acted out, maybe not. at any rate i wanted outa there. he came forward to hug me. i guess i hugged him back like a whore worried about her hair or about touching too close down there. it was brief, awkward and sad. this man, this wonderful man who had brought so much to so many had had to hide all those years. hide from the scorn that would have inevitably chewed him alive. hide from the feelings he had for those up-chinned boy sopranos, hide, hide, hide. it tears me up to think about him, even though i know i could never have been even remotely his friend. i guess love requires illusion. C. R. Y. created one of the most beautiful i have ever known.

small details

of the day - the laundry, taking out garbage, making the bed, clumping cat shit out of the litter box, getting the list of to-do's crossed-off off one-by-one at day's end. groceries, vitamins, idiot shopping, dishes, vacuum, phone calls, emails, twarts, bills paid - they are endless and they keep me in line. my lumbering 66-yr-old body likes doing housework minutiae, holding insanity at bay with regularized chaos. 'i do, therefore i am'. 'clean up your room and make your bed. it will quiet the blues,' my best friend's mom, Weastie, admonished. (she later sat in a car, garden hose from exhaust to window and killed herself.) so i wonder how i will handle NOT being able to look after everything. not being able to wipe my own ass. will i lose it? will i be able to bear, let alone ask friends and family to handle the detritus of my day? will i stand for it? will i not want others to be at my beck and call? why clutter up their lives with my clutter? or will i become a stinko curmudgeon like my Uncle Andy and chase help out of the apartment with a cane?

how do they know

dogs (and cats)? when you're hurting? they do, don't they? when i was a kid we had a standard poodle (the only one of the many dogs we had growing up that we disliked) who looked after my granddad after he lost his wife. he slept in a tiny room (the 'maid's room') at the end of a long hallway on the 2nd floor. the poodle would trot down the hall, sit at the side of the bed and rest his chin on the mattress next to my granddad, looking mournfully up at him with big brown eyes. he knew. he gave solace in ways none of us could.

the grim smile

looks like this: lips tighten, the corners of the mouth curve down and the chin puckers - all in one simultaneous gesture. we all do it. i do it. famous people do it. politicians on TV do it. i never fully took this in this i saw Bubba, in his empathetic prime, put that face on, the grim smile. he had me believe him even when i shouldn't. the grim smile says a million things. 'i hear ya.' 'i'm humble.' 'my heart goes out to you.' 'i acknowledge my mistake.' 'you caught me in a lie.' 'don't worry, you'll be fine.' if you add a nod, it communicates a deeply felt 'yes'. if you move your head from side to side, it becomes: 'what can i say? ya got me.' it's a con. it's also the truth. where did these muscles learn to do this? i see kids doing it, imitating parents. is it ingrained, a signal developed as early as cave men guilt? was there a cave man Bubba? i can't stop myself from doing it even if i wanted to. still, i wish it weren't so automatic. god, i'm doing it now even as i type.

staring at stuff

i see them, wandering away from a party in the restaurant, wrists clasped behind lower back, up and down the hallway, staring blankly at posters, memorabilia and artifacts. it is as if they don't feel like small talking, or managing a birthday moment, or being pushed about by a friend or family member to participate. they want outa there, but can't leave, so they wander and gaze like giraffes at anything not human. that's one version. the other is the small town tourist i imagine driving a gigantic stainless steel RV, traveling the USA and stopping to gape at every scenic view. they have to take a picture, to memorialize what is to me impossibly boring. and so, at Doyle's i see them, up on tiptoe and down on heels, wrists round the back, squinting at all that crap on the wall as if it tells them something vital, something which, if they missed it, would become an existential loss.

harlow my hero

Harlow was The Man when i was a boy growing up on the Main Line, just north of Philly. he lived in the big house across a thin road from our big house. his family along with mine were inseparably close until the inevitable college diaspora. we did small kid's 'dirty things' in the fields when we were small. we built tree forts, hauled up buckets of pine cone ammo to heave at imaginary enemies and had school girl crushes on each other. but it was Harlow who was the undisputed king of our insular, one-square-block hood. he sported a floppy white-man's fro, had a lanky build, angular features, rarely needed a shave (though he was hardly baby-faced) and he had a sharp tongue and flint-sharp eyes. he seemed to know all the post beats. Dylan, Baez, Van Ronk were his discoveries and he turned us onto them. he could play hard, finger-picking folk, none of his own songs, but the newly minted from the soon-to-be legends. one night, drunk, he sang 'Motherless Children' in front of my best friend at the time who's mom had just killed herself (there were a lotta suicides in the hood). this didn't slow him down. forthrightness was his MO. maybe he did the right thing. he always seemed to do the right thing, even when it seemed 'wrong', which shook up my pre-teen head. he did that a lot, shaking up the complacent and the fearful. word had it that he fucked Baez, but we were never sure. he scored big with the Bryn Mawr girls even before he graduated high school, which, near as i can tell, he never finished. he started his own construction company (in his early twenties) in South Philly, tearing apart brownstones and putting them back together and yelling at workers in a good-hearted way. he was a kid on the way up we figured. i worked for him one summer, in over my head, but his charismatic bluster held me in thrall. hell, he was friends with Mott, an inventor who looked like Gandalf and who met visitors at his door stark naked and bellowing. Harlow (nice name for a boy, right?) won the heart of an insanely beautiful Russian girl, Leah. they had a kid. we were never sure if they married. there was even a famous photograph by a famous photographer that showed Leah's full tit squirting milk on their baby and they let the kid ride mama's back when they were fucking. at one point he accumulated a pile of parking tickets at his construction sites which added up to cash in the thousands. he couldn't afford to pay them so he changed his name, skipped town and moved to San Francisco. he got a commercial pilot's license and flew rich people up and down the coast. the last great time we spent together was when my dad flew him out to Santa Barbara to pick me up after i'd been busted and jailed for shoplifting. we drove home cross-country, non stop, high on meth and solving all the problems of the world in one sleepless trip. i wonder how he's doing. breaking barriers still, i bet.

bloody shave

at one point i had free access to a gym. a 30th floor downtown health spa filled with chrome machines, mirrors, men and women sweating off pounds and working hard to transform flubbery bodies into generic, cut, hairless 'beauty'. nothing more absurd looking than a rock hard 20 year old body sprouting a 45 year old head. i pretty much got nowhere fast. there were no pounds lost, no change in body contour. i went because it was, for a few short months, free and it got me out of the non-profit office where i holed up. what stayed with me was an unforgettable sight. in the shower everyone keeps an eagle-eye perimeter around their naked selves. 'i'm naked. you're naked. i see you, but i'm not looking at your dick and for fuck sake's don't look at mine'. one afternoon i'm toweling off at the sink while the guy next to me is shaving. he has a big slap-happy grin, but his face is covered in blood. the blade has sliced up his neck, throat, cheeks and Adam's apple. i can't believe what i'm seeing until i get it, he's blind. the guy is fucking blind. here he is, 30 years old, 30 stories up, towel around waist, shaving in a public bathroom. shaving blind and bloodied-up and ecstatic. the freedom he feels, unassisted, shaving himself thoroughly rips me out of my bleak cynical judgement. what a dude he is. what an amazing amazing guy. i didn't say a word. i just admired how incredibly awesome he was.

patience

does not become me. i try to wait (they also serve who only stand and shit), but i'm terrible at it. i rush through songs, i tick off my list-for-the-day like a housewife on meth. i meet new people and crash course their biography. at work i smack the plates down on the table even as i try, so help me, to gently settle the food onto the paper mat. driving cross country i count not miles, but states, hurtling through the imaginary dotted lines that atlas-separates Kansas from Iowa. i drink beer like water at an oasis. i eat shovel-fulls of Chinese and suck up Pu Pu like a Hoover. perhaps i am racing towards the end of my life. or maybe i'm trying to see, touch, experience, absorb everything and everyone in my path as quickly as possible so as to not miss anything. i watch myself roar down the road in 5th gear but it never slows me down. i rev the engine, i lurch through life. Buddha would have a problem with me.

nureyev revives fonteyn

he pulls her out of retirement. they dance on big stages across the globe. she's young again. he's leaping to inspired heights. they adore each other. the other night i'm watching the last 5 minutes of Toy Story 3 and working up a good cry when i notice my spinster cat, Sofi, on top of the foot stool. underneath is the new kid, Mao, who looks up at her with half-closed but curious golden eyes. Sofi half-heartedly paws the air with a matchstick leg. Mao's seems half asleep, but they're communicating. what was once fight and scratch has for the moment become what i can only describe as play, or off-hand shadow boxing. Mao has drawn her outside her stay-in-the-safe-closet persona and now they're in kitty love. she prefers to leave my room when i go to sleep rather than crash at the foot of my bed. she wants to be out there in the hallway with Mao. they've slept body-to-body when i caught them in an unguarded moment and the other morning. he stood watch at the door to the porch while she shat in her box, undisturbed, like the centurion boyfriend who guards the men's room while his girlfriend takes a hurry-up piss. it took months, this ever so gradual friendship and on Christmas day, i swear, as Sof was curled up on a couch pillow, Mao leaped up, clumsy tip-toed over to her and kissed her on her hard licorice-lipped kitty-mouth. a tiny cat kiss like a bird fart. they still wrestle and scratch and bite and hiss and spit, but it's closer to a good time than a hate-fest. so on top of Toy Story 3 i get this image of two ex-enemies in a paw-de-deux.