curtis york

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

small details

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

how do they know

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

the grim smile

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

staring at stuff

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

harlow my hero

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

bloody shave

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