P A R A G R A P H S

note: all of these (and more) can be found here:

sunday 7/1/07
love is just emotion on the make
legs overboard on my roof talking to you on yours, canyon between too far to jump. wouldn't anyway. rubber tar surface heel depressed oozes back like a giant snail. when you smile i can't see it in the bloodshot night even with a fat yellow moon. gesturing nicotine fingers (orange tip circles a bette davis drag), watery emotional voices sloppy with booze makes me wonder about everything. nearly next to you - but better not. not tonight. as if shouting across a line of sheeted laundry - we're safe this way. black pant legs damp sneakers off the end of a rooftop dock-o'-the-bay. clinking ice worth the whole damn night.

monday 7/9/07
the 'regular'
read in BUTT (as in GAYbutt) that year-of-magical-drinking Kiki (of Kiki n Herb) decides that not drinking one day a week is good for the kidneys and liver. i take her advice - though my room mate tells me i don't drink enough for any of this to matter. so what? give it a shot. take sunday off the bud lites and spend it with a book, knees under, pumpkin lampshade overhead feeling 'clean' because 4 buds at the behan, midnight to 1, takes it's toll and lo n behold - the day after is one crystal sky. what i do miss by not going to my regular chair are the big arms of friends, how they look up when another bangs in the door. the laughs the red sox analysis the latest gossip the nod into the night from the unknown bum who's not afraid to talk, who wants to tell his life to a stranger. the cute one at the end of the bar who has me thinking about him when he's not around who was so much fun to spar with the night before even as he avoids me next time 'round when i look to see if there's that spark in his eye when he sees me laughing like an idiot over nothing funny.

sunday 7/14
fantasy nails
a few birthdays back i decide to creep up on fantasy nails on centre st (didn't want t be caught with feet in swirl bucket by unsuspecting friends) to get a pedicure from the vietnamese lady - a ferocious one who pulls one foot out of the swirl bucket and goes at my toenails with a pair of cutter teeth that look like the choppers on a stainless steel psycho beaver. i stare at japanese rock videos on a silent screen. my feet shrivel in the swirl. to be honest, i'm glad to get the lady; the guy's too delicate (a subtle application of eye liner). i want tough love from the bitch on my gnarled, dog-hard toes, warped into gruesome ugliness when, as a killer nun in neverland, i leaped from the stage, landed on a electric cable and broke a foot. you don't get a cast for this kind of injury. you hobble and wait and in the end your foot is a disaster. that photo of Baryshnikov's feet? decades of crushed 'on point'? like that. my big right toe is twisted and bent, my toenails look like fungus muffins. which is why i treat myself to fantasy nails in the first place: the makeover. lifting one heel out of water, dragon lady swipes a cheese slicer across the bottom of my foot and scrapes centuries of yellow callous into the bubbly in larded lumps. the bottoms of my feet are now soft as a puppy's belly. but i'm worried. i remember of polanski's 'repulsion'. catherine deneuve as a manicurist snips a vein paring the cuticles of an elderly man. black blood squirts over white linen, soundless screams ricochet off the walls. (my fantasy at fantasy nails becomes a nightmare.) an arsonist torched the place last year and now fantasy nails is kaput. i try alternatives. none make the grade. who's gonna make my feet once-a-year new now? moi. privatization. when my room mates are outa the apartment i fill a spaghetti pot with water, soak, and chop my screwed up nails, one foot hiked on the tub, ass on toilet, cat meowing outside the door. see, with the soak pot replacing the hi-end swirl im still able to snip my softened nails and nibble off the wierd, stonehenge shapes with impunity. i feel naughty and in-a-hurry fearful of the unexpected room mate catching me in the act, like mom coming in a teenage bedroom at 'the wrong time'.

thursday 7/26
jimmy doody
i was born in sioux city. my sister janie in tuscon. lisa in san francisco. dad made a lotta moves. we didn't actually live in san francisco, but across the bay in oakland. when i tell someone about my past however, i always say san francisco cuz it seems, i dunno, cooler, even thought it isn't. i sort of remember how it was, even though i was only 5. three story walkup. narrow stairs. dark interior. i went to a school where you're supposed to learn immersion french. the teacher, when i arrived my first day, was cleaning piano keys with a cloth. one note at a time. boong...boong......BOONG. never looked up. scared me, but i sweated it out i guess. walked home with a classmate and we'd throw rocks through the windows of an abandoned house, set back from the road, wild lawn, broken gate, discarded biked - a nightmare landscape. rock would shatter glass, hit something weirdly soft and a howl curled up out of the dark recess, freaking the shit out of of us. we'd run away shrieking and laughing, high as kites. i made my first best friends out there. jimmy and judy. 'jimmy doody'. they didn't go to my school but we met up in the afternoon and invented stuff to do. one day we pulled turds out of the toilet, wrapped them in christmas paper and tried selling them door to door. our thinking: there was So Much of it maybe a fortune could be made. needless to say... my dad had a pale green desoto with heavy steel doors that made a sure sound when you shoved them shut. smelled new inside, like leather and gasoline. we took her for a spin across the oakland bridge, one of those with a road surface made of metal gauze. you could see the bay rippling underneath. janie sat shotgun, i was in the middle. her door swung open. her hand on the latch, half her body stretched away from the seat, one foot swinging like a doll's. i could see the blink blinking of the bridge girders flickering underneath. i grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her in. dad was yelling. as i picture it, as it tell it, i saved her life, but i probably made the whole thing up. a month later i swallowed a peach pit. couldn't 'go' for days. they took me to the emergency room. the doctor snapped on a rubber glove, smeared it with goo and pulled the doody out of my ass. jimmy doody. i trace a lot of who i am back to that moment.

thursday 8/25
unicorn horn
as a kid, an 11 year old boy, i found in the woods near our big white house in Connecticut, an antler, or horn. it was nearly three feet long, smooth ivory, a twisted yellowing tusk. i knew it belonged to a Unicorn. it had to. there was no other explanation. i buried it under wet leaves + put a boy's spell on it for safe keeping. i told people about it but never showed it to anyone. finally, it was lost, or decayed into the ground or ether. magic for sure. i still remember it like a favorite character in a book that stayed with me, or a lover from a dream too real for reality.

saturday 9/1
reflections in golden eyes (put another way: porn saves the sexless night)
this is not a lament. it really isn't. it's just that after a certain point, a certain age, we succumb to gravity. we have no choice. all the jogging and lifting and diets in the world lose the battle. evaporating gradually (as if we ever had it) is the commodity of the smooth handsome face, tight under chin, lean upper arms, hammock-less under-eyes, fabulous hair. we cut loose the possibility of Something Ever Happening With A Future (ie 'a relationship'). our surface Self, the one we mock with false modesty, loses it's persuasive lure. we let it go. we have to. instead we employ the brutal truth, honesty as a con, our 'charming' seduction repertoire transmogrified into the quiet qualities of The Listener. youth - the only 'true aphrodisiac' (Rene Ricard) - stops checking us out and looks to others. I remember my Mom, Jane Kinscherf, trying on wigs to hide the hair that had fallen out after weeks of chemotherapy: 'God, I look so old!' her vanity loosely intact but shrugged off in the end with a laugh. it's more weird than sad - the old face refusing to recognize itself, hallucinating a younger version through through the impressionistic blur of squinted eyes. inevitably, deep down, we're pretty sure that we remain that same compelling, fascinating, oddball soul we've always been. that we still have much to ask, to give, to love, to be funny about. but today, at the onset of our greeting card 'sunset years' we reinvent the way we love. it is no longer about the chase, about roping someone in, or having them 'see' us. it's about seeing them in a way that serves their needs and not our own centrifugal neuroses. there's no preparing for this. no text to teach or thumb through - Romance for Old Dummies. late love has it's own slow momentum and moral impetus. the beautiful, unreachable, untouchable boy loves us when he feels like it, not as any falsely flattering sexual fantasy, but because he senses safe houses in our hooded eyes: 'this one has traveled the long love road'. Uncle Awareness is The Man (our new vanity). the beloved and the ancient sleep side-by-side, goat beside shepherd boy undisturbed on some bright Mediterranean island where beings merge without ownership or showboat passion.

monday 9/17
miss zablocki's tits
my 3rd grade teacher, miss zablocki, would stand behind you and gently lower her tits onto your shoulders, placing them there it seemed, warm sleepy kittens against neck, to encourage wonder and confusion. would tit A slide down your chest like dough? would tit B shift and locate an bra-less nipple against nervous skin? would they smell funny, like sour milk? when would they lift off gradually or with a snap? did every kid in class, boy or girl, get the same pair of presents? we never got anwers. we never talked about it. we held her in awe and mild fear. an angry miss zablocki would swat her hand on your desk so hard you jumped. if it hurt her too much she'd use your hand and smack it on the desk instead. whatever you'd done to piss her off you never did again. sometimes, to get your attention, she'd force the entire class to stare at the black board where she'd draw a giant chalk circle that zeroed in (a concentric spiral) like an old fashioned hollywood special effect implying 'crazy'. you'd become discombobulated, nauseous, woozy. in better spirits she'd tell us about her travels abroad. (i think she went alone). floating like balsa wood in the dead sea or playing canasta on a card table in the great salt lake. she maintained a seated position because the salt was buoyant. (this was hard to picture.) she had dark cherry lip-sticked lips, bottom lip larger than upper, with a clown-like exaggeration effective as either smile or frown. when she snapped her fingers the flesh under her arm jiggled like jello. (you weren't supposed to notice.) she was the 1st exotic character i knew - wild flame-dyed hair, trumpeting alto, east european exaggerated hand gestures. she walked to school on cold days, wearing a loose, partially buttoned, billowing blouse, spain red hair writhing like medusa snakes. her long legged high heeled tick tock steps echoing on the pavement. ever since big loud women scare the shit out of me. 3rd grade changes you forever.

monday 10/8
riggy
i spent the spring and summer of 1971 on martha's vineyard, about a year before band after band took over my life. 1971 was the tail end of the summers of love all of which i'd believed in like a hippie evangelical. a lot of acid consumed. in fact on my first landing 'on island' i was ripped. hitched down route 3 with pat irwin (who describes the vineyard as a 'rich people's park'). we'd got our last ride from a 16 wheeler, country and western music splitting our heads open in slack jawed hallucination. a short run up to oak bluffs put us in hobbit town: the gingerbread armful of tiny houses that looked more imagined than real. we met up with toby (a friend from cambridge). he'd had a motorcycle accident and wound up in the hospital in a room next to a lesbian pilot from an all-lesbian pilot cove (no kidding - they flew over the island in v-formation). she offered him a house on a hill in menemsha. the roof needed shingling and he could live there until the job was done. in less than a week five of us moved in. brought a100 lb bag of brown rice, kerosene lamps, sleeping bags and an upright piano that we got for free from a church. we set it up in the kitchen, banging away as michelle cooked us vegetarian dinners by lamp light. vegetables, nudity, pot, booze and lsd ran the show. this was to be our fucking summer of love, brakes off. i got a job as a painter for a portuguese employer who mocked our flimsy beards ('why cultivate on your chin what grows wild around your asshole?') but who went easy on us with our faux on-the-bus lifestyle. we painted big clapboard houses, high on ladders and drugs and listened to joni on a boom box until dusk. there was a kid who pumped gas in town who reminded me of a wyeth painting, the boy with that huge listening ear, a farm boy with corn blond hair and overalls. he came out to our 'farm' for one of our continual day/night parties, arriving on a vespa. he vomited in the front seat of a truck when i went down on him and fled. i never went back for gas. never saw him again. we swam in a fresh water pond, walked a sandy path from there to the ocean, swam in sea where the pebbles, shells and rocks looked like jewels, walked back, rinsed off in the fresh water, drove home, ate drank and started the cycle all over again. unstoppable. on one clear as a bell afternoon i dropped a tab, slipped into the dark pond in flippers, and pumped the circumference at what felt like 90 mph. round and round and round on my back, the sky convex above me in fish eye distortion. back to the beach i heard my dad ( how the fuck did he get here? how did he find me?)'riggy! riggy!' he yelled, with my sister's high school friend priscilla beside him. he toted a styrofoam carry all crammed with ice, cups, vodka and tonic which he dipped into as he hitched and drank his way around the island. and lo and behold here he was, SURPISE! with priscilla, plunging naked down the sandy slope into the water where my skinny dipping friends treaded water, smiling stoned captain beefheart 'can't go back to my frown land' ear-t-ear grins. he appeared overly real under my lsd lens. he stayed a few nights with us, charming my hippie room mates and leering at the girls. he walked in on me going at it with some rock kid, upstairs in my bedroom, flailing about in kerosene light. ducked out the door without a word. i blinked and resumed. at dawn he was spotted hugging his knees on a rock in the field cooing 'wiporwil...wiporwil' as if the bird might land on his shoulder. my dad. honing in on my hippie summer camp.

thursday, oct 18th
obsession is a player
i am lost in the face body mind of a person. i'll call him A. wake up to thoughts of him. go to sleep the same way. don't spend a lot of time together, but when we do there is a lock on the chord between us that no noise, conversation or view can interrupt. this is of course nothing new in my life. or his. but when the magnifying glass positions itself above the heart and soul of the beloved, all else recedes. obsession is a focus as scary as the face on a 9th inning closer. predictably enough, after months of A, B, takes his place. it isn't a rapid transition, or fickle, but the more time i spend with B, the more i lose track of A. divergent lives, divergent worlds, the revolving romantic door. soon B supersedes A in all areas. i don't see A at all until one night he unexpectedly appears backstage. i don't recognize him. i can't for the life of me remember his name. i am shocked. not even his name! who is this? i wonder. who the fuck is this guy who seems to know me so well? the pattern a cyclical cynical one: A overtaken by B who, not soon after though i can't remember when, is replaced by C. a love whore is what i am.

tuesday 10/23
spit shine
my approach to cleaning has never been thorough. ask charlie isenberg. 'you never really wash the dishes.' he would say, pointing out spots on the glasses, a stray string of pasta under a plate and then rewash with nose in air. at the same time i have a snobs abhorrence for slobs - appearance ahead of truth (at least have your fucking house LOOK clean). for me it was always about aesthetics. i like the look of a clean, apparently orderly apartment. it pleases me, like table lamps, coloring rooms with gentle, fantasy-world ambience. very blanche dubois i suppose. as for the dishes, i burn them clean, a lazy, green-less sterilization process that leaves the tap on it's hottest dial, steam blurring the window above the sink, until cooked. my oddest idiosyncrasy: the spit shot. i lob a gob onto an annoying smudge on the kitchen linoleum and rub the it away with heel of foot-in-sock. while i'm on the phone, multitasking with a vengence.

friday 11/2
return to sender
it seems, much as we fight it, on many levels we become our parents. especially as we get older. body and personality. i see my mom's AND my dad's (dick and jane) legs when i throw mine up and over in the 'plow' (yoga) every morning. there they are, white as a flounder's belly, bowling pin calves, brown spots from the sun recognizable as not mine, theirs. the under chin, what's left of it, sagged in a straight line from jaw to throat. just like jane's. the heavily lidded eyes, chestnut brown, squinting, like the old man's. toenails warped and twisted like mum's. (she retained enough vanity to paint them, crushed and distorted as they were, vampire red.) back of hands, thick veined, raw, spotted and crepe papered. belly: distended and sucked in on the rare occasions when i think it would make a difference; before i think, fuck it, who gives a shit, it lolls back out like a poorly curled bowling ball. like jane, i keep things neat and throw away anything i'm sick of. like dick i chase the young. like him i like bars and dark adventure. like her i'm frugal and generous at once. like him i never hide from a good fart. like both of them i love to laugh. of course in other ways i presume differences, but im closer to the tree than i'd imagined. in my sidewalk self i think im young, smooth-faced and fabulously interesting. not.

monday 11/12
wearing the habit
i repeat myself. over and over and over again. i pretend that i don't. that i am a creative person 24/7. i try to break habits, to prove that i reinvent everything all the time, but the truth is i can't help it. try as i might to change this, i get bent out of shape in a hurry and revert to repetition over and over again. this is most apparent in the shower: 1) turn on spigot, wait for heat to rise, piss in the tub while standing outside. 2) reach and blend cold with hot to scalding - the burn-yourself-clean technique. 3) left foot then right steps in, face to hard rain, squeezing eyes against water as it hits hair line, cupped hands in front of face to repel niagara in pantheistic prayer - hair in face shoved up and back, a quick flip landing collected water in the tub behind me like a bitch slap. 4) shampoo. 5) soap face, squint and burn cheeks for soft shave. 6) neck, upper shoulder, pits, arms, tits, nipples, legs, balls, cock, under ass, ass crack, asshole with back facing nozzle. 7) scrape off, bend over, pull cheeks, douche asshole, check for shit specks in teeth of bath mat, tweeze out and nudge down the reluctant drain. 8) squeeze hair. 9) lazy susan turn in the steam, admiring impressionistic bathroom wall art. 10) twist knobs hard shut, drag shower curtain to right and towel off in predictable fashion - face, hair, pulled ears, head and neck, pits, upper arms, torso, back, ass, legs n feet. i try reversing procedure: feet, legs, asshole, ass, arms, etc - but it was too weird. i'm trapped in a cage i built myself. i wonder what other parts of my life assembly line repetition owns. i wonder if any live-in relationship, or LTR, could survive these set-in-my-ways parameters. it's way too late. i fancy myself an improviser and i am a latin teacher: 'repetitio est mater studiorum' (repetition is the mother of students).

sunday 11/25
the real thing
we had a silver blue weimeraner named boo (after boo radley). he had yellow eyes + a sweet disposition that was unusual for his breed. most of the ones i'd met were high strung bugged-eyed + scrawny. boo was a shade on the mournful side. maybe because we had his balls cut off. what was left was an embarrassing walnut that everyone could see under his clipped tail. he hated being observed doing his business. he'd crane his neck around in squat position to see if we were looking. we'd turn away behind invisible fluttering fans like geishas. he also had a serious fart problem. when one would hiss out of his ass like a steam iron, he'd look more world weary than ever, stare at his behind with an 'oh God what WAS that?!...' expression, rise + move to a distant room, hating his own stench. as a kid i remember him issuing forth while granny was playing bridge with her friends. tap tap tap she'd drum her forefinger waiting to play her hand. boo would erupt, stand + leave, the odor so overwhelming it seemed to 'appear' under the table, wafting into the nostrils of granny + co. she was stalwart, her reaction a raised eyebrow. boo's best friend in the world was a neighborhood dachshund named mopsy, as diminutive + ladylike as boo was substantial. copper brown with perfect sharp teeth + toe nails. she lived down the hill, across a skirt of lawn, over a stream + up a slope in a big brand new millionaire's yellow stucco mansion. every now + then she'd wander out onto our field, a nearly invisible spot against the grass. one afternoon, when my dad + his pals were driving golf balls from an imaginary 'tee' near our house, one of the balls hit mopsy in the ribs. she blew up like a balloon. she had a habit of getting in the way. i was painting a 4x8 foot faux picasso for an art show at school. it had to be laid on the floor for me to work on it. mopsy clicked her sharp black nails across the painting in an effort to satisfy her curiosity about the paints i was using. they were made from egg whites. (i fancied myself a fresco artist who's materials were manufactured from powder + egg). i picked her up by the skin on her back + threw her across the room + out the door. i didn't feel good about it, but mopsy didn't need human love. she had boo who visited her every day. he had befriended charlie the milkman, who tossed boo a milk bone, let him hop into the truck + drove him down to mopsy's mansion. there they'd hang out, go on a garbage hunt, get their fill + then walk up the slope to our house. there they'd sit , side-by-side, just off the flagstone porch + stare down the hill like a couple of old ladies in rockers, except to us they were more like lovers. when it was time for mopsy to go home, boo'd walk her the whole way + come back, a bit lonely we thought. after mopsy left this world (at 17) boo was never the same. he left himself not long after.

monday 12/10
strike out
my mom was in a recuperation house after having part of her lung cut out. t.b. i was about 11 or 12. because she was away, they thought it'd be smart to send me off to camp. camp viking. on the cape. big trips in big sail boats. big everything. i made a model of a schooner. sleek black hull. it actually sailed. that was nice. but i was sick most of the summer. spent it in sick bay. there was a knot hole poked out that looked in on the nurse's station. me + the other kid laid up in there would peek in and watch her undress. never saw much beyond bra + panties. i wasn't sure about myself in the naked girl turn-on department, but i do remember liking the shoulder of the other kid against mine as we watched with naughty excitement. not that we ever did anything, him + i, although one night he decided i needed a 'sex lesson'. he made me take off my pajamas. with a pencil + paper he drew a cock + balls + showed me how 'the white stuff' came up out of the balls + boner. he also showed me on me with the eraser end of the pencil. i don't think i got hard or anything, but i never forgot it. but none of this was as critical or as shameful as the baseball incident. i didn't know i was a fairy back then. i did know that i was a shitty athlete, even before viking + there i was on the field during batting practice one hot afternoon before i hit sick bay for good. i stood at the plate, legs apart, bat cocked like a noodle + couldn't hit the ball. not once. swing, miss. swing, miss. over + over + over again. the coach pitched meatballs + still i couldn't hit. 'you're gonna stand there, kinscherf, in the batter's box + you're not getting out of here until you hit the god damned baseball!' he warned, level-eyed - a real man. i stood there shaking + crying + swinging + missing + swinging + missing. it was a horror show. the other kids stood around watching, scuffing their cleats. he didn't let them make jokes, but i could hear what they were thinking: 'faggot'.

monday 12/24
dancing with cuba
im a busy guy. i like t think so. if im hurtling through the day, the last thing i need is some unexpected distraction or person obliterating my bullet head get-out-of-my-way schedule. i slither out of most of 'em - the big laugh, the joke at my expense. but sometimes i can't get away with it. the onslaught is too persistent, or too cute to say no. it's a good thing too, because those are the times i can actually fend off the ticker tape, the static in my head + enter The Zone, unannounced + nearly free. about a week ago i dropped down to la casa del lagados where my landlady, the irrepresable aida lopez holds court + keeps my mail for me. (i lost the key to our mailbox a few months back. down a rabbit hole at the foot of the stairs). so aida retrieves it from the mailman, straps on a rubber band to hold what is mostly crap in place + points it out to me with her big cuban smile, hands held together in front of her waist. last week she had her blaster playing some serious cha cha music. she twirled up at me, grabbed my wrists + made me dance with her. laughing it up - her high soprano, musical laugh. dip, spin, twirl, laugh, cha cha cha. it was crazy. i was completely caught up in it + i hate to dance. i'm the sour pus at the wedding when all the drunks are up on the floor shimmying + grinding + laughing + me feeling like a total boob, checking my watch like the elder bush debating clinton. i can't wait t get outa there. last time i actually got off dancing was on a hit of ecstacy at a gay bar with a Very Cute 'Straight' kid. we were not appreciated. too many big gestures that didn't go with the territory. it took a pill to get me out of myself enough to not think about every little dumb move i was making + that was one rare night. dancing with aida was another. i think the two events are at least 15 years apart, but maybe, had i lived in cuba...

saturday 1/5
stand by us
stevie macintyre lived in a one story shack, damp + mildewed, grey rotting shingles + an absentee mom n dad. or maybe i just never saw them. he had boxes + boxes of comic books that we'd pull out from under his bed + leaf through, lying side-by-side on the floor, up on elbows like praying mantises. stevie was poor, at least compared to us kinscherfs. we lived in a big white three-story house with lots of land, a horse barn (without horses), a swimming pool, a vegetable garden + help - 2 tons of it as my dad used to say. 2 fat women + a rail thin old man. so what. stevie was my best friend + only later did i notice the differences in our houses or in the incomes of our dads. every afternoon after school, i'd walk over to his house though a path in the woods that stood between our properties. we'd hang out, run around the fields, show each other our 'things' under the umbrella branches of a weeping willow, throw rocks at trains. i don't think we talked much, but we were inseparable. stevie had mouse soft hair, cut close with an upturn at his widow's peak. he wore second hand clothes + his fingernails were dirty but there was nothing insecure or apologetic about him. i think the favorite thing we did was pluck over ripe tomatos off the stems in our garden (which eventually died a death of neglect), lick the skin, salt 'em down, bite into them, juice + seeds squirting our faces + smile that big smile of knowing that we both felt the same joy at the same time. it stayed like that, stevie + i until richard tebay moved into town. the new kid. spry, handsome + soon to replace stevie as the person i wanted most to be with - maybe my earliest glimpse of homo, though i wouldn't have called it that. my grandmother caught us pulling each other's pants off on my bed one afternoon. he left in disgrace i think, though after we moved to philly, we wrote letters, quasi love letters to each other. to tell the truth, stevie + i were, in a true way, easier friends. we didn't share or require the love assault on our emotions. i'm not sure if he was hurt being upstaged by richard + if he was i did nothing to quiet him or to repair our friendship. regardless, both boys played a part in my early life. stevie by being the kid who, from the 'other side of the tracks' didn't have a phony bone in his body + richard by being the accepting object of my affection. they continue to live in my heart to this day. don't they all.

friday 2/1
nostril yoga
when i catch cold + sometimes when i don't, i have a serious which-nostril-to-breathe-out-of freak out. one works, the other doesn't. the working one clogs, the other's clear. a needle thin stream of air bites the roof of my mouth. i try everything: lie on side, one sheet fold covering open nostril; lie on back, head under covers (cat the fuck out of the way); press clear nostril into pillow at just the right angle; twist a wad of tissue into a cork to plug/adjust aperture; open mouth like grandpa, make lungs happy, get cotton mouth. if all else fails: sit up + read until exhausted enough to not give a shit about what a disaster the whole thing has become. if i were a shaman or a guru or a disciple i'd know for sure that this was an opportunity to practice yoga breath, elevate my consciousness, arrive. don't breathe, be happy.

valentine's day 2/14
hot springs
1968. i'm eligible for a draft deferment if i teach shcool or join the peace corps. terrified of viet nam, of killing or being killed or of being a shitty teacher, i opt for the peace corps (korea) but get the boot half way through training. the shrink diagnoses me a confrontational personality in a non-confrontational society. the classic ugly american. next stop: the teaching deferment. through yale i land a job as a special class/art teacher in a one-street town. moosup, connecticut. i last 8 months. i fall in love with one of my students, E. he lives across the street from my boarding house in a listing, two story shack with his mom, her boyfriend(s) + 6 brothers + sisters. by winter, i stay in his bed every single night. no one minds. we are tentative physically. i get no sleep + tip toe out in the morning, shoes dangling from two fingers, rush across main street, dress for school + get picked up by the football coach, heart in vertigo. moosup jr high is not eton or exeter (where i imagine boys slept with boys +/or teachers for centuries. a right of passage + part of the curriculum). of course this is bullshit. im working a public school in a tiny town with tiny minds. E will be found out, shamed or worse. god knows what will happen to me. i decide the best thing for everyone is for me to leave town. i ride to philly on my kawasaki 650, depressed + weakly suicidal. when i call E up, twenty years later, his son answers: 'dad's out,' he says. i tell him who i am, how i knew his dad + before i can finish explaining the kid shouts: 'rick!? from moosup?!' like i'm some long lost hero, back from traversing the globe, the person his father told him about. when E takes the phone, he tells me that i wouldn't like him now. he has a pot belly + isn't 'that way' anymore. he says we'd been good with each other then + are still so today. maybe we'll get a beer if he comes up north. but this conversation occurs long after i try, only one year after moosup, to take a second crack at teaching. this time in a co-ed boarding school in steamboat springs, colorado. what was i thinking? sure enough, three months down the road i have 'those feelings' again. this time for K, my english student. we spend hours together. get messed up on robitussin, weed. take long walks in the snow, the electricity of high emotion + laughter bounces off the hills. sometimes i lie in his lower bunk, he in the upper we hold hands top to bottom. not saying a word. smiling. we drive to the top of a hill, take off our clothes + slip into the hot springs - floating there, at peace + forgetting school, job, drama, age difference (i am 21, he's 16) + thrive in the moment of our friendship, close, a bit in love. it is a rare, psychedelic oasis on top of a colorado peak + though we never 'do anything', i'm 'caught', accused of sleeping with boys AND girls + fired. they shunt me off to a motel where i drop acid + wait 'til one of my teacher friends sneaks K down to see me one last time. we hold each other, cry some + then, next day, K goes back to school + i take the bus to denver for my draft physical, high as a kite + scared to death. i flunk. i have letters from two shrinks that are conclusive: i am both 'suicidal AND homicidal' - 4F. the ignominious end to both my last stand as a teacher + dodging bullets in nam. i write K long letters about everything. missing him. i guess they were love letters. the headmaster reads them aloud to the student body at lunch in the cafeteria terrifying my friend + dooming our relationship. i try to repair us by driving to santa barbara + waiting for him. he'll fly home christmas. but when he arrives he doesn't want to see me. it had been too much to bear. the public humiliation. love drifts + evaporates in a cloud over the pacific. it is a long, amphetamine drive home. i suppose, even as i was terrified + partly ashamed of everything that went down, it was time to take seriously the idea that i might become that most pretentious identity: artist/musician/homo.

monday 2/18
mouse twitching
my cat, sofi wan kenobi (or sofia di putzi, or sofi anon depending on my mood) is a runt. tiny head. tiny body. funny off kilter walk. lopsided, skittering run. in fact she gallops (i hear there's a german word for this) up + down the hall of our apartment. thundering hoofs. i chase her in my socks, trying to imitate her, to make her run faster. she loves this. sofi's noir, w/ yellow/green eyes + a few straggly white hairs on her chest. she distrusts everybody. she hid behind a couch for 2 weeks when i got her, second hand, from a girl moving to the west coast. the girl called her zoey, which was cool, but i had to name her for myself. if i was gonna feed her + solicit her affection, then i should call her what the fuck i wanted to. strangely she's a one man cat + i'm her man. he who feeds her... of course there's more to it than that. i think she got kicked around in her old neighborhood, like nixon. + it's still with her. the paranoia. she's also sweet. when she watches tv in my lap, her purr is so loud you can hear it in the next room. she licks my hands. she's a pro at seductive 'i love you' eyes. last summer i had to extract some of her teeth. they were rotten at the root. it cost a small fortune. she survived the surgery, but had to be fed mushed up tuna + water for weeks, hating the dry pellets when forced to go back. a funny result: her tongue gets caught in her missing tooth gums during a licking session. it gags her little throat. she reels it back in, like a birthday curly horn contracting into place, but it makes her look pathetic. i refuse to let her get fat. i'm obsessive about it. too much to ask of a dime-sized heart, i rant. i feed her parsimonious portions 4 times a day which means she wakes me up at 6:30 in the morning staring at me. 'NO,' i say. 'NO, SOFI!' but she's right. she's always right about feeding time. i lumber out of bed, feet like ski boots + clink her pellets into the bowl. afterwards i can't sleep. i read. noir fiction while my noir cat glares, nose-to-nose, hoping for a post breakfast scratch. i give in. pat, purr, scratch, lean, purr, read. big news - she's a super hunter. handling the mice problem is a total sport. i can tell she's caught one when i hear her leap up + through the secret door in my closet making muffled meow sounds, mouse in mouth. she lets it go. chases it to pieces. i find the poor creature in the morning, tweeze it's tail w/ a square of toilet paper + dump it in the garbage. when she doesn't kill it dead it's not alive enough to interest her. there it is on the floor, upright, tiny feet just so. i touch the tail + one little matchstick leg shivers. i jump. i'm horrified. i can't put it in the garbage until i'm sure it's totally gone. i won't let it suffocate in the stench. but it hurts - this mother nature struggle. which sofi always always wins. i'm proud of her, but i feel badly for da poor widdle mouse.

friday 2/22
collision doll
at 14 we thought it would be cool if we could get cars to crash. at night. on a dark stretch of road near our house in wayne, pa. there were nine of us. henry pemberton, four voorhees (harlow, john, teddy + lilian), keith manley + three kinscherfs. we made a life-sized doll out of clothes and stuffing. strung a clothesline across the street near a bend in the road that was surrounded by trees. we dropped it there, lax, with the doll, looking like a ten year old child, attached, but at rest. we practiced. we would abruptly tighten the clothesline + the fake kid would snap to startled attention. it performed like an early cgi. we waited in the dark, having sneaked out of our houses after we were sure our parents were asleep. it was late. past midnight. in june i think, but i'm not certain. it was cool out, not cold. no shivering. we waited in the bushes on either side of the road. we wanted two cars. one from one end of the street, one from the other. we heard them coming. we could see the lights. we knew what to do. we knew how to escape. we knew the woods, the crazy property. as they neared, 200 yards between them, we snapped the rope. the little fake boy popped up like a startled deer. both cars slammed on the brakes. tires burned + screeched to a slow motion halt, but not quickly enough to avoid cracking into each other. we heard the smack, glass shattering, one headlight out, cursing from both drivers, doors opening. we crept backwards into the black woods + made our escape, hearts pounding, sweaty, unable or even afraid to speak. we were pretty sure no one was hurt, but that they might have been was a chastening thought. we stopped doing stuff like that afterwards. we never read about the accident or heard anything, but we knew. each of us. it was an unspoken secret. we lived, if for a few frightening minutes, on the island of the 'lord of the flies'.

thursday 2/28
the love lottery
don't get me wrong. i like sorella's. something about it. not quite a diner. hardly an uppity cafe. the food can be awful. in june a kid was found puking his omlette into the gutter. you have to be smart about what you order. eggs over easy, luke warm home fries, dark toast with bacon usually cuts it. the coffee is hardcore. a surefire diuretic. tippy-toe walk to the toilet. my favorite thing is to go there alone, on a sunday, eat something safe, read + inventory the beautiful boys. last week, they sat me upstairs. i prefer the original room with the ugly greek art + omlette posters, but i don't really care. the fat guy who waits, thighs churning against thighs, is a scenic view in + of himself. strangely, there is not One Single Handsome Person in sight. fine. easier to concentrate on my book. i live dangerously + order a vegetable crepe with a side of braised tempeh. it arrives tepid, flat + the crepe the fat guy smacks down is spilling over with fruit. i didn't order fruit, but i refuse to make a scene. we waiters never want to make a fuss or embarrass a comrade. soon, however, the big man returns with the veg version - raw onion, raw sprouts, damaged spinach, cold crepe. fine. I wolf it down, i'm in a good mood. my noir novel (the dead yard - mckinty) is clickity-clacking down the track. i get lost in it + in the dead yard on my plate, until, simultaneously, two couples are seated on either side of my table. the girls as striking, as the boys. my eyes lift from the page. the kid facing me on my left has black briary brezhnev eyebrows, corn blue eyes + full lips, nearly lipstick engorged. he + his girl spend hours lost in each other's eyes. the open windows. not for show. he smiles as i lurch up from the table to leave, a salad of singles next to my coffee. i ask, nervously, if he's seen rushmore. he has. you look like that kid, i say, big smile. no kidding? it's safe to connect on a silly pretense. but it is the boy to my right that takes my breath away. i stare over my glasses at his legs, beardsley profile, wild art school hair, big boots. i must look like a sex starved librarian. i picture him in boxer shorts, boner poking a tent. a cliche porn fantasy, but what's really captivating is what he + his girlfriend are doing. taking turns drawing on a single napkin. that's right. drawing. with a blunt golf score pencil. she is engrossed as he looks on. as if she traces a line on his naked back, in the sun, on the beach. she pushes the paper over. his turn. i try to see what the images are. hieroglyphs of a personal, in-joke nature. i can't tell. it doesn't matter. it is this thing between them. this happy, sandbox way of liking each other that is beautiful. i love them for it. is she french? she has that paris girl band of outsiders thing. no makeup, pouty lips, disheveled hair. who cares clothes. they are lost in the game. they have won the love lottery.

friday 3/7
in the weeds
i first get high in college. senior year. 'when does it begin?' i wonder. 'i don't notice anything...'. i lie back on a filthy dormitory persian rug, close my eyes + trip into cartoon land. daffy duck cavorting in a field of sunflowers, leaping, laughing - animation by van gogh via disney. a week later i am listening to horowitz perform chopin's funeral march. my mother appears in a pale blue greek robe crossing a cracked dali desert. her head falls back, freighted with sadness, exaggerated picasso profile, slow motion silver tears. she carries my father in her arms, like a baby, tiny limbs crooked + blackened like the burnt ends of match sticks. she traverses the landscape in deliberate martha graham strides. her movement echoes the dark, lo-end piano chords. i am shattered by the visceral visual hallucination created by smoking this tiny, dried up plant. it is 1967. i am ready to jump on the flower power bandwagon. ready, set, groovy. but years later i get paranoid every time i smoke. i talk too much, laugh too loudly, stare too aggressively, worry my tits off. pot stops being fun. some wise man on a street corner explains: this happens to some of us. it's physiological. your body reaches a tipping point. bad outweighs good. mary jane scowls. she no longer smiles. she's over you. she's moved on. after many more tests to prove him wrong, i give up. i stop. no more ganja. no more paranoid nightmares. not for me. in the late 90's a friend comes to town. we go to his brother's apartment. the pipe is passed. maybe this time. maybe my body's cured of its aversion. 2 puffs later i'm in orbit. i can't shut up. i can't uncross my legs. i'm frozen, babbling + jumping out of my skin. my friend turns to me + says, deadpan: 'you know, rick. no one is listening to you'. it takes every ounce of energy to stand up, find a dark empty room, lie down + wait for it to go away. clearly my body rejects the high. 2008. on occasion, with rarely more than one other person, i can handle a feeble hit + be ok. it's fun again. pissing takes a century + every conversational nuance is brilliant; insight around every corner. i get lost in the face of the beautiful. wow, man, your teeth, your crooked yellow teeth are fuckin beautiful. the place where your neck disappears into your shirt...

wednesday 3/19
first fight
weatogue, connecticut. 1955. our house is a big-box, 3-story, white clapboard, wrap around porch, acres of lawn, copper beach trees, massive untended vegetable garden. it is idyllic, the least disturbing, miraculous part of my childhood, until one night, late, after bedtime, when i get up to pee. flannel pajamas, no hair down there, watch the stream, shake off when i hear something. an argument in the kitchen. the voices thundering up the backstairs. i hear mom, furious. tears folded like egg whites into the yelling. i hear dad, screaming back at her. a glass shattering. i tip-toe to the top of the stairs where the shouting gets louder, but the words are either indistinct or i don't let myself understand them. i hadn't a clue my parents weren't ok with each other. just that afternoon i helped dad paint new yorker cartoons on a bathroom wall (a rare collaboration). last night i watched mom get ready for a cocktail party in her incredible gold dress. you look like a movie star, like tallulah bankhead, i brag. (tallulah's voice has captivated my prepubescent imagination. deep, low, ironic. replacing the lone ranger in my pantheon of luminaries.) but that was hours ago. this fight hits me like a rock in the head. I cover my ears + retreat onto the back porch - a screened-in, second story 'day room'. there the sound is muffled. i am 'intrigued + repulsed at the same time' as my friend jane said once about a strap-on. it's like discovering santa claus is a lie. i take mom's side in my little head. she's hurt. i should defend her. but is it fair? i hate hating my dad. sure enough, a month later, things get worse. when he takes me on a ski trip, i rat him out. he's plastered. there are women on couches in our bedroom laughing. one, two? college girls? i'm not sure. this is new. they're 'guests' i suppose. but they also seem to 'be with' him in some way i can't comprehend. while i'm on the phone checking in i tell mom about it. the drinking, the girls. right in front of him, close enough to hit. he goes berserk. he'll never trust me again - his fairy-assed son. the little boy he calls the prince as in 'you pay more attention to the prince than you do your own husband'. this after she refuses to call in sick for him at the bank. 'you're hung over, you're not sick. go to work'. i think she's right, but i'm never sure. i'm proud of how crazy he is. how easily he can make her laugh. how he likes to fart in the elevator + blame it on a stranger. but remembering that first fight i want to protect her from being hurt again. so i rat him out. 100%. i shame him in front of his college girls + in front of me, his son. i threaten his manhood. two years later on a train from philly to montreal for yet another ski thing we kids are about to conk out in bunk beds, clickity clack train wheels soothing us down, when dad stumbles in, shattered. mom reaches back + clocks him, a sucker punch to the jaw + he goes down. it's gotta be tough for a guy to be punched out by his wife in front of his kids. i realize, deep down, that we love them equally. it is more painful to take sides than not, even as we did, jumping from one ship to the other in hopes of some miraculous balance. we are never certain where love lies. we wonder if our subsequent luck or ill fortune in the relationship game grew from that tight, unyielding yankee tempest.

wednesday 4/2
vacancy
watching last weekend's winter soldier II i was struck by how distant i am from knowing, in any profound or visceral way, what it is that a soldier, any soldier, suffers. i've not been there as my comrade is shot to death or has his arm blown off. i've not been there when the machine gun in my hand severs the head of my 'enemy' while his son looks on. i've not been there arriving home, stepping off a bus, looking into the eyes of family, friends, loved ones + feeling that they can never comprehend where i have been, what i have seen or what i have done. i've not had my humanity trained out of me, dehumanizing, demonizing 'the other'. i've never know the screaming pain of having my leg exploded by a roadside bomb, half my face acned with shrapnel or my mind lost in the paranoid nightmare of ptsd. i never will unless jamaica plain is invaded + i take up a butter knife to defend my old lady's railroad apartment. i sit stunned in front of the computer screen as i listen the story of the father who takes his 22 year old son's body into his arms + lifts him up out of the garden hose noose he had used to hang himself. i drive to the rainy anti-war vigil by the monument. we are few. cars honk by in the drizzle. our quiet assemblage not noticed by anyone who has the power stop this war. my out of iraq now sign blurring in the wet assuages no one hurt or destroyed in battle. i fear this unknowing although i am grateful to have never known the hot hell of war. i ache for those who cry out, but my pain is nothing compared to theirs. i 'think' - god bless you, but i don't know who or what god is.

monday 4/14
cute
‘cute’ applies in a weird way to my mom, even as she's fighting lung cancer with chemotherapy treatments in portland. and this the day before her 77th. she tugs at the edge of her wig. the tendrils of what’s left of her hair peek out. i snip some off. we laugh, but i notice that fear shades her eyes from time to time, or a far away, inward look as she drifts off from our conversation. her trembling hands look up a number in the yellow pages. her green-rimmed eyeglasses tuck under the wig like a pencil stuck into a rubber bathing cap. her empty cornfield eyebrows (one bent + lonely stalk here, another there) are more sparse than ever. she walks steadfastly away from the waitingroom in her regulation robin’s egg blue hospital robe for an x-ray. she does not look back. her wig is on right, but to her it feels as if it bubbles up on top of her head, leaving an itchy cavity of space between her balding skull + the nap of the wig. she applies herself to this assault of lethal chemicals with what-else-am-I-going-to-do-about-it-I-hope-this-works-matter-of-fact yankee courage, dread, hope + helplessness. all this is transparent in her wrinkled face, the face which she finds ‘so old’ when she looks in the mirror. tonight I catch a glimpse of her in her underpants + sunset boulevard turban. she says goodnight all over again as she sees me seeing her, but she does not start. she is not ashamed of her body, of her mottled skin - the testament to her ongoing battle with pre-melanoma. she is girlish undressing for bed, caught like a snapshot in the soft light.

tuesday 5/13
rage dichotomy
when i was a teenager one of the seniors in my high school, a kid named castigliano, punched me in the face, twice, + shoved me into a swimming pool for 'foul-mouthing his girl' (why do we never forget these things?). i had no idea what he was talking about. i'd had maybe 5 beers + was just standing there, at the edge of the oval pool, zit-faced, nonplussed, oblivious. that's when castigliano clocked me. springing into action, before the 2nd hit, i clenched my fist. i was gonna give him the goods for real, but i...ah...didn't have the balls. my arm froze. ok, he was bigger, stronger + nastier than me, but the picture in my head - my fist to his pretty jaw - disarmed me. i couldn't hurt him, or was afraid to, or so i told myself, or, or, or. my friends yanked me out of the chlorine, dabbed at the cut on my face + consoled me, but i never got over it. i whimped out - a total fag. this confuses me today because i'm such a sicko badass steroidal motherfucker on the turnpike. any asshole hugging the bumper of my old lady's grand am + i hang in there like a mule, 20 mph over the limit, a wall of traffic in the right lane, a stream of cars in mine + this bastard can go fuck himself. i revel in the phantom violence. i will not give one inch from my little safe house motor vehicle. when at long last there's an opening on the right for me to scoot into + let him pass, i ignore it. i even slow down a bit just to piss him off, hit the gas, +, lurching ahead, smiling my most vindictive smile. this fucking cunt will not pass my big fucking gay-assed red car, period! i play chicken with 16-wheelers, six pack pick-up trucks, mercedes elitists - a silly, lethal contest of wills that i choose to play, cool in my cocoon, tense hands on the wheel, on fire with clenched-jawed glee. i am the total opposite of the girly boy at the pool who was too chickenshit to fight back.

saturday 5/31
fish nets
you make a snap decision + it turns out a total fiasco. this time it was fish nets. lime green, sparkly fish nets. at a college, a fucking college. short shorts, a see-thru skimpy 'blouse', gold reflective converse all stars + fucking lime green fish nets. if this was a nod to glam, to bowie, to some consistent 'look' maybe it could have cut it. but no. this was a fluke. it came outa left field. right up there with the gold lame pajamas i wore for an orchestra luna show at the orpheum. the band didn't get written up, but the pajamas did. 'jumping around the stage like a hot potato in tin foil'. good going, berlin. + The Hair. forty colors over 12 months, but nothing consistent. nothing that held. just a weak water color smear. one hair job - swimming pool blue. i'd hoped for superman blue. the chick who did it fucked up. i washed it out + colored it over to some weak pinkish result. laughing stock pink i think it was. ah, image. how you failed me. on the top of the mountain: the lime green fish nets with leg hair squirting out between threads.

sunday 6/22
bad burgers
in the dentist chair for a new crown to replace one 30 years dull w/ decay. doc says i have 'long roots' which is why i need not one but three hits of Novocain or else i flop around in the chair like a trout. the temporary insert is plastic. 'chew on one side til you get the new one' he advises. home later, the drug worn off, my jaw throbs w/ the abuse suffered. the left side of my mouth can't smile. drool drools out. it hurts to open up. eat something, you'll feel better i tell myself like a jewish mother. i check the food wall menu to find something tofu soft + then rethink. there's leftovers in the fridge from the barbecue last sunday. toss out the chicken (it smells like fart). accept the frozen tomatoes, weak lettuce + two ok burger patties. tweeze out the crusty bottom-of-foot yellow bun. plop the patties into a the Teflon skillet i bought my room mate travis months ago, replacing his old one - the surface so scarred it took very un-Teflon, violent scrapings to scour. i tap on garlic powder, pepper + cover the pan with a glass top. seems as if it's gonna take awhile to get done so i drift back to the piano to practice. losing track until i smell something foul. the burgers! fuck! at first i hope (finger to chin): hmm..., they must be ready. wonderful. but the kitchen's a disaster, the pan in flames, smoke like a dust storm + the burgers transmogrified into rock hard charcoal briquettes. i click off the burner + yank the pan clear just as the smoke alarm screams - a robotic female voice: 'fire! fire!'. smoke obscures kitchen + hallway. i flip on the day porch fan + grab another from downstairs to suck out the smoke. it crashes to the floor. my cat skitters down the hall, rear legs like dragon fly wings. i re-set the fan, the smoke dissipates, the alarm gives up + i construct a sorry assemblage of bun, 'blackened' burger, sliver of nasty cheese, 2 tomatoes, slab of lettuce + a squish of ketchup. i had to chisel the burgers off the pan. a hammer would have helped. i eat the bed i make. i eat the embedded teflon too. i shuffle down the hall + fire up the latest episode of the wire. i inhale my pathetic dinner, careful to keep everything to one judicious side. later, washing up, i realize i'd destroyed the new Teflon + will have to buy another. hey, not all faggots can cook.

tuesday 7/15
fat face
out of the sack. fart. piss. feed cat. rip open curtains. gulp vitamins. park in front of computer. suddenly a strange hot tingling grows on surface of my chest. it ekes it's way up my neck, down across forearms, onto face + then, as if sunburned from the inside out, the skin on my cheeks begins to bloat - as if botox is being injected into all the wrong places. instead of ironing out a crevasse, it pumps the skin on either side, creating a aerial grand canyon of my face - grotesque + distorted like Thing (Fantastic 4). bright red. i observe with b movie horror (hand on side of face, a silent scream). after 30, 40 minutes, it goes away. my doc thinks its a late developing allergic reaction to the vitamin ammo i've been shoving down my throat for the last 30 years. gonna try not taking 'em + keeping an eye peeled. should it happen again, i'll take a snap, or a sped up, time lapse video: narcissist's nightmare on centre street.

monday 7/21
gay schmay
jury out on this one: in my head flicker out-takes of The Worst Cliche Images of Homos - worse even than some radical born against. through my judgmental binoculars 'they' squeal, hiss, walk funny (quick tiny chinese steps) + perform outrageous 'flaming' gestures that sometimes amuse but most times drive me nuts! that is, unless they're my friends. if not, they're catalogued on my self-righteous shelf, collecting pixie dust. oh no, i tell myself. this is not internalized homophobia. nor masked self-loathing. i like myself. i like my queer, gay, poofter, flouncy, faggoty self. i can be that way. they can not or i won't like them. i certainly won't be attracted to them. this instant reaction rears it's ugly head, like the pinkie finger in La Cage Au Folles, all by itself. i can't help it. i realize how dated it is. i am. zeroing in on the parade float with the leather boys letting it all hang out of the chaps. on the other side of the block the on-the-street-homos I walk past here at home are as hard to identify as the metro sexual straight boys in the what's-going-on-here local bar. i'm as often off with my gay-dar as on. however, when i walk up commercial street in p-town, it hits me all over again. the too-tanned, short-shorted shrieking pansies ogling anyone within eye-shot just to get attention. the elders (like myself) look over their glasses with nostalgic lust at the young, the cute + the out n proud as if they'd missed something back in the day. all this makes me want to run. to take the new years vow my friend peter took back in '85. to 'go back in the closet' because he'd had it with the homos. the culture. the silliness. the emphasis on surface beauty, youth, ass... which would of course be the last thing any of us need - more hiding, more suicides, more beatings, more killings, more prejudice. still i wonder: are we people first, queer second? do i ask as a pre-emptive question my straight friends if they're straight? is that the way they introduce themselves: 'hi. i'm tom. i'm straight'. no. no need. meanwhile the outrageous queen makes it known for miles how different he is. look at me. i'm here, i'm queer, get used to me... but he deserves to, doesn't he? or she? deserve to be who they are, hell or high water. tutu or sleek couture. punk purple or trans. come on already, girlfriend. get over your weird self. don't beat around the bush. you're a queer. you always have been. your sexual orientation that took however long to admit to your friends, to the world, is now your badge of honor, your cred. your phony mystique. use it, baby. use it to seduce. 'weird homo voo doo' a kid once called it. don't pull that 'weird homo voo doo shit on me' he said. like that would insinuate me into his pants. still, it baffles. all of it. because i long to just quiet down all the hissing cruising gesticulating steam + stares + just talk for a bit. about anything besides movie reviews or clothes or who's doing whom. ok. i do all those things. so yeah, maybe i'm the most egregious example of the self-hating homo. but there you have it. c'est moi. i prefer the ambiguous bars where my predatory instinct feels at least in the vague pool of impossibility, possible. that conversation may or may not lead to intimacy but will at least spool out a thread of contact that does not necessarily lead to deed. but what's up with that? my friend danny (scorer of infinite boys) claims: 'it's sex or love, baby'. 'rugs or drugs'. not both inotherwords. so where am i left? i guess i identify with the beats. with ginsberg. love finding home in dark places, in friendship, in art. his affliction being his continuous, obsessive attachment to straight boys. i'm with ya there, allen. dark it can be. deep, dark + beautiful.

friday 8/11
dog food
my sisters fried up a can of alpo + told our dad it was corned beef hash. turned some over easy eggs to go on top. a morning hangover 'breakfast surprise'. dad loved it. ate the whole thing. best he'd ever had. never told him.

thursday 8/14
zits
during the hair-down-there transition i got hit with serious acne. zits all over the face. crusty, puss-oozing mini volcanos. all my friends, save one, were zit free. i grinned my way through it, feigning oblivious. weekly visits with dr savage (real name) didn't do much. she focused a hot lamp + went at 'em with a silver, miniature cocaine spoon that had a tiny hole in the center that she shoved against a black head + pop the puss out in a thin wormy stream. if we were quiet enough + god knows i kept my 14 year old mouth shut, you could hear the thing geyser - a teensy pip followed by the faint hiss of mustardy ooze screaming out like a tired birthday horn. i wasn't sure how to handle this. feeling ugly on top of wondering why i had uncontrollable erections when my friends slept over was not an easy passage. meanwhile i was in choir. at this point, with puberty, an alto. i felt the glare of stares as we entered chapel. one kid actually called me 'pizza face' but ricky simonson told the kid to shut the fuck up. could be this was my first encounter with being 'different'. they painted out the crust in the class portrait, but you could tell. there were tiny removal scars all over the gloss. i guess we're not supposed to be reminded of our grotesque teen face down the road when memory becomes selective. ya know, every time i see a kid who used to have that perfect peach complexion suddenly show up with a pimple problem, my heart goes out to him. seems boys have it worse than girls. or maybe with my predilection i don't notice. i actually think a zitty face is kinda hot. maybe like heroin chique they'll be zit chique in details magazine.

thursday 9/8
yellow teeth
get a baby grand from my parents when i turn 9. big n black n calling out to me like a harpie on a crag. 'play me, baby, but watch it, i'm a scary motherfukr.' (not in those words exactly) it is shiny + seems to ask a lot. all those keys. but the sound of a single note, held down + reverberating sings in my chest like a premature ejaculation. driven to lessons by my stubborn sneak-a-shot-o'-likker granny in her dark blue ford, a line of honking cars stretches out in back of us, 'fuck 'em' in her set jaw, i tremble. i hate these lessons. i hate the music paper. i fog out on ink blots + the struggle to transmit them to fingers makes no sense. at my first recital, some child's song, i freeze. run out the door, fighting tears. months later i 'experiment', in the dark, tentative notes from the hulking whale, amounting to little, but mesmerizing my tiny brain. i did strike it up with an 'original composition' at a talent show in prout's neck, maine. got a big ovation. i am 14, showing off my twist moves + acne. comparing thigh muscles with a boy from rhode lsland. 'boys are better,' he says. i am silent. but i always remember him as a part of the summer i made friends with the piano. after we move to philly we give the lessons another shot. some quack-invented 'system' to fire up a left hand accompaniment to whatever-the-fuck horrible pop song. all ya need is a melody. i quit 2 weeks later, hating it all over again. meanwhile, across the street in wayne, procrastinating homework, our friends the voorhees + future oberlin whacko, henry pemberton + i play 'guess who this is?' - a bruise clue on the keys that is supposed to identify someone we all know. an early warning of what eventually became song 'portraiture'. the summer following my last year in high school i am a counselor at camp munsee, in the poconos. in a barn sits a lonely, scabby, out of tune upright. after the boys are asleep i sneak down + improvise. sounds echoing into the night. at yale, same story, with a drug caveat. in a college tower, i lock the door, drop acid, play with eyes shut + hallucinate psychedelic film clips as they un-spool, fingers hammering with faux stravinsky cluster up n down the nicotine ivories. keep it on the down low. it is awful, i'm sure, but i keep going back, transported by the thrill of this strange river of sound. 2 years later, back in new haven, a house full of nutty artists + musicians crank the motor up all over again. we snitch an upright from a church + for the first time, inspired by musician friends, francesca reitano + ed askew, i begin to crunch improvisations into songs like a blind man in a junk store, just trying to tell the truth + to hit my compatriots in the heart. maybe it never gets better than that. maybe it gets worse.

friday 10/10
mouse everest
wrapping it up with late night emails i sense a twitchy movement overhead. a scratching. i look up + i swear-t-god there's a mouse climbing the window curtain, way the fuck up there, near the ceiling, scrambling his skittery cuteness along the edge + vanishing into the upper window. how does he do it? clutchy curly-fry toenails? where is sofi? 'sick 'em, sof! i yell. get the motherfucker! which is two-faced for me who always feels dali lama sorry for the hard-as-a-rock dead thing left by my cat after she's finished with 'em. no longer toys to bat around. god knows where the thing went or if it is even actually up there. but it gives me the shivers. the fat lady with the rolled knee stockings up on a chair, skirt in fist, faint from the sight of the little bugger.

saturday 10/18
cat abrasion
my dermatologist, dr w, a no nonsense asian woman, checks everything out. everything. each visit. 'take off all your clothes + put this on, the opening at the back'. frog's belly white legs stare up at me. i wonder if i wiped properly earlier that morning. could 'leave something' on the paper covering - a human stain? she is non-plussed. orders me about like a sergeant, squirt freezing suspicious asymmetrical spots with an ice gun. it hurts, but in an ok way. like picking a scab. i'm here for good reason. my skin. when i was in nassau my sophomore year at yale, on a drunken singing group spree, i got horribly sun burned water skiing off lyford cay (they were filming goldfinger that year). i was darting about on a single ski, whoosh whoosh, when a shark's fin broke the surface a few yards behind me. a giant white as i recall through the filter of jaws + selective memory. i angled towards the pearly beach, flapping one hysterical arm, coasted up onto the sand and the monster slithered back out into the briny deep. that was the half of it. turns out, the sun, reflecting off the caribbean blue, carved up my skin like a laser. i grew blisters the size of robin's eggs. i bled. we didn't know it then, the latent horrors of melanoma. my mom needed stamp sized patches of skin removed periodically. i notice divots on noses of customers my age at doyles. on my last visit, instead of the freeze offs, dr w proscribed a tube of 'carac' (where do they get these names?). apply daily for a month. slather it on, rub it in, wait. miniscule homing cels in the sauce zero in on potential pre-melanomas, stimulate anti-bodies + eat up the nasty spot. you itch. you develop lesions the look like leprosy. you are not allowed dressings to cover them up. you look scary. the hard part is that with this stuff on my arms, back of hands + the upper side of my face, my cat can't lick me. NO, SOFI, NO! i ward her off. not for a month. girl's confused, hurt. who knew that a slow shark in the water would have a debilitating psychological effect on my cat. to say nothing about the idle kid at the end of the bar with whom i strike up the band. the one who averts his eyes as the pus oozing sore on the back of my hand makes him want to vomit.

friday 10/19
tar, baby
it seems all over town menino is re-paving. smooth, unlined road - a sleek black river that car tires become quiet on. flooding the stretch of the formerly bumpy with a bow-shaped rush of warm sticky tar. at night, with few cars on the road, it's like lake water. you skim the surface, cutting no wake, the purr of engine, the muted roar of tires taking you back even 50 years when cars + roads owned america + the wild whooping freedom of the forever teenager leaped from town to town. i swell up a bit, after work, one cheap beer buzzing in my ears, when the old pavement succumbs to the new. the bad skin blasted away. 'work done' on the city giving us a temporary stay on whatever debilitated horrors the sick economy has in store. the last glass of champagne before the besotted jumps out the window.

tuesday 11/11
neverland
'i'm too old for this.' i hear it all the time. from people younger than myself. the sense that what was once funny, or do-able, or easy now feels used up, jaded, is-that-all-there-is?, 'i can't do it anymore' the up-all-night drinking, waitressing for shitty tips from asshole customers, loving the mirror or, most embarrassing, going for The One after years of disappointment. t hell with it, throw in the towel. sound familiar? but for me, jowled, eye-bagged, slack-mouthed...i don't feel it. not yet. with skin problems, flu shots, stringy hair, hearing loss, lower back pain, hemorrhoids, insomnia - the goal posts are more in focus then ever. still i feel like a kid, a 63 year old kid with a squinting eye-on-self + a forgiving (blind?) ambivalence. i laugh at how much older i look in the mirror than i feel. in many ways i haven't 'grown up'. i don't have a Real Job (20 years of waitressing is more fun than money + has no ladder-to-climb future). i don't shoulder a wife n kids. i don't own a house. i don't have a for real boyfriend. it's a relief we can't see ourselves behaving. we would, i would for sure, be horrified. watching the music videos my friends shot for OLD STAG was like staring at a stranger. i LOOK like that?! what the fuck! when i perform or waddle around doyles or have animated talks at the behan i imagine that i look what? 45?, tops? lithe, no spastic facial contortions, bright eyes, wise wit. jean cocteau, filming of 'la belle et la bete', ran about, hung sheets, adjusted arms-in-walls-with-candles + observed: 'we felt like teenagers until we saw ourselves in the mirror + realized that we were old men'. is the surface a lens to the soul? not if you're really looking, but who is? old folks out for dinner, sparkly-eyed, who need a cane to shuffle across the floor + have a date with the tube later, seem to harbor a covert hankering for deep throat or a dirty poem from an imploring suitor. an honest kiss. (shut your eyes + go home again.) even as they assemble in awkward dignity, a minefield of propriety. a friend of mine emails: america is 'no country for old men'. the crusty, useless, annoying elderly out-to-pasture, no longer jacked up with rampant hard ons have run out of turf. 'i'm too old for this'. + yet, inside, under the surface, are we not all ageless? does our skin, our voice, our walk give us away? did peter pan have it right?

monday 11/17
rimbaud, redux
ya know, the question: what is yr type? that you can sort of answer that, but don't want to. you don't want to admit to anyone, least of all yrself, that you have a type. or worse, a pattern. nah. you're way open minded. or at least you know who's not yr type. in my case - squealy homos, anyone close to my age, someone who works out so much they look like everybody else. then i think about it. go on, admit it berlin. you like the marginal. the terrified, scary adolescents or near to, the ex-jailbirds, the one's who hurt inside, scratch poetry on napkins + throw it away, the dispossessed, the dark, the lonely. it's not like any old crumpled ferocious kid will do. it's not merely the 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 + pretentious. ('we ALWAYS think they're smart' - danny fields). when i look back at these guys, 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 me. more than once have they enthralled me. set me on edge. been feared. most of all, michael w. the boy i met at the screen door of my sister's apartment in somerville. there he stood in his underwear, panting from the run from his house. 'will you walk me home?' he asks. we became inseparable for the next year + the next. he looked like rimbaud. same piercing ice-blue eyes. he wrote prayers + poems + 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. he almost pulled the trigger. he was only 12. from his porch he saw a motorcyclist beheaded as 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 the vineyard. it caught. he drove my friend's vw into the ocean. he took off his clothes + boarded the bus stark naked. he dropped acid with me, but because he ground his teeth fiercely, or thought he did, he refused ever after to close his mouth. it hung open, drooled. he gave me a black eye after sex. he shoved a coke bottle up his dog's asshole. we would slow dance in a bar for old timers, hugging, near kissing, showing off, 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, for me. i met someone else. he was hurt. 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, damaged his spleen. it was removed. when he returned he had a scar. then things got worse. his mom didn't know what t do with him. he wound up in marlboro state mental hospital. i went to see him, standing in a line, in a regulation dress-like robe accepting his paper cup of pills just like '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 pounds. i broke down. his mom told me that no one in his life had loved him as much as i. 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. since michael, there are the others. 2 former inmates. an artist who again, resembles the dangerous one, fire-starter of the soul, ridiculer, prescient. my knees buckle every time they seem to find me.

tuesday 11/26
poke through
toilet paper (carefully accordioned) splits open on your way 'in'. chocolate brown half moon sliver under terrified 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: is this a common 'accident' or are you the singular exception? come on, tell the truth. have you ever poked through?

saturday 12/6
my ridiculous hair
i'm not sure if there was ever a time in my life when my hair was anything but ridiculous. 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, invisible + from the end of high school, through yale, the song remains the same - short all over, wisp flip above the forehead, fat face. followed by the acid years: carefree undulating hippie hair. in my lsd trip to the mirror i am almost cool, a dude, under a gandalf wide-brim, hanging in soft shirley temple clumps alive like medusa snakes. i add an under beard. i look amish. in my passport photo i am rasputin. turns out 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 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 the do. i say fuckit. buzz the shit off. go for dachau. 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 a dead giveaway. next up: dye jobs. tried em all. ugly black. peroxide green-blonde. irish setter red. my favorite: mallard duck - a dark, neon blue/green, right? '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 to repair the damage + make it worse: horse shit brown. cool. i attempt a do-it-yourself cellophane - a translucent iodine which, at a swimming hole populated by african americans, the colored girls dig 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 do + it looks the color of a nuclear sun. in the meantime the hair cuts get wilder. shave the sides, froo froo rooster tail on top, sloping sideways. braids. bangs. perms. where am i? who am i? is there any hope? lately, i let it grow, long, tired + 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 + 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 + it makes you look old'. at this point i don't give a fuck. i like that it's odd. i'm odd. berlin, a b-movie monster.

friday 12/19
vox humana
the singing began in tuscon. leaning over the andrews sisters 78 rpm recording of 'shrimp boats are a comin'. mesmerized gaze at the round-n-round trying to sing along in a boy-as-chipmonk squeak. not until entering middle school at the episcopal academy did i 'get' the transcendental side of singing. curtis r york (c.r.y.) was our music teacher, chorus/glee club conductor + 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) dime-sized 'o' mouths , tiny lifted chins. if we did well we made choir. we sight read, without knowing the notes. the dots went up + down. 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, lifting, strong + clear into the gymnasium air, was my true introduction to music - physical, emotional, spiritual. i remember wanting to sit next to whomever was my pre-homo 'best friend' at the time; all that singing a major part of what got me into yale where a LOT of singing goes on. glee, choir + all those drunken gentlemen songsters that lead triumphantly to the whiffenpoof alps (seniors only) who in tight ('tight') formation cast their anachronistic spell. the arrangements, some by cole porter, were stunning, complex, irresistible. i wasn't sure how i fit in with those guys socially. most of 'em were high powered preppies + had that haughty, upper class thing down to a white shoe t. i was locked in the closet + terrified. still, the music was worth the discomfort. i loved being surrounded by that thick blend. we drank + drank + sang + sang, wore white tie + tilted slightly forward as if to put a careful nose on the perfect note. down the road, when i began to write my own songs, i hit wall. a vocal wall. i brayed + squawked + fought to hear a voice that fit in with pop or rock + what i heard coming back in the studio monitors sounded like an operatic whiffenpoof. i was horrified. i went to great lengths to make it sound 'rock right', ultimately damaging my vocal chords + requiring 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 a bad idea). i got myself a second opinion, had the things scraped off + resumed my band obsession. when my boyfriend at the time joined up, possessing a voice closer to paul rogers than to ethel merman, i was asking for it. 'why doesn't HE sing all the tunes? his voice is WAY more commercial', my band mates complained. 'we're treading industry water here with your weird vocal chords'. there was even a vote to throw me out of my own band + have the now X boyfriend do all the singing. it wasn't until i got back to playing my stuff on the piano + using my whatever-it-sounded-like voice honestly, 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 t 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 a boy soprano, eyes crossed, floating towards the stars.

friday 1/1
o tannenbaum
i'd fallen asleep. there were only 6, 7 people left in the living room still drunk from the party. the christmas party. the surreal christmas party. pwetty lights, stench of pine n beer n pot. that's when the tree fell over. it just leaned + fell, slo-mo, balls cracking on the floor like eggs. lights twisted like underwear around the bulbous waist of the tree. the wicken star toppled + was repaced with a pbr jammed onto the hard thrusting tippy top. it looked drunk leaning against the window. we lifted her up, yanked off the can, straightened the lights, swept up the broken balls, re-inserted + 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, for being at a tilt. more endeared am i to this one, this imperfect touchstone to childhood, then to all the pretty houses with all their pretty trees. pretty losing 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 displacing balance. the aubrey beardsley kid in particular. it hurts to look at something like that. i have to latch onto words in order to not hold eyes uncomfortably. to be with both + not monopolize one vs the other. without presuming intimacy. all goes nicely. info exchanged as if after a car accident. smiles all round. nervous goodbye handshakes. meet up later at the behan. the rush rising with each sentence. i stumble. my stumbling obvious im sure to the inevitably 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: the group that hits doyles after the berklee boys leave has been volunteering at a homeless shelter. they + the homeless with them are Not Cute. not even the metaphorical cute that ameliorates the sexually prejudicial eye of the cock. some stink. faces have bruises, holes in clothes, persnickety about food orders, but joyful + full of christmas spirit. they sing in loud out of tune voices all the carols they can remember + then standards (puff the magic dragon, kum-by-ya). up on their feet. hugging each other. i skate back n forth from bar to table. cleaning up, delivering food + beer. one of them, the dirtiest, with pockmarked skin, a sweaty scarf, open unlaced 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 + orders a bigger beer, a pilsner urquell. he isn't going back. he isn't going to be part of the silly singing. he sits at a round table with his big green bottle. during one of my manic traverses, he looks up at a spot above my head + says 'i love you'. his lipless mouth agape, a yawning walrus, flappy chops, the faint lift of a smile. 'i love you'. wow. had the 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.

tuesday 1/20
sardines
i don't get to fly much. 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. the scale of the plane when you boarded up silver stairs from the tarmac. in the 50's, flying from san francisco to connecticut with my sisters + my mom i realized something was wrong: 'hey! ma! there's smoke coming out of the engine! + fire!' one out of 4 in 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. packed like sheep. seats we can barely stuff our bloated butts into. neck cramps. insidious farting. yellow air. no free nothing to drink or eat. ok. i do like take offs, the landings. i like watching streets, cars + houses become monopoly pieces. i like the new stewardesses + (gay) stewards who aren't hollywood hot anymore. saggy old bra breasts, age lines, receding hair, bad makeup. but that all goes awry when i imagine crashing into shark water. or sky scrapers. 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. the lord of the flies? all this amusing 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. it's torture time. the tin can trap - 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 til my eyes ache, i hold off a piss. after a century of fetal cramps + window squinting the squawk box announces descent. down down down. cotton wisps slither across the wings. tiny house dots enlarge. 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. we're down, landed, safe, nudging up against the uncircumcised cock tube we hurry through, like sperm to the airport egg. that's when it happens. that's when all hell breaks loose. waiting for the sheep to yank out their bags from the over head + 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 munch scream that sucks up the stale space in the cabin like a cyclone. we all hear it, seething silently. the level of impatience at code red. sweaty necks. clenched jaws. beady eyes. 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 angry rats behind him who would strangle him given half a chance. i understand how frightening the group impulse of a crowd in panic. i understand why innocents get trampled to death. i would be first among them, even as i smile my stewardess smile of phony acceptance.

saturday 2/14
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. same today as i was as a kid. in high school i wore the standard blazers + sweaters. nothing exceptional. i looked all right leaving the house, but as soon as i got to school i was a disaster. boogers on tie. cereal on pants. loafers crushed at the heel. shirt tail out. dandruff on shoulders. ink stains on cuffs. today the last place i spend cash is on clothes. old navy. salvation army. boomerangs. i buy dumb t-shirts + generic pants with too many pockets. the t's have armpit holes + dated logos + they're getting bigger. like hawaiian mumus. from XL to XXXL. 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! hardly a dent in hipster-ville. as for the shoes? my party shoes? buxom doc martin boots, scuffed up like scabs + worn rarely. the laces ravaged + stressed out like raw nerves. they require 'orthotics' - layered strips of rubber that lift + twist my right heel to make one leg longer or shorter than the other. to take the pressure off my hip + lower back. my podiatrist intones: "forget surgery; go with orthotics" (hard to pronounce without a lisp...orthotixth). they slide like trout into the bottoms of my 'beasts' - 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 + within a week are transformed into petri dishes of doyles drippings + droppings, the white smudged out, my big toenail poking through the upper front + busting a peek hole that looks like an 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 + 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.

saturday 2/14
band parents
are not the same as stage moms or hockey dads. they don't show up during childhood. it's not 'til the kids are in college + 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, dispirited. they make innocuous conversation in hopes of windexing 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? must be awfully hard.' 'i can't hear the words + you wrote 'em, right? don't you think they're important?' anticipating the d-day of distortion: 'we shoulda have picked up some earplugs, 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 + 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 into the microphone?' 'he loves what he's doing i suppose, but his drummer's a real asshole.' 'can't wait t get outa this crack hole'. they notice their own graying hair, bald spots, pot bellies + mothery skirts + 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 + straining to zap out a zillion notes in front of the mirror. 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 + their own world is unbreachable. they listen as carefully as they can to the demo they had to pay for + 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 + 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 + tennis claps add up to zilch. where loading in + loading out seems endlessly tiresome. where the money is non existent. they don't get it + hate not getting it + wish they didn't have to try. you feel badly for them even though you can't extend a hand. they do look silly + sad. they don't know their kid anymore. santa claus is long gone + 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.

saturday 2/14
bourne-d to death
i rent the movies, the bourne movies, all three: identity. supremacy. ultimatum. the bourne erection soon to follow. there he is - matt damon. the walk. the bourne walk. i think kiefer sutherland copied it all: the walk, the look, the steady cam, the speed freak jump cuts, the paranoia. i watch in the afternoon, bird food cereal on lap + a pint of cafe bustelo that hurries me to the shitter before half a cup is gone. i shut off the tv mid-stream so i can get real work done, 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 to wash dishes. a no nonsense approach to the smallest detail. i don't even realize i'm doing this until i get it - me as jason + i burst out laughing. my all-by-myself barking walrus, chin whiskers-in-the-air laugh at how incredibly not like jason bourne i am. i sneak a look in the mirror. flouncy, over-conditioned stringy hair, no lips, 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 it a lot. leaving a movie theater i walk to my car, get in + fire it up as if it was me up there on the silver screen. the after burn of the cinematic mind alive around me like the rainbow traces that follow the tails of sparrows in an LSD sky.

friday 3/13
piss etiquette
the men's room is wall-to-wall dudes. i can't hold it another second. i sneak into the ladies'. it's empty. it's not what i'm used to. immaculate stalls. a wisp of perfume. a tampon dispenser. sparkly mirrors. a smear of lipstick on a faucet. 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 flecked with pubic hair, beer bottles, puke stains, unraveled, damp toilet paper + stink-o stalls with graffiti ads for blow jobs + 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 cel phone + wallet + waiting, 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 + one is occupied, do not take the slot next to the other guy. use the stall or keep the empty piss hole between yourself + 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 + get the fuck outa there. 5) flush with foot, elbow or knee. do not use 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 whale's eye surveillance radar works like an FBI charm. 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 to take it out + put it back in. 1) camouflage cock behind hand or zipper + cut loose. 2) stand back + fire into the hole, confident of your proud unit, certain of aim. 3) be-stir the unbuckled belt, zipper, opening of slit in drawers, lowering of the drawers + engage in frenetic child-tearing-open-a-christmas-present as prep for the spew. ditto the shake off. 1) kill the thing, choke it to death. 2) get rid of it quick + suffer wet leg + spot. 3) the in-between, half-hearted jerk, yellow drops on wrist. rub off on pant leg. now how did all these rules + 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 + does not look. ok? even as he checks out sonny boy's pencil + chip-off-the-old-block looks up at the old man's yard arm + so forth. dad won't say it out loud: go ahead, boy, stare. but the rule + the breaking of the rule we probably got from pop. that's what i figure + 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, he knows that you saw it. or enough of it to think about it, right? as for myself - 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 it off or anything, but it was cool t 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? a life of caution? it ain't no life at all + rules are made to be broken.

saturday 3/28
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 + about my cat snarfing up leftovers. she'll puke on your bedspread or in your shoes if she eats anything other than her chicken-n-rice pellets. so i fingernail pick off the marinara spots, the curled onion peels + dead pasta that whoever cooked last night failed to wipe off the floor. i sponge the stove. i do the undone dishes. i vacuum. 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 + rub it out with my sock. the surface of the stove i wipe, but the grime in + around the burners i leave untouched. in the bathroom i whisk about the bowl, but miss stains on the wall 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 + if i was fucking that much maybe my room'd be a wreck too. i berate myself for being an old auntie, tsk tsking them in silent prayer that i'm setting an example - they'll see that i vacuumed the hallway + 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. it's not for them. it bothers you. it doesn't bother them. so it's on your ass to get the job done.' what-the-fuck-ever. who cares when the entire planet is on the ropes + people are being slaughtered in afghanistan? a tidy apartment is a blackhead on the ass of real life. which takes me to today + the birthday balloon. i borrowed a big white balloon at work from one birthday party + gave it to my room mate who was having her own celebration in another part of the restaurant. i figured ya gotta have a fucking balloon on a day like that. anyhow, she brought it home. it kissed the ceiling for awhile, lost helium + descended to the floor where it slept for weeks. i thought it would eventually turn into a rubber scrotum + die, but it didn't. it retained enough gas to lie around the house like a stoner - useless + semi-flacid. because it said 'happy birthday' in black magic marker i hadn't the heart to kill it. until today. 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 + this is when it got weird. i shut my eyes. yup. shut my eyes + 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 cbjbs. so i pinched the balloon by it's scrawny chicken neck, closed my eyes, turned my head + stabbed. 'POP!' it wasn't that loud, more like a 'pip'. like a bird fart, feathery + 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 + dead. maybe i was one of those hooded executioners in a previous life time + this my scardy cat karma.

friday 4/10
irish
even though i work at an irish bar + 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 'em, 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 + 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 + 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 + you theirs, end of story. loyalty is the bible + you don't fuck with it. likewise, the pub is their church - a club house of celebration, belonging, wound nursing + 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 + lousy fathers - the all-too-familiar list of debilitation. on the other hand one can't help but envy these blokes + broads + 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 + so it goes. here lies an exuberance that has no twin in any culture i can think of. we wasps have our fussy martinis + 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 + perfect samurai hair. vodka ripped russians tend to fight each other as much as the irish, but are dour, pasty faced + 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 + i'm done. add a sickening shot + 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 + hung with portraits of irish writers + drunkards - share that rarest of rejoicings: a double birthday. same exact. 'he has my brain' says one. the other is jumping up + 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 + full of arrgh, they kill the rasta oiling out of the speakers, crank up the pogues, link arms in a scrum + sing - the loudest lung work i've heard since the fat lady sang in '04 + 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. 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 + return to the bar for my weak-assed miller lite, 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 these can you count on one hand? + 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.

saturday 4/25
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 'em. 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 stood, 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. as for death? 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 + run. a revolving parade of dog pals, 20 or 30 of 'em, circled the body in the late afternoon. remembering their friend from woo hoo haunts around town - garbage dumps to pig out, flower beds to shit in, cats to tree. they came to say good bye, to honor a fallen friend. but this is not a story about them, it's about ralph - a 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 said. we were gonna give him to my mom who had, only weeks before, put sydney, a big fat 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 + cut him loose in the apartment. turns out he was a piece of shit who 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 + that's when i prayed. a fool's mumbo jumbo involving light with a capital 'L', The Force + a mental picture of mickey - a runt 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 + turn him into a cool cat + 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 + woke us up. who could climb a drain pipe from yard to second story, tip toe the gutter + scratch at the screen until we let him in. + he was funny. he corrugated his whiskers into a tv antennae by sunning under a 150 watt lamp. he snuck into the fridge + 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 + 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 + 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 + 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 - unimaginable. we had to put him down. we had to put our dear ralphie to sleep. but this time would be different. this time we would face reality head on. we would not hide outside the execution room. 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 + b) that it wouldn't hurt. the room was tiny. a metal table, a basin, a bright over head neon tube. we nuzzled his neck. the doc filled the syringe + stuck it into the exact spot where we'd prolonged his life. his mouth 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. looked to us like he went through hell. they stuck his ashes in a styrofoam box, a hamburger put to sleep.

sunday 5/3
coke + a can o' coke
i was at the rat. early 80's. watching some hot band be hot. the kid next to me bobbing his head arhythmically. looked like a young ric ocasek who wasn't as string bean long + drawn out. kinda cute. from peru or some west coast south american country. black hair, shiny black eyes, 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 da kawcaine? he explained in broken english that he ran a profitable connection with a drug cartel in his country + that he was dealing the stuff to 'all de beeg bahnds in town'. would i like to try some he asked? i'd never done a single line, but hey, why not give it a shot. he seemed to like me + 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 + gave me the tube. (all the right cliches.) i watched him do it + followed suit. it shot up my nose like a drill + i was 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 + 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. he didn't budge. he closed his eyes, opened his mouth a little, stopped talking. i unbuckled his belt, pulled his zipper, brought it out like a fish + went down. he was right-away hard. beautiful there. but i had dry mouth. felt like i was sucking bark. i needed to get slippery. to drink. i held him with my left hand + 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 + globs of ash. down n back like a zip gun. 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 + hurtled down the stairs. i saw him off, but didn't get him off + 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 calm me down. i sprinted back upstairs, dragged on some filthy running shorts + took off, thomping the pavement like a super hero just as the sun came up. sweat pimpled my face. 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 he knew about coke. he knew all about it. he told me to stop running. to take a shower. to wait til the dark fear passed. (in a few short months he'd be dealing the shit himself + terminating our dead-in-the-water relationship. coke is good for that. 'instant asshole' a friend calls it.) no shit, tonto.

saturday 5/30
the switch
romantic love. is it for-real possible without devolving into george + martha, into the black rain of the operatic? each of us has our own bloody valentine to lament or extoll. thumbs up for the heart-wide-open, plug-into-socket split-second when ego takes a back seat + heart is the driver. thumbs down when mr. thrill-is-gone sticks his tongue out + ego re-takes the tiller. in my case the twist in the wind begins as soon as i microscope the cold distance infecting myself + the one i wake up thinking about. not saying the unsaid. resisting 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 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. 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, a talker. the time flew. castaways for the day. we never saw each other again, although he looked me up on line + 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 + rules of the 'contract' to follow. for good or ill. eyes wander over a hugged shoulder + lust for another. ears pretend to listen as we rehearse our next monlogue. judgement looks over it's glasses at a phony laugh. 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. 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 + pull me safe 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. 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 + how we created each other. wanting to earn the romantic diploma: 'dudes! you won the lottery! safe on the high bed of the heart! rock the universe! carry the sword!' (the show-off vanity of having scored a 10 in loveland.) i quit my job as a cabbie + worked where he worked, where i'd met him + where we happened, evolving a language of ya-had-to-be-there rituals that turned up the heat on a daily basis. he'd climb my third-floor porch when my boyfriend was out, heart like a cap-in-hand. we'd buy 40's + walk the arboretum, laughing, lost in the shimmering light. we'd lie under trees on damp leaves + 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. + he was beautiful to look at. all of him. i could watch his face for hours - the flicker of feeling as it moved over him like a dervish spinning across a still pond. it was the luckiest time in my life. i wrote a song: 'over the hill'. 'BCN 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 + 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 + who knows what lies ahead in our memory of the future*. still, we ended badly. he was leaving for college. long distance was a minefield. 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 + stopped, facing each other, wet with slobber + tears + 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 from 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. so sad. i didn't say a word 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 + i hurt him i'm sure, because he knew, of course he knew + forgave me as he always did. silently. spiritually. he's married now. has two beautiful kids. lives far from here. but i'd say, after all this time, i can, in a blink, re-enter that eden of the heart + see his eyes upon me, filled to the brim.
*courtesy of susie

saturday 6/13
prom date
i was in charge of both of 'em. junior + senior. how did that happen? must be 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 + erected scrims, backlit with life-sized cut out silhouettes of speakeasy figures playing horns, dancing, high + happy. transforming 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 floor + 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 + senior prom chair. whoppee. over the summer before the our last shot at living-at-home-and-breaking-all-the-rules my best friends + i got drunk on a beach in avalon. cold cases delivered over the phone with a 'dad' voice, crushed beer cans littering the sidewalk from porch to ocean. throughout, i was thinking (god help me) - 'prom'. when we spotted a 50's cover band, we got their card + booked 'em, puffed up about what a hot thicket we knew they'd be - live music a rarity in those days. next to a bonfire, staring at the stars we decided that for this last-in-a-lifetime promenade we'd transform the high school gym, a big nasty echoing sweaty box, into an out-of-the-park garden. trees, flowers, shrubbery, earth, rocks, worms + weeds - the full catastrophe as a midnight caper: van, pick up truck, blackened teen-age special forces drunk with weapons of choice: hedge clippers, saws, gloves + goggles. we cruised the hood + stole shit. motoring up to the shoulder of a main line mansion, we'd belly crawl to an innocent tree or bush, hack + watch it quiver, seize up, tip over + die, the corpse dragged across an immaculate lawn + flipped into the van. we did this over + over again until we had enough green 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...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 + besides, i loved impersonating impresario. i suppose it carried over into all that show biz fluff i did later on. funny about high school.

thursday 6/18
small-time marquis
behind my good-guy mask lurks a cheesy sadism. examples abound like old gum stuck under a chair. short list: 1) sadistic waiter. i dart past a three-top of raised arms with a big sunny smile on a pretend mission to somewhere important. shit, guys, got beers at the bar t pick up, back in a sec. the upraised hands like a stadium wave fall back into human surf. i could have stopped + given attention, but i reveled in the opaque diss. when i double back + attend their chirping needs i'm all generosity + solve-your-problem finesse. slap, kiss. 2) sadistic pet owner. no, sofi! NO! NO! NO!. it's fucking 6 o'clock in the fucking morning + 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 boogers + it's time, it's fucking time to lumber out from under cozy covers + deliver the goods. but i wait. no, sofi, NO! the negative-to-positive ritual. she resorts to foot-of-bed sulk + i give in, plinking pellets into dish. 3) 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 agnes irwin drive, but instead of letting them out where they wanted to be let out, i'd slow down, pretend to stop, tap the gas + go round again. + again. funny the first time. 3 or 4 revolutions later the girls hit code red. i'd relent, let 'em out + roar off with a joker's grin. 4) sadistic son. my mom asked me to mow the lawn. i wanted to snitch the vw + hurtle across town to see friends. she tried to shame me into manning the mower by starting 'er up + climbing on herself, head bobbing with the bumpy ride + shouting after me to stop the car, get out + take over. she was so mad she was in tears. what did i do? i took off like a zit-faced teen sociopath. lawn later i argued to myself. 5) sadistic clean-up girl. the vacuum cleaner, it's head caught behind the door frame to my bedroom whimpers in pain as i yank away, trying to reach the dust rats under the desk. i jerk the hose like a maniac. the poor howling piglet bonks it's head, won't budge. i tug-of-war the sucking screaming elephant trunk + the beast scuds into the room on it's fore-wheels like an abused circus chihuahua. punk sadism. can't help it. love it. like chris says in skins: 'i'm a wanker'.

saturday 7/4
chinese box
msg floats the bar. i'm having a shit beer with friends at the behan. 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). we gin up the gossip as the odor overtakes the nose the same way the fumes from a cartoon pie on a window sill sniffs goofy off the ground. takes a horse bit t keep us from skittering across centre st t get last call at food wall. but we don't. we lock onto conversational back roads until, out of the hazy blue, a tattooed, pierced-into-oblivion boi grl appears beside me, food box mouth agape like a grouper. '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 wall of food or at least to share the pillows with my friends, but as i pull the box towards my lap, she pulls back. i pull again, thinking she's being careful not to spill the pillows, but she pulls harder. back-n-forth, to-n-fro - a miniature war of wills. oh...i get it. she's offering up just one of the dumplings, one only + wants t navigate the room, handing out the rest to the rats of brendan. 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 last my greedy truck driver fingers relax, she owns the box, her box + crabs away in a spitfire huff. i guess i busted her pc share-the-wealth good will big time.

wednesday 7/22
vampire at the bar
michael jackson-y powder white face, baby jane hudson red lip smear, corn yellow teeth, layer cakes of black something-or-other denim, goth-y 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? 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 n tonic sparkling in one upraised claw. we share the loud gay laugh, have a similar over-the-glasses view of life, of odd behaviors + friends in common but don't know each other well. point being: as i perch three stools to the left of the dark drifter, casing him out with a whale's eye, i twist + cast a lighthouse lamp across the joint as if to scope out a desperate loner, but more as an excuse to x-ray mysterioso c'est moi. i see my friend waving. i echo, but get nothing back. oh. i get it. he is captivated. he has an interest in iago. i twirl back + realize that mr spellbound-by-his-own-monologue has two blokes giving fascinated unconditional attention. the voice - 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 - a sigh of the body. it is then that my friend from the corner has mounted the stool next to mine + stares like a bird dog at lady 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 + heading out the door. 'here t see, rick?' i scoff. 'you are so full of shit.' 'that obvious, huh?' 'are you kidding!?' (like next-door-neighbor house wives hanging laundry + 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 + who might have been reading up on the craig's list killer. he hasn't been back.

thursday 8/6
pool hopping
beauty. we never forget do we? the real-time imprint on the heart of object, music, person - a vasco de gama love fountain. no photograph or recording is as true or as affecting. it happened all over paris (pere lachaise, the eiffel tower at night, notre dame under construction) + when i heard nina simone throw back her cowl at woolsey hall + open That Mouth young, beautiful + black + whiffenpoofing for pablo casals in puerto rico drunk off my tits, one diminuendo finger to his lips + watching jack kennedy deliver his inaugural address on a black n white motorola in the driving snow + seeing the boy lift his head to smile in the tv light in a dank living room in moosup. the sight of a astonishing face, the shade of unfairly long lashes, the hair on a wrist catching sunlight, a friend's eyes startled by loss - gifts from the human guru. i think in the promised slow-motion reel we un-spool in that split second before death, we flicker these rare remembrances across the soul's silver screen. we are in love. we are drinking, sloppy + happy on the high cumulous of romance. 'ever go pool hopping?' he asks. '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 + knees. we take off our clothes + slip into the water like alligators. we swim, we get out, we drag back on our gear + run barefoot across the sprinkling lawn.' the thought of seeing him naked in moonlight, mercury silver wet, smiling that smile pumps blood a thousand-miles-per-second. 'sure.' so we do it. we find a house. we park. we creep. dogs bark. we strip (haven't time t worry about tiny dick syndrome in cold air), slither across the flagstone + slither into the electric blue. the water is ice cold but the exhilaration of what we are doing, the fact that we are doing it together, the air, the light, the hush of whispers, the ecstasy in our eyes: mad mad beauty. he looks like a boy i 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. eyelashes heavy, splayed wet, suppressed laugh moving his belly, his sex just above the water line. this is the first time i see him naked. things get complicated down the road, but this moment survives like a stolen portrait in the love attic. keats got it right: beauty is truth.

thursday 8/13
car washed
my car, the grand am my mum bought used knowing she would die + i would inherit, is a filthy sandlot mess. i tune up the engine. i change the oil. the brakes + tires are spell-checked, but the interior, the shell of my menstrual red pontiac - is bad news. banged up + bent, the ariel twisted like a raw nerve, the ac unable make up its hot or cold mind, the window on the driver's side 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 + crushed down to accommodate my piano, trash rats the floor, 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 + rolls around like a fake eyeball + the whole package 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 + the 15 bucks it cost t run it through. but today is cowboy clear + i've felt guilty long enough. i will drive to my favorite car wash in brookline, pay the next-t-cheapest option, enjoy the ride-thru + tidy the fucker up. i'd rolled the passenger window down so i could get a breeze in the car + as i pull in, i reach over to wind it back up + 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 + off we go. i know that the window on the driver's side will leak so i yank the ropes taut like a champ + that's when it happens. that's when i'm hit in the side of the face by soap + 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! 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 n suds, the more i'm fighting a waterloo. a pool of green slime collects on the passenger seat like a toxic pond + i lose it, breaking into cascades of laughter. the spray, the wet, the slime, the entire gizmo is masturbating all over me + i'm deliriously happy. next up - 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 + slice me in the neck + then it's over. we're through the maze, my car + i, as we regurgitate out the ass-end of the colonic machinery all sparkly + smiling. i round the bend + park next to the vacuum hose so i can suck out the ugliness, but i 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 + give liposuction only to realize that the real grand dames of brookline are peering up at me with 50's disdain as they buff their mercedes + audi's all high n mighty about my gonzo appearance. of course i love this like the weirdo who crashed the debutante party on methamphetamines.

wednesday 8/19
chew bakka laureate
why is it that i fail to notice or to watch people when they chew? i don't. i won't. i refuse. too cud-like + 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 dumb dog, chops flibbering, spit flying. 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 + 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.

saturday 8/22
golf tits
i notice 'em. those bight shirted middle aged men (tiger too) lumbering down the links in the blazing sun. there they jiggle - dude boobs. left, right, up, down, shiver n shake. they make me laugh. i wonder if the wives in their lives look over at the tv while spooning slobber up baby's chin + see 'em, their husband's titties + think: how did he let this happen?! i don't play the game, but i sport my own omelettey pair. i sense them bloobing 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 'em? something t squeeze, to feel comfy with as the waist expands? on the mountain top of male rack - the prime example: 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 + down the fairways + soldier on. do they scarf down pizza n 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 'em flat n 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 nike shirts? has vanity yet t strike the greens? i think about guitar hero pecs - perky pikers above heroin 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 michelin chicks with dicks? eew.

monday 9/7
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? 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) + i told each other that boys were better than girls 'all over', 'comparing' on my bed when grandma burst into the room + yelled at us for 'being bad', her face cop red. we didn't get it. we weren't sure what she was all riled up about. we certainly weren't aware that our identity was anything out of the ordinary. next up: the canvas covered haystack probe. brandy L called 'em 'boner cosmetics'. he persuaded the boys across the street + me t take off our blue jeans so he could nudge a carefully whittled n greased 'dick stick' into our tiny, reluctant pink entryways. not so far as to hurt or suggest anything 'wrong' - just because. t tell the truth we liked t watch, but when it all went down there was no queer alarm. i can polaroid the boy who came over to our house with his family to let us pick out a basset hound puppy while he stood on a stone wall above me + i could see up his too short frenchie shorts. no underwear. 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 + got felt up by gib L when his family came t town. crayon erections under damp sheets, but that was just something we did when he came over. didn't everybody? i still had miles t go before i got it about being bent. i slept over john K's house in a bed too small. he'd reach down under there + touch stuff. got a stiffy + had t go to the bathroom. something other than piss came out. it looked like puss. 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. not in 1954. i was sure it would be girls in my future anyhow. that's how it was supposed t be. until kin L. he'd have me lie on top of his back with my gear in his ass crack + 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 + make stuff come out of him. but kin was weirdly unavailable after our bedroom camp out. no more sleep overs. plus i'd been warned. a friend insinuated: 'be careful. kin + his brothers do things, dirty things at night.' so i kept my distance even though this piece of news made the possibility of re-enactment all the more tantalizing. but i waited in the wings + it wasn't til i was 16, be-zitted + able t 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 + climbed into his bed. i wanted to get him off the way he got me off, but he was ornery + horny at the same time. when i'd feel him up (pistol hard), he'd roll to the far side of the bed + make conflicting sounds. back-of-the-throat gasps v sneering disgust. had he uncovered homo files about himself? was he as uncomfortable + freaked out as i was? i slid out from under the covers, boner bobbing + drove home. part way down the stairs he called out in a whisper for me to come back. that he was ok. that it was ok. that i could, i should, you know...+ he would oblige. but i was too wigged out. i left + that was that. no more kin. no more foolin' around. i was not gonna be a homo. i was going to fight back in my solitary teen tower until i wanted girls the way i wanted him. i slipped up here n there with an occasional 'we're not actually doing what were doing while we're doing it' encounters. a rip-off-the-towel wrestling match with bill S, team captain, in a swimming pool cabana. ok, we weren't wrestling. flag pole salutes quivering in the dank + the dust, but we never talked about it. i stuffed all erotic tug of wars deep in my psyche until i graduated from college + became, as a teacher, intimately involved with one of my students. he lived across the street from my boarding house. love, sex + the promise of scandal converged to bring me out of the closet. meanwhile, i heard that good ol' kin had tried t schuss down mt washington. (the speed record for down hill still stands on that mountain.) he fell near the top + broke all 4 limbs. charging down a motel hallway chased by horny brothers, he bolted through a plate glass window + cut himself up like a leper. this kid, who's most likely married with children + grandchildren by now, brought it out of me, so to speak. a predilection that was inevitable, irrevocable + ultimately beautiful. i think about him often. i recapture those first awkward stinky steps. i owe him a nod to my own truth.

friday 9/11
small talk big talk
one of my favorite things ever is t 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 listened to fully, towering like a sequoia. not the predictable internal prep for one's own commentary or anecdote, but where listening is true + speaking frankly matters. wild ride carnivalesque jazz jiz over coffee or before the slur hits the booze wall or before a pot high paranoia overwhelms the senses. here the appearance of actual communication infests the vibe ahead of seduction + 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 t see ya' can carry, in spite of its cliche off-the-hook flippancy, emotional weight. in eyes you can read it, in voice you can hear it - the heartfelt interior. i used t disdain 'what's up, dude?' + short hand hi-5s, but not any more. of late i'm more apt t 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'.

sunday 9/13
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.

sunday 10/4
why don't i know the song?
'rick, that song on the radio, what is it?' 'what song? i can't hear it. (+ if i could, i wouldn't know what it is anyhow - deaf ears - too many hours on stage with screaming egos + guitars). the real problem: i know next t 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 t...' so they listened. they got it. they danced on the hum wire of artist-to-artist umbilical. birth by proxy. when a 'new' song shivered out of 'em it was often a tip of the hat t 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 or the wrong artist. i stroke my chin as i watch earnest fans bump, grind + sing, word/melody perfect, along with tunes blasting in a bar or on the radio or in ear buds + i'm flabbergasted. how do they know this shit? as if they ARE the song, reliving the exact time + 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 all over the tune choices for weddings, start up relationships, 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 would turn it into a homework assignment. listen to the tune, absorb it, master it, memorize it. i don't. i won't. i like t hear from someone else about a song. about how it was recorded. why it was written. why it holds meaning for my friend. but that's the end of it. it's my beer allies, my co-wokers, or even total strangers that compel me to write music. it's their stories, failures, troubles, love labors that appeal to my vampiric stenographer. it's them, my pals, not the famous, that get me. + movies as shortcuts t 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. + 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 + 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 music hall or r+b or folk or rock 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, the words. it seems not to matter all that much. nick cave put it this way: 'there's a song walking down the street + 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, thus enabling my part-time self image as a charlatan.

thursday 10/8
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 + he ain't a dominatrix, he's a motherfucking sadist who will get you t say anything, do anything, fuck anything. if you could 'jump' to a safe haven, you would, wouldn't you? i would. regardless, 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 all-too-human grass-is-greener complaint. 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 t get the fuck outa here + go home.') but he can't. he has t finish up or quit. that's how we learn. that's how we grow. the unavoidables we resent + confront + find our way past. a hairdresser friend of mine put it this way describing parents who hope to protect their kids from hurt + 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. kids you watch like a high school teacher grow up + fly the coop, irritated by the parents once revered. the see-saw variable of tips you make on any given night. the hard elbows of football dykes. hey, i could have left town. i could have moved t paris. i could have had any number of shit jobs around the globe + seen the rest of this wild planet + 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 + the town new over + over again. i love it here + i've come to accept that i need t live in one place long enough t get the music done. if i played guitar? maybe a different story. carry it on my back. but i don't. i can't. i look really stupid playing that thing. so here i am, a faux buddha under an elm tree.

monday 10/19
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 + who doesn't. my sisters do. my nieces + nephews don't. my (german) room mate does. my co-workers don't. my father did. my mother did not. she slapped me loud + 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 funny. except once when i blew a brown note into my cat's face. mum was sitting on the couch + peering over a magazine as i squatted + aimed my artillery inches in front of ralphie's little pink eraser. he squinted, edged a bit into the shit blizzard, wrinkled his nose + sniffed, as if reading a tea leaf. mum lost it. she doubled over. tears of laughter. i got her. just that once. so i guess even with the proprietary, a fart can make you laugh. it is one of the most 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 + grim. in a noisy bar egg n 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 + he was in a book you had t read. i doubt i will ever get over doing, hearing, talking about, waking up to these foul snorts out the back door. keeps the kid in all of us present + accounted for. embarrassed? well 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 + maybe i'll transform into a dancin' fool. so i did it. right then + there + immediately had t go. had t go bad before i shit myself. there was only one unisex piss pot + this was an emergency so i cut in line, squirreled in + locked the door. i KNEW how bad it was going to be. i'm not sure if it's the shit itself, the gas, the combination or the effect of cocaine on nostrils that does this, but i can assure you it is just The Worst Smell Ever. sure enough, the results were ungodly. i batted at the fumes to disperse them + planned on returning t daisy + the hot pump of the dance floor, but, as i exited (slamming the door in hopes that it would kick back the smut smog) a line of 10 frantic queens were waiting t get in + bump themselves silly. uh oh. i ducked, arm in front of face like a chicago mafioso who doesn't want his picture in the paper + bolted for the door just as les girls ricocheted like a paddle ball - a fanfare of shrieking, fanning of noses, coughing + gasping for air. i'm outed, flat out outed. i squirmed through the exit + made my way home, tail between rubber legs. the moral: shitting + farting never amuses all the people all the time.

saturday 10/31
got physical?
we all know what this means: the olde finger up the 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 t be burned out, sliced up + 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 + a nurse reminding us that 'the drugs are awesome'. so you think about it. all of it. if time is on your side, or if it's not. + 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 a sunny day 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 h.m.o. hurry-up, has seen me through minor worries + reads me like a country doc. like the honest auto mechanic who gets the difference between silly + serious, my guy never advocates procedures or drugs that won't heal or help. sadly, he transfered to florida. good for him. 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 t 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. so i'm doubly in doubt about my new guy with his long eyelashes + borderline lisp. 'uh oh' i'm thinking, 'the prostate check is gonna be weird'. he snaps on the rubber glove like nurse ratched + is in + 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 + informs me that in one year's time he, like my previous primary, will be moving on. i'll have t hunt n peck another fella (or woman?) t do the probe. based on a name. a funny name.

monday 11/16
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 hasta be discreet cuz he had t hide his 'nature' all those early years + will get it about secrecy')? do they unload because i have a rep? i leak + they want it told to others. they want the dead fish pried out of their gut + 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 deliver 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, or 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 that first time you realize that mom n dad are not god. 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 thru dad's playboy unmoved by marilyn's juicy tits. they don't know what happened between you + your next door neighbor out in the barn. you are out of range from mon n dad's all-seeing eye of saruman. it began for me when i realized that santa claus was a fiction. that he smelled of booze + 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 + living the magic of neverland. i kept doubt to myself until i met my first best friend. the first kid i told things to i never told anybody else. with whom i did things i never did with anyone 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 + 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 got it's charge from secrecy, from a dream world enshrined in a cathedral built, brick by brick, with the person you loved. why, early on, i didn't want to use the 'l' word until i was sure. i didn't want t jinx it with a silly word. i didn't want my friends to be in on what was happening or to break love down into shards of idiotic transparency. if all secrets are known then magic vanishes - torch light exposing worms + rust + insects.

monday 11/30
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 + with a band that no longer has anything t 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 n 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 old shoes. 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're 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'd be distant at holiday reunions + blaming the hard eyes of old friends who were convinced i hadn't changed, when, in fact, i had, in a thousand ways. i couldn't be 'read' or i didn't want t be. my emotions were covered with bruises + 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 he had fooled everyone, including himself. to be back home was like staring into a fun house mirror + despising the distortion. + 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 + 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 + 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, color, 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 + 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.

monday 12/7
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.

sunday 12/13
it is drunk
a girl slid off a bar stool at doyles + melted into the floor. an unsteady, lean-on-whatever's-within-reach hobble to the exit was in slo-mo + hysterical to watch. i put my hand on a table as i choked back a laugh. poor thing had no clue. tomorrow morning she'll be 'sick'. i sat next to an off-the-boat irish boy at the behan who had 7 empty pints of guinness in front of him lined up like clay ducks. he was counting + gulping + midway through #8 i asked: 'how can you get away with this + 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 + Very Proper Lady: high heels, sparkly blouse, exaggerated eye-liner (improperly applied + 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?! 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 + argues as if to persuade a jury of nuns. if they're cute you put up with the vomit potential in hopes of a score, but inevitably you shift away. not only because it's uncool or date rape tagged, you just can't deal with the slur, the wavering eyes, the thick fingers. pretty becomes not so pretty + 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 + staring + hoping + worked up all at once in this dutch playground crammed t the gills with the young + the hot. a skateboard hero with a watercolor moustache is so drunk he 's propped up like a discarded doll. his legs hang wide, his arms weigh a ton, his hands 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 + slippery behind a puke pout, puke breath, puke skin. one chartreuse bubble floats sadly in front of a 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.

tuesday 1/5
brothers
i love my sisters. we know each other in that honest way only time can grow. i depend on them for it. i never resented their gender or tried to convert them into boys, but i think as i began, early on, to have boy crushes, some of those friendships may have been predicated on my desire for a bro. i always wanted one. or two. someone to compete against. someone older as a sign post teacher, or younger as a kid i could look after + protect. maybe i bought the idea that brothers, when young, fooled around + in innocence played with each other or in front of each other + found out what that tent in your pants was all about. but it goes deeper than that. i wanted someone (dad not being the greatest in the bonding department) to lock in with. to compare notes. to challenge my manhood or dispel/forgive my weakness. if i 'made' brothers (the way they 'make' members in the mafia) it was with my first friends. we walked the great wild world arm-in-arm as if blood related, or brothers by proxy. cut a finger, share the cells, belong to a soul river self-created. that's how technicolor those first glorified friends translated. i have your back, you have mine. in books the characters of augustus mcrae + woodrow call ('lonesome dove') are equal to this archetype. neither was complete without the other as a foil, as a measure against himself, as a trustworthy, truth-telling pair of eyes. man-love without sexual rising. that's who i wanted. a captain call or a gus mcrae in the next door saddle. i guess i found 'em, these part-time brothers past, present + future. they sustain the parts of myself about which i'm ok: loyalty, directness, an open heart, a crazy imagination, a symbiotic view, a foolish leap, a willingness to look like shit on any given day.

wednesday 1/13
dad 'saves' me
i'm not sure i got this right. memory colorizes + distorts to please the ego. but here it is: dad was playing tennis at the club. 'the club' was what they called the shingled one-story building where you signed up for golf or tennis or watched sunday movies or bought a lemonade or a sarsaparilla on your parent's tab. the club was located near the magic door entrance to prout's neck (home to winslow homer + many of the scenes he painted + eventually a summer retreat for the rich + social registered.) it's a beautiful, short thumb pennisula poking into the atlantic off the lower coast of maine. it's where my mom grew up + the locus of many first stirrings of the heart + of my imaginary world, including my first public performance on a piano - an upright in the hall at the club where we put on end-of-summer spectaculars on a rickety red-curtained stage. i played a faux classical 'piece' all by myself + was rewarded with room-papered applause. one mid afternoon, as i ambled across the narrow two-lane, sand-shouldered road in front of the tennis court where dad was playing doubles, i was hit by a car. the speed limit, anxiously observed, could not have been more than 10 mph. i was 14, in shorts, no pimples yet, bright-eyed + probably on my way to see a dirty friend. i was knocked to the ground + scuffed my knees. no worse than that. dad heard the screech of tires, flung his racquet, shot through the pine grove to my rescue + lifted me up in his arms. he was worried + red-faced angry. he was screaming at the driver. probably someone he knew. maybe not. it's unclear. but i know i was proud of him. proud that he rushed to my side, that he ripped that driver a new hole. this was before the shit hit the fan with the wake of infidelities, the bottles of gin + vodka buried in the woodpile, the embarrassed, broken man he was later to become. i had forgotten about this day, this sunny blue sky afternoon at 'proutsy proutsy' as he called it. the place where he was silently blackballed for his loud mouth + drunken insults. but he was so cool that day + my narrow 14 yr old chest was filled up with the sight of him.

monday 2/8
getting old is no fun
my dad's brother, my uncle karl, was one tough guy. an athlete who played football for the giants + held the punting record there for decades. a soldier who, during the war, drove an ambulance for the american field service in italy. a fly caster rambo who broke his leg a mile from his car + crawled back the full distance on elbows. an illustrator who lit up a book on fly fishing. a free lancer who produced architectural renderings so he could raise his family without the uncertainties of being an artist only. a romantic who loved his wife madly + who, deaf as a door knob, had her to hit a cowbell to get his attention. an in-fighter who didn't get along with my dad. they'd yell at each other on lakes, scaring the fish away. they'd yell about work. karl loved t paint, dad hated the bank but did it for the dough + the phony prestige. he ragged on my uncle for not 'knowing the value of a buck'. karl had the balls to be an artist + dad wished he'd written books. karl was a moralist who hated hearing that my dad cheated on my mom, but who reversed himself when she divorced him. why couldn't she gut it out? back n forth they'd fume. made my little boy's head spin until i'd watch him paint. water colors up on easels in snow fields near our house in connecticut. quick, sure strokes, pipe in mouth, eyes squinting at a tobacco barn in the near distance. unlike my dad, a word whore, karl was a man who spoke with his eyes. one look from that mashed in football face + i knew i'd found a grown up who understood me. who recognized the art idiosyncrasy in my character. who sussed out a sensibility that few had guessed at (including myself). who knew that i'd make unconventional choices as i sorted out wherever-the-fuck i was headed + was ok with it. when we'd leave his house after a thanksgiving/football weekend, he'd nudge me aside + paper airplane acknowledgment with a wave of the pipe, a gandalf trail of smoke to let me know that i'd be fine, no matter what. to say that the odd path can be the right one. to listen to my heart. to keep at whatever strange interest seduced me. sadly, after college, i saw little of the man. i was caught up chasing my whims all over the game board. peace corps. architecture. teacher. hippie. actor. none panned out until i began, unexpectedly, to write songs. karl heard about it. could i send him a tape? were the songs honest? not sure his ears could hear, let alone judge what i sent him i felt a peculiar certainty knowing that my early work mattered to him. then his kids grew up + scattered. he lost his dear wife + began to lose touch with the real world. he believed that credit cards were free money. he sand-castled an everest of debt. not being able to hear, he mistrusted strangers + became paranoid, fearful, accusatory. chronic vertigo stumbled him down stairs + he broke his ankle. he shuttled through hospital, rehab, a nursing home, assisted living - a downward spiral whirl-pooling him away from his beloved self-sufficient life. the ankle wouldn't heal. the doc cut bone from his hip to fix it. took a year + a return to the hateful nursing home. old ladies cackled about his 'hot legs' + winked. nurses made fun of him behind his back + were inattentive. the medics messed him up. when he got pneumonia they doled out the wrong drugs. he became delusional. popped out of bed, wheeling his chair, spying, making remarks, nobody paying attention. 'lets go for a dip!' he'd shout. 'there's a pool upstairs + we gotta see rick! he's up on the 2nd floor, we gotta go see him. c'mon karen! (his daughter)' she'd listen. shrug, teary-eyed. not knowing what t do, his life narrowing to nothing. his vertigo came back. he fell. broke his hip. trapped again. it was hard for his kids to show up, their lives hurrying along with their own families to look after. he grew distant + dark, but no one could find a solution. he didn't want anyone to save him. a blood clot in his heart (a pulmonary embolism) could have been averted had he been properly hydrated, but the docs failed again + he died. he must have hated this humiliating conclusion to a lion's life. he had become the dad his kid's joked about, even as they loved him. as for me, i never went to visit. he died in that fucking rest home, bullshit about the last mile he could no longer crawl. + my dad, like hendrix, puked into his lungs on a christmas eve + choked to death, alone in a hospital in boston. no kids, no wife, no girlfriend. nobody - parallel to karl's isolated demise. the brother's kinscherf - a russian novel from new jersey.

thursday 2/25
where do you put it?
your snot? you pick your nose at a stoplight + what do you do? fling it out the window? rub it onto the steering wheel? under the seat? i paste 'em behind my legs, smudging in layers of crust that speak like tree rings, dating all deposits. or on my sock. who's gonna look at my sock? on foot i smear lamp posts, like insect sperm glistening on an aluminum pole. when i'm sick + the spew of phlegm is infinite + no surface can retain it, i fill a grocery bag with little bird's of discarded tissue. rubber cementy boogers are rolled into bee bee's + flicked across the living room rug. hard fingernails of nose shale drop like cork bark onto floors. what else? i'm a watcher. i want t see what safe house surfaces are utilized. a kid in chapel in 3rd grade, knuckle deep, eyes glassy, dragged a glob like a paintbrush across his school sweater. a diagonal tape worm pollock-ing a narrow filthy front. my next-door-neighbor: 'bet i can make you moo-oove.' 'no ya caa-an't' 'yes i caa-aan'. a snot river ran out his nose, down his upper lip + into an open mouth. green-yellow slugs. he'd gob 'em up into a french twist, like cotton candy, raise it over his head + that's when you ran, the boy at your heels snorting his nose off. a friend in high school, shuffling a receiving line at a debutant party, flobbed an oyster onto the exposed tit of the girl who's tiny chinese hand he was shaking. it landed like egg yolk + quivered as if wondering what to do with itself. her mom, all brisk philadelphia efficiency, whisked out a hanky + dabbed the doo doo off the tit. 'never you mind,' she might have said. my dad, hurtling like a salmon against the current of grey flannel suits on their way to work, was fighting for a seat on the commuter rail. he harked back a flapjack of goo, collecting it in his throat + zinged a slo-mo parabola at the idiot running in front of him. the target clapped his hand on the back of his neck as if shot. dad surged ahead, knees pumping + made his train. + there's the pocket hanky conundrum. pocket around a rag caked with gunk? in college my east african room mate grew up in zanzibar. over there you press finger to nostril, close it off + fire product onto sidewalk, grass, tarmac, toilet, wastebasket, desert sand. i adopted the slingshot. i loved it. made perfect sense. got me into trouble in central square. i was mid-snort, head down + didn't see the kid approaching, hand up for a high 5. friend, fan? who knows? what i do remember is that my ju ju flew like a mortar onto his brand new converse all-star. i will never learn. i am, as the girls at doyles say: 'gross'.

monday 3/15
college
i wonder if we need to go. straight out of high school, into the firing line + not even sure why. just to move a kid out of the house + onto the dogtrack of binge drinking, shirtless screams at a sports cam, knocked up or riddled with std's, studying at the last gasp on amphetamines, useless info shitting itself like bad brains into the next day toilet. the money spent or borrowed - an everest of debt. we are led to believe that the ladder climb to success, respect + money begins with a college degree. but what about the slackers who squeak through high school + are not ready for prime time? why spend the cake? could the pandora promise of college life be a let down? could a dull job snap 'real world' hardship into focus + step up a seizure of introspection about what a rightly directed education might prove down the career highway - a cogent blueprint once he or she knows what the fuck they really want out of life. in the days of white shoe, when boys (not girls) joined the frats their fathers rushed, a hollow leg up could be won with little more than the ability to get stinko drunk or hit the whore house of letter sweater intimacy. i for one, much as college taught me about my twisted heart, my hidden drives, my obsessive probing of the withdrawn, burned up dad's money like a forest fire. i could have learned as much or more on a tramp steamer, or hitch hiking across the galaxy. there is something to be said about testing one's self in the fish stew of peers. to find out with whom you can catch your breath, or learn the odd degrees of difference. or at least scab off the sophomoric whims of 'i will be a doctor/lawyer/hot shot' as soon as that chemistry course nails you to the floor. or 'i will be a writer' when at the bottom of your paper in american studies in red pencil is the comment: 'this is either the best or the worst thing i've ever read in my life'. but to spend or owe that much money to learn all the places you fail is false advertising + bought into, like the credit cards handed out like candy to freshmen, only to be abused. all these kids gobble up is the pretense of discipline when on a good day it's really about learning how to get by, to cheat, to do the least + still make the grade. to wait might not be such a bad idea in hurry-up america.