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word snob

2011-10-21T11:57:00.002-07:00

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

2011-10-21T11:57:00.001-07:00

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

2011-10-20T13:45:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-20T13:28:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-20T13:02:00.001-07:00

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

2011-08-31T11:11:00.000-07:00

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...

2011-08-28T11:03:00.000-07:00

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

2011-07-10T10:47:00.000-07:00

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

2011-06-15T12:31:00.001-07:00

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

2011-06-15T12:30:00.000-07:00

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

2011-05-20T10:12:00.000-07:00

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

2011-05-06T10:49:00.001-07:00

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

2011-04-07T12:13:00.001-07:00

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

2011-04-03T11:17:00.000-07:00

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

2011-02-13T12:40:00.001-08:00

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

2011-01-28T12:06:00.001-08:00

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

2011-01-16T12:27:00.001-08:00

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.

the old lady

2010-12-29T17:01:00.000-08:00

in the back room has one good and one fucked-up eye. she's all chicken bones in a house dress, frail and helpless. she needs to be led around by the elbow. she doesn't want a cocktail, she wants coffee. she helps herself. the bad eye is watery, poked-out and unseeing, a scary egg-white blob. i wonder if, in an earlier century, she would have been accused of practicing the black arts, run outa town or burned at the stake. she doesn't say much. she's in her own world. at times it's as if she's not there at all. friends and family speak to her or at her. how is she doing? she looks at her loafers. she waits until they finish with their attentions. i imagine her young, pretty, flirting, but it's a stretch. i see her in her kitchen under a harsh fluorescent light, the dishes piled up and befouled, a smell of piss and toast crumbs on the formica. definitely a bad-picture TV with the sound on low, her slippers worn at the heel and the photos of relatives turned over. a sickly cat is curled up in a corner. i hope i get her wrong. i hope she's aware, safe, living in her own house, taking calls and sky-high on pills.

my job:

2010-12-18T12:04:00.001-08:00

waiter at Doyles and for more years than i can count. doing anything that long invites disaster, boredom, wet brain, mistakes, getting shit-canned, psychiatry or criminal acts. in my case i'm just plain lucky because i love what i do. i did from the start. i look forward to it every night, even when my art homework is coitus interrupted and a song is half boiled on the stove. there are so many reasons why i dig the gig. for one, it ain't phony. yuppies (when they existed) are never comfortable there. it ain't posh, but it's decent and it's a good time, the food and service friendly and inexpensive. booths and beer sell the joint to the newly arrived. the three rooms, from the original antique bar to the 80's additions, have a family frankness, a we-did-this-ourselves-not-some-interior-designer-with-ascot-and-little- dog crap. tin ceilings, wobbly fans, paintings and photos of politicians, Red Sox teams, high school year book portraits taken back in the mid-20th clutter the space. i like looking around. it appeals to me in an easy way. the worn-through linoleum, beer neon, hanging lamps and the recently added flat screen tvs co-exist with the sway-backed shelves behind the bar. the kitchen is huge and crazy loud with the attack of cooking, dish washing, pizza hurling, foul language, frantic expedition and screaming cel phone calls to kids. the bar is one yards long slab loaded with a soldier's salute of beer taps. the murals make no sense. are we in Boston? Switzerland? Ireland? some are incomplete (the artist couldn't paint hands and hid them behind Pilgrim skirts). the Indians are more yellow than red and were repainted, as well as the ceiling, after the smoking ban. the cigarette era accumulated a nicotine crust on the walls and tin. the new paint job holds, translucent as glass. but none of the above would keep me, or anyone else, working there all these years if there wasn't more to it. more than whizzing about the floor, banging through doors, mopping up kids rice-on-the-table or dealing with idiots. it's who you work with and work for that gets you through the night. i get a bang out of my co-workers, then and now. they are a rag tag lot and we yell, fight, laugh, steal tables, shrug off asshole customers as we beat up on them as soon as we're out of earshot. we squeal/cheer the Sox, Pats, Bruins and Celts. the jokes and anecdotes never let up or get stale. gossip is as thick as gravy, complaints wild and the side-work can be spotty. we shrug off the annoying cliches: 'i'll DO a Hogaarden' - 'do'? are you serious? should i watch? 'i'm still WORKING on my prime rib' - with a screw driver? can ya get me a glass of water 'when you have a chance'...as in HURRY THE FUCK UP! 'i hated it' hardy har har har (when every plate has been licked clean). the naughty desert eyes: 'i'll try the mudd pie' tee hee hee - like they're remembering some exotic sexual position. the presumption of the regular who assumes that because he's been to Doyles a zillion times, he deserves the extra attention. really? probably. but over time, regulars become friends. like teachers, we watch their kids grow up. we hear about an impending divorce, a son's first guitar, a daughter who won a writing award. the wait staff (except for me) are girls. cooks, dishwashers, bartenders are all dudes. the kitchen guys hang tough and are dirty-mouthed and hilarious. when you boom through the swinging door you enter their turf which is louder, raunchier and more real in a lotta ways than the 'how can i help you?' politesse back on the floor. the bartenders open wine bottles by grabbing the belly in one hand and back-assward twisting the bottle not the corkscrew. but hey, we ain't in the South Wnd. we ain't Vogue sleek or knock-out hot. we cover a broad age spectrum, but we're good looking in that straight forward working class what-the-fuck way. we wear t-shirts, shorts and jeans. there is no snotty have-to-wear-black dress code. and we're quick. turn over is our bread and butter. not many customers linger anyhow. big families with lotsa kids running all over the restaurant want in and out with a snap. the back room is the only function space of its kind or size in Jamaica Plain. it can handle birthday parties, political fund raisers, soccer trophy nights, wedding receptions, graduations and lesbian football teams. years ago, Eddie Burke, who bought the joint back in the 60's, made sure that no prejudice be allowed. he made it a rule: if some asshole was racist or homophobic, he was banned for life. who knew that a liberal agenda was gonna take over the hood? dykes love doyles. so do cops, veterinarians, African Americans, indie rockers, Germans, nuns, Haitians, students, socialists and trans-genders. the polyglot is happy here. there's no paid vacation, sick or maternity leave. you show up or you don't and you make the money you make, but you walk outa there with your tips, you can adjust your schedule to suit another occupation and you don't take the job home. i rarely hang after work. i love the interplay and frenzy during my shift, but i don't feel like sticking around later. (i have other friends at another bar.) but ya know what? when things get tough, we count on each other. we pitch in. we pass the hat for someone who's sick or who's lost a friend, having a birthday or getting married. we read with a glance how waitress X is handling the dope at table 30 and we have her back. regulars have nick names: 'the dog lady'. 'the basketball guys'. 'why do you DO that?'. we laugh about them. we have to. it's like that in 'the industry' and especially at Doyles. it ain't corporate and that's why it's fun, that's why it works and that's why so many of us have stayed on. my sister, a waitress for years, said 'you can't be yourself when you wait tables'. i get it and acting does happen at Doyles, but it ain't Shakespeare and you can pretty much be who you are. you can even have a count-your-farts-in-the-hallway contest with Kelly and Sheila, or do the crossword when it's dead slow. that's just part of why the place is awesome, why there are so many returnees ('are you still here?'), why so many of the staff have stuck around and why i'm grateful to have the gig. hey, they even call me 'Ricky'.

is the grass really greener? (redux)

2010-11-24T14:30:00.000-08:00

or are we honestly just fine in our own skin? would we, if we could, be anyone other than who we already are? to have the flash money of a Wall Street tycoon, the endless sexual opportunities of a rock star, the way-too-beautiful boy who draws moths to his preposterous flame, the leggy body of the model who walks the runway like fuck you, the outsized athleticism of the Olympic swimmer, the impossible leap of a dancer, the oceanic saxophone voice of a black blues singer or the power to move people as poet, novelist, painter, film maker. we lie in bed, heavy with the weight of the not done, the all we may never be, the relationships that are missing or too much with us, the families that drive us crazy, the cars that won't start, the jobs that don't pay enough for the shit we take, the books we never write, the plays we're not in and the races we're too scared to run. we collect so many debits and so few credits. but honest-to-god, we like who we are, don't we. we like our name, our silly astrological sign, our dysfunctional families, our besotted friends and our peculiar failures. the face that ain't gettin' younger is still the face that we quietly, reluctantly, love and the way our eyes in the mirror can not lie. the blur we see in the window as we imagine a younger, hotter self is a soft joke, amusing, familiar and oddly cool. so, when you get right down to it, we wouldn't ever want to be anyone other than who we are, right? the grass 'looks' greener, but it ain't, it's burnt. we own our Dharma path, no one else does. why would we trade that in for the unknown other? we can't and we wouldn't. our soul is not for sale.

performing

2010-11-07T11:46:00.000-08:00

at 9. first as a cub scout with a whiffle and singing a 'negro' spiritual in black face (burnt cork on grease paint). that was the first time i remember doing anything like this. the unfamiliar rush in my skinny chest in front of a crowd of easy-to-love-you parents. i think i'd seen my dad in the Pirates of Penzance and was bowled over. the lights, color, make-up, huge bellowing voices and pit band killed me, as well as the on-the-road Broadway musicals that hit Philly i went to with my family. the stage was lit up like a forest fire with dancing, gesticulating big busty broads and (did i know it at the time?) gay gay gay chorus boys. what was this? why did it hit me so hard? how was i drawn to this flame? this had to have inspired my show-n-tell boyhood. i'd whip a cape around my shoulders and jumped through windows onto the lawn as if to save the day. i busted through a barn wall into a room-within-a-room and imagined myself a Flash Gordon hero. i would mind-wander out a 3rd story window into an other-personality night sky and fantasize a dream cloud Neverland to which i belonged. i banged out 'original' piano improvisations at the Prout's Neck talent show. but when it really took hold was in choir and chorus at the Episcopal Academy. trying out with my thin reed of a voice, singing scales with earnest eyebrows and hoping to impress the choir master with my little boy/girl's voice. which i did, making choir-boy and chorus-kid. i was exuberant and red faced in my (brief) tremulous solo at the Big Moment spring concert. i giggled in chapel over smothered farts-in-robes, a hard in-the-pants pencil up against the boy soprano beside me. it weren't just foolin' around. it instigated a transformative shiver in the soul, all this showing off in front of any audience. i can't remember a time, since the cub scout Uncle Remus, when i was not in a play, chorale, glee club or living room show-and-tell. at Yale my entire social life revolved around singing groups. the white tie prestige, the complex arrangements, the dazzling eyes-that-won't-let-go-of-you effect on girls and closeted boys. the fat sound, acapella, that could fill a hall. i joined choir, glee club, The Duke's Men and The Whiffenpoofs. we were ginned-up songsters with tinkling cocktails leaning against mantle pieces, champagne badges of courage in a faux demi-monde, an icicle-keening tenor bounding across a college yard in the autumn frost. sex, music, art, performance was a Dagwood sandwich i ate up. still, i was singing songs i had not written, that didn't express my inner or outer life. when, years later, on a borrowed upright in an over-stimulated New Haven house, i began to write my own songs and my own music, a change occurred. i was not filling another's shoes, but standing in my own. i'm thinking about this now because a friend asked me recently why i perform. i didn't know what to say. i'd never been asked. i hadn't thought about it. Bob Dylan said 'the only time he felt like his real self was on stage' (off stage being less authentic than 'real life'). it is the exact same for me. i am my most-est self when i perform. in captivating ears, eyes and hearts one imagines an electric synapse with another. one synthesizes his microscopic view of self, life, friends, loss, trauma, love and sex on a safe proscenium, offered up risk free. and then there's The Zone. if you give it all you got, if you 'leave it all on the stage', you occasionally inhabit an ego-vanishing dimension. your 'you' vaporizes. you transmogrify into an energy that is not from, but through the Self. your 'muse' weegie boards an art wave. this is intoxicating and let's face it, you love the love even as you wonder how to win the anonymous heart. you invent reciprocity. the nightmare, the other side of the coin, is the uncertainty that lurks above every singer's watchtower. the hell possibility of fakery, of when you're 'acting and not being' spits on your face. 'who the fuck do i think i am? i suck! they hate me! my voice is gross. my songs are absurd! i'm overdoing it. anyone is better at this than i am. i'm wasting your time. etc etc.' - crash, burn, explode. or when the narcissistic star fucking groupie blow job staggers past an open door, or when the i-need-to-get-high post coital sadness storms in after leaving all your everything on stage, or when the intense need to be loved but not intimately hurls you into the dank house of horrors. 'they loved me minutes ago, where are they now?' it's lonely at the top (or the bottom), even for a weekend blues warrior, a fat Karaoke singer, a zit-faced shedding teenager doing 'moves' in front of a sweaty mirror with a hardon in his shorts. for all these reasons, pro or con, i do what i do on any given night on any stage that will have me. maybe, like the tenor Jussi Bjorling or like Mark Sandman, i will drop dead performing, no regrets, with slow-motion flowers falling like snow upon the stage.

my KIA

2010-09-26T11:40:00.001-07:00

is a brand new, grass green, sparkly 2011 CMV (cunt mama vehicle?! cytomegalovirus?!) 'Soul/Exclaim!' with all the implications of those words. i bought it last month and not only did it cost more money than i've ever spent on anything ever in my whole entire life, it is also the absolute very first car i've ever bought, period. prior to that i borrowed, or took a cab, or a long time boyfriend would have something, a Duster or a shitbox Dart. my dad bought me a blue panel truck when i drove to Steamboat Springs, CO to teach at an ill-fated school. my last car was the used GrandAm my mum left me after she died. it's still going strong, the motor anyhow, albeit dented up and nutty, but drivable and kicking. now my sister has it. my mechanic promised it'd be good for at least another 60-90 thou. for 15 years it drove me all over town, gear and all. the point is, again, i never bought one of these myself. i never had to. i was terrified of the expense, the responsibility and the threat of getting smacked up in traffic. but now, with Social Security to handle the monthlies, i own this thing, this car, this object of which i am so fond. oddly it is as if i am in some over the top, obsessive romantic relationship with a 'thing', an inanimate. i talk to it as i approach (clicking open the door from 20 feet away): 'hi'. when i leave i say goodbye. when i start to meditate i 'see' it, the face of my beloved, a misty vision before me. it is my friend, my easy lover, my favorite dog. it even looks like someone i know with it's snub, bug's nose. i caress the hood, the dash, the hound's tooth upholstery. everything on it works - the windows, the doors, the gas cap, the sun roof, the electronically adjusted rear view mirrors and the hazards (which i forget to shut off and rush back to correct). every design choice pleases my aesthetic eye as if delivered in some rare Nirvana cloud by a beloved guru. it is So Quiet with the windows up you can't hear the engine idle at a stop light. there are so many instrument panel buttons i lose focus trying to make adjustments on the radio/cd/Sirius player. the AC kicks in like arctic snow. i can, if i want to, open the gas cap without leaving the driver's seat. (the GrandAm required a screwdriver.) the mileage is green - 24 city, 32 highway. the front window is so wrap around huge it's as if i'm in a diving bell with a 360 panorama, an Avatar in a 3-D future. in the rain the wipers, front and back, work seamlessly with no scars across the glass. an endlessly gorgeous tingling sensation has every trip i drive feel brand new, like a pot high and each regular journey a first time kiss. i don't know when i'm going to tire of this, if ever. i wish my mum could have seen it, she would have loved it, beaming and posture erect in the passenger seat, proud of me for making such a brave, wise choice. i can't take full credit. my room mate's girlfriend posed as my wife. she did her hair and wore a snooty, just-try-to-impress-me look to ward off any hard core salesman. in the meantime she'd already chosen the KIA on line, pricing and comparing the other models i checked out, the Chevy HHR and the Honda Element. we looked at all three on motor mile. the Element was four-square awesome. it's all-plastic interior can be hosed down without spoiling. it's salesperson was a sweet, wet-lipped, mumbler who was the exact opposite of the sleaze bag hotshot Music Man type we expected. it was as if he tried to not sell the car. we liked him. my 'wife' liked him. but the Element, as fab as it was, was ultimately 4G's more expensive than the KIA with way worse mileage. the HHR guy couldn't have given a shit. his shop was greasy and no one there seemed to want to sell anything to anybody. the car looked cool on the outside, but was claustrophobic to drive and the steering had a squooshy, no-control feel. we saw the KIA last at a small mom n pop dealership. we test drove a 2010 red, but i was not, under any circumstances, going to buy a red car and meanwhile the saleman was a shark, but so obviously so that we laughed him off. the only available not-red was a pea green 2011 loaded (the only 'Soul' on the lot). i had sworn up and down that the one thing i would not do was buy that day. we were just looking, period. i'd brought the wife along to make sure i kept my promise. but the shark showed his teeth and offered an awesome deal and the wife whispered that it was too good to pass up and so fuck it, i bought it on the spot and strangely without a shred of buyer's remorse. i drive it like a little old lady terrified she's gonna hit something or get hit. eek! i take it all the way out to Watertown to my favorite car wash so it can be sprayed with protective goo. i pluck something as small as a single pine needle off the floor mat and flick it out the window like a booger. i guess it's the American thing, a dude and his car, except that this one's Korean, smallish with no leather ball sack under the rear axel and well, in the vernacular, 'gay'. but fuck it, i'm in love and when that happens no one can tell you different. my plan, my hope is to drive it as long as i did the GrandAm at which point i'll be 80 years old and they'll want me the fuck off the road. i will fight whomever tries to do that with brick-in-purse as i hit the gas and crash it through a store front window.

herpes

2010-09-20T13:06:00.000-07:00

was the name of Chet and Billie's cat. he was orange and yellow, like the sore without the pus. i think Chet had the ooze on his cock and so kitty got honored with the diagnosis. Kelly had it on her lip, upper right. in her yearbook picture she did the one-finger rescue, just so. her classmates duplicated the gesture in support. 10's of pretty girls with cocked head and forefinger on the upper right smiley lip just so. we always knew who her boyfriends were because they all had the same burnt bacon scab in same spot. an Irish girl at work had it so bad her entire mouth was Cajun blackened. it was grotesque. i have one, mid-upper. it cracks open at gigs and bleeds a trickle when i hit the mike in an extravagant emotional moment. the thing is, herpes ain't AIDS so we kinda laugh it off, but still i wonder about the origins, the ontology. who gives it to us? was it a deep french kiss in Prague? foul drinking water from an over-shared bottle? a nefarious coke addled blow job? it ID's you, Herpes, as if to indicate and tag an overactive, dirty sex life (if there is such a thing). who wouldn't want that, the scab badge of courage? at some point Lysine eradicates the symptoms. an occasional thumper pulsing on my upper lip reminds me of an old friend, but he never materializes. he is a he, isn't he? a particularly man-triggered flag. what would constitute a female STD? warts? warts down there? i dunno. thank god i don't 'show' any longer.

guns

2010-09-12T11:03:00.001-07:00

scare the shit out of me. i was never the brat with the plastic holster and a pop gun. i liked Tonto more than the Lone Ranger and Silver more than either. i played doctor, house and store not war. i can count on one hand my encounters with the dark metal. 1) dad marching into the living room with a Civil War musket that he strung up on the mantle that now leans against my bureau like an exhausted whore. 2) the brass flare gun he fired into the night sky chasing my sister and her boyfriend around the block in a jealous rage. 3) the 22 which, along with my mother's jewelry, was stolen out of our house in Philly. my parents were away. i was in charge. i brought some inner city kids out to the house to drink, smoke weed and go crazy. which they did. (i was probably after one of them.) when mum and dad returned only to discover the missing jewelry, the 22 and their screwball son, they flipped. weak-kneed courage and guilt carted me down to South Philly to track down the culprits and the loot. i located two of the guys on the street and pleaded with them. 'the shit ain't mine. i have t get it back. i understand why you took it. i'd been a fool to have you guys out to a house with a lot of stuff around when you have little. i won't call the cops. i just want the shit returned. pretty please.' one of them sent a scout to find their leader. he sent back a message: if i return the next day he'd hand it over. i did and got it back, but the 22 had been sawed off and the punk pointed it at my head, watched me sweat, lowered it and laughed at my silly, tail-between-legs girly idealism. no more social work for Berlin. 4) in Somerville my sister and i met a pyro who'd burned three houses to the ground. we considered adopting him (cross-eyed hearts). i'd met the kid when he was 'working' at the Ritz Carleton beauty salon the same time i was wall papering the back room. (this was the same place i unearthed hair rinses with fancy names like 'Frivolous Fawn', 'White Mink' and 'Chocolate Kiss' that got transformed into the Orchestra Luna song 'Doris Dreams'.) he moved in, slept in my bed and enjoyed nights of passive blow jobs and meaningful looks. one day my next door neighbor, the boy i was really in love with and who'd become jealous of pyro, showed up at the door with a 45, heavy in his hand. i think it was his way of telling me to dump blondie. i hid it under the mattress until the fire starter left, nervous about the maniac next door. in seconds me and my sister grabbed the gun, walked to the Charles and threw it in the river, plop. 5) in JP, back from seeing 'Raging Bull', stoned, my boyfriend and i walked into the kitchen and there it was, on the table under the lamp, thick, gray and nasty, a serious piece. it had been put there by some coke dealer staying the night. i yelled at him to get the gun and himself the fuck outa the fucking house or i'd call the fucking cops. truth be told there were times during the operatic scenery of my relationship back then when i tried to manipulate my boyfriend under threat of suicide - prima donna Berlin. had there been a gun lying about i think in a split second of weakness i might have tried to use it on myself, or worse. so there ya have it. i hate them. i'd love to get rid of them. fuck that i-am-a-real-man-with-a-gun shit. fuck it up the ass.

money

2010-08-21T13:21:00.000-07:00

freaks me out. supposedly, the 'law of abundance' (Isabel Hickey style) claims that if you don't ask for what you don't need the universe will provide. even as i buy into that i'm buying way too much, although my collection of the useless seems less indulgent than it might be. the clothes i buy at Old Navy. for dinner out it's chinese-in-a-bag. my last vacation was 15 years ago and paid for by a dear friend. when i was a kid i watched mom pay the bills, while the old man in his red leather chair smoked a pipe and chewed ice on his 5th vodka tonic. mum sat at her creaking antique desk, leaning forward, neck long, writing checks and balancing bills vs income. i'm like her. i try not to live beyond my means. i refuse to be held hostage to debt. i don't O.C.D. balance my checkbook, but i keep a wary eye. i didn't have a credit card for decades because i'd never bought anything on time. i paid up front or didn't buy. i loathe the idea of paying money to spend money. eventually my friend's dad cosigned for a card and now i have one, which i pay off as fast as i use it. i love the bitch. the simplicity of the hard shiny rectangle. the clarity, tax time, of the statement. the speed of web transaction. but here's the rub: my grandfather's father was a millionaire. he lived in a mansion in Rhinebeck, NY. he lost his shirt in the crash of '29 and my grandad, having grown up with dough, with a chauffeur to drive him to school a) never learned to drive and b) didn't give a fuck about money. his son, my father, felt cheated out of 'the life'. he wanted the show money could buy. Broadway musicals, fancy suits, new cars, a 50's bullshit status with decals of the colleges we went to littering the rear window of his Jaguar. my mom had a small inheritance that doubled dad's income so we were ok, just shy of upper middle class. we lived in a big house with 9 acres of lawn, two cars, private schools and big-assed vacations. but we saw how much dad hated his job at the 'Girard Trust and Corn Exchange' (who's name shitted out of his mouth like an oily turd). he wished he'd been a writer. he resented mom's income as a sword held over him even as he lapped it up. my sisters and i never mastered the money game. we scratched out a living, two of us as waiters, one a teacher and none of us making the big grab. this painted us into a corner at times. the fat options money could buy were out of reach, but we saw through the charade of vacant materialism, opted for art, life, love and spirit ahead of wallet. we seem happier for it. my sisters have great kids and their lives are full. i don't have a family, but i spend my tips making records. i lose money, but i love it. it's who i am, it's what i do. i stand tall on the catalogue. i wander afield only on rare occasions when i want to give a friend a good time and they can't afford it. or if a Democrat has a chance of kicking Republican ass in an election. still, i worry. what will happen when i'm 'let go' at work? when my measly Social Security check can't pay the rent, let alone a trip to the movies. i fantasize myself sporting a beehive and pencil and pushing a walker around Doyles 'til the cows come home, but without that, to tell the truth, i'm screwed and drooling toothless in a wheelchair onto a linoleum corridor and hopefully so out of it on tranquilizers i won't know the difference. was there ever a time in history when money had nothing to do with quality of life? probably not. were this India i would head out onto the dirt path with a rag around my waist, low balls, a wooden bowl and chase all the skinny black-eyed boys who'd have me.

the roof

2010-07-28T11:41:00.001-07:00

may be the only place you can find infinity in a city - the big dome sky, clay soft tar under bare feet, vertiginous ledge to piss over, a blimp lit from within circling Fenway like an overweight duck. i don't go up there often, but when i do it's with just one person and the time spent is as rare as the location. stars shoot, traffic below purrs like surf, moonlight quicksilver melts on the face of a boy, laughter lifts like beating wings, like a beating heart and closeness is possible and real. one night, up there, after wine and too many cheap beers, the two of us peek through splayed fingers at a fatty in his underwear bucking towards his girl in mock sex-god pantomime. he looks silly and doesn't know we're watching. we try not to be voyeurs but can't help it. we fall down on our backs giggling like girls. we can't believe what we're seeing and the party on the next-door flat, raising bottles to us, has no clue. we move about, changing position, place and view. the conversation is wild and out of range, an acid escalator to the shifting pale pink clouds overhead. things are told that until this night were secret. these are dark, embarrassed, wonderful, poetic, sexy blood brother confessions. the pipe we hold onto, like a rope on a keening ship, keeps the body from falling into the bushes below when we piss, studiously apart from one another. a golden arc splashs onto the cement, chases a cat and turns on lights that are movement activated. we hear Hispanic staccato cha cha and buzz on a nearby porch, the girls invisible and big-titted in our comic book fantasy. we lie at the edge above the street and spit. a white cotton ball floats haphazardly three stories to the sidewalk. in a laughing fit you stomp on the tar and wake the guy in the bedroom below who didn't want to be an asshole and make us shut up like a mad mom and who sends in his place a magic girl, a proxy, to tell us that although she's fine with the noise, he isn't. she hugs you and touches your face as if fireflies had landed on your cheek. she leaves with a silent Navaho drift, her skirt like soft breath, downstairs and we are alone again. we get close up here, you and i, as if proximity isn't possible in other places. statements pontificate and play, but it's ok. we know how silly and how deep we talk. time stops or flies as we ride the wave. the imagined glint of sunrise soon to flash on the curve of earth tells us it's late and it's time to go. that we are lucky for the hours we had, uninterrupted. sex has happened here and kissing, but not with you. love and sex hover like a hornets, but do not bite. we are probably thinking about it, me a lot more than you and you not with me, but the sex talk is honest, hot, revelatory and brave. it is as if we could, but can't or won't. there's been 5 nights of this. one would have been good enough, i guess, but we go for repeats. it is astonishing and ridiculous that more that once has worked. when something so wonderful happens we worry we'd mess it up with repetition, but fuck it, worry never got anyone anywhere. you say: 'language is the biggest obstacle to communication'. i say: 'my heart opens up when you're around'. 'yes' you reply, mentioning Joyce whom i can not read. maybe you will read him to me aloud some night on this roof. we thump downstairs into a dark kitchen, down a dark hallway, outside onto the sidewalk we just looked down upon. we shiver and i walk you home, off roof. we finger snap 'good-night' with exhausted smiles. the sky is more full with fading stars and a thin pale moon.

plum boy

2010-07-05T11:55:00.000-07:00

eating another diarrhetic breakfast on a quiet Sunday i see him with his friends. he's a geek. they're all geeks at his table. geeks are hot. i think they really put out in bed, even if there's stinky fingerpaint in unwashed tighty whities. or so i imagine. but there he is. knobby El Greco fingers pulling on chin hairs, picking his nose and rubbing his neck. he has enormous teeth, too many it seems, deep water blue eyes and a big jumpy smile. i can't tell about the hair. it's combed aggressively forward. when i get up to take a caffein dump i pass by and glance at the crown. hmm, maybe he has an early spot? oh well, he's still hot, fuck it. then it begins. the looks above my book. he doesn't notice at first, but like radar (i hate the tag 'gay-dar') he sniffs something in the air, eyes catch eyes and there's a bewildering fog in his Sinatra blues. he's not sure. was Freddy Krueger in the corner actually staring at him? he steals another glance and sure enough he knows. the book dude is in fact looking directly at his face and smiling as if t say 'hey, it's cool, just looking. you're cute. i like the sound of your laugh'. he blushes but quickly returns to his gesticulating conversation with fellow geeks. uh oh, something weird. he pushes his tongue out of his mouth in a chub arc, locking the tip behind his lower front teeth. his lips open and the tongue protrudes. it's as if he's sucking on a plum. a dark crimson orb when in fact it is his own engorged member. i don't think he knows what he's doing. maybe his friends are used to it or don't notice. who cares? i can't help staring. he's sexy even with the tongue trick and his leg, his right leg, is bouncing under the table like a jack hammer, ratta-tat-tat. i think he'd have fun at my place over for a visit. he'd let me look at him for longer periods of un-embarrassed time. of course i wonder if all these at-the-moment idiosyncrasies would, after awhile, turn me off and i'd wind up hurting his feelings. build up his nascent narcissism only to tear it down. i remember years back another kid, a bad-breath yellow-toothed geek stayed the night. he wanted to. i doubt he'd done anything like that before, or would again. but somehow his awkward, skinny body fell into my bed. he might have left before dawn not wanting to be caught by room mates. i can't remember. but i would have loved to have been with the plum kid. at least i think i would. perhaps, like so many fantasies, it's best to have remained un-acted upon.

false endings

2010-06-20T11:39:00.001-07:00

'how can a thing so perfectly ended, continue?' is what Peter Barrett said in a spoken word intro to Love Is Not Enough, the Orchestra Luna song that made it onto the 1974 record (Epic). Peter complained: 'the Beatles say All You Need Is Love and you're telling me Love Is Not Enough? i don't get it.' i was thinking Bergman, not Lennon as in Through A Glass Darkly. a boy's sister is insane. 'why can't she get better, father, when all of us love her so much? when she is surrounded by our love?' but it was not enough. she was helicopter-ed to an asylum. nevertheless, Peter had a point. how can an ending continue? we get fed up, wrung out and quit on each another, on a job, on family, on ourselves. all the love in the world, prior to dissolution, fails until something unexpected happens. the pencil flips (eraser to lead) and scratches a new sketch. jumping out of a canoe in one direction sends it off in another. the caterpillar becomes a butterfly. nevertheless, when doors close we have a hard time imagining escape. it is not until we give up completely that we can be born anew, or so the cliche spins. and what about lovers who've thrown in the sweaty towel? 'she doesn't love me anymore. i can't take it. it's killing me! i'm fuckin' outa here!' crys the losing boy. 'he's a shithead. he's checking out my best friend. he's always 'confiding' in my fucking sister! i'm gonna throw up!' that's when the 'maybe we can still be friends' coin hops into the fountain and bubbles hope to the surface. 'i still love you. differently, ok?, but we understand each other too well to cast the baby out with the bath water. maybe there's a new way to be.' so whispers the cross-my-heart prayer. it is most often put forth by the losing half and seems unrealistic to the one who cares less. and it's a ploy to wrestle lost love back into the sheets. 'we'll talk. have coffee. learn to deal the 'new person, ok?' is the argument put forth to re-discover what had joined the two together in the first place. the big unsaid: 'we're not fucking right now but maybe we will again'. it's the fucking, isn't it, the sex. where did the attraction go? why did it stop? who were you thinking about when i wasn't around? who were you fantasizing when we were still together? who is sucking your cock, eating you out, driving you crazy with impossible pleasure? sexual jealousy, more than it's emotional cousin, voids the 'let's be friends' fantasy. unless one is, at long last, emotionally neutral or has that rare disinclination to be jealous, the ending is true and not false. it's over. let it go. let him go. let her jump out of the car and die. get over yourselves. i love false endings in music, getting fooled into thinking that the song is over and then it's not. it's easier in art. to finish something only to fire it up again. to paint over a ruined canvas or wad up a poem and try another. in love it's not so simple. all those painful complicating failures and soul-lacerating endings, all the refused-to-be-believed expiration dates scream back at us from the chasm when love is not enough.

kitty projection

2010-05-31T12:17:00.000-07:00

my cat is neurotic. she will not to be picked up unless just before the pellets hit the bowl and then just behind her shoulders, legs stiff as drum sticks, a measly 3, 4 feet off the linoleum and not in arms, not hugged against chest. visitors oo and ah and reach out to pet her, but she darts away, fussy and paranoid. with visitors she hides in my closet on a shelf waiting impatiently for them to leave. if a dog barks she hibernates until it's gone. on the other hand, with me, she's awesome. she sleeps under the covers, in the crook of my arm, on her back, purring. she loves to have her belly rubbed when it's cold out. her purr is so loud you can hear it a room away. her prized trick is to slip in and out of my bedroom through a pantry portal between the kitchen and my room, a miniature swiss window she discovered when we moved in 7 years ago. she's getting on, 10-12 years old. i worry that once she hit's 17 she'll be shitting herself and unable to jump, to access the glory hole. when she arrived at my apartment for the first time she hid behind a couch for two weeks until she got up the tits to emerge and stake out the territory. for years that territory has been this apartment, unshared with any other beast. a revolving door of room mates and friends until last week when a new kitty, an irresistibly cute, fluffy, Yoda-whiskered guy moved in, skin, bones and fur. his name is Mao after the Chinese dictator. my room mate thought he looked dictatorial with his tough guy stance and big paws. we went down the list: Hitler, Stalin, Idi, Pol Pot and chose Mao, because, ok, that's the sound he makes: 'Mao'. we love the little fella. how could we not? he's fuckin' wonderful. but Sofi is petrified. Mao scampers about the house on curiosity skates and Sofi hides on her shelf like a rejected glove. i don't know what's going on in her kitty brain, but i imagine all sorts of terrible thoughts. that i'm cheating on her, that i don't love her anymore, even as i pat her more than ever. i've made my bedroom her sanctuary so she can eat in peace. once Mao's big enough to leap through the hole, that'll be the end of the quarantine. at first i blamed her. i thought, fuck, get over yourself, Sof, you weirdo. any other cat would have handled the kid no problem. but i call the vet and she tells me that this is normal. that it might take one to six months to a year for Sofi to adjust, if not longer. a friend of mine went through the same thing with her guy and that cat is still, two years down kitty lane, freaked. i did take one indulgent step. the vet suggested a product from France, a plug-in atomizer good for a month. it wafts oily feline fumes into the atmosphere that have a calming effect on an upset kitty. sometimes it works, sometimes not. but i bought the Eau de Chat and it seemed to do the job. Sofi acquired a sort of Xanax equilibrium. occasionally she peeks around the kitchen corner and stares down the hall at Mao who's staring back from the far end. maybe when no one's home they hang out and have a laugh over how worked up we humans get over all this. i love her. i need her to be ok. i tell her that. she purrs. i imagine she listens and is working on it with some invisible, screwball shrink. coda: things seem to be better of late. both creatures lie on the same bed blinking at each other, paws crossed.

miracle

2010-05-23T10:30:00.000-07:00

i have a friend who believes that everything can be explained scientifically. that all is chemistry, math, physics. one doesn't fall in love, one's chemicals interact. one is not inspired, one's neurons fire ganglions that spark synapses which translate 'i will paint the library red'. there is no New Age or old age other dimension, after life or ESP. spirituality is soft brain. Tarot cards are a gypsy mirage. astrology, meditation, prayer, religion - a fool's fabrication. miracles do not exist. all has an objective, rational fingerprint understood and languaged by the mighty mind. i'm in the other camp. a hard core ex-hippie who believes that whatever you imagine is 'real'. other dimensionality via drug spoon, deja vu or a dream-triggered song is evidence sufficient and who can 'explain' love anyway? Keats, Auden, Bishop - it takes a poet, not an ivory tower. why clutter up a pretty mind with dirty facts? i defer to a Van Gogh landscape which was how he 'saw' the fields of southern France, or the dazzling whirl of stars. i take the inexplicable as an 'of course'. of course there are previous as well as follow-up lifetimes. of course there is karma in love, in difficulty, in the dharma bum path of each snowflake being. of course there is a soul. of course there are miracles. case in point: healing a burn on my hand. two weeks ago in a frantic rush to yank a pizza out of the hopper at work, the hot edge of the oven door nicked the skin behind my thumb. it curled up like a window shade snap-exposing a pulpy pink spot the size of a nickel. it made me gag just to look at it. i had a waitress tape a band-aid over it so as to not infect or gross me out. back home i slathered disinfectant only to learn that it's best to do nothing. to not cover up. to let the burn air out, dry and heal. my fabulous t-cells went to work collecting around the wound like circled wagons, ant busy and tireless to clean, repair and rebuild new skin. it took 15 days and itched as i waited. the sting of the work done was a reminder that something amazing was going on. like ET healing Elliott with a god-creates-Adam touch of forefinger-to-forefinger. the Hollywood miracle became true blue 'reality' on my hand. i appreciate the happy rehab. i know, it's all science. any idiot with half a brain could explain what was up, but not me. it was, for this stubborn old bird, a miracle.

couples syndrome + the wisdom of a wise old lady

2010-04-26T12:19:00.000-07:00

what is it about long time companions that so often, when out to dinner, they don't look at each other, but stare off into the restaurant, eyes glazed, not speaking. it is as if all has been discussed seven times over, or there's something so difficult to bring up they both say nothing. maybe i'm reading it wrong. maybe they share a serenity that requires no words and instead, exquisite silence. then again, wasn't it Nietzsche who wrote that all relationships, all the good ones, were essentially long conversations, with the cup never dry, the jokes never stale? in company the stories both have told before still make them laugh while sour couples roll their eyes. not again, they fume. 'i am so tired of his show-off blather.' 'can't she shut up? she's fucking flirting with that asshole with the same line she used when she met me.' the isolating desperation of two as if the other is not in the room, or worse, all too present. on the flip-side there is the mother of a friend who told my sister that 'unless you're jealous you're not in love'. and my friend Jane who used to say: 'they fight like they're in love'. without tension there is no love story. god knows we chew up the initial emo-rush with dark imaginings. or we stir a tepid pot with accusation so that the make-up sex is hot, or at least new, or re-newed. it's rare and wonderful to see those few couples, gay, straight, bi, trans whateverthefuck where life hasn't gone out of the frame. i remember reading about Bess and Harry Truman. when they'd moved out of the White House while it was being renovated and were sleeping at the Blair House. the secret service could hear the springs of the bed in the President's Suite squeaking like mad. they still loved each other, those two. they still went at it. neither had ever known another. i like hearing about that. it keeps me from settling (as if there is a Particular Perfect Someone) just because i don't want to be alone. i see a too much of better-someone-than-no-one, the fear of solitude. worse, however, is the nightmare of feeling isolated around the very one you're with. landing in Vineyard Haven, high on acid, my friends Patrick, Aam and i sat at a table at the Black Dog. across from us an old woman was reading. she wore a tight-fitting one-piece gray suit with a zipper that ran from crotch to throat with a ring, like a cock ring, at the neck inviting a pull down. she looked terrific and very old, but with none of the wandering mind, the looking back wistfully, the feel sorry for herself spectre. with my usual LSD forwardness i inquired: 'how is it, being old?' she put down her fork and looked right at me with clear blue eyes. 'you know what', she said, 'an old tree, weathered by storm and bleached, is beautiful. we all think so. an old car, up on cinder blocks in a back yard with weeds growing up around a rusted frame is beautiful. we all agree. we love old things. we even collect them. we pay for them. new is nice, but doesn't share that soul quality that has us loving old things, old objects. it isn't like that with people, is it? not for the most part. we like the young. and another thing? you may think, you might hope or imagine that eventually one reaches a plateau where one arrives, finally and where all makes sense and all questions answered. well i'll tell you, you don't. you won't. it's an endless upward curve of learning, suffering, moving on and trying again. i was married for many many years. one morning i put down the paper and looked across the table at my husband who was lost in breakfast, who was, in a sense, not there. not there with me anyhow. the sound of his fork on the plate was explosive. that did it. i'd had it. i left him. i walked out. you see you never know where life will take you. that no matter how we plan it, no matter what we anticipate, it will not be that way, not ever. maybe you get close on a good day, when you're lucky, to having The Truth fall into your lap. maybe, but not often. ok, that's it. that's all i've got to say. nice to meet you.' she stood up, pivoted and left, her cock ring bouncing at her throat. she is still very much with me.

speed

2010-04-13T10:44:00.001-07:00

i usta hit it hard in Philly when i was imagining myself as an architect. having been accepted by the Yay-ul Architecture School on a full scholarship i was thinking, well, i'm sort of an artist on the inside, but i need to make a living so maybe something like buildings and shit would do the trick and balance the inner artist with the outer realist. to find out for sure i got a job with Vincent G. Kling and Associates in downtown Philly where i labored over floor plans and carefully etched toilet designs. at night, however, i'd get high on anything i could get my hands on - hash, weed, lsd, mushrooms, peyote, sunflower seeds, meth. loved the double life. a favorite junket was to drop a pill, drive to the airport, park at the end of the runway behind the chain link fence and watch the planes take off and land. the big bellied sky whales lifted your hair and crushed your eardrums. it rocked. or we'd hit up the Electric Factory (a small venue at the time) where i lucked out and saw Hendrix ride a greased pig onto the stage. or Iron Butterfly zone off into a San Francisco twilight. or even Three Dog Night with their hairy chests screaming into the mike. i traipsed up to the skinny androgynous bassist from the west coast band, Spirit, shake his limp hand (a forefinger grazing my palm in code) and gaze like a teenage girl into his mercury eyes. all this got me into the margins at work where i'd sketch 4x8 foot posters (faux Peter Max) and color them in with a fist of psychedelic magic markers. all this led up to my first bad trips on meth. i loved the initial rush, the humorless solve-all-the-problems-of-the-world edge, my heart beating like a bitch in heat. it was great until the inevitable crash. i would denounce to myself all the hot ideas that had only minutes ago seemed brilliant. i hated the sound of my voice. my skin crawled with invisible bugs. my eyes dried out. the only solution would be, though i didn't have any in those days, a sedative or wicked strong weed. more often than not i was stuck sweating it out, long hours of self-loathing and suicidal panic. it did help on cross country drives. who needed sleep? after a brief incarceration in a Santa Barbara jail (for shoplifting) my friend Harlow (flown out from Philly by my infuriated dad) and i drove back to the east coast without a wink, miles high on meth. i don't think we shut up for the entire trip. we solved all the problems of our love lives, poverty, war, inequity on the 2.5 day jaunt. ghostly, skeletal horses galloped alongside my blue panel truck at night. a sabre tooth tiger leaped from a cave, snarling and drooling across the hood. red necks in rest rooms gave us the evil eye. once home, we napped, helplessly fucked up in a 100 mph daze. i gave the shit up soon thereafter only to replace it down the rock n roll road with a coke addiction. it was more glamorous than speed. it was sexy to do, the cutting, shaping, snorting, encrusted mirror. the horny rush would subtract all moral code and inhibition. but that too, like it's white trash pal, would induce a grotesque fall from grace. good and bad times they were, those dark days of infantile fear and loathing.

tits or boobs?

2010-04-05T10:21:00.000-07:00

what d' ya call 'em? girls prefer boobs. guys, tits. breasts sound too clinical, too sibilant. knockers are dated. bosoms are too poetic. to me 'boobs' sounds dumb, like water grenades, demeaning in a goofy way and tits are what? smaller? more perky, more upright, hard nippled? on odd occasions i take a sampling, a census. tit's or boobs? i ask. of course there's a thousand Chaucerian options i could look up. i could Google tits to see what's vogue, but i don't. it's all tits all the time far as i'm concerned. how about you? tits or boobs? you already know, don't ya? shout it out.

my girlfriends

2010-03-29T12:38:00.001-07:00

have often been my best friends well before 'fag hag' made it into the cynical repertoire. beginning with high school, the-girl-who-gave-a-shit-about-me, who stood by her closeted pal was a consistent fact of life. she championed my obsessions, my trafficking in the emo underworld and my starry eyes about art and life. we'd become inseparable, inter-dependant and shared a world view with made-up vocabulary, in-joke humor and x-ray insight. what i overlooked, shamefully, were those rare girlfriends who loved me too much for their own good. who over-worked our un-sexualized connection even as they knew, heart deep, that boy-girl love was not in the cards. they'd listen patiently to my crush rants in the same way i'd listen to straight boys carp about their shitty girlfriends. those unreachable guys i'd mirror with undivided attention as i (weakly) camouflaged desire. i became the straight boy in reverse to my sympatico girlfriend. she'd bite her tongue and console me about the kid who hadn't made it all the way across the bi-bridge. she would wait and hope for more of me for herself, fantasizing that she alone could deliver the missing link in my loser love life. we got strung up in some dizzy parallel karmic love-trap, a half-requited but not unrequited maze, as if 'put there' to teach our sophomoric hearts what had not been learned about full-on soul connection. we slept in the stale bed of unequal romance even as we knew, separately, sadly, that we would suffer. we do that, don't we? choosing in 'best friendship' someone for whom we feel way more. where the imbalanced heart longs for level ground, longing eyes, erotic touch. it's hard to not believe that the person we feel so much for can not, on their side, feel the same back. i've been super lucky. i've had several astonishing, talented, strong-souled, brilliant women nurture my better self and believe in me with spotlight eyes even as it hurt. even with whom the over-the-glasses bar-code scan of drunken locals inspired nasty fiction. 'look at that one. he is SO into his hair', we'd laugh. we were side-by-side. we'd share art, absurd ambition and disappointment all until the unguarded heart broke, or until i woke up and saw how she'd been let down. or until she threw in the towel and chased after a straight kid who could truly love her back. from these great friendships difficult wisdom grew. i love them all, i still do, my best girlfriends. the one's i hurt i didn't mean to. the ones i did not continue to smile from their perch on an elevated dollhouse stage with a great laugh, head back, getting me getting them. maybe in a distant lifetime we were lovers. maybe we sustain a truer thread by not ever being all that we can be.

college

2010-03-15T12:26:00.001-07:00

i wonder if we need to go, straight out of high school, into the firing line when we're not even sure why. just to move a kid out of the house and onto the dogtrack of binge drinking, shirtless screams at a sports cam, knocked up or riddled with STD's, studying at the last gasp on amphetamines with useless info shitting itself out like bad brains into the next day exam toilet. the money spent or borrowed is an Everest of debt. we are led to believe that the ladder climb to success, respect and riches begins with a college degree. but what about the slackers who squeak through high school and are not ready for prime time? why spend the cake? could the Pandora promise of college life be a let down? could a dull job snap 'real world' hardship into focus and step up a seizure of introspection about what a rightly directed education might prove down the career highway? could this then and not prematurely make a cogent blueprint once he or she knows what the fuck they really want out of life? in the days of white shoe, when boys (not girls) joined the frats their fathers rushed, a hollow leg up the Wall Street skyscraper could be won with little more than the ability to get stinko drunk or hit the whore house of letter sweater intimacy. i for one, as much as college taught me about my twisted heart, my hidden drives and my obsessive probing of the withdrawn, burned up dad's money like a forest fire. i could have learned as much or more on a tramp steamer, or hitch hiking across Australia. there is something to be said about testing one's self in the fish stew of peers. to find out with whom you can catch your breath, or learn the odd degrees of difference, or at least scab off the sophomoric whims of 'i will be a doctor/lawyer/hot shot' as soon as that chemistry course nails you to the floor. or 'i will be a writer' when at the bottom of your paper in American Studies in red pencil you read the comment: 'this is either the best or the worst thing i've ever read in my life'. but to spend or owe that much money to learn all the places you fail is false advertising and bought into, like the credit cards handed out like candy to freshmen, only to be abused. all these kids gobble up is the pretense of discipline when on a good day it's really about learning how to get by, to cheat, to do the least and still make the grade. to wait until your life finds focus might not be such a bad idea in hurry-up America.

where do you put it?

2010-02-25T11:53:00.000-08:00

your snot? you pick your nose at a stoplight and what do you do? fling it out the window? rub it onto the steering wheel? under the seat? i paste 'em behind my legs, smudging in layers of crust that read like tree rings, dating all deposits. or on my sock. who's gonna look at my sock? on foot i smear lamp posts, like insect sperm, glistening on an aluminum pole. when i'm sick and the spew of phlegm is infinite and no surface can retain it, i fill a grocery bag with little bird's of discarded tissue. rubber cementy boogers are rolled into bee bee's and flicked across the living room floor. hard fingernails of nose shale i drop like bark onto linoleum. what else? i'm a watcher. i want to see what others do. a kid in chapel, in 3rd grade, had one finger knuckle deep, eyes glassy, as he withdrew a glob and pasted it as if with a paintbrush across his school sweater, a diagonal tape worm Pollock-ing a narrow filthy front. my next-door-neighbor threatened: 'i bet i can make you moo-oove.' 'no ya caa-an't' 'yes i caa-aan'. a perpetual snot river ran out of his nose, down his upper lip and into an open mouth, green-yellow slugs. he'd gob 'em up into a french twist, like cotton candy, raise it over his head and that's when you ran, the boy at your heels snorting his nose off. a friend in high school, shuffling up a receiving line at a debutant party, flobbed an oyster onto the exposed tit of the girl who's tiny Chinese hand he was shaking. it landed like egg yolk and quivered as if wondering what to do with itself. her mom, all brisk Philadelphia efficiency, whisked out a hanky and dabbed the doo doo off the tit. 'never you mind,' she might have said. my dad, squirming like a salmon against the current of grey flannel suits on their way to work, was fighting for a seat on the commuter rail. he harked back a flapjack of goo, collecting it in his throat and zinged a slo-mo parabola at the idiot running in front of him. the target clapped his hand on the back of his neck as if shot. dad surged ahead, knees pumping and made his train. and then there's the pocket hanky conundrum. in college my East African room mate had grown up in Zanzibar. over there you press finger to nostril, close it off and fire your product onto the sidewalk, grass, tarmac, toilet, wastebasket or desert sand. he thought it unclean to save the dried deposits in a hanky. so i adopted his slingshot approach. i loved it. it made perfect sense, but it got me into trouble in Central Square. i was mid-snort, head down and didn't see the kid approaching, hand up for a high 5. friend, fan, who knows? what i do remember is that my ju ju flew like a mortar onto his brand new Converse All-Star. i will never learn. i am, as the girls at Doyles say: 'gross'.

getting old is no fun

2010-02-08T10:40:00.001-08:00

my father's brother, my Uncle Karl, was one tough guy. he was an athlete who played football for the Giants and held the punting record there for decades. he was a soldier who, during the war, drove an ambulance for the American Field Service in Italy. he was a fly caster Rambo who broke his leg a mile from his car and crawled back the full distance on elbows. he was an illustrator who lit up a book on fly fishing and a free lancer who produced architectural renderings so he could raise his family without the uncertainties of being an artist only. he was a romantic who loved his wife madly and who, deaf as a door knob, had her hit a cowbell to get his attention. he didn't get along with my dad. they'd yell at each other on lakes, scaring the fish away. they'd yell about work. they'd yell about anything. Karl loved to paint, dad hated the bank but did it for the dough and the phony prestige. he ragged on my uncle for not 'knowing the value of a buck', but Karl had the balls to be an artist and dad wished he'd written books. Karl was a moralist who hated hearing that my dad cheated on my mom, but who reversed himself when she divorced him. why couldn't she gut it out? back n forth they'd fume. it made my little boy's head spin until i'd watch him paint. usually they were water colors propped up on easels in snow fields near our house in Connecticut. he'd work with quick, sure strokes, pipe in mouth, eyes squinting at a tobacco barn in the near distance. unlike my dad, a word whore, Karl was a man who spoke with his eyes. one look from that mashed in football face and i knew i'd found a grown up who understood me, who recognized the art idiosyncrasy in my character and who sussed out a sensibility that few had guessed at (including myself). he knew that i'd make unconventional choices as i sorted out wherever-the-fuck i was headed and was ok with it. when we'd leave his house after a Thanksgiving/football weekend, he'd nudge me aside and signal acknowledgment with a wave of the pipe, a gandalf trail of smoke that let me know that i'd be fine, no matter what. as if to say that the odd path can be the right one. to listen to my heart. to keep at whatever strange interest seduced me. sadly, after college, i saw little of the man. i was caught up chasing my whims all over the game board - Peace Corps, architecture, teacher, hippie, actor. none panned out until i began, unexpectedly, to write songs. Karl heard about it. could i send him a tape? were the songs honest? not sure his ears could hear, let alone judge what i sent him i felt a peculiar certainty knowing that my early work mattered to him. then his kids grew up and scattered. he lost his dear wife and began to lose touch with the real world. he believed that credit cards were free money. he sand-castled an Everest of debt. not able to hear, he mistrusted strangers and became paranoid, fearful and accusatory. chronic vertigo tumbled him down stairs and he broke his ankle. he shuttled through hospital, rehab, a nursing home and assisted living in a downward spiral that whirl-pooled him away from his beloved self-sufficient life. the ankle wouldn't heal. the doc cut bone from his hip to fix it. took a year and a return to the hateful nursing home. old ladies cackled about his 'hot legs' and winked. nurses made fun of him behind his back and were inattentive. the medics messed him up. when he got Pneumonia they doled out the wrong drugs. he became delusional. he'd pop out of bed, wheeling his chair, spying and making remarks with nobody paying attention. 'lets go for a dip!' he'd shout. 'there's a pool upstairs and we gotta see Rick! he's up on the 2nd floor, we gotta go see him. c'mon Karen! (his daughter)'. she'd listen. shrug, teary-eyed, not knowing what to do, his life narrowing to nothing. his vertigo came back. he fell, broke his hip and was trapped again. it was hard for his kids to show up, their lives hurrying along with their own families to look after. he grew distant and dark and no one could find a solution. he didn't want anyone to save him. a blood clot in his heart (a pulmonary embolism) could have been averted had he been properly hydrated, but the docs failed again and he died. he must have hated this humiliating conclusion to a lion's life. he had become the dad his kid's joked about, even as they loved him. as for me, i never went to visit. he died in that fucking rest home, bullshit about the last mile he could no longer crawl. my dad, like Hendrix, puked into his lungs on a Christmas Eve and choked to death, alone in a hospital in Boston with no kids, no wife, no girlfriend, nobody and parallel to Karl's isolated demise. the brother's Kinscherf - a Russian novel from New Jersey.

dad 'saves' me

2010-01-13T18:32:00.001-08:00

i'm not sure i've got this right. selective memory colorizes and distorts. but here it is: dad was playing tennis at the club. 'the club' was what they called the shingled one-story building where you signed up for golf or tennis or watched Sunday movies or bought a lemonade or a sarsaparilla on your parent's tab. the club was located near the magic door entrance to Prout's Neck (home to Winslow Homer and many of the scenes he painted and eventually a summer retreat for the rich and social registered.) it's a beautiful, short thumb pennisula poking into the Atlantic off the lower coast of Maine. it's where my mom grew up and the locus of many first stirrings of the heart and of my imaginary world, including my first public performance on a piano, an upright in the hall at the club where we put on end-of-summer spectaculars on a rickety red-curtained stage. i played a faux classical self-composed 'piece' all by myself and was rewarded with room-papered applause. one mid afternoon, as i ambled across the narrow two-lane, sand-shouldered road in front of the tennis court where dad was playing doubles, i was hit by a car. the speed limit, anxiously observed, could not have been more than 10 mph. i was 14, in shorts, no pimples yet, bright-eyed and probably on my way to see a dirty friend. i was knocked to the ground and scuffed my knees. it was no worse than that. dad heard the screech of tires, flung his racquet, shot through the pine grove to my rescue and lifted me up in his arms. he was worried and red-faced angry. he was screaming at the driver who was probably someone he knew, or maybe not. it's unclear. but i know i was proud of him. proud that he rushed to my side, that he ripped that driver a new asshole. this was before the shit hit the fan with the wake of infidelities, the bottles of gin and vodka buried in the woodpile, the embarrassed, broken man he was later to become. i had forgotten about this day, this sunny blue sky afternoon at 'Proutsy Proutsy' as he called it. the place where he was silently blackballed for his loud mouth and drunken insults. but he was so cool that day and my narrow 14 yr old chest was filled up with the sight of him.

brothers

2010-01-05T14:40:00.001-08:00

i love my sisters. we know each other in that profound way that only time and blood can develop. i depend on them for it. i never resented their gender or tried to convert them into boys, but i think, as i began, early on, to have boy crushes, some of those friendships may have been predicated on my desire for a bro. i've always wanted one, or two. someone to compete against. someone older as a sign-post scout, or younger, the kid i could look after and protect. maybe i bought the idea that brothers, when young, fooled around and in sexy innocence played with each other or in front of each other and found out what that tent in your pants was all about, but it goes deeper than that. i wanted someone (dad not being the greatest in the bonding department) to lock in with, to compare notes, to challenge my manhood or dispel/forgive my weakness. if i 'made' brothers (the way they 'make' members in the Mafia) it was with my first friends. we walked the forest arm-in-arm as if blood related, brothers by proxy. we could cut a finger, share the cells and belong to a soul river that we self-created. that's how technicolor those first glorified friends translated. i have your back, you have mine. in Lonesome Dove Augustus Mcrae and Woodrow Call are equal to this archetype. neither was complete without the other as a foil, as a measure against himself and as a trustworthy, truth-telling pair of eyes. man-love without sexual rising. that's who i wanted. a Captain Call or a Gus Mcrae in the next door saddle. i guess i found them, these part-time brothers past, present and future in the long trail of best friends. they sustain the parts of myself about which i'm ok: loyalty, directness, an open heart, a crazy imagination, a symbiotic view, a foolish leap off the cliff and a willingness to look like shit on any given day.

it is drunk

2009-12-13T11:12:00.001-08:00

a girl slid off a bar stool at Doyles and melted into the floor. her unsteady, lean-on-whatever's-within-reach hobble to the exit was in slo-mo and hysterical to watch. i put my hand on a table as i choked back a laugh. the poor thing had no clue. tomorrow morning she'll be 'sick'. i sat next to an off-the-boat Irish kid at the Behan who had 7 empty pints of Guinness in front of him lined up like clay ducks. he was counting and gulping and midway through #8 i asked: 'how can you get away with this and not be out cold?'. 'i'm tough' he squinted. as soon as he drained the last pint his head hit the bar like a brick. an older woman drinking giant buckets of cheap Merlot was ok until she ordered 'just one more tiny li'l glass'. her phrasing clear as day until, when i checked back, i got this: 'erm moumph frun grad ur'. she had crossed the slur river into Neanderthal. an octogenarian and Very Proper Lady in high heels, a sparkly blouse with exaggerated eye-liner (improperly applied and smeary) was on her way to the ladies room. a low heel cracked under foot. she grabbed a railing in the nick of time. a waitress asked if she was alright. 'i'm fine,' she insisted, 'just a wee bit tipsy'. after 'tipsy' paddled her way into the loo the waitress rolled her eyes: 'tipsy?! my ass. she's hammered!' funny how we pretend we're not destroyed when everyone else can see that we are. just try to convince a drunk he's been shut off for his own good. he goes ballistic. if they're cute you put up with the vomit potential in hopes of a score, but inevitably pretty becomes not so pretty and you make your way home alone. on the other hand, one lame night in a glitzy bar in Amsterdam called 'It' as in 'look at it, she's gorgeous!' i'm drinking and staring and hoping and worked up all at once in this Dutch playground crammed to the gills with the young and the hot. a skateboard hero with a watercolor moustache is so drunk he 's propped up like an abandoned doll. his legs hang wide, his arms weigh a ton, his hands are engorged. he slouches against a mirror wall, nursing a vodka. every thirty seconds he belches. you can tell because his cheeks puff out, 'bluh.' his lips are parted and slippery behind a puke pout, puke breath, puke skin. one chartreuse bubble floats sadly in front of his Novocain face. i want to rip his clothes off but i keep to myself. 'it' wouldn't go over big at 'It'. it is drunk.

ass

2009-12-07T12:17:00.000-08:00

because you sit on it for hours, it is rarely clean or smooth or pretty. ass topography is speckled with pimply red dots + cuneiform hairs. a hammock of water balloon flesh hides the under-ass parenthesis + worse - a shit chunk gets caught in ass hair, dangling 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, a weed hit you blur the view + make it right. you ignore the spots, the dingle berry, the saggity ass + give it a squeeze or a bite + as for your very own back porch - it is next to impossible t take in. a twist in front of a mirror can offer a 3/4 snap, 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, 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 + even if it's a tight ass, it becomes a dirty ass. it's been sitting on itself long enough to accumulate a collection of creases + black heads. if yr lucky yr boyfriend or girlfriend will pop n scrub n 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 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, you turn + you look (nervous that you might be caught + hoping at the same time he wants t see if you wanted t see + you both hide behind a fluttering japanese fan + a faux 'what you lookin' at?' pissed-off face). still, 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 t catch a glimpse of that forever young rear end? maybe, unless you're a total pedophile, a dirty ass, a be-zitted bum, an ass crack with pubic seaweed sprouting out like gunfire, is hot as hell. we all have our favorites. we all fantasize about how so n 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. still, there are some asses impossible to imagine. on some, there's no movement whatsoever, or what appears to be no ass at all, just a plumb line from upper back to legs, or, weirdly, an indentation - as if there's a vacant lot where on others actual chub bounces along with a smile. i would kill t examine, like an archeologist, one of these ass negatives in the flesh.

old fans

2009-11-30T13:03:00.000-08:00

can identify in my raw face the reflection of the rock dude in leather pants humping a monitor at the Channel, the Rat, CBGB's. they connect with a persona and with a band that no longer has anything to do with me or with what i am working on now. how do i react? not well. i try to not be rude. i smile and nod, but in the background smirks embarrassed discomfort. my first encounter with this phenomenon happened when i came home my sophomore year from college. it seemed that many of my high school friends were trying to relocate the person i'd been, the person they remembered but who was no longer wearing those ratty, down-at-the-heel loafers. they seemed to want me to put 'em back on. 'c'mon, rick. this ain't you!' in some ways we never change, not deep down. the overcoat of identity masks the Essential Self from all but the most observant. we are comfortable in the personality-of-the-present, but we don't like it if we can't shed skin, if the butterfly can't liberate itself from the chrysalis. that's why i become distant at holiday reunions and blame the hard eyes of old friends who are convinced i haven't changed, when, in fact, i had, in a thousand ways. i couldn't be 'read' or i didn't want to be. my emotions were covered with bruises and that was the problem. when i seemed to 'not be into girls that much' it worried my high school pals. they didn't get it or didn't want to. my new friends at Yale thrived on an honest playing field. i'd stopped being the make-'em-happy-president-of-the-senior-class boy who knew in his homo heart that he had fooled everyone, including himself. to be back home was like staring into a fun house mirror and despising the distortion. and so it is with fans. even new ones. they like a song i never play any more. they treasure on a dusty shelf a record i can barely recall. not long ago i ran into a woman who as a teenager was fanatically devoted to one of my bands. before shows she'd appear back stage with some wild object she'd decorated meaningfully and given to us with all her heart. sadly, i not only failed to recognize her, i had no memory at all of any incident or interaction or gift. it had all gone down the brain drain. i felt awful. i did not live up to her nostalgic day dream. i'm hardly a big shot in the music business. i am, at best, a small fish in a small Jamaica Plain pond, known, but not iconic. which is fine. i like how it is. mostly i like what i'm working on at present and am well over my archives. so forgive me, whoever you are, if i have that vacant look when you say hi, when you remember when. i have long since thrown out the leather pants or the see-thru blouse or the lead vocal stomp. i do sincerely appreciate your post card recollection. on a rare occasion when i listen to a record i made 20, 30 years ago, i am moved by the spew of memories, jokes, arguments, colors and scenes. one thing does bother me, however. i wonder when it's a guy, say, in his 40's with kids? 'did i hit on you back then?' because the boy he used to be is now scatter-eyed, losing head hair and has a pig gut. maybe he was fond of the attention. maybe, in retrospect, he'd actually wished i'd tried t get into his pants. or maybe because i didn't, he respected me, but worries about his shy son standing just behind him. all of this in my cob-webbed attic over something as shallow as being recognized as The Rick Berlin.

secrets

2009-11-16T10:41:00.000-08:00

'if i tell you this you won't tell anybody else, ok? cuz i've never told this to anybody ever'. i promise when they ask, but why me? is it the Uncle Homo syndrome (he has to be discreet because he had to hide his 'nature' all those early years and will get it about secrecy)? do they unload because i have a rep? i leak and they want it told to others. they want the dead fish pried out of their gut and onto the street. these confessions remind me of the criminal who is driven to tell a girlfriend, a cell mate, a lawyer, a brother so that he or she will unlock him from the prison of his guilt. so yes, sometimes i break my promise. i slip a velvet whisper into a safe ear just because the secret is nasty, funny, or impossible to keep. i insinuate permission. on the other hand i hide a handful of privacies who's lock box has never ever been violated. some are mine, some belong to friends, or strangers. they live inside my head like a child hiding in the basement, safe but wary. secrets begin in childhood. they begin the first time you realize that mom and dad are not god and that they don't know everything there is to know about you. they don't see you walk out of a barber shop with a comic book that doesn't belong to you. they don't catch you flipping through dad's Playboy unmoved by Marilyn's juicy tits. they don't know what happened between you and your next door neighbor out in the barn. you are out of range from mom and dad's all-seeing eye of Saruman. this began for me when i realized that Santa Claus was a fiction. that he smelled of booze and had a voice like Uncle Karl. i didn't say anything about it because i hated the truth. i didn't bring it up with my sisters because they were younger and living the magic of Christmas. i kept doubt to myself until i met my first best friend. he was the first person i told things to i never told to anybody else and with whom i did things i never did with anybody else. things that were secret. secrecy is a part of love. my first best friend was the first person i ever fell in love with even if i couldn't use those sacred words. i thought about him when he wasn't around. i felt differently when i touched his arm and when he leaned against me. i was hurt when he criticized. my heart leapt when he laughed. it was the secret of how i was with him that changed me, made me feel new, re-invented, bursting with light. which is why, later on, a love affair gets it's charge from secrecy, from a dream world enshrined in a cathedral built, brick by brick, with the person you love. why, early on, i didn't want to use the 'l' word until i was sure. i didn't want to jinx the miracle with a silly verb. i didn't want my friends to be in on what was happening or to break love down into shards of demeaning transparency. if all secrets are known then magic evaporates in a torch light that exposes worms and rust and insects.

got physical?

2009-10-31T10:36:00.001-07:00

we all know what this means: ye olde finger up ye olde bung hole. we think about it on the way there. will he forget? would we remind him? does he look forward to it, or does he resist? will there be a smudge spot left on the paper afterwards to be scraped up by an orderly? will he, this time, find a brocoli-sized nub in there to be burned out, sliced up and scare the be-jesus out of us? will it be time for that loathsome unit, the black snake? trapped for days with nauseating gulps of Gator Aid, CVS enemas and a nurse reminding us that 'the drugs are awesome'. you think about it, all of it, if time is on your side or if it's not and you realize, as the clock winds down, that these visits will increase. that bad news will begin to happen to your body. that fear will intrude on sane reflection, that on a sunny day it might rain. so far i've been lucky in the doctor/diagnosis department. for the last 10 years i've had the same primary with the same 'you're fine' salute. he's thorough. he spends more than the alloted HMO hurry-up, he has seen me through minor worries and reads me like a country doc. like the honest auto mechanic who gets the difference between silly and serious, my guy never advocates procedures or drugs that won't heal or help. sadly, he has transfered to Florida. good for him, but not good for me. my most recent annual is with a new dude who has, as the President might say, a 'funny name'. as soon as he comes through the door to check me out in my reverse blue-green house dress, my heart jumps. this guy drop dead resembles the phony interns i've seen on porn sites. the ones who 'examine' their hot young patients, heart, lungs, glands, only to eventually jerk them off into oblivion. the 'patients' mildly resist until they let go all over the place. i'm doubly in doubt about my new guy when i notice his long eyelashes and borderline lisp. 'uh oh' i'm thinking, 'the prostate check is gonna be weird'. he snaps on the rubber glove like Nurse Ratched and is in and outa there like a mouse to the cheese. whoa! the doc has skills. he wraps up the look-see, says i'm in good shape and informs me that in one year's time he, like my previous primary, will be moving on. i'll have to hunt and peck another fella (or woman?) to do the probe based on a name, a funny name.

farting

2009-10-19T10:57:00.001-07:00

i know. some do, some don't. or they say they don't, but they do, don't they? everybody farts. (isn't that an R.E.M. song?) anyhow it is not who farts but who thinks they're funny and who doesn't. my sisters do. my nieces and nephews don't. my (German) room mate does. my co-workers don't. my father did. my mother did not. she slapped me loud and hard across the face in a Thai restaurant after i cut a string-of-pearls oinker. (i was in my 50's). she did not think it was funny, except once when i blew a brown note into my cat's face. mum was sitting on the couch and peering over a magazine as i squatted and aimed my artillery inches in front of Ralphie's little pink eraser. he squinted, edged a bit into the brown blizzard, wrinkled his nose and sniffed, as if reading a tea leaf. mum lost it. she doubled over with tears of laughter streaming down her face. i got her. just that once. so i guess even with the proprietary, a fart can make you laugh. it is one of those rare unpredictable acts we humans are capable of. we never know, we can never predict what it will sound like, or how it will stink. like jazz, it improvises it's own vocabulary. i don't think i'll ever get over it. armpit blats were funny when i was 5. sour puffs in high school english were historical events. in the sickening incubation of an enclosed fuselage everyone is suspect and grim. in a noisy bar egg and beer conspire to force you to the floor or out the door. in elevators you foist them off onto an infuriated friend. Holden Caulfield cut one in chapel and that was in a book you had to read. i doubt i will ever get over doing, hearing, talking about, waking up to these foul snorts out the back door. they keep the kid in all of us present and accounted for. embarrassed? well maybe, once, tho it's more of a shit than a fart story. on the dance floor at Villa Victoria, Daisy, a black queen, asked if i wanted t do a bump. why not? a teensy pebble of coke won't make me crazy and maybe i'll transform into a dancin' fool. so i did it, right then and there and immediately had to go. had to go bad before i shit myself. there was only one unisex piss pot and this being an emergency i cut in line, squirreled in and locked the door. i knew how bad it was going to be. i'm not sure if it's the shit itself, the gas or the effect of cocaine on nostrils that does this, but i can assure you it is just The Worst Smell Ever and sure enough, the results were ungodly. i batted at the fumes to disperse them and planned on returning to Daisy and the hot pump of the dance floor, but realized, as i exited (slamming the door in hopes that it would kick back the smut smog) that a line of 10 frantic queens were waiting in line to get in there and bump themselves silly. uh oh. i ducked, arm in front of my face like a Chicago mobster who doesn't want his picture in the paper and bolted for the door just as les girls rushed in and then almost immediately ricocheted back out in a fanfare of shrieking, fanning noses, coughing and gasping for air. i'm outed, flat out outed. i squirmed through the exit and made my way home, tail between rubber legs. the moral: shitting and farting never amuses all the people all the time.

is there ever another place to be other than where you are?

2009-10-08T11:26:00.001-07:00

you're in a dungeon, strapped to a table with electric alligator teeth snapped onto your balls. a guy in an executioner's mask has his hand on the trigger and he ain't a dominatrix, he's a motherfucking sadist who will get you to say anything, do anything, fuck anything and you will not resist. if you could 'jump' to a safe harbor, you would, wouldn't you? i would. and so, isn't it true that we're always in the right place at the right time with the right situation or person? what i'm stabbing at here is the realization (increasingly as i get older) that all experience benefits the Self in spite of our too many all-too-human, grass-is-greener complaints. even when it seems the opposite. even when we wish to be almost any other place than right here, right now. ('you ok?' i ask the dishwasher. 'i just want to get the fuck outa here and go home.') but he can't, can he? he has to finish up or quit. that's how we learn. that's how we grow. the unavoidables that we resent and confront and grope our way past. a hairdresser friend of mine put it this way describing parents who hope to protect their kids from hurt and harm: 'we can't keep their lessons from them even if we wanted to.' case in point - i've been a waiter at the same joint for 20 years. my friends can't believe it. 'are you kidding!? 20 years?!' or from a returnee - 'are you still here?' is that running in place or is that running in place? whatever, i love the job. i always have. i actually look forward to going to work. the unpredictability of the customers, the absurd soap opera gossip employees whisper, the kids you watch like a high school teacher grow up and fly the coop, irritated by the parents they once revered, the see-saw variable of tips you make on any given night, the hard elbows of football dykes - all keep the colors bright. hey, i could have left town. i could have moved to Paris. i could have had any number of shit jobs around the globe and seen the rest of this wild planet and been the richer for it. but i didn't. i'm here. the archbishop of rationalization has traveled far in Jamaica Plain. of course one thing i could NOT do was endure a corporate gig, let alone qualify for one. up early, home on a cocktail slide, freaking out the boss with my oddball 'artistic' behaviors. not me. this is where i am, it's where i belong. the tape has not run out on what make's the job and the town new, over and over again. i love it here and i've come to accept that i need to live in one place long enough to get the music done right. if i played guitar maybe that would be a different story. you can carry that thing on your back. but i can't. i look really stupid playing anything but a piano. so here i am, a faux Buddha under a New England elm tree.

why don't i know the song?

2009-10-04T12:34:00.000-07:00

'Rick, that song on the radio, what is it?' 'what song? i can't hear it. (tinitis first off and if i could, i wouldn't know what it is anyhow. the real problem: i know next to nothing about about the history of music. big time songwriters ladder-up the Bunyan shoulders of beloved predecessors, right? you can tell from the interviews. 'oh, yeah. when i heard ______________ for the first time, i knew, deep down, that i had to...' so they listened. they got it. they danced on the hum wire of the artist-to-artist umbilical chord, birth by proxy. when a 'new' song shivered out of them it was often a tip of the hat to bygone music warriors. when something familiar reaches my ears i recall neither the name of the tune nor the artist or worse, the wrong name and the wrong artist. i stroke my chin as i watch earnest fans bump, grind and sing, word/melody perfect, along with the tunes blasting in a bar or on the radio or in ear buds and i'm flabbergasted. how do they know this shit? as if they ARE the song, reliving the exact time and place when it first hit the heart, replaying the timeless camaraderie of 'hey, we were there, you n me babe, right? remember?'. the smarm that creams over the tune choices for weddings, start-up relationships and the death of loved ones. but for me it's a wash. i can't make out the words for the life of me. i wish i could, i do, but tinitis combined with the study task it would take to educate myself would turn it into a homework assignment. listen to the tune, absorb it, master it, memorize it. i don't. i can't. i like to hear from someone else about a song. about how it was recorded, why it was written and why it holds meaning for my friend. but that's the end of it. it is my beer allies, my co-wokers or even total strangers that compel me to write music. it's their stories, failures, troubles and love labors lost that appeal to my vampiric stenographer. it's them, my pals, not the famous, that get me. and also movies as shortcuts to actual life. 'be here to love me' (the doc about Townes Van Zandt) became the inspiration for a tune i dedicate to him even as i know next to nothing about his music or lyrics. and another thing? i 'see' picture-scapes when i write, sound track hallucinations. (it's always been like that, starting in college when i dropped acid, locked myself in a tower with an upright, closed my eyes and improvised whatever cerebral celluloid flickered by on the eyelid screen.) i guess you could say that basically i write out of my ass, not from a music hall-of-fame or r+b or folk or rock or punk throwbacks. not because Cole Porter wasn't a true genius, or Joni Mithcell can say love like Eskimos can say snow in 10,000 ways. ok, i do know a little about a few of 'em, my own particular music heroes. still, with rare exception, i don't know the tune, the singer, the genre or the words. it seems not to matter all that much. Nick Cave put it this way: 'there's a song walking down the street and if you don't shake it's hand, somebody else will'. it is like that. i'm like that. still, it haunts me, my weak excuses for not knowing those who's work came before and thus i enable my part-time self image as a charlatan.

ted

2009-09-13T13:15:00.000-07:00

i had t go. i'd been t st particks t honor bobby. this was as critical a view. i dislike lines + crowds. i went t the sox victory parade in '04 + the first one for the pats in the snow. glad i went, but after waiting for hours on numb feet just t see the boats lumber by i was let down, bored, is-that-all-there-is-to-a-victory-parade? sure, it was good t plant my feet in honor of the hard-earned, long time coming, champs. t see the rock star athletes on display in real time. but once was enough. on the other hand i liked being in line t hear obama speak during the campaign. the people, thousands upon thousands, psyched, inspired, happy, up - a part of something bigger than my routine, as if all were one. that was the last time i saw teddy. bellowing on stage t 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. not a big deal but something never forgotten. on the way t the jfk library, on the T, looking out the window it seemed as if a lot o' guys looked like him. overweight, chin up jaunty, toothy grin, eyes on the sky, feet on the ground. but they weren't. 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. kind thoughts about strangers. i was gonna read t pass the time, but didn't. i quietly inched towards the under sail like library with the rest. the kennedy kids thanking us for being there, for coming t honor their grandfather, for loving the world he believed could be better even as dark forces conspire against it. inside the smith room where i'd last seen 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, by members of the clan who sat quietly on spindly metal chairs. we had t be there. all of us. to do this. to honor this storm of a man who outlasted so many hurricanes in his personal + 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.

small talk big talk

2009-09-11T11:23:00.000-07:00

one of my favorite things ever is to have the Big Talk, the kind of conversation that instead of being an ever repeating ego echo, climbs a discovery ladder. each side of the conversation is listened to fully, towering like a Sequoia. when your side of the conversation is not an internal prep for one's own commentary or anecdote, but where listening is true and speaking frankly matters. this wild ride carnivalesque jazz riff over coffee or before the slur hits the booze wall or before a pot high paranoia overwhelms the senses is rare indeed and we know it when it happens. it is here that the appearance of actual communication infuses the vibe ahead of seduction and real talk is real talk is real. but of late i think, especially at work where a mere 'hey', or 'what's new?' or 'good to see you' can carry, in spite of its cliche off-the-hook flippancy, it's own, sincere emotional weight. it is in the eyes. you can read it there and in voice you can hear it, one's heartfelt interior. i used to disdain 'what's up, dude?' and short hand hi-5s, but not any more. lately i'm more apt to doubt the depth, the sincerity of my own late night spew. i join in with the not-as-simplistic-as-they-seem people who get more out of less, a world out of a worm. as a friend put it: ' don't say it, be it'.

alpha before omega

2009-09-07T12:49:00.001-07:00

the homo recog, when did it happen? when did i know for sure that it wasn't going to be girls Geigered anymore? i remember feeling all sorts of something for Steve M lying face down on the floor of his much-poorer-than-ours living room rug, reading comics leg to leg, but it wasn't anything that stuck in my 7 year old brain. playing Flash Gordon in a barn, we de-pantsed each other one dark afternoon, but no 'hey, faggot' light bulb popped off. Richard T (the new kid in 2nd grade) and i told each other that boys were better than girls 'all over', 'comparing' on my bed when Grandma burst into the room and yelled at us for 'being bad', her face cop red. we didn't get it. we weren't sure what she was riled up about. we certainly weren't aware that our identity was anything out of the ordinary. next up was the canvas covered haystack probe. Brandy L called them 'boner cosmetics'. he persuaded the boys across the street and me to take off our blue jeans so he could nudge a carefully whittled and greased 'dick stick' into our tiny, reluctant pink entryways. not so far as to hurt or suggest anything 'weird', just because. to tell the truth we liked to watch and it felt sorta nice, but still, when it all went down, there was no queer alarm. i can mentally Polaroid the boy who came over to our house with his family to let us pick out a Basset Hound puppy. he stood on a stone wall above me and i could see up his too short frenchie shorts, no underwear. his tiny testicles hung like apricot pits in crinkly skin. it kind of excited me, but i didn't know why. i shrugged it off. i felt up and got felt up by Gib L when his family came to town. crayon erections under damp sheets, but that was just something we did when he came over. didn't everybody? i still had miles to go before i got it about being bent. i slept over John K's house in a bed too small for two. he'd reach down under there and touch me up until i got a stiffy and had to go to the bathroom. something other than piss came out. it looked like puss and frightened the shit outa me. i thought i'd caught a disease, but i kept it to myself. you can't talk about dick when you're 9, not with clarity or safety or cool and definitely not in 1954. i was sure it would be girls in my future anyhow. that's how it was supposed to be. until Kin L. he broke down all the barriers. he'd ask me to lie on top of his back with my gear in his ass crack and that's when it happened, that's when the white stuff did a spit shot in my underwear. i was 13, a late bloomer, but that's when it clicked. that's when i wanted to do it again. to set it up. to revisit the 'moment'. to give him a woody and make stuff come out of him. but Kin was oddly unavailable after our bedroom camp out and there were no more sleep overs. plus i'd been warned. a friend insinuated, 'be careful. Kin and his brothers do things, dirty things at night.' so i kept my distance even though this piece of news made the possibility of a re-enactment all the more exciting. i waited in the wings and it wasn't til i was 16, be-zitted and able to drive that i took matters in hand. one morning around 3 am, i drove to Kin's house, tip-toed up to his room on squeaky stairs and climbed into his bed. i wanted to get him off the way he got me off, but he acted strangely, ornery and horny at the same time. when i'd feel him up (pistol hard), he'd roll to the far side of the bed and make conflicting sounds. back-of-the-throat gasps verses sneering disgust. had he uncovered homo files on himself that he wanted to reject? was he as uncomfortable and freaked out as i had been months before? i slid out from under the covers, boner bobbing and headed home. part way down the stairs he called out in a whisper for me to come back. that it was ok. that he was ok. that i could, i should, you know... and he would oblige. but i was too wigged out. i left and that was that. no more Kin. no more foolin' around. i was not gonna be a homo, no sir. i was going to fight back in my solitary teen tower until i wanted girls the way i wanted him. i slipped up here and there with an occasional 'we're not actually doing what were doing while we're doing it' encounters. there was the rip-off-the-towel wrestling match with Bill S, team captain, in a swimming pool cabana. ok, we weren't wrestling. flag pole erections quivered in the dank and the dust, but we never talked about it. i stuffed all erotic tug of wars deep in my psyche until i graduated from college and became, as a teacher, intimately involved with one of my students. he lived across the street from my boarding house. love, sex and the promise of scandal converged to bring me out of the closet. meanwhile, i heard that good ol' Kin had tried to schuss down Mt Washington. (the speed record for down hill still stands on that mountain.) he fell near the top and broke all 4 limbs. and charging down a motel hallway chased by horny brothers, he bolted through a plate glass window and cut himself to pieces. this kid, who is most likely married with children and grandchildren by now, brought it out of me, so to speak, a predilection that was inevitable, irrevocable and ultimately beautiful. i think about him often. i recapture those first awkward stinky steps. i owe him a nod for facing myself and my true truth.

golf tits

2009-09-07T12:48:00.000-07:00

i see them, those bight shirted middle aged men (Tiger too) lumbering down the links in the blazing sun. there they jiggle, the dude boobs, left, right, up, down, shiver and shake. they make me laugh. i wonder if the wives in their lives look over at the tube while spooning slobber up baby's chin and notice them, their husband's titties and think: 'how did he let this happen?!' i don't play the game, but i sport my own omelettey pair. i sense them boobing about in my t-shirt as i careen around Doyle's. there they are in the window. there they are in the mirror. there they are when i bend over to take an order. do they cleave? should one have work done? do the lovers in our lives go for them? are they something to squeeze, to feel comfy with as the waist expands? on the mountain top of the male rack, the prime example are golfers with titties. it doesn't make sense. they're athletes, right? they walk around a lot. some slave carries the bag, but the players tromp up and down the fairways and soldier on. do they scarf down pizza and beer between strokes? do they huff or puff off camera? do they encourage their titties as a counter balance to an effective swing? would a sports bra squeeze them flat and sweaty? do they hurt? will they require a mastectomy at the 19th hole? do they even care that they have jello boobs dancing like miniature fat girls in their Nike shirts? has vanity yet to strike the greens? i think about guitar hero pecs, those perky pikers above heroin-lean abs. those guys look good. they don't play golf. ah ha! so that's it, the game itself! slapping testicular globs across OCD lawns. have they been unconsciously castrating themselves into chicks with dicks? eew.

chew bakka laureate

2009-09-07T12:47:00.002-07:00

why is it that i fail to notice or to look at people when they chew? i don't. i won't. it's too cud-like and unflattering. i imagine how i must appear chomping on a runny egg, or spoofting bits of oyster cracker onto a table of startled customers like a dog, chops flibbering, spit flying. it's not a pretty sight. at the movies i notice actors chew the way they've been taught at drama school, as if there's nothing but soft air in the mouth. 'i am pretending to eat but i still look fabulous.' at brunch where the hangovers chow down, the gnashing that coincides with mastication i ignore. i see eyes, beards, shorts, legs, ass, but no chaw. nobody chews in my universe. i picture other things, dirty things, hot behavior, but not chewing. behind a Geisha fan i bat averted eyes.

car washed

2009-09-07T12:47:00.001-07:00

my car, the Grand Am my mum bought used knowing she would die and i would inherit, is a filthy sandlot mess. i tune up the engine. i change the oil. the brakes and tires are checked, but the interior, the inside shell of my menstrual red Pontiac, is bad news. it's banged up and bent, the ariel is twisted like a raw nerve, the ac is unable make up its hot or cold mind, the window on the driver's side can only be raised or lowered by a clothes line (my auto body pal said 'it's '300 bucks or a rope job'), dust furs the dash, the back seat is torn loose from it's moorings and crushed down to accommodate my piano, deflated Stop n Shop carry bags lie like discarded toilet paper on the back seat, the screw driver i use to pry open the lid on the gas tank peeks out from underneath a jump cable Putanesca, one of the fog lights is out of it's socket and rolls around like a fake eyeball and the whole interior stinks of garbage. 'don't you ever clean this wreck?' i'm asked. my excuse is the weather. if i wash it, it'll rain or snow, i'll lose the shine and the 15 bucks it cost t run it through. but today is cowboy clear and i've felt guilty long enough. i will drive to my favorite car wash in Brookline, pay the next-to-cheapest option, enjoy the ride-thru and tidy the fucker up. i'd rolled the passenger window down so i could get a breeze in the car and, as i pull in, i reach over to wind it back up and at the same time pay the dude collecting at the gate, a gay frenzy multi-task. he sprays her down, fish hooks the front end, the car lurches forward and off we go. i know that the window on the driver's side will leak so i yank the ropes taut like a champ and that's when it happens. that's when i'm hit in the side of the face by soap and spray. hot soap, hot spray. what th' fuck!? in closing the passenger window i'd actually opened it further, disappearing it down the slot. shit! piss! fuck! cunt! soapy goo frosts me like a money shot, a pearl neckless, a glue gun in the hands of the Terminator. i try to close the window, but, like the driver's side, it's off track. the harder i hernia to lift it, the more it refuses, the more water and suds froth in, the more i'm fighting a Waterloo. a pool of green slime collects on the passenger seat like a toxic pond and i lose it, breaking into cascades of laughter. the spray, the wet, the slime, the entire gizmo is masturbating all over me and i'm deliriously happy. next up, the wind tunnel: vaporizing hot air to blow dry the jizzum. i press against the remaining shard of window so that it won't come flying out of it's slit and slice me in the neck and then it's over. we're through the maze, my car and i, as we regurgitate out the ass-end of the colonic machinery all sparkly and smiling. i round the bend and park next to the vacuum hose so i can suck out the ugliness, but i realize that i must look ridiculous, like the clown who stuck his finger in the socket, hair like Bozo, a failed wet t-shirt contestant. i shake my head. i fire up the vacuum and give liposuction only to realize that the grand dames of Brookline are peering up at me with 50's disdain as they buff their Mercedes and Audi's all high and mighty about my gonzo appearance. of course i love this like the weirdo who crashed the debutante party high on methamphetamines.

pool hopping

2009-09-07T12:46:00.000-07:00

beauty, we never forget it. the real-time imprint on the heart of object, music, person is a Vasco de Gama love fountain. no photograph or recording is as true or as affecting as the real thing. it was all over Paris, the astonishing beauty of Pere Lachaise, the Eiffel Tower at night, Notre Dame under construction. it was before me when i heard Nina Simone throw back her cowl at Woolsey Hall and open That Mouth to declare young, beautiful and black. it cracked my chest open when we Whiffenpoofed for Pablo Casals in Puerto Rico when i was drunk off my tits, his one diminuendo finger to his lips. and i felt it watching Jack Kennedy deliver his inaugural address on a black and white Motorola in the driving snow. and again when i saw the boy lift his head to smile in the TV light in a warm living room in Moosup. the sight of an shining face, the shade of unfairly long lashes, the hair on a wrist catching sunlight, a friend's eyes startled by loss - all are are gifts from the human guru. i think in the promised slow-motion reel we un-spool in that split second before death, we catch these rare remembrances across the soul's silver screen. we were in love. we were drunk, sloppy and happy on the high cumulous of romance. 'ever go pool hopping?' he asked. 'nope.' 'we're going.' it's past midnight, stars diamond the sky. 'here's the deal. we find a mansion. we park. we look for a swimming pool. we crawl in on elbows and knees. we take off our clothes and slip into the water like alligators. we swim, we get out, we drag back on our gear and run barefoot across the sprinkling lawn.' the thought of seeing him naked in moonlight, mercury silver wet, smiling that smile of his, pumped blood a thousand-miles-per-second through my heart. 'sure.' so we did it. we found a house. we parked. we crept. dogs barked. we stripped (hadn't the time to worry about shriveled dick syndrome in the cold air). we slithered across the flagstone and into the shimmering electric blue. the water was ice cold but the exhilaration of what we were doing, the fact that we were doing it together, the air, the light, the hush of whispers and the ecstasy in our eyes was mad mad beauty. he looked like a boy i'd met in a dream, or the boy kissing his lover in marble at the louvre, or all the boys i'd ever loved in one face. his eyelashes were heavy, splayed wet, a suppressed laugh moving his belly, his sex just above the water line. this is the first time i'd see him nude. things got complicated down the road, but this moment survives like a stolen portrait in the love attic. Keats got it right: beauty IS truth.

vampire at the bar

2009-09-07T12:45:00.002-07:00

a Polaroid: the kid is super Michael Jackson-y with powder white face, Baby Jane Hudson red lips in a smear smear, corn yellow teeth, layer cakes of black something-or-other denim, goth cape accoutrement. who is this Captain Midnight who rides the stool at the end of the bar at the end of the world seconds before last call? should i, would i, 4 beers in the pocket, strike up the band? i need to hear a sound, an emanation, a gesture, a cough, a clue? i need something to give him away, to set me up with an angle to hit on. while i'm throwing my can-i-buy-you-a-beer-where-are-you-from-do-you-smoke-pot resume together i see, in one dark corner, a familiar face, an almost-but-not-quite...friend. i think there's a Tangueray and tonic sparkling in one upraised claw. we share the loud gay laugh, have a similar over-the-glasses view of life, of odd behaviors and friends in common but don't know each other well. the point being: as i perch three stools to the left of the dark drifter, casing him out with a whale's eye, i twist and cast a lighthouse lamp across the joint and see my friend waving. oh. i get it. he is captivated. he has an interest in Iago. i twirl back and see that Mr Spellbound-by-his-own-monologue has two blokes giving fascinated unconditional attention. the voice is lispy, an alto. eew. the relief i feel at being turned off (knowing i won't have to take a fool's stab) is palpable. it is a sigh of the body. it is then that my friend from the corner has mounted the stool next to mine and stares like a bird dog at Zorro. the bartender asks if he needs a drink. 'oh no, i'm here to see my friend rick,' he purrs, eyes lasered onto Hamlet, who is collecting his black shoulder bag, black iPhone, black everything and heading out the door. 'here to see, rick?' i scoff. 'you are so full of shit.' 'that obvious, huh?' 'are you kidding!?' (like next-door-neighbor house wives hanging laundry and gossiping, the bond of predators). 'i think i've seen my first vampire,' 'he says. one wonders if one should allow oneself to be entertained by a total stranger in black who might nip you in the neck and who might have been reading up on the Craig's List killer. he hasn't been back.

chinese box

2009-09-07T12:45:00.001-07:00

MSG floats like a brown cloud in the bar. i'm having a beer with friends. a clot of indie lesbians are chowing down, chopsticks like knitting needles, pigging out from an open box (one of those ear-flap chinese take-out origamis crammed with sweaty unknowns). they gin up the gossip as the odor overtakes the nose the same way fumes from a cartoon pie on a window sill sniffs Goofy off the ground. but we're lazy and won't skitter across Centre St to grab last call at Food Wall. strangely, out of the hazy blue, a tattooed, pierced-into-oblivion boi grl appears beside me, food box mouth agape and held in front of my nose. 'want some?' she smiles. it's chock full of those stapled tight peking dumpling pillows, a food offer i can't refuse. 'sure,' i say, as calmly as possible, taking hold of the bottom end of the shiny white paper lotus. 'thanks, babe'. i'm thinking she wants me to eat the entire box or at least to share the pillows with my friends, but as i pull it towards my lap, she pulls back. i pull again, thinking she's being careful not to spill the pillows, but she pulls harder. back-and-forth, to-and-fro, a miniature war of wills. oh...i get it. she's offering up just one of the dumplings, one only and wants to navigate the room, handing out the rest one-at-a-time to the remaining rats. she's upset. her eyebrows are arm wrestling. we're locked in gay combat as if my hand has yet to get the brain telegram: LET GO OF THE FUCKING BOX, ASSHOLE! at long last my greedy truck driver fingers relax, she retrieves the box, her box and crabs away in a spitfire huff. i guess i busted her PC share-the-wealth good will big time. my bad.

small-time marquis

2009-09-07T12:44:00.002-07:00

behind my good-guy mask lurks a cheesy sadism. examples hide like old gum stuck under a chair. the short list: 1) the sadistic waiter. i dart past a three-top of raised arms with a big sunny smile on a pretend mission to somewhere important. sorry, guys, got beers at the bar to pick up, back in a sec. the upraised hands like a stadium wave fall back into the human surf. i could have stopped and given attention, but i reveled in the oblique diss. when i double back and attend to their chirping needs i'm all generosity and solve-your-problem finesse. slap, kiss. 2) the sadistic pet owner. no, sofi! NO! NO! NO!. it's fucking 6 o'clock in the fucking morning and you are out of your fucking kitty-cat mind! no pellets for you, baby. NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! she's right of course. she waited 7 hours for her ridiculous spoonful of chicken-n-rice goobers and it's time, it's fucking time to lumber out from under the cozy covers and deliver the goods. but i wait. no, sofi, NO! the negative-to-positive ritual. she resorts to a foot-of-the-bed sulk until i give in, plinking pellets into her dish. 3) the sadistic brother. when i was old enough to drive to school, i was required to drop my sisters off first. i'd pull into the semi-circular drive, but instead of letting them out where they wanted to be let out, i'd slow down, pretend to stop, tap the gas and go round again and again. it was funny the first time, but 3 or 4 revolutions later the girls went berserk. i'd relent, let them out and roar off with a joker's grin. 4) the sadistic son. my mom asked me to mow the lawn. i wanted to snitch the VW and hurtle across town to see friends. she tried to shame me into manning the mower by starting 'er up and climbing on herself, head bobbing with the bumpy ride and shouting after me to stop the car, get out and take over. she was so mad she was in tears. what did i do? i took off like a teen sociopath. i'll cut the lawn later, i argued to myself. 5) the sadistic clean-up girl. the vacuum cleaner, it's head caught behind the door frame to my bedroom whimpers in pain as i yank at it, trying to reach the dust rats under the desk. i jerk the hose like a maniac. the poor howling piglet bonks it's head against the door frame and won't budge. i tug-of-war the sucking screaming elephant trunk until the beast scuds into the room on it's fore-wheels like an abused circus pig. it's punk sadism. i can't help it. i love it. like Chris says in Skins: 'i'm a wanker'.

prom date

2009-09-07T12:44:00.001-07:00

i was in charge of both of them, junior and senior. how did that happen? it must be that i had an inkling (or my classmates did) that i was, you know, 'good that way'. i had skills, decorating, organizing, stage directing, delegating, making something pretty out of nothing. junior year we took over a former chapel and erected scrims, backlit with life-sized cut-out silhouettes of speakeasy figures playing horns, dancing, high and happy. we transformed an unappealing rectangle into teen noir. i asked a girl from summer vacation to come down from Boston to Philly for the big night. i knew she was not a going-out-with girl, but someone who would make me look cool on the twist-again-like-we-did-last-summer dance floor and who was terrificly cute, with a wispy voice like Mia Farrow. maybe i hoped she'd make it seem as if i 'scored'. at any rate the effort got me elected class fucking president and senior prom chairlady. whoppee. over the summer before the our last shot at living-at-home-and-breaking-all-the-rules my best friends and i got drunk on a beach in Avalon, NJ. cold beer was delivered (we ordered by phone with a 'dad' voice). crushed cans littered the sidewalk from porch to ocean. throughout, i was thinking (god help me) 'prom'. when we spotted a 50's cover band loading into a VFW hall, we got their card and booked them, puffed up about what a hot thicket we knew they'd be. live music was a rarity in those days. standing next to a bonfire and staring at the stars we decided that for this last-in-a-lifetime promenade we would transform the high school gym, a big nasty echoing sweaty box, into an out-of-the-park-into-the-gym garden. we'd 'borrow' trees, flowers, shrubbery, earth, rocks, worms and weeds as a full-on midnight caper. we got a van and a pick up truck. we blackened our faces like teen-age special forces drunk on shitty beer. we appropriated our weapons of choice - hedge clippers, saws, gloves and goggles - as we cruised the hood and stole Eden. motoring up to the shoulder of a main line mansion, we'd belly crawl to an innocent tree or bush, hack at it and watch it quiver, seize up, tip over and collapse - a green corpse dragged across an immaculate lawn and flipped into the van. we did this over and over again until we had enough garden poofery to convert the gym into 'paradise'. it even smelled like outdoors. 'how did you guys pull this off?' the faculty advisor asks. 'we ah...i dunno...we just did it. contributions from families of the class of '63'. i asked another summertime girl to be my 'date', girl as corsage. she looked like Natalie Wood in Rebel Without A Cause, a total babe. god knows i must have disappointed her in the get-it-on department, but so what. my over-compensatory huge event made the girlfriend ruse worth the ticket and besides, i loved impersonating as impresario. i suppose it carried over into all that show biz fluff i did later on. funny about high school.

the switch

2009-09-07T12:42:00.000-07:00

romantic love, is it for-real possible without devolving into George and Martha, into the black rain of the operatic? each of us has our own Blue Valentine to lament or extoll. our thumbs are up for the heart-wide-open, plug-into-socket split-second when ego takes a back seat and the heart is the driver. it's thumbs down when Mr. thrill-is-gone sticks his tongue out and the ego re-takes the tiller. in my case the twist in the wind begins as soon as i microscope the cold distance infecting myself and the one i wake up thinking about. when we start not saying the unsaid. when we resist the homework required to love the one you're with. romance is a snap when the connection can't wear thin from overuse. when a one-night-only-pair of eyes peers over a pint in me-too commiseration. or when a boy on a bus is a winner for the short ride. i sat next to a kid on the way to New York City. i hung back in the boarding line to snag someone who wouldn't stink me out. my not-so-innocent 'would it be ok, ya know, if i sat here with you?' worked. he was cool with it. a Brit, a musician, handsome and a talker. the time flew. we were castaways for the afternoon. we never saw each other again, although he looked me up on line and we write. on the sad side lurks the decaying relationship. the lying, the cover-up, the flayed flounder that rots in the gut entombing intimacy, spoiling the spark that jump-started two lovers when both felt 'new'. a friend suggested that in those first minutes we define the scope and rules of the 'contract' to follow. for good or ill. eyes wander over a hugged shoulder and lust for another. our ears pretend to listen as we rehearse our next monlogue. judgement looks over a book at a phony laugh. these are the petty annoyances that sprout like scabies after a one night stand. i'm guilty on all counts. i've cheated in one way or another with just about every person i've spent a decent number of days with. i've pretended my beloved was a fascinating conversationalist when all i was thinking about was what i wasn't getting done while i was stuck there listening to him. i've choked back comments about a body part that weirded me out. (all are petty crimes on the emotional docket.) there are exceptions. there always are. the primary love in my life grew like a pot plant in the manure of my longest term relationship. he was young, 20 years less than i, who magically, immediately, knew my heart, my brain, my paranoid imaginings like a gypsy reading a palm. he knew when i was falling backwards into doubt. he would catch and pull me back with a single look. he knew who i was in all those places i feared uncovering after our best-foot-forward honeymoon. the ones i'd eek out like mustard gas to warn him off, to prove my unworthiness, to be forgiven. you like me this much? ok, see if you can cope with these worms in this head. it was a psycho test i could not help running. we both did it, daring the other to challenge the truth about how we were, of who we became and how we created each other, wanting to earn our romantic diploma. we wanted to be ever safe on the high bed of the heart, to rock the universe, to carry the gleaming sword-in-stone' (the show-off vanity of having scored a 10 in loveland.) i quit my job as a cabbie and worked where he worked, where i'd met him and where we happened, evolving a language of you-had-to-be-there rituals that turned up the heat on a daily basis. he'd climb up to my third-floor porch when my boyfriend was out, heart like a cap-in-hand. we'd buy 40's and walk the Arboretum, laughing, lost in the autumn light. we'd lie under trees on damp leaves and do things he'd never thought of doing but did for the love of me, urgently, awkwardly. the pop song wonders, we did not. we had it all. and he was beautiful to look at. all of him. i could watch his face for hours, the shades of feeling as they moved over him like a dervish spinning across a still pond. it was the luckiest time in my life. i wrote a song about us, Over the Hill. WBCN played it for weeks in summer drive time. he'd listen incognito, in a car with friends who hadn't a clue. no one did. we were cloaked, safe, in Neverland and now, because of him i no longer binocular the horizon for The One. i have no need, no desire to find someone like him again even though all interactions vary and who knows what lies ahead in our memory of the future*. still, after all this, we ended badly. he was leaving for college. long distance would make it difficult. we got stinking drunk on what would be his last night home. we wept the hard, ugly sobbing that accompanies loss. we walked around the block and stopped, facing each other, wet with slobber and tears and that's when it happened. that's when the switch moved from on to off, the switch in my heart. i can't give a reason. i still don't understand it. i'm not proud of it. a vortex of light, of energy shot up, out of the top of my being into the starry night. i became in that instant, neutral, emotionally flat-lined. i didn't love him anymore. not in that way. not in the way we'd been. it was so sad. i didn't say a word to him about it. i couldn't. in the next several years he sacrificed a lot to re-connect with me, a selfless boy, a generous man. but i was not there for him in my heart and i hurt him i'm sure, because he knew, of course he knew and forgave me as he always did, silently, spiritually. he's married now. he has two beautiful kids. he lives far from here. but i'd say, after all this time, that i can, in a blink, re-enter that Eden of the heart and see his eyes upon me, filled to the brim.

*courtesy of Susie

coke + a can o' coke

2009-09-07T12:41:00.000-07:00

i was at the Rat in the early 80's watching some hot band get hot. the kid next to me was bobbing his head arhythmically. he looked like a young Ric Ocasek but not as string bean long and drawn out. he said he was from Peru or some west coast South American country. he had black hair, shiny black eyes and a bright smile. i asked him back to the house (my boyfriend was away doing god knows what with god knows whom. we both played that game.). 'sure,' he said. 'you wanna do some kawcaine?' he explained in broken english that he ran a profitable connection with a drug cartel in his country and that he was dealing the stuff to 'all de beeg bahnds in town'. 'would i like to try some?' i'd never done a single line, but hey, why not give it a shot. he seemed to like me and who knew where it would lead? back at the apartment he broke out a stamp-sized packet of powder, cut it with a credit card, rolled a 100 dollar bill, snorted 2 fat lines and gave me the tube (all the right cliches). i watched him do it and followed suit. it shot up my nose like a dental drill and i got instantly horney. we were in the guest room (a nod to false propriety). he lay on his back, sneakers off, chain smoking. we had a couple of cokes in cans on a side table. he was tapping ashes into the tin key hole and squeezing stubs into the brine. he was coke-stoked for sure, but i wasn't hip to all the signs. he had a sweet oblivion in his eyes that erased any walls he might have had about who i was or what i might be up to with him. i touched his leg, his knee and he didn't budge. he closed his eyes, opened his mouth a little and stopped talking. i unbuckled his belt, pulled his zipper, brought it out like a fish and went down. he was right-away hard, beautiful there, but i had dry mouth. it felt like i was sucking bark. i needed to get slippery, to drink. i held him with my left hand and took an frantic swig of coke from what i thought was my set-aside can. it wasn't. it was his. it was filled with tobacco. sloshing down the hopper were 2 cigarette butts and globs of ash. it went down and back like a zip gun and i puked all over the kid's belly in a gusher. if this was his 'first time with a guy' it was probably going to be the last. he grabbed the pillow, swiped the vomit, yanked up his tight black jeans, click-locked the belt, collected his coke gear and hurtled down the stairs. i saw him off, but didn't get him off and never saw him again. maybe he located some non-projectile head from one of boys from one of 'da beeg bahnds in town'. who cares? i'm flipping out. what had i done? why was this drug pounding my heart like a gatling gun. hmm...i thought. why not run it off? that ought to do the trick. i sprinted back upstairs, dragged on some filthy running shorts and took off, thomping the pavement like a super hero just as the sun came up. sweat pimpled my face and my fists pumped like pistons. of course the symptoms intensified. i was scared. i called my boyfriend who, unbeknownst to me was doing the same thing with some colt in Jersey, but i knew that he knew about coke. knew all about it. he told me to stop running. to take a shower and to wait til the dark fear passed. (in a few short months he'd be dealing the shit himself and terminating our dead-in-the-water relationship. coke is good for that. 'instant asshole' a friend calls it. no shit, Tonto.

put to sleep

2009-09-07T12:40:00.002-07:00

- the euphemism. of course there's nothing sleepy about it. it's a white lie murder. when i was a kid we put dogs down, a lot of them, for doing bad things. for killing sheep. for chasing a child around the block. for being old. 'the Kinscherfs always kill their dogs' said a friend. what we did not do was be there when it happened. we drove, crying, with the dog in the back, unaware of his fate. just another ride in the car. we huddled, terrified, in the waiting room while Boo or Caesar or Fawny got euthanized. animals live in the guru present, right? if pain is what they have, so be it. but do their doggy brains wonder about the end of everything? about being put to sleep? i doubt it. but on a bus ride to New York City i saw a dead dog on a cement island in the middle of the highway, a hit and run. a revolving parade of dog pals, 20 or 30 strong, circled the body in the late afternoon, remembering their friend from woo hoo haunts around town, the garbage dumps they pigged out, the flower beds they shat in, the cats they treed. they came to say good bye, to honor a fallen comrade. but this is not a story about them, it's about Ralph, my cat, a second-hander who poked his paw out of a cage in a shelter in Philadelphia to touch my boyfriend's hand. 'this is the guy', he smiled. we were gonna give him to my mom who had, only weeks before, put Sydney, her overweight longhair, to sleep. but she didn't want him. she didn't want to suffer another gruesome loss. the vets in Philly decided that we'd make good parents for the guy so they spent their money to fly Ralph up to Boston. we met him at airport, drove to Jamaica Plain and cut him loose in the apartment. it turns out he hated us on sight. the paw through the cage was a ruse. we told him he had 48 hours to chill or we'd send him back to Philly or put him to sleep and that's when i prayed, a fool's mumbo jumbo involving light with a capital 'L', The Force and a mental picture of Mickey, the cat we'd had on life support at an all-dyke animal hospital, until, as they say in the obits, 'following a long battle with cancer' she was, you got it, put to sleep. i prayed to Mickey to fix Ralph, to correct his character and turn him into a cool cat and oh my god, in seconds, i swear, he shape-shifted into a fabulous kitty-witty. a smarty pants who could jump from floor to bureau, poke at a quarter, a watch, a picture frame until it clattered to the floor and woke us up. who could climb a drain pipe from yard to second story, tip toe the gutter and scratch at the screen until we let him in. and he was funny. he corrugated his whiskers into a TV antennae by sunning under a 150 watt lamp. he snuck into the fridge and choked on a turkey carcass until we found him in the cold, shivering his face off. he had those i-love-you-but-watch-it eyes that owned your heart and he stayed healthy until he hit 17. that's when he got it, the cat curse, kidney damage. we infused him with fluid from a saline sack hung from a coat hanger. he hated it. he hated being caught under the bed, wrapped in a straight jacket towel, crushed onto the kitchen table and taking the jab into his lower neck. when it was over he looked like he'd sprouted a fanny pack of fur jello. the infusions added a couple of years, same as chemo gives a cancer patient remission, but doesn't save a life. Ralphie slowed down. he couldn't leap onto the bed, let alone floor to bureau and he got the shits. black goo squirted out of his ass as he dragged it across the rug, a Jackson Pollack of hot tar in his wake. the stench was unimaginable. we had to put him down. we had to put our dear Ralphie to sleep, but this time it would be different. this time we would face reality head on. we would not hide outside the execution room. we would suffer, like Truman Capote watching Perry Smith hang from the neck until dead, we would suffer the truth of the euphemism. Ralphie was not being put to sleep, he was being put to death. the vet was a large lady with a nice face who assured us a) we were doing the right thing because Ralphie's quality of life was nil and b) that it wouldn't hurt. the room was small with a shiny metal table, a basin and a bright over head neon tube. we nuzzled his neck while the doc filled the syringe and stuck it into the exact spot where we'd prolonged his life. his mouth was a silent shriek, his eyes narrow, his back arched in a grotesque reverse curve until he collapsed, asleep forever. it did not look painless. no sir. it looked like it hurt a lot. we found out later that the proper method includes not one but two injections. one to induce sleep, the second, to kill. we were so out of our minds viewing the spectacle we couldn't remember if he'd been given one or two. it sure looked like he hadn't. it looked to us like he went through hell. they stuck his ashes in a styrofoam box, a hamburger put to sleep.

irish

2009-09-07T12:40:00.001-07:00

even though i work at an Irish bar and spend 6 nights a week at another one, i'm not of the green, not even close. German/French/Scot is the mutt i am. still, when i think about them, these loud, red-faced boy/men who have become my friends, i like what i see. i like how hard they work. i like the juice they give a good story. i like how they laugh from the toes up and that they know how to sing, gifted or otherwise, balls to the stinking wall. i admire their healthy regard for death, the ritual of the wake, of seeing the body, of bidding farewell and drinking ferociously to the memory of. i respect their reluctance to open up, to deliver the dark secret of the self. however, once you earn their trust, the connection is unbreakable. they have your back and you theirs, end of story. loyalty is the Bible and you don't fuck with it. likewise, the pub is their church, a club house of celebration, belonging, wound nursing and absurdity. of course it's the Irish 'disease', the alcohol fixation, that gets called out. booze kills, grows a liquor nose, ruins families, makes liars and lousy fathers - the all-too-familiar list of debilitation. on the other hand one can't help but envy these blokes and broads and their athletic bouts of drinking: a pint in a slobbery mouth, numbing away a shitty day. a clink of the glass to a good joke. forcing an ugly shot down a reluctant throat. jacking up enough courage to make a move on the snotty bitch at the end of the bar and so it goes. here lies an exuberance that has no twin in any culture i can think of. we Wasps have our fussy Martinis and wry smiles. in Paris, the little finger rises like a baby penis, a prissy sniff of fine wine. the Japanese shatter themselves silly in safe houses of repute, but practice daytime decorum with perfect Samurai hair. vodka ripped Russians tend to fight each other as much as the Irish, but are dour, pasty faced and depressive. Hispanics know how to party, but don't, near as i can tell, genuflect at the gate of the corner pub. these Irish own the map. they throw back booze with an abandon that is as childlike as it is insane. i for one can't keep up. 4 or 5 puny Miller Lites and i'm kaput. add a sickening shot and my mouth hangs open like a fuck doll. these guys, these shit-faced Irish hounds achieve that rare rubbery gift of a good sentence, a lacerating point of view, a sudden jerked-open window of insight no matter how many sheets to the wind. the other night is a case in point. 2 bartenders from the Brendan Behan (named after the famous alky/poet himself and hung with portraits of Irish writers and drunkards) share that rarest of rejoicings: a double birthday, same exact. 'he has my brain' says one. the other is jumping up and down on a bar bench, squinty-eyed, spewing beer like piss onto the floor, lost in a parallel universe. back from crowd surfing at a Pogues concert, back to the Behan kite high, out-of-body happy and full of arrgh, they kill the rasta oiling out of the speakers, crank up the Pogues, link arms in a scrum and sing, the loudest lung work i've heard since the fat lady sang in '04 and the Yankees watched hell freeze over. i don't know any of the songs, but they they rope me in nevertheless. i nod like Hillary Clinton as they shout out, nose-to-ceiling, a cluster fuck of bellowing cross-eyed lions. my outsider identity dissipates as they explode these glorious, raging songs. it doesn't matter that i can't join in. fuck that. i love every awkward minute. they eye each other like dogs who'd spent the day chasing a rabbit down a hole. this is not stereotypical male bonding. no sir. it's more like a fist of 21st Century Captain Bloods riding a Kami Kazi rocket into an Irish worm hole. this double birthday beams the rest of us up. i brake away and return to the bar for my weak-assed Miller Lite and my periscope view of the crowd, the boy scan. meanwhile the joint is on it's feet rocking in a frenzy of song or blinking from an uptight distance, missing out entirely. the 'best night of my life, ever' says one. i look him in the eye just to be sure he means it. of course he does. how many of those can you count on one hand? and damned if you don't need to be Irish to know the fookin' difference. CODA: i ran into a Behan rat who'd been off the sauce for a week. 'how's it going?' i ask. 'great! i feel great!' 'really?' i say. 'how come?' i know a guy with pills.' 'pills?' 'yeah.' 'what kind?' 'Xanax.' 'oh...i see. cool.'

killing the birthday balloon

2009-09-07T12:39:00.002-07:00

i'm not next-to-godliness obsessive, but i like my place to look clean, even if it isn't. what's more, i worry about the roaches coming back and about my cat snarfing up leftovers. she'll puke on my bedspread or in my shoes if she eats anything other than her chicken-n-rice pellets. so i fingernail pick off the marinara spots, the curled onion peels and dead pasta that whoever cooked last night failed to wipe off the floor. i sponge the stove. i do the undone dishes. i vacuum. the thing is, i don't go all out. my room mates are way more thorough about cleaning then i am. it's just that they do it once in a blue moon. i don't think they even notice mess the way i do. but like i said, my work is spotty. i miss things. instead of mopping the floor, i spit on a spot and rub it out with my sock. the surface of the stove i wipe, but the grime in and around the burners i leave untouched. in the bathroom i whisk about the bowl, but miss stains on the tiles in back. in my room i vacuum under the desk, but ignore the dust rats behind the piano. i make the bed every morning. I punch up the pillows, but my room mates? they don't do this stuff. on the other hand they fuck a lot more than i do. they're wiped out from it i suppose and if i was fucking that much maybe my room would be a wreck too. i berate myself for being an old auntie, tsk-tsking them in a silent prayer that i'm setting an example, that they'll see that i vacuumed the hallway and soon they'll do it too, right? they don't. i rationalize 'ok rick. this sort of clean freak shit is a priority for you, but it's not for them. it bothers you, it doesn't bother them. so it's on your watch to get the job done. then again, who cares when the entire planet is on the ropes and people are being slaughtered in Afghanistan? a tidy apartment is a blackhead on the ass of real life. which brings me to today and the birthday balloon. i borrowed a big white balloon at work from one birthday party and gave it to my room mate who was having her own celebration in another part of the restaurant. i figured you gotta have a fucking balloon on a day like that. anyhow, she brought it home. it kissed the ceiling for awhile, lost helium and descended to the floor where it slept for weeks. i thought it would eventually turn into a rubber scrotum and die, but it didn't. it retained enough gas to lie around the house like a loser, useless and semi-flacid. because it said 'Happy Birthday' in black magic marker i hadn't the heart to kill it until today as i was tidying up. there it was in the living room, under a window, staring up at me as if to say 'you got the balls to do this or what?' i felt guilty, but i carried it into the kitchen on one arm like a baby. i plucked a knife out of the drainer and this is when it got weird. i shut my eyes. yup, i shut my eyes and looked away, same as when the nurse draws blood. it's not the pin prick, it's the sight of the needle going into my vein that gives me the creeps. so i pinched the balloon by it's scrawny chicken neck, closed my eyes, turned my head and stabbed. 'POP!' it wasn't that loud. it was more like a 'pip', like a bird fart and then it was over. i could swear it felt pain, as if i heard a small cry, like ET: 'ouch'. my heart sank. my lower lip trembled. i plopped it on top of an empty pizza box in the pantry, sad, abandoned and dead. maybe i was one of those hooded executioners in a previous life time and this was my scardy-cat karma.

piss etiquette

2009-09-07T12:39:00.001-07:00

the men's room is wall-to-wall dudes. i can't hold it another second. i sneak into the ladies' room. it's empty. it's not what i'm used to. here are immaculate stalls, a wisp of perfume, a tampon dispenser, sparkly mirrors, a smear of lipstick on a faucet and a baby rack. i imagine gossip zinging around the tiles, dishing the bitches back in the bar. the opposite is true of the men's room. sloppy urinals are flecked with pubic hair, beer bottles, puke stains, unraveled, damp toilet paper and stink-o stalls with graffiti ads for blow jobs and, most importantly, we don't talk. we're not supposed to. the difference is behavioral. guys in public johns observe The Unspoken Rules. 1) don't go in there with the guy you're hanging out with. he will wait for you at the bar, or at your table, keeping watch over your cel phone and wallet and wait, properly, until you return, alone, so that he can then, on his own, relieve himself. you don't talk about it. you just do it. 2) if there are more than two urinals and one is occupied, do not take the slot next to the other guy. use the stall or keep the empty piss hole between yourself and your neighbor. 3) don't talk. talking implies weird friendliness in an unfriendly location. 4) it's ok to fart, but if you're a big barking tuba farter, don't laugh or draw undue attention. keep your reaction to yourself. farts are not funny in the men's room. just fart and get the fuck outa there. 5) flush with your foot, elbow or knee. do not use your hand. you never know what insidious herpes sore has smeared itself onto the chrome. 6) do not, under any circumstance, look at the person next to you. stare at the ceiling, focus on the golden yarn squirting into the porcelain or pick your nose, but do not look. that said of course, we do. we all do. we look. we don't look like we're looking, but that wandering falcon eye surveillance radar works overtime. so, yeah, we do it. we look. we don't want to be caught looking, we don't look all the time, but covertly, like i said, we look. not because we want to do anything with IT, with the unit. we don't. our competitive instinct is at work here. we compare size, shape, color, grossness, pubes, heft, etc. like Bowie says: 'boys check each other out'. from grade school to the Senate floor they want to know what you've got, or they want you to know what they've got. so they look. you look. c'mon. in the high school locker room when everybody was scared shitless about being found out, everybody looked. not only that, if we don't look directly AT it, we pick up on the choreography, the urinal dance. how it's taken out and put it back in. a) camouflage your cock behind hand or zipper and cut loose. b) stand back and fire into the hole, confident of your proud unit, certain of aim. c) be-stir the unbuckled belt, zipper, the opening of the slit in drawers, lowering of the drawers and engage in frenetic child-tearing-open-a-Christmas-present as prep for the spew. ditto the shake off. A) kill the thing and choke it to death. B) get rid of it quick and suffer a wet leg and spot. C) an in-between, half-hearted jerk, yellow drops on wrist and rub off on your pant leg. how did all these rules and behaviors get started, the ontological source of piss etiquette? i blame it all on dad who lowered his flashlight with a fatherly slight-of-hand so that sonny boy could learn how to do it on his own. in silent instruction, dad made it clear that one adheres to the rule of rules and does not look. ok? even as he checks out sonny boy's pencil as chip-off-the-old-block looks up at the old man's yard arm. dad won't say it out loud - go ahead, boy, stare. but the rule and the breaking of the rule we probably got from pop. that's what i think and so, when we walk back into the bar behind the stranger, who, minutes ago stood beside us shaking the be-jesus out of his thing, we know that he knows you saw it. or enough of it for both of you to think about it. one night i actually spoke up: 'dude, i gotta tell ya, ya got a gorgeous penis there'. that's right. i used the 'p' word. i thought 'cock', but i said penis. i hate that word. whatever. i figured the kid would like to know that there was a queer out there who had sincere admiration for his gear. something to store away for future ref. 'wow. a dude liked my dick. i didn't let him suck me off or anything, but it was cool to get the props.' i realize i took my life in my hands. that a forehead-to-stinky-urinal might have been the bloody end game. but ya know what? a life of caution ain't no life at all and rules are made to be broken.

bourne-d to death

2009-09-07T12:38:00.004-07:00

i rent the movies, the Bourne movies, all three: Identity, Supremacy, Ultimatum with the Bourne Erection soon to follow. there he is, Matt Damon walking the walk, the Bourne walk where fast and steady wins every race. i think Kiefer Sutherland copied it whole, the walk, the look, the steady cam, the speed freak jump cuts and the paranoia. i watch in the afternoon, my bird food cereal on my lap and a pint of Cafe Bustelo that will hurtle me to the shitter before half a cup is gone. i shut off the tv mid-stream so i can get my art homework underway, saving Jason for later. but here's the kicker, my celluloid fantasy. as i stride down the hallway of my railroad apartment i do the walk. the Jason Bourne/Matt Damon bouncy heel walk, killer look, chin lowered, vigilant, a laser beam from my forehead to a red dot targeting the sink walk. sharp Karate moves wash the dishes with a no-nonsense attack to the most insignificant detail. i don't even realize i'm doing this until i get it, me as Jason and i burst out laughing. my all-by-myself barking walrus, chin whiskers-in-the-air laugh at how incredibly not like Jason i am. i sneak a peek in the mirror only to catch the flouncy, over-conditioned stringy hair, no lips and 63-year-old yellowed teeth that look asymmetrically filed down. there is no Hollywood here. no Matt Damon there. no Jason anywhere. just me. i do that a lot. leaving a movie theater i walk to my car, climb in and fire it up as if it was me up there on the silver screen. the after burn of the cinematic mind comes alive around me like the rainbow traces that follow the tails of sparrows in an LSD sky.

band parents

2009-09-07T12:38:00.003-07:00

are not the same as stage moms or hockey dads. they don't show up during childhood. it's not until the kids are in college and have left the nest. then it begins, the nightmare. i watch them having dinner with their son before a gig at a nearby club. they look lost, anxious and dispirited. they make innocuous conversation in hopes of Windex-ing the glass on their blurry imaginings. 'seems like a nice enough club, dear, but it's so...dirty.' 'how do you get people to actually show up for these things? it must be awfully hard.' 'i can't hear the words and you wrote 'em, right? don't you think they're important?' anticipating the d-day of distortion: 'we shoulda have picked up some earplugs, honey, doncha think?' later, inside the club: 'god, we look old, stand-out old. all these idiots bobbing their heads like dolls to whatever it is the music is saying to them and whatever it is that it's saying we don't get'. 'he sure seems to drink a lot on stage'. 'the owner's a prick, a loud mouth prick.' 'that fat girl looks ridiculous in a mini skirt.' 'why does he close his eyes when he's singing?' 'why does he say fuck so much on the microphone?' 'he loves what he's doing i suppose, but his drummer's a real asshole.' i can't wait t get outa this crack hole'. they notice their own graying hair, bald spots, pot bellies and motherly skirts and yet they put up with it. they put up with him. they're not sure why. they don't talk to each other at the club. all the drinks in the world make no dent in their demeanor. meanwhile, under the table, they pray that this is a phase he'll grow out of. they realize that 'fall back on' is a pipe dream for their ever practicing son who, holed up in his bedroom all through high school, zits galore, shedding guitar and straining to zap out a zillion notes in front of the mirror is in this for good. they worry that maybe he'll fall through a crack they can't see coming. they worry he'll catch some fatal S.T.D. they worry that the void between what their kid is doing and their own world is unbreachable. they listen as carefully as they can to the demo they had to pay for and begin talking above the music long before the first song is over, unable to pay attention let alone comprehend what is being heard. unexpectedly, dad gets weepy. for some reason art and sound moves him in spite of himself, a catch-in-the-throat pride in his black sheep son. had he become an heroin addict or a transexual, things could have been worse, though maybe more manageable than having to support his stupid band at ugly clubs where woo hoo's and tennis claps add up to zilch. where loading in and loading out seems endlessly tiresome. where the money is non existent. they don't get it and hate not getting it and wish they didn't have to try. you feel badly for them even though you can't extend a hand. they do look silly and sad. they don't know their kid anymore. Santa Claus is long gone and their boy's dream impossible to imagine, let alone believe in or want for him. will his kids be stock brokers? they can only hope.

clothes hoarse

2009-09-07T12:38:00.001-07:00

i am not turned out. i never give it a thought. i tell myself i'm ok with it. i can pass as someone who dresses adequately. it's the same today as it was when i was as a kid. in high school i wore the standard blazers and sweaters, nothing exceptional. i looked all right leaving the house, but as soon as i got to school i was a disaster - cereal on tie, milk on pants, loafers crushed at the heel, shirt tail out, dandruff on shoulders and ink stains on shirt cuffs. today the last place i spend cash is on clothes. i shop old navy, the salvation army and boomerangs. i buy dumb t-shirts and generic pants with too many pockets. the t's have armpit holes, dated logos and they're getting bigger. they resemble hawaiian mumus. from XL to XXXL they've become the Super Bowl of t's. they tent over my beer belly like a deflated all weather dome. sometimes i experiment with color. red t, green pants - Christmas-y! brown on brown - Miles Davis-y! black-on-black - DKNY-sy! and i make hardly a dent in hipster-ville. as for the shoes? my party shoes? buxom Doc Martin boots, scuffed up like scabs and worn rarely. the laces are ravaged and stressed out like raw nerves. they require 'orthotics' - layered strips of rubber that lift and twist my right heel to make one leg longer or shorter than the other and to take the pressure off my hip and lower back. my podiatrist intones: "forget surgery; go with the orthotics" (which is hard to pronounce without a lisp...orthotixth). they slide like stubborn trout into the bottoms of my 'beasts', the sneakers he also insisted upon which, at $120 a pop, are as expensive as they are ugly. they come in bleach white only, like nurses marsh mellow shoes and are, within a week, transformed into petri dishes of doyles drippings and droppings, the white smudged out, with my big toenail poking through the upper front and busting a peek hole that looks like an inflamed asshole. maybe they should call them that: 'assholes'. anyhow, i wear these more than the party boots just because i don't want to bother with the trout transfer and i figure who's gonna look at my feet anyway? perhaps if i had short people 'lifts' or cha-cha heels i'd seem more in style, but i gave that up years ago. like Popeye says: 'i yam what i yam' - a pig in a t-shirt with fat shoes.

sardines

2009-09-07T12:37:00.002-07:00

i don't get to fly much, at least not in the last 20 years. i liked airplanes as a kid. the undulating porpoise backs of those 4-prop TWA's obsessed my little boy brain. the Ipana stewardesses patting my head, fluffing pillows, pouring coke over ice cubes gave me the shivers. the scale of the plane when you bounded up silver stairs from the tarmac seemed like story-book magic. in the 1950's, flying from San Francisco to Connecticut with my sisters and my mom i realized something was wrong: 'hey! ma! there's smoke coming out of the engine! there's flames!' we swooped down into O'hare like a wounded gull. i wasn't afraid, after all i'd saved us by spotting the smoke. now all that's changed, all that little boy turn-on. i loathe planes. they pack you in like sheep to the slaughter, the seats can barely fit our bloated butts. the neck cramps, insidious farting and used up air is enough to make you want to murder someone. meanwhile, there's no free anything to drink or eat. ok. i admit that i like the take offs and landings. i like watching streets, cars and houses recede into monopoly pieces. i like the new stewardesses and (gay) stewards who aren't Hollywood hot anymore and have saggy old-bra breasts, age lines, thinning hair and bad makeup. but that all goes awry when i imagine crashing into shark water, or sky scrapers, when i'd be forced to make friends with the idiots on board just to survive. i wonder if i have what it takes, or if they do. or will it be war. all this amuses me quietly. i feel my brain-dead bimbo Mona Lisa smile smiling above it all, smiling at myself smiling at them. ah, the guru witness, what a joke! soon enough it all unravels and it's torture time. the tin can trap becomes a nightmare. i try not to touch the fatty on my left or work up a conversation with the good looking kid who by chance takes the seat next to mine, baseball hat backwards, ear buds fending off inquiry. i try to sleep. i read until my eyes ache. i hold off a piss. after a century of fetal cramps and window squinting the squawk box announces descent. down, down, down as cotton wisps slither across the wings and tiny house dots enlarge. the sun sparkles off man-made lakes. the shadow jet hurtles across the relief map below like a jack rabbit. the flaps rise, the wheels lower and we're down, landed, safe, nudging up through the uncircumcised cock tube as we hurry through, like sperm to the airport egg. that's when it happens. that's when all hell breaks loose as we wait for the sheep to yank out their bags from the over head and get the fuck off the fucking plane. when i stand up, the curved ceiling crooks my neck like a hanged man. it's then that i hear it, the scream, the silent Edvard Munch scream that sucks up the stale space in the cabin like a cyclone. we all hear it, seething silently. the level of impatience is at code red. sweaty necks, clenched jaws and beady eyes turn us into cattle just prior to execution. that's when we're all alike. that's when we cumulatively despise the out-to-sea asshole who can't locate his carry-on, staring up at the stow-away like a stoner, oblivious to the rage of the angry rats behind him who would strangle him given half a chance. now i understand how frightening the group impulse of a crowd in panic can be. i understand why innocents get trampled to death. i would be first among them, even as i smile my stewardess smile of phony acceptance.

o tannenbaum

2009-09-07T12:37:00.001-07:00

i'd fallen asleep. there were only 6, 7 people left in the living room still drunk from the party, our annual Christmas party, the surreal Christmas party. the pretty lights, the stench of pine and beer and pot and debris all over the kitchen. that's when the tree fell over. it just leaned and fell, slo-mo, balls cracking on the floor like eggs, the lights twisted like underwear around the bulbous waist of the tree. the Wicken star was toppled and replaced with a can of PBR jammed onto the hard thrusting tippy top. it looked hung over leaning against the window. we lifted her up, yanked off the can, straightened the lights, swept up the broken balls and re-inserted and tightened the stand screws. it was ok now, but off kilter. room mate Travis: 'the Christmas tree has been drinking, not me...'. now it has a personality, being at a tilt. more endeared am i to this one, this imperfect touchstone to childhood, then all the pretty houses with all their pretty trees. pretty loses out to truth. the next night is a dead zone at work, but i luck out. two Very Cute Boys (Berklee/LA) are among the few seated in my section. because it's slow going, we talk. i, on weak legs. the power of The Beautiful upsets my balance. the black-haired kid in particular hurts to look at. i have to latch onto words like a plank in a flood in order to not hold his eyes uncomfortably. to be with both and not monopolize one vs the other and without presuming intimacy. all goes nicely. info is exchanged as if after a car accident, smiles all round and nervous goodbye handshakes. we meet up later at the Behan. the rush rising with each sentence. i stumble. my stumbling is obvious i'm sure to these straight, savvy kids. they know i'm a homo, they know that i know that they know. but here's the kicker, drunken tree part 2 BEFORE the boys at the Behan. there is a group that hits Doyles after the Berklee boys leave came from volunteering at a homeless shelter. they and the homeless with them are Not Cute. some stink, their faces have bruises, there are holes in their clothes and their shoes are untied. they are persnickety about food orders, although joyful and full of legit Christmas spirit. they sing in loud out of tune voices all the carols they can remember and then standards (Puff the Magic Dragon, Kum-By-Ya) up on their feet, hugging and singing at each other. i skate back and forth from bar to table, cleaning up, delivering food and beer when one of them, the dirtiest, with pockmarked skin, a sweaty scarf, open boots, shirt-tails out, orders one Bud after another. as soon as i drop one off, he asks again. when the singing really takes over, he goes to the bar and orders a bigger beer, a giant bottle of Pilsner Urquell. he isn't going back. he isn't going to be part of the silly singing. he sits by himself at a round table with his big green bottle. during one of my manic traverses, he looks up at a spot above my head and says 'i love you'. his lipless mouth is agape, a yawning walrus with flappy chops and the faint lift of a smile. 'i love you', wow. had Very Cute said this to me from his astonishing face i would have collapsed into his heart. i am, like the song says, a fool for beauty. but this homeless man, like our peculiar, sad tree, is the one to deliver this snail of an endearment. not the pretty boy with the hot smarts, nor his friend with the dark eyes.

vox humana

2009-09-07T12:36:00.004-07:00

the singing began in Tuscon, leaning over an Andrews Sisters 78 rpm of 'Shrimp Boats Are A Comin'. i am mesmerized. i gaze at the round-n-round trying to sing along in a boy-as-chipmonk squeak. it was not until entering middle school at the Episcopal Academy that i 'got' the transcendental side of singing. Curtis R. York (C.R.Y.) was our music teacher, chorus/glee club conductor and choir master. i was 11. my voice had that pure, no vibrato soprano that we were led to believe was ok (not girly). Mr York, after all, coached baseball. we auditioned (200 cherubs) with dime-sized mouths and tiny lifted chins. if we did well we made choir. we sight read, without knowing the notes. the dots went up and down. it wasn't that hard. if we were 'gifted' we earned a solo spot in that swath of boys at the annual concert. the sensation of 200 voices, rising from rib cages strong and clear and into the gymnasium air, was my true introduction to music, physical, emotional and spiritual. i remember wanting to sit next to whomever was my pre-homo 'best friend' at the time. i'm pretty sure that all that singing was a major part of what got me into Yale where there is a huge singing tradition. glee, choir and all those gentlemen songsters led triumphantly up the Whiffenpoof Alps (seniors only) who in tight ('tight') formation cast their anachronistic spell. the arrangements, some by Cole Porter (a grad), were stunning, complex and irresistible. i wasn't sure how i fit in with those guys socially. most of them were high powered preppies and had that haughty, upper class thing down to a white shoe T. i was locked in the closet and terrified. still, the music was worth the discomfort. i loved being surrounded by that thick vocal blend. we drank and sang, wore white tie and tails and tilted slightly forward off-heel as if to put a careful nose on the perfect note. down the road, when i began to write my own songs, i hit a wall, a vocal wall. i brayed and squawked and fought to hear a voice that fit in with pop or rock, but what i heard bouncing back from the studio monitors sounded like an operatic Whiffenpoof, or worse, a Broadway chorus boy nasal tenor. i was appalled. i went to great lengths to make it sound 'rock right', ultimately damaging my vocal chords and necessitating 2 polyp operations. the first E.N.T. doc warned that a) i would never sing again or b) would sound like Doris 'Que Sera Sera' Day (which, when i think about it, might not have been such a bad idea). i got myself a second opinion, had the things scraped off and resumed my band obsession. when my boyfriend at the time joined up, possessing a voice closer to Paul Rogers than Ethel Merman, i was asking for it. 'why doesn't HE sing all the songs? his voice is WAY more commercial', my band mates whined. 'we're treading industry water here with your weird voice'. there was even a vote to throw me out of my own band and have the now X-boyfriend do all the singing. it wasn't until i got back to playing my songs on the piano and using my whatever-it-sounded-like voice honestly and not trying to parody some asshole rock slut, that i came into my own. singers can be the most neurotic of performers. on a loud stage they can't even hear themselves think. to lose your voice in that environment is a nightmare. it's all you have. you can't turn it up to 10. what to do? NO MORE BANDS. as a solo dude i finally sound like me. i love it all over again as if, chin tilted upward, i'm in that miraculous innocent winged orbit of the boy soprano, eyes crossed, floating towards the stars.

my ridiculous hair

2009-09-07T12:36:00.003-07:00

i'm not sure if there was ever a time in my life when my hair was anything but ridiculous. whether from my point of view or from others, on stage or off or in that netherworld where the two get mixed up. maybe, when i was a boy with a whiffle, it was ok. in the family scrapbook i look 'regular' - buzzed, traditional and predictable from the end of high school through Yale, the song remaining the same - short all over, wisp flip above forehead and fat face. this was followed by the acid years: carefree undulating slippery hippie Jesus hair. in my LSD trip to the mirror i looked almost cool, a dude, under a gandalf wide-brim, hanging in soft shirley temple clumps that came alive like Medusa snakes. i added an under beard and looked Amish. in my passport photo i resembled a dagger-eyed Rasputin. it turns out that facial hair is as much trouble as head hair. I can't grow sideburns. they stop a quarter inch below the spot where they are supposed to weave in with the hair hair. my soul patch is a triscuit. a sad off-yellow piece of patch punctuation that takes weeks to become noticeable. i tell my friend Ben there's a long list of people who don't like it. 'add me to the list,' he says. that's the other part of the problem - other people. they hate whatever do i do. i say fuckit. buzz the shit off. go for Dachau. get a cinchy no-haircut hair cut. what the Doyles girls go for. 'makes you look younger, ricky,' they say. which is absurd. nothing can make you look younger. it's like a facelift. the neck crepe is a dead giveaway. next up: the dye jobs. i tried them all - ugly black, peroxide green-blonde, irish setter red. my favorite was Mallard duck, a dark, neon blue/green. 'honey,' squeals my poofter hair dresser, 'you will look FABulous!' hours-in-the-chair-and-under-the-dryer later my do becomes a diaphanous swimming pool blue. i race home, squirt CVS product all over myself to repair the damage only to make it worse, a drab buster brown. not cool. going in another direction i attempt a do-it-yourself cellophane, a translucent iodine which, at a visit to a local swimming hole populated by African Americans, the colored girls dug the do. 'dat color is da shit, girl! how you do dat?' no one else agrees. in fact, traveling to Prague i realize that all the x-commie old ladies have the same cellophane job i had and it looks like the color of a nuclear sun. in the meantime the hair cuts get wilder. i shave the sides, froo froo a limp rooster tail on top, try braids, bangs and perms. where am i? who am i? is there any hope? lately, i just let it grow, long, tired and stringy. in the morning i am Neil Young on a bender dancing with a bag lady. at night i slop on a glue-like Hispanic gel, smear it hard as glass and hope for Pat Riley but wind up with planet of the apes or worse, a sociopathic sex offender. 'when are you going to cut it, rick? it's really ugly and it makes you look old'. at this point i don't give a fuck. i like that it's odd. i'm odd. berlin as a b-movie rubber monster.

poke through

2009-09-07T12:36:00.001-07:00

thin toilet paper (carefully accordioned) can split open on your way 'in' and a chocolate brown half moon collects under a horrified fingernail. smell check confirms the worst. you swear this will never happen again. (it does.) on your next trip to the supermarket you examine labels for guarantees: super strength, multiple layering, 'no poke through' as subtext. you wonder if this is a common 'accident' or are you the singular exception? come on, tell the truth. have you ever poked through? you can say.

rimbaud, redux

2009-09-07T12:35:00.002-07:00

you know the question: what is your type? you can sort of answer that, but don't want to. you don't want to admit to anyone, least of all yourself, that you have a type, or worse, a pattern. but go on, Berlin, you can say. you like the marginal, the terrified, scary adolescents or near to, the ex-jailbirds, the one's who hurt inside, scratch poetry on napkins and throw it away, the dispossessed, the dark and the lonely. it's not like any old crumpled-up ferocious kid will do. yours is not some easily-tagged Florence Nightengale sydrome. they have to be good looking in that pimply, seering-eyed way. they have to see through my bullshit. they have to be young and pretentious and smart. ('we ALWAYS think they're smart' - Danny Fields). when i look back at these boys, especially reading, again, about Rimbaud, i realize they all have some of him in them. some more than others. as i have some of Verlaine in myself. more than once have they enthralled me, set me on edge and turned me inside out and far away from complacency. among these, most of all, it was Michael, the boy i met at the screen door of my sister's apartment in Somerville. there he stood in his underwear, out of the blue, panting from the run from his house. 'will you walk me home?' he asks. i had never met him, never laid eyes on him before this night. 'yes'. of course i would. we were inseparable for the next year and the next and the next. he looked like Rimbaud. he had the same piercing ice-blue challenging eyes. he wrote prayers and poems and burned them. he aimed a gun at the back his father's head when they walked in the woods in Louisiana. the gun was loaded and he almost pulled the trigger. he was only 12. from his porch he saw a motorcyclist beheaded when his bike slid under the tailgate of a truck. he wrote love words on the wall of his bedroom with his dog's shit. he threw matches into the brush alongside a narrow road on Martha's Vineyard. it caught fire. he drove my friend's VW into the ocean. he took off his clothes and boarded the bus stark naked. he dropped acid with me, but because he ground his teeth, or thought he did, he refused ever after to close his mouth. it hung open and drooled. he gave me a black eye after sex. he shoved a coke bottle up his dog's asshole. we slow danced in a bar for old timers, hugging, near kissing, showing off and laughing. they smiled at us. it was his idea. i suppose he was crazy. of course i think we all are, but it was all too much for him and for me. i met someone else and he was hurt. 'we always hurt the one's we love'. at a friend's suggestion he went to a camp for tough kids up in Maine. the kids thought he was gay. i guess he'd made a sloppy pass at one of them. i'm not sure, but the short of it was that he got hit in the lower back with a log and damaged his spleen. it was removed. when he returned home he had a scar like a railroad track on his belly. then things got worse. his mom didn't know what to do. he wound up in Marlboro State Mental Hospital. when i went to see him he was standing in line, in a regulation dress-like pale blue robe, accepting his paper cup of pills just like the patients in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. a few days later he drowned himself in a bathtub. it was a scandal. he was not being watched. i went to his funeral. the boys from the camp in Maine carried his coffin. he looked beautiful at the wake, even though he'd put on weight. i broke down. his mom told me that no one in his life had loved him as much as i had. still, i wonder, i worry to this day, that it was our, my, tidal wave attraction to him that hurt him most. that sent him off the cliff. i still love him, my Rimbaud. he never found the African desert. he never found peace, or gentle love. since Michael, there are the others - 2 former inmates, an artist who again, resembles the dangerous one, a fire-starter of the soul, a ridiculer, a prescient. my knees buckle every time they seem to find me.

neverland

2009-09-07T12:35:00.001-07:00

'i'm too old for this.' i hear it all the time, even from people younger than myself. the sense that what was once funny, or do-able, or easy now feels used up, jaded, is-that-all-there-is?, 'i can't do it anymore'. what are they missing? the up-all-night drinking, waitressing for shitty tips from asshole customers, loving the mirror or, most embarrassing, going for The One after years of disappointment? to hell with it, throw in the towel, fuck this shit. sound familiar? as for me, jowled, eye-bagged and slack-mouthed, i don't feel it, not yet. even with skin problems, flu shots, stringy hair, hearing loss, lower back pain, hemorrhoids and insomnia, the goal posts are more in focus then ever. i feel like a kid, a 66 year old kid with a squinting eye-on-self and a forgiving (blind?) ambivalence. i laugh at how much older i look in the mirror than i feel. in many ways i haven't grown up. i don't have a Real Job (20+ years of waitressing is more fun than money and has no ladder-to-climb future). i don't shoulder a wife and kids. i don't own a house. i don't have a for real boyfriend. it's a relief we can't see ourselves behaving. we would, i would for sure, be horrified. watching the music videos my friends shot for Old Stag was like staring at a stranger. i LOOK like that?! what the fuck! when i perform or waddle around Doyles or have animated talks at the Behan i imagine that i look what? 45? tops. lithe, no spastic facial contortions, bright eyes and with wise wit. Jean Cocteau, during the filming of La Belle et la Bete, ran about, hung sheets, adjusted arms-in-walls-with-candles and observed: 'we felt like teenagers until we saw ourselves in the mirror and realized that we were old men'. is the surface a lens to the soul? not if you're really looking, but who is? old folks out for dinner, sparkly-eyed, who need a cane to shuffle across the floor and have a date with the boob tube later, seem to harbor a covert hankering for deep throat or a dirty poem from an imploring suitor or an honest kiss even as they assemble in awkward dignity their minefield of propriety. a friend of mine emails: 'America is no country for old men'. the crusty, useless, annoying elderly out-to-pasture, no longer jacked-up with rampant hard-ons have run out of turf. 'i'm too old for this'. and yet, inside, under the surface, are we not all ageless? does our skin, our voice, our walk give us away? did Peter Pan have it right, or Dorian Gray?

tar, baby

2009-09-07T12:34:00.004-07:00

it seems all over town that mayor-for-life Menino is re-paving the roads. smooth, unlined sleek black rivers that car tires become quiet on. paving trucks flood stretches of the formerly bumpy with a bow-shaped tide of warm sticky wonderfully smelling tar. at night, with few cars on the road, it's like lake water. you skim the surface, cutting no wake. the purr of engine, the muted roar of tires take you back 50 years when cars and roads owned Eisenhower America and the wild whooping freedom of the forever teenager hopped in souped-up jalopies from town to town. i swell up a bit after work, one cheap beer buzzing in my ears, when the old pavement succumbs to the new, the bad skin blasted away like a dermabrasion treatment. 'work done' on the city gives us a temporary stay on whatever debilitated horrors the sick economy has in store. the last glass of champagne before the besotted lunatic jumps out the window.

cat abrasion

2009-09-07T12:34:00.003-07:00

my Dermatologist, Dr W, a no nonsense Asian woman, checks everything out, Everything, and on each visit. 'take off all your clothes and put this on, with the opening at the back'. my flounder's belly white legs stare up at me. i wonder if i wiped properly earlier that morning. would i 'leave something' on the paper covering, a human stain? she is non-plussed and orders me about like a Sergeant, squirt freezing suspicious asymmetrical spots with an ice gun. it hurts, but in an ok way. like picking a scab or getting a tattoo. i'm here for good reason, my skin. when i was in Nassau my sophomore year at Yale, on a drunken singing group spree, i got grotesquely sun burned water skiing off Lyford Cay (they were shooting Goldfinger that year). i was darting about on a single ski, whoosh whoosh, when a shark's fin broke the surface a few yards behind me. a Great White as i recall through the filter of Jaws and selective memory. i angled towards the pearly beach, flapping one hysterical arm, coasted up onto the sand as the monster slithered back out into the briny deep. that was the half of it. it turns out that the sun, reflecting off the Caribbean blue, carved up my skin like a laser. i grew blisters the size of robin's eggs. i bled. we didn't know it then, the latent horrors of Melanoma. my mom needed postage stamp sized patches of skin removed periodically. i notice divots on the noses of customers my age at Doyles. on my last visit, instead of the freeze offs, Dr W proscribed a tube of 'Carac' (where do they get these names?) which i was instructed to apply daily for a month. slather it on, rub it in, wait. miniscule homing cels in the sauce would zero in on potential pre-melanomas, stimulate anti-bodies and eat up the nasty spot. you itch and you develop lesions the look like Leprosy. you are not allowed dressings to cover them up. you look scary. the hard part is that with this stuff on my arms, back of hands and the upper side of my face, my cat can't lick me. 'NO, SOFI, NO!' i ward her off. the poor girl's confused and hurt. who knew that a slow shark in the water would have a debilitating psychological effect on my cat 50 years later, to say nothing about the idle kid at the end of the bar with whom i strike up the band. the one who averts his eyes as the pus oozing sore on the back of my hand makes him want to puke.

mouse everest

2009-09-07T12:34:00.001-07:00

wrapping the day up with late night emails i sense movement overhead, a scratching and a struggle. i look up and i swear-to-god there's a mouse climbing the window curtain, way the fuck up there, near the ceiling, scrambling his skittery cuteness along the edge and vanishing onto the upper ledge. how does he do it? clutchy curly-fry toenails? and where is Sofi? 'sick 'em, Sof! i yell. 'get that motherfucker!' which is two-faced for me who always feels Dali Lama sorry for the hard-as-a-rock dead thing left by my cat after she's finished with him, no longer a toy to bat around. god knows where the thing went or if it is even actually up there. but it gives me the shivers. the fat lady with the rolled knee stockings is high on a chair, skirt in fist, faint from the sight of the little bugger.

yellow teeth

2009-09-07T12:33:00.004-07:00

i get a baby grand from my parents when i turn 9, big and black and calling out to me like a harpie on a crag. 'play me, baby, but watch out, i'm a scary motherfucker.' it's shiny and seems to ask a lot with all those 88's extending from one horizon to another. they make me nervous. i stay near the center, near middle C. the sound of a single note, held down and reverberating sings in my chest like an ejaculation (the one i was yet to have). driven to lessons by my stubborn sneak-a-shot-o'-likker Granny in her dark blue Ford, a line of honking cars stretching out behind us on the mountain road, 'fuck 'em' in her set jaw, i tremble. i hate these lessons. i hate the music paper. i fog out on the precisely inked notes. my struggle to transmit them to fingers makes no sense. at my first recital, a child's song, i freeze. i run out the door, fighting tears. months later i return to the keyboard and i 'experiment', in the dark, tentative notes resounding from the hulking whale, amounting to little, but mesmerizing my pre-teen brain. and later i strike up an 'original composition' at a talent show at Prout's Neck, our summer vacation spot in Maine. i got a big ovation. i am 14, showing off my Twist-N-Shout moves on the dance floor and i'm covered with acne. i compare thigh muscles with a boy from Rhode Island. 'boys are better,' he says. i am silent, but i remember him as a part of that summer when i made friends with the piano. after we move to Philly we give the lessons another try. this time it's some quack-invented 'system' to fire up a left hand accompaniment to whatever-the-fuck horrible pop song takes me into a refusenik orbit. 'all you need is a melody', he promises. i think, 'you are so full of shit'. i quit 2 weeks in, hating lessons all over again. meanwhile, across the street in Wayne, procrastinating homework, our friends the Voorhees and a future Oberlin organ student, Henry Pemberton and i play 'guess who this is?' - a crush clue on the keys that is supposed to identify someone we all know and an early warning of what eventually became song 'portraiture'. the summer following my last year in high school i become a counselor at Camp Munsee, in the Poconos. in a barn sits a lonely, scabby, out of tune upright. after the boys are asleep i sneak down and improvise. the sound echos into the night. at Yale, same story, but with a drug caveat. in a college tower, i lock the door, drop acid, play with my eyes shut and hallucinate psychedelic film clips as they un-spool, fingers hammering with faux Stravinsky cluster up and down the nicotine ivories. i keep it on the down low. it's awful, i'm sure, but i keep going back, transported by the thrill of this Mississippi river of sound. 2 years later, back in New Haven, living a house full of nutty artists and musicians i crank the motor up all over again. we snitch an upright from a church and for the first time, inspired by musician friends Francesca Reitano and Ed Askew, i begin to crunch improvisations into songs like a blind man in a junk store, just trying to tell the truth and to hit my compatriots in the heart. maybe it never gets better than that. maybe it gets worse.

zits

2009-09-07T12:33:00.003-07:00

during the hair-down-there transition i got hit with serious acne. zits appeared all over my face, crusty, puss-oozing mini volcanos. all my friends, save one, were zit free. i grinned my way through it, feigning obliviousness. weekly visits with Dr Savage (her real name) didn't do much good. she focused a hot lamp on my face and went at them with a stainless-steel, miniature cocaine spoon that had a tiny hole in the center that she pressed against a black head and popped the puss out in a thin wormy ribbon. if we were quiet enough and god knows i kept my 14 year old mouth shut, you could hear the thing geyser, a teensy pip followed by the faint hiss of mustardy ooze. i wasn't sure how to handle this. feeling ugly on top of wondering why i had uncontrollable erections when my friends slept over did not make for an easy passage. meanwhile i was in choir. at this point, with puberty, an alto. i felt the glare of stares as we entered chapel. one kid called me 'pizza face' but Ricky Simonson told the kid to shut up. they painted out the crust in the class portrait, but you could tell. there were tiny removal scars all over the gloss. i guess we're not supposed to be reminded of our grotesque teen face way down the road when memory becomes selective. every time i see a kid who used to have that perfect peach complexion suddenly show up with a pimple problem, my heart goes out to him. seems to me that boys have it worse than girls. or maybe with my predilection i don't notice. i actually think a zitty face is kinda hot. maybe like heroin chique they'll be zit chique in Details magazine.

dog food

2009-09-07T12:33:00.001-07:00

my sisters fried up a can of Alpo and told dad it was corned beef hash, over easy eggs on top. a morning hangover 'breakfast surprise'. dad loved it. ate the whole thing. the best he'd ever had. they never told him.

gay schmay

2009-09-07T12:32:00.002-07:00

the jury is out on this one although i'd expect to get life in the closet from my gay peers. in my head flicker out-takes of The Worst Cliche Images of Homos. they are worse even than those of some sicko radical born against. through my judgmental binoculars 'they' squeal, hiss, walk funny (quick tiny chinese steps) and perform outrageous 'flaming' gestures that sometimes amuse but most of the time drive me crazy. that is, unless they're my friends. if not, they're catalogued on my self-righteous altar, collecting judgement dust. oh no, i tell myself, this is not internalized homophobia, nor masked self-loathing. i LIKE myself. i like my queer, gay, poofter, flouncy, faggoty self. i can be that way, they can not or i won't like them. i certainly won't be attracted to them. this instant reaction rears it's ugly head like the pinkie finger in La Cage Au Folles, all by itself. i can't help it. i realize how dated this is, how dated i am. zeroing in on the parade float with the leather boys letting it all hang out of assless chaps. on the flip side are the on-the-street-homos I walk past here at home who are as hard to identify as the metro sexual straights in the what's-going-on-here local bar. i'm as often off with my gay-dar as on. however, when i walk up commercial street in P-town, it hits me all over again. there they are, the too-tanned, short-shorted shrieking pansies ogling anyone within eye-shot just to get attention. the elders (like myself) look over their glasses with impotent lust at the young, the cute and the out and proud as if they'd missed something back in the day. this makes me want to run, to take the New Years vow my friend Peter took back in '85 and 'go back in the closet' because he'd had it with the homos, the culture, the silliness and the emphasis on surface beauty, youth, ass... which would of course be the last thing any of us need: more hiding, more suicides, more beatings, more killings, more prejudice. still i wonder, are we people first, queer second? do i ask as a pre-emptive question of my straight friends if they're straight? is that the way they introduce themselves: 'hi. i'm Tom. i'm straight'. no they don't, there is no need. meanwhile the outrageous queen makes it known for miles how different he is. look at me. i'm here, i'm queer, i'm fabulous... but he deserves to, doesn't he? or she? deserve to be who they are, hell or high water, tutu or sleek couture, punk purple or tranny? come on already, girlfriend, get over your snotty self. don't beat around the bush. you're a fag. you always have been. your sexual orientation that took however long to admit to yourself, to your friends, to the world, is now your badge of honor, your cred, your artsy mystique. use it, baby. use it to seduce. 'weird homo voo doo' a kid once called it. don't pull that 'weird homo voo doo shit on me' he said. as if that would insinuate me into his pants. still, it baffles, all of it. because i long to just quiet down all the hissing cruising gesticulating steam and stares and just talk for a bit about anything besides movie reviews or clothes or who's doing whom. ok, i do all those things. so yeah, maybe i'm the most egregious example of the self-hating homo. but there you have it. c'est moi. i prefer the ambiguous bars where my predatory instinct feels at least in the murky pool of impossibility, possible. that conversation may or may not lead to intimacy but will at least spool out a thread of contact that does not necessarily lead to deed, but at least to connection. but what's up with that? my friend Danny (scorer of infinite boys) claimed: 'it's sex or love, baby', and not both inotherwords. so where am i? i guess i identify with the Beats, with Ginsberg where love finds a home in dark places, in friendship, in art. his affliction being his continuous, obsessive attachment to straight boys. i'm with you there, Allen, dark it can be. deep, dark and beautiful.

fat face

2009-09-07T12:32:00.001-07:00

every single morning, out of the sack i fart, piss, feed my cat, rip open the curtains, gulp vitamins and park in front of computer. every single morning. but today i notice a strange hot tingling expanding on surface of my chest. it ekes it's way up my neck, down across my forearms, onto my face and then, as if sunburned from the inside out, the skin on my cheeks begins to bloat, as if Botox is being injected into all the wrong places. instead of ironing out a crevasse, it plumps up the skin on either side creating an aerial Grand Canyon of my face. i look as grotesque and distorted as The Thing. in the mirror i see the distortion with horror-movie horror (hands on the side of my face and a silent scream). after 30, 40 minutes, it goes away. my doc thinks its a late developing allergic reaction to the vitamin ammo i've been shoving down my throat for the last 30 years. i'm gonna try not taking them and keeping an eye peeled. should it happen again, i'll take a snap, or a sped-up, time lapse video - a narcissist's nightmare on Centre Street.

bad burgers

2009-09-07T12:31:00.004-07:00

i am lying prone in the dentist chair for a new crown to replace one 30 years decrepit w/ decay. the doc says i have 'long roots' which is why i need not one but three hits of Novocain or else i'll flop around in the chair like a beached trout. the temporary insert is plastic. 'chew on one side until you get the new one', he advises. back home later, the drug worn off, my jaw throbs with the abuse i suffered. the left side of my mouth can't smile, drool drools out and it hurts to open. eat something, you'll feel better i tell myself like a Jewish mother. i check the Food Wall menu to find something tofu soft and then rethink. ah ha! there's leftovers in the fridge from the barbecue last Sunday. i toss out the chicken (which smells like dead mice) and accept the frozen tomatoes, brown lettuce and two ok burger patties. i tease out a crusty bottom-of-foot-yellow bun. i plop the patties into the Teflon skillet i bought my room mate Travis months ago, replacing his old one. the surface was so scarred it took totally un-Teflon like, violent scrapings to scour clean. i tap in some garlic powder and pepper and cover the pan with a glass lid. it seems as if it's gonna take awhile to get cooked so i drift back to the piano to practice, losing track until i smell something nasty. it's the burgers! fuck! at first i hope (finger to chin): 'hmm..., they must be ready. nice.' but the kitchen's a disaster, the pan is in flames, smoke is billowing like a dust storm and the burgers have transmogrified into rock hard charcoal briquettes. i click off the burner and yank the pan clear just as the smoke alarm squawks with a robotic female voice: 'fire! fire!'. the smoke fills the kitchen and hallway. i flip on the porch fan to suck out the smoke. it crashes to the floor. my cat skitters down the hall, her hind legs like dragon fly wings. i re-set the fan, the smoke dissipates, the alarm gives up and i construct a sorry assemblage of bun, 'blackened' burger, a sliver of bad-smelling cheese, 2 tomatoes, a slab of lettuce and a squish of ketchup. i had to chisel the burgers off the pan. a hammer would have helped. i eat the bed i make. i eat the embedded teflon too. i shuffle down the hall and fire up the latest episode of The Wire. i inhaled my chemical dinner, careful to keep everything to one judicious side on my mouth. later on, washing up, i realize i'd destroyed the new Teflon and will have to buy another. hey, not all homos can cook.

fish nets

2009-09-07T12:31:00.003-07:00

you make a snap decision and it turns out to be a fiasco. this time it was fish nets, lime green, sparkly fish nets. i try them on at a college gig, a fucking college. i'm wearing short shorts, a see-thru skimpy ladies 'blouse', gold reflective converse all stars and fucking lime green fish nets. if this was a nod to glam, to Bowie, to some consistent 'look' maybe i could have cut it. but no, this was a fluke. it came out of left field. it was right up there with the gold lame pajamas i wore for an Orchestra Luna show at the Orpheum. the band didn't get written up, but the pajamas did. 'jumping around the stage like a hot potato in tin foil'. good going, Berlin. but still, on the top of the embarrassment mountain were the lime green fish nets with my leg hair squirting out between the gnarly threads.

rage dichotomy

2009-09-07T12:31:00.001-07:00

when i was a teenager one of the seniors at my high school, a kid named Castigliano, punched me in the face twice and shoved me into a swimming pool for 'foul-mouthing his girl' (why do we never forget these things?). i had no idea what he was talking about. i'd had maybe 5 beers and was just standing there, at the edge of the oval pool, zit-faced, nonplussed and oblivious. that's when Castigliano clocked me. springing into action, before the 2nd hit, i clenched my fist. i was gonna give him the goods for real, but i...ah...didn't have the balls. my arm froze. ok, he was bigger, stronger and nastier than i was, but the picture in my head of my fist slamming into his pretty jaw disarmed me. i couldn't hurt him, or was afraid to, or so i told myself, or, or, or. my friends yanked me out of the chlorine, dabbed at the cut on my face and consoled me, but i never got over it. i whimped out, a total wuss. this confuses me today because i'm such a sicko badass steroidal motherfucker on the turnpike. any asshole hugging the bumper of my old lady' Grand Am and i hang in there like a mule, 20 mph over the limit, a wall of traffic in the right lane, a stream of cars in mine and this bastard can go fuck himself. i revel in the phantom violence. i will not give one bloody inch. when at long last there's an opening on the right for me to scoot into and let the cunt pass, i ignore it. i even slow down a bit just to piss him off, hit the gas and then, lurching ahead, smile my most vindictive smile. this fucking fuck will not pass my fucking gay-assed red car, no way, no how! i play chicken with 16-wheelers, six pack pick-up trucks and Mercedes elitists. this is a silly, lethal contest of wills that i choose to game, cool in my cocoon, white knuckles on the wheel, on fire with clenched-jawed glee. i become the total opposite of the girly boy at the pool who was too chickenshit to fight back.

cute

2009-09-07T12:30:00.002-07:00

‘cute’ applies in a weird way to my mom, even as she's fighting lung cancer with chemotherapy treatments in Portland. one day before her 77th birthday she tugs at the edge of her wig. the tendrils of what’s left of her hair peek out. i snip some off. we laugh, but i notice that fear shades her eyes from time to time, or a far away, inward look as she drifts off from our conversation. her trembling hands look up a number in the yellow pages. her green-rimmed eyeglasses tuck under the wig like a pencil stuck into a rubber bathing cap. her eyebrows (one bent and lonely stalk here, another there) are more sparse than ever. she walks steadfastly away from the waiting room in her regulation robin’s egg blue hospital robe for an x-ray. she does not look back. her wig is on right, but to her it feels as if it bubbles up on top of her head, leaving an itchy cavity between her balding skull and the nap of the wig. she applies herself to this assault of lethal chemicals with what-else-am-I-going-to-do-about-it-I-hope-this-works-matter-of-fact Yankee courage, dread, hope and helplessness. all this is transparent in her wrinkled face, the face which she finds ‘so old’ when she looks in the mirror. tonight I catch a glimpse of her in her underpants and sunset boulevard turban. she says goodnight all over again as she sees me seeing her, but she does not start. she is not ashamed of her body, of her mottled skin, the testament to her ongoing battle with pre-melanoma. she is girlish undressing for bed, caught like a snapshot in the soft light.

vacancy

2009-09-07T12:30:00.001-07:00

watching last weekend's Winter Soldier II i was struck by how distant i am from knowing, in any profound or visceral way, what it is that a soldier, any soldier, suffers. i've not been there to watch my comrade get shot to death or have his arm blown off. i've not been there when the machine gun in my hand severs the head of the 'enemy' while his son looks on. i've not been there arriving home, stepping off a bus, looking into the eyes of family, friends, loved ones and feeling that they can never comprehend where i have been, what i have seen or what i have done. i've not had my humanity trained out of me, dehumanizing and demonizing 'the other'. i've never know the screaming pain of having my leg exploded by a roadside bomb, my face acned with shrapnel or my mind lost in the paranoid nightmare of PTSD. i never will unless Jamaica Plain is invaded and i take up a butter knife to defend my old lady's railroad apartment. i sit stunned in front of the computer screen as i listen the story of the father who takes his 22 year old son's body into his arms and lifts him up out of the garden hose noose he had used to hang himself. i collect with other in the rain for an anti-war vigil by the JP Civil War Monument. we are few. cars honk by in the drizzle. our quiet assemblage is not noticed by anyone who has the power stop this war. my out of Iraq now sign blurs in the wet and assuages no one hurt or destroyed in battle. i fear this unknowing on my part although i am grateful to have never known the hot hell of war. i ache for those who cry out, but my pain is nothing compared to theirs. i 'think' - god bless you, but i don't know who or what god is.

first fight

2009-09-07T12:29:00.004-07:00

i heard between my parents was in Weatogue, Connecticut, in 1955. our house was a big-box, 3-story, white clapboard wedding cake, with a wrap around porch, acres of lawn, copper beach trees and a massive untended vegetable garden. it was idyllic and the least disturbing, miraculous part of my childhood, until one night, late, after bedtime, when i got up to pee in flannel pajamas, no hair down there, watching the stream, shaking off until i heard something new, an argument in the kitchen. the voices thundered up the backstairs. i heard mom, furious, her tears folded into the yelling. i heard dad screaming back at her and a glass shattering. i tip-toed to the top of the back stairs and the shouting got louder, but the words were either indistinct or i didn't let myself understand them. i hadn't a clue my parents weren't ok with each other. just that afternoon i helped dad paint New Yorker cartoons on a bathroom wall (a rare collaboration). last night i watched mom get ready for a cocktail party in her incredible gold dress. 'you look like a movie star, like Tallulah Bankhead', i bragged. (Tallulah's voice, deep, low and ironic, had captivated my prepubescent imagination, replacing the Lone Ranger in my pantheon of luminaries.) but that was hours ago. this fight hit me like a rock in the head. I covered my ears and retreated to the back porch, a screened-in, second story 'day room'. there the sound was muffled. i was 'intrigued + repulsed at the same time' (as my friend Jane said once about seeing a strap-on for the first time). it was like finding out that Santa Claus was a lie. i took mom's side in my little head. she was hurt. i should defend her. but was that fair? i hated hating my dad. sure enough, a month later, things got worse. when he took me on a ski trip, i ratted him out. he was plastered. there were women on couches in our bedroom laughing. one, two? college girls? i wasn't sure. this was new. they were 'guests' i supposed. but they also seemed to 'be with' him in some way i didn't understand. while i'm on the phone checking in i tell mom about it - the drinking, the girls and right in front of him, close enough to get smacked, he went berserk. he said he'd never trust me again, his fairy-assed son. the little boy he calls the Prince as in 'you pay more attention to the Prince than you do your own husband'. and this after she refused to call in sick for him at the bank. 'you're hung over, you're not sick. go to work'. i thought she was right, but i was never sure. i was proud of how crazy he was. of how easily he could make her laugh. how he liked to fart in the elevator and blame it on a stranger. but i remembered that first fight and i wanted to protect her from being hurt again. so i ratted him out, 100%. i shamed him in front of his college girls and in front of me, his son. i threatened his manhood. two years later on a train from Philly to Montreal for yet another ski trip we kids were about to conk out in bunk beds, the clickity-clack train wheels soothing us down, when dad stumbled in, shattered and loud. mom clocked him one, a sucker punch to the jaw and he went down. it had to be tough for a guy to get punched out by his wife in front of his kids. i realized, deep down, that we loved them equally. it was more painful to take sides than not, even as we did, jumping from one ship to the other in hopes of some miraculous balance. we are never certain where love lies. we wonder if our subsequent luck or ill fortune in the relationship game grew from that fierce, unyielding Yankee tempest.

in the weeds

2009-09-07T12:29:00.003-07:00

i first got high in college, my senior year. 'when does it begin?' i wonder. 'i don't notice anything...'. i lay back on a filthy dormitory persian rug, closed my eyes and tripped into cartoon land. Daffy Duck quacked at me in a field of sunflowers, leaping and laughing, an animation by van gogh. a week later i listened to Horowitz perform Chopin's funeral etude. my mother appeared in a pale blue greek robe crossing a cracked Dali desert. her head fell back, freighted with sadness, an exaggerated Picasso profile weeping slow motion mercury tears. she held my father in her arms, like a baby, his tiny limbs were crooked and blackened like the burnt ends of match sticks. she traversed the landscape in deliberate Martha Graham strides. her movement echoed the dark, basso piano chords Vladimer struck. i was shattered by the visceral hallucination that came on by inhaling this tiny, dried up plant. it was 1967 and i jumped on the flower power bandwagon. sadly, years later, i got paranoid every time i smoked. i talked too much, i laughed too loudly, i stared too aggressively and hated the high. pot stopped being fun. some wise old goat on a Cambridge street corner explained that this happens to some of us. that it's physiological. the body reaches a tipping point. the bad outweighs the good. Mary Jane scowls. she's over you. she's moved on. after many more tests to prove him wrong, i gave up. i stopped. no more Ganja. no more paranoid nightmares. not for me. in the late 90's a friend came to town. we went to his brother's apartment. the pipe was passed. maybe this time, i hope. maybe this time my body's cured of its aversion. 2 puffs later i'm in orbit. i can't shut up. i can't uncross my legs. i'm frozen, babbling and jumping out of my skin. my friend turns to me and says, deadpan: 'you know, Rick, no one is listening to you'. it took every ounce of energy for me to stand up, find a dark empty room, lie down and wait for it to go away. my body once again rejected the high. lately, however, on occasion, with rarely more than one other person, i can handle a one-shot hit and be ok. it's fun again. pissing takes a century and every conversational nuance is brilliant, insight at every corner. i get lost in the face of the beautiful. wow, man, your teeth, your crooked yellow teeth are fuckin beautiful, and the place where your neck disappears into your shirt...

the love lottery

2009-09-07T12:29:00.001-07:00

don't get me wrong, i like sorella's. there's something about it. it's not quite a diner and is hardly an uppity cafe. the food can be sketchy. in June a kid was found puking his omlette into the gutter. you have to be smart about what you order. eggs over easy, luke warm home fries, dark toast with bacon usually gets the job done. the coffee is hardcore, a surefire diuretic promising the inevitable tippy-toe walk to the toilet or a sprint back home with your fingers pressed like a prayer against your sphincter. my favorite thing is to go there alone, on a Sunday, eat something safe, read and inventory the beautiful boys. last week they sat me upstairs. i prefer the original room with the ugly greek art and omlette signs, but i don't really care. the fat guy who waits on me, thighs chafing against thighs, is a scenic view in and of himself. oddly, there is not One Single Handsome Person in sight which is fine, making it easier to concentrate on my book. i live on the edge and order a vegetable crepe with a side of braised tempeh. it arrives tepid and dull tasting and the crepe the fat guy smacks down is spilling over with fruit. i didn't order fruit, but i refuse to make a scene. (we waiters never want to make a fuss or embarrass a comrade.) soon, however, the big man returns with the veggie version: raw onion, raw sprouts, damaged spinach in a cold crepe. I wolf it down, i'm in a good mood. my noir novel (The Dead Yard - McKinty) is clickity-clacking down the track. i get lost in it and in the dead yard on my plate until, simultaneously, two couples are seated on either side of my table. the girls are as striking as the boys. my eyes lift furtively from the page. the kid facing me on my left has black briary Brezhnev eyebrows, corn blue eyes and full lips, as if lipstick engorged. he and his girl spend hours lost in each other's eyes. they have that wet just-showered-after-a morning-fuck hair, thick and heavily scented from post coital cum (my imagination is off the charts). he smiles as i lurch up from the table to leave, a stack of singles under my coffee cup. i ask, nervously, if he's seen Rushmore. he has. 'you look like that kid', i say, with a big ingratiating smile. 'no kidding?' it's safe to connect on a silly pretense. but it is the boy to my right that knocks the breath out of me. i stare over my glasses at his legs, Beardsley profile, wild art school hair, big boots. i must look like a sex-starved librarian. i picture him in boxer shorts, boner poking a tent, a cliche porn fantasy. what's most captivating is what he and his girlfriend are doing. they are taking turns drawing on a single napkin. that's right, drawing, with a blunt golf score pencil. she is engrossed as he looks on. it is as if she traces a line on his naked back, in the sun, on the beach sending a shiver up his spine. she pushes the paper over. it's his turn. i try to see what the images are. i'm guessing they're hieroglyphs of a personal, in-joke nature. i can't tell. it doesn't matter. it is this thing between them, this happy, sandbox way of liking each other that is beautiful. i love them for it. is she French? she has that Paris girl, Band of Outsiders vibe with no makeup, pouty lips, a sexy overbite, disheveled hair and who cares clothes. they are lost in the game. they have won the love lottery.

collision doll

2009-09-07T12:28:00.003-07:00

at 14 we thought it would be cool if we could get cars to crash at night, on a dark stretch of road near our house in Wayne. there were nine of us. Henry, Harlow, John, Teddy, Lilian, Keith and the three Kinscherfs. we made a life-sized doll out of clothes and stuffing and strung a clothesline across the street near a bend in the road that was surrounded by trees. we dropped the line, lax with the doll looking like a ten year old child, attached at the neck. we practiced. we would abruptly yank the clothesline and the fake kid would snap to startled attention, performing like a marionette. we waited in the trees. it was past midnight. it was cool out, not cold. no shivering. we hid on either side of the road waiting for two cars. one from one end of the street, one from the other. then we heard them. we could see the headlights. we knew what to do and we knew how to escape. we knew the woods, the crazy property. as they neared, 200 yards between them, we snapped the rope and the little fake kid popped up like a deer. both cars slammed on the brakes. tires burned rubber and screeched to a slow motion halt, but not fast enough to avoid cracking into each other. we heard the glass shattering, one headlight out, mad cursing from both drivers and doors opening and closing. we crept backwards into the dark woods and made our get away, hearts pounding, sweaty, unable or even afraid to speak. we were pretty sure no one was hurt, but that they might have been was a chastening thought. we stopped doing stuff like that afterwards. we never read about the accident or heard anything, but we knew, each of us. it was an unspoken secret. we lived, if for a few frightening minutes, on the island of the 'Lord of the Flies'.

mouse twitching

2009-09-07T12:28:00.001-07:00

my cat, Sofi Wan Kenobi (or Sofia Di Putzi, or Sofi Anon depending on my mood) is a runt with a tiny head and a tiny body. she has a funny off kilter walk and a lopsided, skittering run. in fact she gallops (i hear there's a ten syllable German word for this) up and down the hallway of our apartment, thundering 'hoofs'. i chase her in my socks, trying to imitate her, to make her run faster. she loves this. Sofi's inky black, with yellow/green eyes and a few straggly white hairs on her chest. she distrusts everybody. she hid behind a couch for 2 weeks when i got her, second hand, from a girl moving to the West Coast. the girl called her Zoey, which was cool, but i had to name her for myself. if i was gonna feed her and solicit her affection, then i should call her what the fuck i wanted to. strangely she's a one man cat and i'm her man. he who feeds her... but of course there's more to it than that. i think she got kicked around in her old neighborhood, like Nixon and it's still with her, the paranoia. she's also sweet. when she watches TV in my lap, her purr is so loud you can hear it in the next room. she licks my hands and arms to wake me up in the morning and she's a pro at those seductive 'i love you' eyes. last summer i had to extract a few of her teeth. they were rotten at the root. it cost a small fortune. she survived the surgery, but had to be fed mushed-up tuna and water for weeks, hating the dry pellets when forced to go back. a funny result is that her tongue gets caught in her missing tooth gums during a licking session. it gags her tiny throat. she reels it back in, like a birthday curly horn contracting back into place. it makes her look lie a Turette kitty. i refuse to let her get fat. i'm obsessive about it. too much to ask of a dime-sized heart, i rant. i feed her parsimonious portions 4 times a day which means she wakes me up at 6:30 in the morning staring at me. 'NO,' i say. 'NO, SOFI!' but she's right. she's always right about feeding time. i lumber out of bed, feet like ski boots and clink her pellets into the bowl. afterwards i can't sleep. i read. noir fiction while my noir cat glares, nose-to-nose, hoping for a post breakfast scratch. i give in, pat, purr, scratch, lean, purr, read. she's a super hunter. handling the mice problem is a total sport. i can tell she's caught one when i hear her leap up and through the secret door in my closet making muffled meow sounds, mouse in mouth. she lets it go, chasing it to pieces. i find the shriveled creature in the morning, tweeze it's tail with a square of toilet paper and dump it in the garbage. when she doesn't kill it dead and it's not alive enough to interest her, it twitches on the floor, partially upright, tiny feet just so. i touch the tail and one little matchstick leg shivers. i jump, horrified. i can't put it in the garbage until i'm sure it's totally utterly kaput. i won't let it suffocate in the stench. but it hurts, this Mother Nature struggle, which Sofi always always wins. i'm proud of her, but i feel badly for da poor widdle mousey.

nostril yoga

2009-09-07T12:27:00.002-07:00

when i catch cold and sometimes when i don't, i have a serious which-nostril-to-breathe-out-of freak out. one works, the other doesn't. the working one clogs, the other one's clear. a needle thin stream of air bites the roof of the back of my mouth. i try everything. i lie on my side with one sheet fold covering the open nostril. i lie on my back with my head under covers (forcing my cat the fuck out of the way). i press the clear nostril hard into the pillow at just the right angle to allow for some-but-not-too-much air. i twist a wad of tissue into a cork and plug/adjust the aperture. i open my mouth like grandpa, making my lungs happy even as this provokes cotton mouth. if all else fails i sit up and read until i'm exhausted enough to not give a shit about what a disaster the entire situation has become. if i were a shaman or a guru or a disciple i'd know for sure that this was an opportunity to practice yoga breath, elevate my consciousness and 'arrive'. don't breathe, be happy.

hot springs

2009-09-07T12:27:00.001-07:00

It's 1968 and i'm eligible for a draft deferment if i teach shcool or join the Peace Corps. terrified of Viet Nam, of killing or being killed or of being a shitty teacher, i opt for the Peace Corps (Korea) but get the boot half way through training. the shrink diagnoses me as a confrontational personality that won't cut it in a non-confrontational society like Korea. i would be the classic ugly American. my next try was for a teaching deferment. through Yale i land a job as a special class/art teacher in a one-street town called Moosup (as in 'there's a moose up the river'), Connecticut. i last 8 months. i fall in love with one of my students, E. he lives across the street from my boarding house in a nearly-falling-into-the-river, two story shack with his mom, her boyfriend(s) and 6 brothers and sisters. by winter, i am sleeping in his bed every single night. no one minds. we are tentative physically. i get no sleep and tip-toe out in the morning, shoes dangling from two fingers, rush across Main Street, dress for school and get picked up by the football coach, my heart in vertigo. Moosup Junior High is not eton or Exeter (where i imagine boys slept with boys and/or teachers for centuries as a right of passage and part of the curriculum). of course this is bullshit. i'm working a public school in a tiny town with tiny minds. E will be found out, shamed or worse. god knows what might happen to me. i decide the best thing for everyone is to skip town. i ride to Philly on my Kawasaki 650, depressed and weakly suicidal. when i call E up, twenty years later, his son answers: 'dad's out,' he says. i tell him who i am, how i knew his dad and before i can finish explaining the kid shouts, 'Rick!? from Moosup?!' like i'm some long lost hero, back from traversing the globe, the person his father told him about. when E takes the phone, he tells me that i wouldn't like him now. that he has a pot belly and isn't 'that way' anymore. he says we'd been good with each other then and are still so today. maybe we'll get a beer if he comes up north. but this conversation occurs long after i try, only one short year after Moosup, to take a second crack at teaching, this time in a co-ed boarding school in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. what was i thinking? sure enough, three months down the road i have 'those feelings' again, this time for K, my english student. we spend hours together, get messed up on Robitussin, weed and take long walks in the snow, the electricity of high emotion and laughter bouncing off the hills. sometimes i lie in his lower bunk, he in the upper we hold hands top to bottom. not saying a word, smiling. we drive to the top of a hill, take off our clothes and slip into the hot springs, floating there, at peace and forgetting school, job, drama, age difference (i am 21, he's 16) and thrive in the moment of our friendship, close, a bit in love. it is a rare, psychedelic oasis on top of a Colorado peak and though we never 'do anything', i'm 'caught', accused of sleeping with boys AND girls and fired. they shunt me off to a motel where i drop acid and wait until one of my teacher friends sneaks K down to see me one last time. we hold each other, cry some and then, next day, he goes back to school and i take the bus to Denver for my draft physical, acid high and scared to death. i flunk. i have letters from two shrinks that are conclusive. i am both 'suicidal AND homicidal', a 4F. this was the ignominious end to both my last stand as a teacher and dodging bullets in Nam. i write K long letters about everything, missing him. i guess they were love letters. the headmaster reads them aloud to the student body at lunch in the cafeteria embarrassing my friend and dooming our relationship. i try to repair the damage by driving to Santa Barbara and waiting for him when he flies home for Christmas. but when he arrives he doesn't want to see me. it had been too much to bear, the public humiliation. it is a long, amphetamine drive home. i suppose, even as i was terrified and partly ashamed of everything that went down, it was time to take seriously the idea that i might become that most wonderful, infamous identity: artist/musician/homo.

stand by us

2009-09-07T12:26:00.004-07:00

Stevie MacIntyre lived in a one-story shack, damp and mildewed and covered with grey rotting shingles and an absentee mom and dad. or maybe i just never saw them. he had boxes and boxes of comic books that we'd pull out from under his bed and leaf through, lying side-by-side on the floor, up on elbows like praying mantises. Stevie was poor, at least compared to us. we lived in a big white three-story house with lots of land, a horse barn (without horses), a swimming pool, a vegetable garden and 'help', 2 tons of it as my dad used to say. 2 fat women and a rail thin old man. Stevie was my best friend and it was only much later that i noticed the contrast in our houses and the incomes of our dads. every afternoon after school, i'd walk over to his house though a path in the woods that stood between our properties. we'd hang out, run around the fields, show each other our 'things' under the umbrella branches of a weeping willow and throw rocks at the trains that ran behind our houses. i don't think we talked much, but we were inseparable. Stevie had mouse soft hair, cut close with an upturn at his widow's peak. he wore second-hand clothes and his fingernails were dirty but there was nothing insecure or apologetic about him. i think the favorite thing we did was pluck over ripe tomatos off the stems in our vegetable garden (which eventually died the slow death of neglect). we'd lick the skin, salt them down, bite into them with the juice and seeds squirting all over our faces as we'd smile that big smile of knowing that we both felt the same joy at the same time. it stayed like that, Stevie and Ricky until Richard Tebay moved into town. he was the new kid, spry, handsome and soon to replace Stevie as the person i wanted most to be with. maybe this was my earliest glimpse of homo-love although i wouldn't have called it that. it was also, in a way, my first infidelity, the first time i can remember moving away from one heart attachment to another. one afternoon my grandmother caught Richard and I pulling each other's pants off on my bed. Richard left in a hurry. after we moved to Philly, we wrote letters, quasi love letters to each other. when i think about it, Stevie and i were easier friends. we didn't share or require the love assault on our emotions. i'm not sure if he was hurt being upstaged by Richard or if he was i did nothing to quiet him or to repair our friendship. regardless, both boys played a part in my early life. Stevie by being the kid who, from the 'other side of the tracks' didn't have a phony bone in his body and Richard by being the accepting object of my affection. they continue to live in my heart to this day. don't they all.

dancing with cuba

2009-09-07T12:26:00.003-07:00

i'm a busy guy. i like to think so. if i'm hurtling through the day, the last thing i need is some unexpected distraction or person obliterating my bullet head get-out-of-my-way schedule. i slither out of most of them with a big laugh or a joke at my expense, but sometimes i can't get away with it. the onslaught is too persistent, or too cute to say no. it's a good thing too, because those are the times it's good for me to fend off the ticker tape, the static in my head and enter some new dimension, unannounced. about a week ago i dropped downstairs to La Casa del Regados where my landlady, the irrepresable Aida Lopez holds court and keeps my mail for me. (i lost the key to our mailbox a few months back down a rabbit hole at the foot of the stairs). so Aida retrieves it from the mailman, straps on a rubber band to hold what is mostly junk in place and points it out to me with her big Cuban smile, hands held together in front of her waist. last week she had her blaster on playing serious Cha Cha music. she twirled up at me, grabbed my wrists and made me dance with her. laughing it up in her high soprano, musical laugh. dip, spin, twirl, laugh, Cha Cha Cha. it was crazy. i was completely caught up in it and i hate to dance. i'm the sour pus at the wedding when all the drunks are up on the floor shimmying and grinding and i feel like a boob, checking my watch like the elder Bush debating Clinton. i can't wait t get outa there. last time i actually got off on dancing was on a hit of ecstacy at a gay bar with a Very Cute 'Straight' kid. we were not appreciated. too many big gestures that didn't go with the territory. it took a pill to get me out of myself enough to not think about every little dumb move i was making and that was on one rare night. dancing with Aida was another. i think the two events are at least 15 years apart, but maybe, had i lived in Cuba...

strike out

2009-09-07T12:26:00.001-07:00

my mom was in a recuperation house after having a piece of her lung cut out. (T.B.) i was 11 or 12. because she was away, they thought it'd be smart to send me off to camp, to Camp Viking on Cape Cod. i made a model of a schooner with sleek black hull. it actually sailed, which was nice. i went on trips in the real thing. we skinny dipped at dawn. it was an ok time, but unfortunately i was sick most of the summer and spent it in sick bay. me and another kid spotted was a knot hole in the wall that we pushed out on purpose so we could look in on the nurse's station. we would peek in and watch her undress. we never saw much beyond bra and panties. i wasn't sure about myself in the naked girl turn-on department, but i do remember liking the shoulder of the other kid against mine as we watched with naughty excitement. not that we ever did anything, him and i. one night he decided that i needed a 'sex lesson'. he made me take off my pajamas. with a pencil and paper he drew a cock and balls and showed me how 'the white stuff' came up out of the balls and squirted out of the boner. he also showed me on me by touching my stiff little erection with the eraser end of the pencil. i never forgot it. still, none of this was as critical or as shameful as the baseball incident. i didn't realize that i was a fairy back then. (who does?) what i did know was that i was a shitty athlete, even before Viking. there i stood on the field during batting practice one hot afternoon a few days before i wound up in sick bay for good (was there a connection?). i stood at the plate, legs apart, bat cocked like a wet noodle and could not hit the ball to save my life. not even once. swing, miss, swing, miss over and over and over again until i was fighting back tears. the coach pitched meatballs and still i couldn't hit. 'you're gonna stand there, kinscherf, in the batter's box and you're not getting out of here until you hit the god-damned baseball!' he warned, level-eyed, a real man. i stood there shaking and crying and swinging and missing and swinging and missing. it was a horror show. the other kids stood around watching, scuffing their cleats. he didn't let them make jokes, but i could hear what they were thinking: 'faggot'.

the real thing

2009-09-07T12:25:00.004-07:00

we had a silver blue Weimeraner named Boo (after Boo Radley). he had yellow eyes and a sweet disposition that was unusual for his breed. most of the ones i'd met were high strung bugged-eyed and scrawny. Boo was a shade on the mournful side. maybe because we had his balls cut off. what was left was an embarrassing prune that everyone could see under his clipped tail. and he hated being observed doing his business. he'd crane his neck around in the squat position to see if we were looking. he also had a serious fart problem. they would hiss out of his ass like a steam iron and he'd look more world weary than ever, staring at his behind with an 'oh God what WAS that?!...' expression, rise and lope to another room, repulsed by his own stench. as a kid i remember he would issue forth under the table where Granny was playing bridge with her friends. tap, tap, tap she'd drum her forefinger waiting to play a card. Boo would erupt, get up and leave the room, with a left behind odor so overwhelming it seemed to 'appear' under the table, wafting into the nostrils of Granny and Co. she was stalwart, her reaction - a single raised eyebrow. Boo's best friend in the world was a neighborhood Dachshund named Mopsy who was as diminutive and ladylike as Boo was substantial. copper brown with perfect sharp teeth and toe nails. she lived down the hill, across a skirt of lawn, over a stream and up a slope in a big brand new millionaire's mustard stucco mansion. every now and then she'd wander out onto our field, a nearly invisible spot against the grass. one afternoon, when my dad and his pals were driving golf balls from an imaginary 'tee' near our house, one of the balls hit Mopsy in the ribs. she blew up like a balloon. (she had a habit of getting in the way.) there was the time i was painting a 4x8 foot 'Picasso' rip off for an art show at school. it had to be laid on the floor for me to work on it. Mopsy clicked her sharp black nails across the painting i suppose in an effort to satisfy her curiosity or just to fuck with me. the paints were made from egg whites. (the fresco materials were a mix of pigment powder and egg). i picked her up by the skin on her back, heaved her across the room and out the door. i didn't feel good about it, but Mopsy didn't need human love. she had Boo who visited her every day. he had befriended Charlie the milkman, who tossed Boo a milk bone, let him hop into the truck and drove him down to the Mopsy mansion. there they'd hang out, go on a garbage hunt, get their fill and walk back up the slope to our house. there they'd sit, side-by-side, just off the flagstone porch and stare down the hill like a couple of old ladies in rockers. to us they were like lovers. when it was time for Mopsy to go home, Boo'd walk her the whole way and come back, a bit lonely we thought. after Mopsy left this world (at 17) Boo was never the same. he left himself not long after.

wearing the habit

2009-09-07T12:25:00.003-07:00

i repeat myself over and over and over again. i pretend that i don't. that i am a creative person 24/7. i try to break habits, to prove that i reinvent everything all the time, but the truth is i can't help it. try as i might to change this, i get bent out of shape in a heartbeat and revert to repetition. this is most apparent in the shower: 1) i turn on the spigot, wait for the heat to rise and piss in the tub while standing outside. 2) i reach and blend cold with hot to a scalding, burn-yourself-clean technique. 3) i step in, first left foot then right, my face in the hard rain, squeezing my eyes closed against the water as it hits the hair line, my cupped hands in front of my face to repel Niagara in a pantheistic prayer, the hair in face then shoved up and back, a quick flip which lands the collected water in the tub behind me like a bitch slap. 4) i shampoo leaving the suds on top like a frilly cap. 5) i lather up my face, burning my cheeks in prep for an easy shave. 6) i soap up the neck, upper shoulders, pits, arms, tits, nipples, legs, balls, cock, under ass, ass crack and asshole having turned so my back faces the nozzle. 7) i scrape off the excess soap, bend over, pull the cheeks apart, douche my asshole, check for shit specks in the teeth of the bath mat and tweeze out and nudge them down the reluctant drain. 8) i rinse the shampoo out and squeeze off the excess water. 9) i lazy susan turn back into the steam, admiring the impressionistic bathroom wall art. 10) i twist the chrome knobs hard shut, drag the shower curtain to the right and towel off in a predictable order: face, hair, pulled ears, head and neck, pits, upper arms, torso, back, ass, legs and feet. i've tried reversing the procedure: feet, legs, asshole, ass, arms, etc - but it was too weird. i'm trapped in a cage i built myself. i wonder what other parts of my life's assembly line this repetition owns. i wonder if any live-in relationship, or LTR, could survive these set-in-my-ways parameters. it's way too late. i fancy myself an improviser and i am a latin teacher: 'repetitio est mater studiorum' (repetition is the mother of students).

return to sender

2009-09-07T12:25:00.001-07:00

it seems, much as we fight it, that on many levels we become our parents, especially as we get older. our bodies and personalities fun house mirror them both (Dick and Jane in my case) and resistance is futile. i see their legs when i throw mine up and over my head in the (yoga) 'plow' every morning. there they are, white as a flounder's belly, my bowling pin thick and hairless calves with brown spots the size of quarters from the sun recognizable as both mine and my mom's. the under chin, what's left of it, is strung like a taut hammock in a straight line from chin to Adam's apple, just like Jane's. the heavily lidded eyes are chestnut brown, squinting and ready to laugh just like the old man's. my toenails are warped and twisted like mum's. (she retained enough vanity to paint them, crushed and distorted as they were, whore red.) the back of my hands are thick veined, raw, spotted and crepe-papered like hers. the belly, distended and pale lolls out in slow motion like a poorly curled bowling ball. like Jane, i keep things neat and throw away anything i'm sick of. like Dick i chase the young. like him i like bars and dark adventure. like her i'm frugal and generous at once. like him i never hide from a good fart. like both of them i love to laugh. of course in other ways i presume differences, but i'm closer to the tree than i'd imagined. in my sidewalk self i think im young, smooth-faced and fabulously interesting. did they? i never asked.