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.

ass

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

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

'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?

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

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?

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?

'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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.