how do they know

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

the grim smile

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

staring at stuff

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

harlow my hero

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

bloody shave

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

patience

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

nureyev revives fonteyn

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