my girlfriends

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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.