August 1984, State College, PA

I realized after writing my last piece that a nice bookend would be describing the act of leaving for college two years earlier. My first two years of college were spent a local Penn State branch campus, where I kicked ass academically for the first time in my life (having been a solid B+ type student in the past). But I couldn’t go on doing that forever as the campus did not offer four-year degrees. It was time to hit the big show.

I had been to State College before – obviously to find an apartment the previous spring, which was difficult as I had no idea how crazy that process was. Basically, if you didn’t have a place for the upcoming fall semester lined up by March or April, you were shit out of luck. I went up in late May and must have been through dozens of places that were too expensive or strange. I had never lived away from home before, save for extended vacations to relatives. Eventually, I found a place about a mile north of campus, the lower half of a ranch house owned by a strange but friendly middle-aged guy named Mike. I would be sharing the apartment, although I had no idea who my roommate would be, as I had no one to provide on my end. Mike told me he’d find someone over the summer. The rent was great – I think $160/month if I recall, There was a cornfield on the edge of the yard, which immediately put me at ease with my rural upbringing.

That was one of those factory summers, the second and last. God, I had such a good time there – not being facetious at all. Again, finite amount of time working there, being exposed to a bunch of guys who weren’t out to screw each other over, a very healthy way to be introduced to the concept of adult employment. And that was the summer of P, the Born-Again girl as noted in the previous post. I don’t have her picture handy, but believe it or not, she looked a lot like Jessica Alba circa the movie noted in this week's picture on the upper right.

Just a gorgeous, out-going, manically-depressed Catholic girl with a Christ complex. That summer we were hanging out regularly, a few nights a week, driving out for ice cream or going to the mall, listening to Springsteen on my cassette deck in the station wagon – very innocent stuff, as even holding hands was a stretch for her, easing away from the concept of becoming a nun. That night she wore a white dress and sandals. We went up to sit in the graveyard on the edge of town after dark. The weather was like now: hot, sunny days followed by cool nights where you could feel fall inching closer.

I was feeling horrible, knowing I’d be gone in a few days, and she’d still be there. Of course, not yet realizing I could drive the two-hour trip home any weekend I wanted … and did most weekends that first year away. “Edge of the earth approaching” type vibe that night. And she sensed it and was so kind. We should have went for it that night. Granted, not getting laid on my grandparents’ grave – that would have been totally inappropriate – but pushing it forward to the next level. But as also noted, I had my first hemorrhoid, no doubt due to the stress I was feeling over leaving, that burning little nut just above my asshole, which I did not know was a hemorrhoid at the time but would later realize when I got this thing once every three years. I was way too out of sorts to think like a horny teenager, but looking back now, man, I should have gone for it.

Work wrapped up later that week, and that weekend I packed my meager belongings (most importantly, stereo, records and Radio Shack Nova 40 headphones). Packing up, I quickly realized Mom was in worse shape than I was. She looked like the Grim Reaper was coming to take me away to hell, as opposed to me making the next logical step in my life and going away to college. Dad was fine – he laid a $20 on me when he caught me outside loading up the station wagon. Mom made the mistake of trying to show me a map of how to get to State College, when I had already been there at least half a dozen times and knew the way, as she knew, but Mom, to this day, has a habit of getting hyper-active and strange upon departures. She opened up the map in front of me, and I snapped, “Mom, stop it. I know the way. You don’t have to show me anything.” She slammed the map shut and stormed into the cellar.

But I had to go. Dad shook my hand and gave me advice on what to do in case the car broke down. I remember it was overcast, but not raining. And it was that moment I felt about as empty and afraid as a kid can get. I was leaving. Right fucking now. Leaving home, possibly for good. I knew it had to happen, but I didn’t want to go. But I had to. Where’s Mom? I’d had it. I was a bundle of nerves, wound up, and didn’t feel like waiting around. I got in the car, turned the key and started driving.

The last thing I saw, looking in the rear view mirror, was Mom, standing in the middle of our street, waving. She had run up from the basement when she heard me pulling out but was too late. That moment sticks with me now, as I can see it will happen one day in the foreseeable future with Mom, and me on the other end, save she won’t be coming back. I thought about driving back to say goodbye, but let it go. (I should note here: I already had plans to drive back the following weekend!)

I didn’t weep as I left my hometown – that came a few towns later, when it sunk in that I was leaving home, alone in the world for the first time, which I’ve since come to realize is a liberating feeling, but had no clue at the time. That feeling, as I recall, was amazing. Feeling horrible, just beat to shit, but knowing full well there was no turning back, and it had to be done.

Any way you drive to State College, PA, you are spending hours on heavily-wooded interstates, in my case, blasting straight across the state on Route 80. It’s a ride I’d make a few dozen times over the next two years, and I think getting out on the road like that put me at ease, playing my music and letting the hum of the road miles relax me. I got to State College a few hours later, pulled the station wagon into Mike’s driveway, and this big guy came out to greet me, white guy who appeared to be somewhere in his 20s, wire-frame glasses, sideburns. This was new roommate, M.

That half of the house we’d be sharing was a two bedroom with a bathroom, kitchen, living room and garage. Man, if I could have rented that place for myself, it would have been heaven, and I probably could have with the money I’d saved up, but wasn’t thinking that far ahead as I was still a kid.

M was friendly enough, from a rural area south of Pittsburgh. He had spent a few years in the armed forces and was now going to college in his late 20s. This guy was considerably older than I was, which felt strange. I could have done a lot worse – as it was, we simply had very little in common. Most nights after classes, I’d come back there, make small talk with M, then go back to my room and work on my writing. He must have thought I was a sequestered lunatic, but I did need to write, and that was the only time I could do it. As it was, I had a nice quiet room to do it and felt fine with that. M made the living room his domain, as I recall it, watching a lot of M*A*S*H reruns on TV or listening to his albums, Four Way Street by Crosby Stills Nash & Young being the main one I recall.

This was probably all for the best, as Mike had made it clear he didn’t want any wild parties or tons of kids coming by to hang out and cause trouble. And I had work to do. Most nights, Mike sat up there alone, practicing his steel guitar. Mike was an odd duck to begin with – a nebbish sort of bachelor who put out vague Norman Bates vibes. But the steel guitar thing was just too weird. At the time, I had zero comprehension of country music and thought the steel guitar was a pure hick instrument. (I’ve since come to realize it’s an incredibly delicate piece of equipment … and love hearing it on any piece of music.) I’d picture Mike up there, naked, wearing a hockey mask, and playing Hawaiian songs on his steel guitar in his living room.

It was a strange time. But good. As noted, applied for a columnist position on the school newspaper, landed one, and that served as a doorway into a cool little world of fellow English and Journalism majors, all of whom got to know me through my writing and being in the same classes.

There was one Journalism class in particular, my first one, that had a strong effect. I did poorly in that class, a C, which was basically because I still didn’t know how to write. I was great at writing tight little humor pieces and such, but reporting? I’m still not very good at that. I can interview people – actually, very well – but that sort of backseat-taking a writer does to become a good reporter was beyond me at the time. My ego was too big to do it well. And the instructor was a real stickler. Not a bad guy, but the sort of exercises he gave us, those who/what/where/when/why exercises of taking a jumble of facts and arranging them properly, was just a huge pain in the ass. I should have learned this stuff at the time, but it didn’t sink in until much later.

But in that class were some interesting people. The guy who sat next to me was the late Damon Chappie, who I later learned went on to have a pretty interesting career as an investigative reporter in Washington, D.C. He was doing much the same at Penn State, getting into hard-edge stories on the paper along the same lines. It’s not fair to say I didn’t like the guy, but I was put off upon first meeting him as he was sporting that lame fashion trend of mid-80s yuppies: a polo shirt with an upturned collar that he wore to every class, and Vuarnet sunglasses on a rope. The sort of thorniness that surely served him well as a reporter was present then in his personality. He put some people off, but we got along in a strange way. He was a very good reporter, which was clear from the get-go in that class.

(And I’d meet him again later. This story about Dewey Beach, Delaware, that lawn party … I saw Damon at that party. We sort of ignored each other instead of greeting each other as long-lost classmates. It was strange. We should have said hello, but didn’t. That was a very bad weekend!)

And there was old friend Justin. Meeting him, and then the group of guys he was hanging with down at headquarters on College Avenue, was another important door opening, as he and roommate Colin have gone on to be lifelong friends (as I knew they would). As I recall, Justin was a gangly, good-looking kid who wanted to be a poet and worshipped T.S. Eliot and Bob Dylan, so once he caught wind of my columns, we clicked immediately and felt that spark of friendship from the first hello. It was a very cool experience to meet people on the exact same creative wavelength, and they weren’t assholes. (In New York, I’d meet plenty of people who were, despite their artistic leanings, and veered away from these sort of folks as time went on.)

There were two women in that class who were great. One of them, I can’t even recall her name: a hippy chick from Pittsburgh who must have smoked 2-3 packs a day and was a real free spirit. Good-looking, too, but apparently had some sort of hippy 30-year-old boyfriend who was never around. Again, it was cool to be able to discuss Beat writers and music with someone like this, who was a real open spirit, not the kind of person I was meeting back home, sort of the doppelganger of P.

And there was Stacey, a Jewish girl from Philly. Pretty, too, and she always took shit for being too jappy (Jewish American Princessy, not Asian). She was jappy, which was a gauche thing to be around college English majors. She was just being herself and apparently felt comfortable enough with herself to stay that way – good for her. We goofed on her at the time, but she knew who she was. She flirted around with Justin quite a bit, and me, too, the following year. I still recall grinding her ass a bit when we all went to see a show at a jam-packed local bar by Backstreets, a hugely popular Springsteen tribute band. I also recall a strange night just before graduating, in her living room in one of those apartment towers, Justin out on the balcony, periodically waking up to puke over the edge, two of her roommates passed out on the living-room floor, and she and I sort of drunkenly spooning but not doing anything more. This was college!

As scheduled, that first weekend I came back, hung out with P, and for the first of many times, ate like a horse when I got home as I wasn’t eating that much during the week. I didn’t know how to cook (and wouldn’t truly learn until about five years ago) and lived on ramen and Chef Boyardee. That was also our salad bar days back home, which started when I was at the branch campus, and all the guys back there were in their late teens and early 20s. Some time during the week, we’d all converge on the Bonanza Steakhouse salad bar and kick ass with the endless salad bowl. We must have consumed 2,000 calories of salad, dessert and soda at each sitting … and neighbor JB would invariably end up puking in the parking lot, which was always hilarious in that rough-and-tumble young guy way.

It was a heady time. Having had a bad few weeks at work lately, doing things I don’t want to do for money, just like Dad did, I can look back at those days and miss that sense of feeling perfectly in stride with life, that I was doing what I was supposed to be doing and taking a lot of joy and good will from the experience. But that’s how a kid should feel about life: hopeful and uncertain at the same time. It’s an adult’s lot in life to put up with a fair amount of shit and endure the grind, especially in times like this.

I leave Pennsylvania all the time now, about once every six weeks or so when I go back to see Mom and decompress the city for a few days. It’s a routine, that never feels fully routine. I can tell it still bothers Mom to say goodbye, whereas I’m much easier now with it, can say goodbye at the drop of a hat, as I’ve done it dozens of times over the years. But it seems like she never gets used to it … which must be a parent’s lot in life whenever one of her kids goes out the door for any reason.

August 1986, State College, PA

I’ve noted before the ragged time I’ve seen friends having with kids in their late teens/early 20s as they try to find their way in the world. And I surely noted that any romantic notions an aging person has about that time in their lives ought to pay attention to situations like that, because they bring back the rampant insecurity, lack of direction and awkwardness that we tend to gloss over or forget with passing time.

Of course, their parenthood issues aren’t isolated to those years. That last blast of tension they feel before their kids go off on their own seems fairly lightweight as compared to some of the wild shit they went through with the kids in their teen years. And the nonstop time and attention of their early years. If they were lucky, it seemed like they had a small window of child-raising comfort from about the kids’ ages of 8 through 12 or so. (That's the age I think of when I think of "lost youth." Not teenage years. Which tend to be car wrecks of varying degrees for most people.) I don’t envy them or sit around pining for children. It seems like whatever joy is passed along, there’s a ton of “other shit” that goes along with the process … and I’m talking about basically good kids with relatively few problems. Troubled kids seem like prolonged grief and worry.

But I’m trying to recall that last summer at Penn State, when I finally took time off for myself to just do nothing for awhile before adulthood kicked in. I kick myself now because I didn’t do something like the youth hostel thing and bum around Europe for a few months. That would have been the time. I know a few people who did that, and they all have good memories of that trip.

As it was, I had maneuvered through college like a shark. Was the first to graduate in my family, although I was the youngest. Had good grades (a step down from excellent, which I had my first two years when living at home and studying my ass off). Made a bunch of new friends, a core group of which I still know today. Wrote a weekly humor column for the college newspaper that got my feet wet in the writing world. In short, had a fantastic college experience that worked on so many levels. About all I did wrong was fall for a girl who swayed into the shady world of Born Again Christianity, wasted far too much time trying to make that work and then mourned the loss afterward. I should have been screwing like a billy goat in heat, as so many guys were back then, instead of emulating a forlorn 33-year-old divorcee.

But I knew it was time to go in the summer of ’86. I can see why so many people hang onto college long after they should have left, as college towns present a microcosm world of high ideals and permanent youth which one can play along with well into his 20s, but it must get a bit silly after that. I knew I had to go, but wasn’t quite ready, as I had no plans or direction whatsoever. I knew I wanted to write, but had no idea how that was going to happen on any real level. The college paper let me get away with murder, gave me carte blanche to write anything I wanted. How many newspapers have you read this sort of stuff in? Magazines? It’s self indulgent, for sure, but I also hope it gets across someone stretching out a bit. I knew straightaway that if I landed an entry level editorial gig, I’d have to spend a lot of time writing in styles I didn’t want to write, and writing stories I didn’t want to write. Possibly for years. (And I just never wrapped my mind around that, all these years later. So be it. God bless entities like the NYPress in the 90s and my old pals at Leisuresuit.net for letting me loose.)

My landlord, Olgie, suggested I take a few months off, if I could afford it, and just enjoy the town for the summer, as I had never spent a summer there. (My first two college summers I worked in Dad’s factory, which was a great experience. Third summer, I spent literally a few hours fumbling through two shit jobs I wanted no part of then reverted to a teenage “do nothing until school starts” mentality for a month, which felt deeply awkward and ill-fitting at that point in my life.) I could afford it, the German Department, where I had been working, was glad to have me stay a little longer, so I decided to treat myself and spend three months working 20 hours a week with no other responsibilities.

It was a good summer. Got up late every morning. Ran 6-8 miles. Worked four hours a day. Spent my afternoons lazing in the sun on the main lawn. Hit the local record stores late afternoon. Had just enough to buy all those cool mid-80s indie albums. Hung out with the few friends who were there for the summer, too.

I’ve never been as relaxed since. There have been times in my adult life when I wasn’t working, especially between freelance and temp gigs, but those were always fraught with money worries. That summer at Penn State, I knew I was gone come September, didn’t have much money, but figured I’d be going home, at least temporarily.

All summer I’d also been sending out cover letters and articles to dozens of publications. First wave was ones I wanted to work for (music magazines like Rolling Stone, big-city papers, etc.) Next was any publication I could find the address for. I must have sent out 200 letters, with no immediate response. Eventually, one of my favorite music magazines would write back, and I’d write a story for them that fall. And I got two huge thumbs up from associate editors at The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Detroit Free Press, although their editors wouldn’t hire me (sensing rightly that I’d make a pretty bad “serious” editorialist, which has always seemed like a bad racket to me, especially the political junk).

It was sobering. All summer long, not even rejection letters, just silence. Even my home county newspaper didn’t respond … which I’ve never forgotten. To get the freeze out from such a bland, vanilla publication felt like the worst rejection … getting ignored by people I didn’t even want to write for!

So while I had that gray cloud of no future hanging over me, I still managed to feel relaxed and casual about life in general. Evenings I’d come back to Olgie’s house. Right at the end of my tenure in her place, she moved from a nice little house on the outskirts of town to one just off fraternity row right off campus, so I helped her move and lived there for a month or two. A great change – walking to bars and the downtown area as opposed to worrying about being too drunk to drive. And her new place was beautiful, huge backyard, and a back deck that we’d hang around at sundown and chat, this time of year, enjoying the cool of the evening before I’d head out for whatever that night.

And that would usually be music-related. Seeing local bands, like the fondly remembered Screaming Ducks, who were your basic bar band playing 60s and 70s hits, long in the tooth by the time I got there, but they had a great repertoire of Van Morrison, Stones, Beatles, CCR, etc. … the kind of shit that still went down well in a crowded college bar circa the mid-80s. In the summer, there’d be just as many townies as college kids going to their shows, and it was a nice atmosphere, not the mob scene of the school year.

What I remember most was a few of us, almost always Doug from the record store, heading back to our friend Pat’s place in one of those huge apartment developments a mile or two from town, hanging out into the wee hours, getting drunk and listening to all kinds of shit Pat had in her record collection. Pat was a good 10-15 years older than us at the time, working on the Arts staff at the paper and doing graduate work in Psychology, and she had a record collection that was mind-blowingly good. I've surely caught up and gone way past since then, but her collection was deeply impressive at the time, and filled with many things I'd never heard.

When I got into Soul music, she was way ahead of me, as that was the music of her childhood. I can still recall one night her putting on a Ray Charles album. Not the stuff I knew like “Georgia on My Mind” or “I Can’t Stop Loving You.” His earlier, more raw stuff, like “It Should’ve Been Me,” “Night Time is the Right Time” and “Mess Around.” That sound was a revelation to me, and another door kicking open to even more music I’d never heard before. There’s still a rawness to early Ray Charles, and that time in R&B music, the 50s before rock exploded, that I love to hear.

Pat would blow our minds routinely like this. James Brown. Ray Charles. Solomon Burke. And of course all the great indie stuff floating around. MTV’s 120 Minutes would usually come on as we were lounging on her cheap sofas and easy chairs, and we’d take in the latest offerings, dozing off a cheap red wine drunk to Camper Van Beethoven. That was such a sweet time in life, to have that sort of time, hours every night, to sit and talk with friends, listen to great music, stumble onto old and new stuff we hadn’t heard before, never realizing a lot of this stuff served as a musical foundation we’d spend the rest of our days building on.

That’s what I miss the most about college, and that summer in particular: that sense of spare time. I knew it wasn’t endless – I could see the end and knew it was coming. But there’s something about your mind at that point in your life, some weightless, worry-free spirit unencumbered by memory, experience, decades of passing time … it was just easier to hang loose and relax back then. Everything about our lives encouraged it. Very few responsibilities. No big-money jobs. No careers. No kids. No marriages. No divorces. Relatively blank slates, writing good things on those slates, and having brains enough to know they were good, lasting things that were changing us and pushing us in directions we hadn’t gone before.

At our graduation in May, a bacchanalia I wrote about here, we had that party to end all parties that went on for the better part of a week with all sorts of depravity and wild emotions. My two good friends from that time and former roommates, Colin and Justin, both came back and made appearances later that summer. First was Colin, who was off to Los Angeles with his then-fiancé to start life on the west coast. They came by to visit in July and encouraged me to come with them … as none of us quite knew what were doing and figured any option is as good as another. I held off for awhile, actually for months, and then went out there, to Venice, CA that winter. And had a fucking terrible time, as they were fighting like cats and dogs, in a one-bedroom apartment, and I was often stuck in the middle. That hang-loose sense of college freedom was replaced by a claustrophobic “relationship starting to come apart” vibe that I had to be part of … and got the fuck out of there in a hurry! I could have stayed in L.A., but felt out of place there and came back home a few weeks later feeling totally defeated and lost.

But that was in the future as compared to the sunny afternoon they showed up and bid farewell as they took off for the coast. Ironically, Colin now lives in a house in Venice only a block or two from the ratty apartment building we were living in at the time (that's still ratty). Married, but not to that then-fiancé. Doing well for himself and moving along with whatever well-trained dogs he has in his life at any given moment.

Justin came by that August, feeling just as lost as I was, too. He was thumbing it from his town up around Erie, PA down to see his Mom in the Philly suburbs and stopped by. Actually, I gave him a ride back home one weekend, which got him a lot closer to Philly. He was in his Woody Guthrie phase, which would last awhile, roaming around. I was shocked that he was still thumbing it, which seemed like a 70s thing, but he seemed to be doing all right with it. He’d later try to shoehorn himself into an advertising position in northern New Jersey, where I visited him once, and he seemed just as miserable as I was over our prospects. Save he eventually freaked out and did do the Europe thing. Caught him again on the tail end of that, this time while living in the Bronx, which surely blew his (and his hippie girlfriend’s) mind when they visited briefly. He’d eventually find his way to California, too, farther north, and is also doing pretty well, running a graphic arts business while his wife does office work, and I think they have 50 kids now.

But I do remember us that summer: “I don’t know” should have been our motto, because none of us had a clue how we were going to get from Point A to Point B, or even what Point B was, as that time immediately after college, unless you’re going to grad school or really busting ass to race down a career path, is just a huge question mark. I will note one glaring difference between us then and what I see with my friends’ kids now: we knew how to support ourselves. For one thing, we didn’t have credit cards, or expensive gadgets like cellphones, therefore could only spend what we had, and learned to budget our money, too, what little of it there was. We didn’t have parents supporting us either – for a few years there, I was learning to be self sufficient when I could see a lot of fellow students were cruising on parental donations. I think that’s the core difference – we drilled it into our heads that we were going to make it on our own.

Of course, after that summer, I immediately went home as I had no other options. Immediately got work at the local branch campus as an English tutor, which I could have parlayed into a teaching gig down the road (but didn’t when I ran off to Venice that winter). Right choice? I don’t know. I can see my going off to California like that struck some kind of spark in me that would eventually lead to me taking the big plunge and moving to New York a year later with about $300 in my pocket and a cardboard suitcase filled with two or three days worth of clothes. If I stayed back there and put in the years to become a professor? I often fantasize about summers off and a more relaxed daily schedule. But I also think about the red tape and stale rigidity of colleges … and the teenage pussy, I can guarantee you, would have driven me crazy. It was driving me nuts the short time I was there as a tutor, girls only 2-3 years younger than I was, and I was forbidden to go there. I’ve seen how flirty college girls get with older men, and lord only knows how reasonably attractive male professors keep it together.

None of this was on my mind that August. The future was a blank slate, and I was saying a slow goodbye to a way of life I knew could not last. August always feels like a “goodbye” month to me. Goodbye to summer. Which feels good, as I love the fall. But as you get older, you tie this in with your own life, and there’s that bitter sweet feeling of youth fading away with the last days of August. So it goes. I surely hated this song in the summer of 1986 – I was way too cool for school – but Rod Stewart, after his fall from grace, got it right every now and then. This was one of those times, and this is how August feels to me now.

Random Acts of Kindness

These things happen every now and then. Hopefully, you’re making them happen sometimes. I had a nice one on Saturday that’s worth noting. Saturday was possibly the hottest day of the year here: temperatures in the mid-90s with high humidity. Just the sort of brutally hot New York day that encourages sane people to stay inside and not move. Because you move, you sweat, a lot. It’s been a pretty miserable summer in this respect, with forecasters noting “a cooling period” when the day-time highs drop to the high 80s.

We had a tornado warning Friday night around 8:30 that luckily only turned out to be a nasty thunderstorm for half an hour. Blew right through. I didn’t hear any branches coming down on the street, so I felt all right. Got up this morning, surveyed the landlord’s patio, some minor stuff down from high winds, but nothing horrible. Turned the corner, and saw that one of the dead trees on her property had snapped off near the trunk and was suspended against the telephone wires up above.

Man. This was a mixed blessing. Any time part or all of those dead trees come down, it saves her a truckload of money in terms of not having to get them cut down eventually, which would be a four-figure proposition around here. So it was a good thing that this entire tree had come down in one fell swoop.

It was a bad thing in that someone would have to bring the thing down and clean it up … that someone being me. On the hottest day of the year. I took my clothes to the laundromat and set about doing this in between loads. You can guess that I sweated buckets – looked like I had jumped in a pool with my clothes on, sweat just pouring off my body as I worked on this thing. First move was to push the hanging tree over to the sidewalk so I could then grab the broken-off trunk and pull it down the sidewalk, thus bringing the whole severed tree down. Which I did, with a great bang and crash as 30 feet of dead wood hit the sidewalk and cracked. I jammed my thumb in the process, a similar injury I used to get all the time playing basketball in my childhood. Thought I’d broken it, too, hurt like hell, but kept moving and it wasn’t as bad as I thought.

It was easy pulling off the broken branches and stacking them on the patio. The hard part came in sawing down the trunk, with a small branch saw I have for tree limbs, so I could carry large chunks of it to the patio. This was where the sweat really started pouring. Sun was beating directly down on the sidewalk, just relentless. Got to the point where I had the 10-foot long stump of the trunk to go, still too heavy to drag or carry, with about a 20-inch diameter to cut through. You can’t do this easily with a branch saw. You have to feverishly cut here and there, rotate the trunk as much as possible, keep cutting, and when you think you’re getting close, repeatedly pick up the trunk and slam it on the sidewalk, or position it so you can jump up and down on it and hopefully break it in half.

This sucked. Really sucked. I must have sounded like Mel Gibson phoning his girlfriend. It was taking me forever, close to an hour of fruitless sawing and dropping, and I was losing my mind. I went into my apartment and got Dad’s old hammer, using the claw to chip out the wood I had been sawing at, which was working, until I bent the head of the hammer in half. It was that kind of job.

Had I kept going like this, I’d have eventually won out over the stump, but it would have taken a long, long time. Just then, this older Mexican guy who was clearly walking around the neighborhood collecting plastic bottles from the trash saw me, came over, called out, “Amigo need help?” He immediately took the branch saw and started going at it, which went a lot better with one guy, me, holding the stump down. I’d had the job about 80% done on my own but was losing steam and sanity. This guy came along at the perfect time, when I felt like quitting, and apropos of nothing save being a nice guy, he helped a stranger on a day when fucking nobody was going to help me.

Five minutes later, we picked up the stump and dropped it on the sidewalk. Nothing. Again. This time we heard a slight crack, both of us smiling. But it was still connected. At this point, I started jumping on the stump as it was at a slight incline, and sure enough, I snapped it with my body weight, breaking that piece of shit down into halves that could be carried onto the patio. I was elated. This guy was a saint … and if I’m not mistaken, he hadn’t even broken a sweat. He even helped carry the second huge piece on the patio, heaving it on his back.

I gave him a $10 spot for his troubles, which he gladly accepted, and we shook hands. He asked me if I wanted to take down the other dead tree on Sunday. I said no, wasn’t my call to make, and the landlord didn’t have any more space to put the limbs. So he picked up his plastic bags of empties, bid me a good day and went on his way.

That random act of kindness had me thinking all day. It’s hard to find friends when there’s hard work to be done – I’ve found this to be very much true. You can generally count those people in your life on one hand. I try to be one of those people because I know how hard it is to do stuff like an apartment/house move, or shovel snow, or clear a yard of debris, or anything that would be hard as hell on your own. Even if I don’t know you that well, I’ll clear time to do something like that. On one hand, I simply like doing that kind of work in small doses. On the other, this is what you do for people you know … help them when you can.

Of course, it’s not all that rosy and self congratulatory. I have people in my life I’ve let slide. People with bad problems. In most cases of their own doing, but sometimes a combination of things: sliding off the map AND having something catastrophic occurring to deepen the bad luck streak. And I find myself strangely distant in these situations. More accurately, I make myself strangely distant and don’t make much of an effort to bridge the gap.

It’s a guilt thing with me – I feel bad about this handful of bad situations in my life. Won’t get into specifics or name names. But it does bother me that I’ll bend over backwards to give you any sort of physical help you need but will hedge on the emotional variety at times. In each case, I have to note, situations where the person spent years burning down the house in some sense: drinking, drugs, carousing, etc. These aren’t bad people, but they’ve had issues that have gone on for decades. And I guess it offends me in some spiritual sense that the message (stop doing this shit) didn’t sink in after the first warning shot. Or the second. Or the first radical failure. Or the second. Or the third. And so on.

I know the cause of their decline shouldn’t matter, but it does. So much of how I see the world now can be traced back to the winter of 2004, watching Dad pass away. When you see someone in your life like that get pile-drived by a disease and slammed into physical failure and then death, it has a profound effect. In other words, I saw someone I care about a great deal have his health destroyed by circumstances beyond his control, watched him fight these circumstances to the best of his abilities, and lose.

That experience turned me ice cold towards people who throw their lives away. Some who are friends and acquaintances, too. I wouldn’t say I’ve given up on these people. Haven’t even read a single one of them the riot act. People are going to live however they want to live, and I’m not going to stop them. But after watching my father have the shit kicked out of him in a hospital bed, I get fucking angry when I see people willfully put themselves in harm’s way in any sense. As you get older, you see, some people push themselves into a downward slide, repeatedly, over and over, year after year, willfully making the wrong choices, in the mistaken belief that their youth, wits and guile will get them through, like they have in the past. Not realizing how much they’ve eroded their reserves of youth and luck. Much less the good will of those around them who’ve spent as long a time putting up with this stuff. Bad shit catches up to all of us, and much faster if you entertain it.

So I can rationalize my inaction on that part, but still recognize there’s a person there I’ve known for a long time, decades or much of my life in some cases, and I’m letting the person down. I’m not writing this as some sort of emotional pep rally to get back into these situations – I’ll probably go on doing very little to nothing in each situation – but I am aware of it and can acknowledge it. Which counts for very little here. But I’d rather see this larger picture of myself than focus in on my desire to randomly help people when they need it. Life gets tricky like that. Or maybe it just gets more clear. When you’re younger, you tend to focus on your positive qualities because that’s how you want the world to see you. But you get older, you see it all within yourself, the good and the bad, hopefully can acknowledge both, and understand your shit truly does stink just like everyone else’s. If you’re like me, you’ll spend the rest of your days doing good and bad things, and wondering how it all pans it out in the end.

Still, what that guy did for me today was great, and it registered, will surely influence me to do the same in situations where there is no personal gain for me, save to help someone having a rough time. Be a saint when you can, because it’s not as hard as you think it is. No one bats a thousand, so there’s no harm in hitting one out of the park every now and then to counter-balance those times when you strike out using a corked bat and blame it on the ump.

Steinbrenner’s Inferno

George Steinbrenner passes on at the age of 80 on July 13, 2010.

Moments after his life ends, he feels himself gliding through a long, dark tunnel. There’s a light at the end of it, and he feels irreversibly drawn to it. Only it’s not a golden light: it’s a red light. A burning red light. As he grows closer, he can see it’s a raging inferno, like a neighborhood in the Bronx burning down in a riot.

He slides out of the tunnel and finds himself dumped in a room that looks like a major league baseball clubhouse. It’s empty, save for a card table in the middle of it. “I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive" by Hank Williams is echoing from the PA system. An old-fashioned Coke machine with bottles hums and sweats in the corner.

At the card table sits a being who is obviously Satan, just as depicted for centuries: a large, red man with yellow eyes, black hair, goatee and horns sprouting from his forehead. He has a tail, cloven hooves and is swathed in a long red cape. The only strange touch: he wears a New York Mets cap jauntily arranged to keep his horns showing.

Satan is playing poker with a rail-thin, dark-haired, middle-aged man in a mustard-stained tank top, a pair of white boxer shorts with hearts, stirrup socks and baseball cleats. The man has a cigarette in his card-holding hand, and a can of Billy beer in the other. It’s Steinbrenner’s old friend/nemesis, Billy Martin.

Billy: (blows a smoke ring and glances over at Steinbrenner on the floor) Well, well, well. Look what the cat dragged in.

Satan snickers and wags his tail.

Steinbrenner: Billy, what the. I was just napping in my hospital bed a few minutes ago. What in the hell is going on here?

Billy Martin: You got it. Hell is going on here. You’ve gone to hell, George. I’ve been waiting for you.

Satan: So have I.

Steinbrenner: What do you mean “hell”? This can’t be hell. I like the clubhouse. I can even live with the Mets hat.

Satan: This is hell. You own this place. The clubhouse. The team. The stadium. If you walk around outside, it will look a lot like Pittsburgh. You now own the Pittsburgh Pirates. Any good players you have came up through your farm system and leave once their contracts expire. You can no longer afford to buy the best. Your family owns a string of kielbasa restaurants in western Pennsylvania. Your team lost tonight to the Houston Astros, 7-2. Attendance was 8,531. Billy is your manager, and you can’t fire him.

Steinbrenner: Christ. This really is hell.

Satan: Come. Sit at our table. We can deal you in on the next hand.

Billy crushes his beer can and throws it over his shoulder.

Billy: Christ, I can’t stand this shit. It’s warm as piss, too. Can’t you ever get Budweiser down here?

Satan: You know warm Billy beer is part of your hell. We save the Budweiser for sinners who love good imported beer. Besides, you have the same name.

Billy: Don’t remind me. I got drunk with that asshole once in Texarkana in 1979. There was something weird about that boy. He smelled like turpentine and had his own Secret Service agent. Kept chasing my dog around the yard. Shit, Satan, give me the Belgian beer for once, you know the only beer I like is Bud.

Satan smiled at Billy, knowing who ruled here. Just then, Richard Nixon came through the clubhouse door.

Nixon: George! Old buddy, how are you?

Steinbrenner: Oh my God. Dick. Dick Nixon! You’re here, too?

Nixon: Where else would I be? All politicians go to hell. Well, in reality, all lawyers go directly to hell, and most politicians are lawyers by default.

Steinbrenner: But we were good men in our lives. We did so much good for the world.

Nixon: Don’t I know it, George, don’t I know it, but not everyone can see things the way we do. I never got to thank you for the campaign contributions in ’72. I know you caught hell over those, but I’ve never forgotten.

Steinbrenner: You showed them, though, didn’t you, Mr. Nixon. Crushed McGovern and all those hippies. The day you won that election, I put right up there with any of my World Series wins. What do you do down here?

Nixon: Well, I, uh, don’t like to talk about it.

Satan: He’s Bella Abzug’s campaign manager and sex slave. She’s down here, too.

Steinbrenner: (grimacing) Oh, dear lord. Oh, that’s so harsh. Mr. Nixon, I don’t know what to say.

Nixon: Don’t say anything, George. I don’t want to talk about it.

Steinbrenner: What do we do here?

Satan: This is it.

Steinbrenner: What do you mean “this is it”?

Satan: Some sinners get chased around lakes of fire by one-eyed demons. Some roll boulders up huge hills only to have them roll back down and crush them for eternity. But for our special sinners, like you, we give you a special kind of hell. When you’re here long enough, we allow you to walk around and be part of other people’s hells. So you know you’re not alone.

Billy: George, I lose to the fuckin’ Astros 7-2 every night then get puking drunk on Billy beer.

Nixon: And Bella beats her Republican opponent in New York state every night, then makes passionate love to me in the coat room at the campaign after party. Believe you me, it’s no picnic for her either.

Satan: Mr. Nixon, you know full well you earned your place in hell.

Nixon: So I took a few short cuts.

Steinbrenner: Don’t you do stuff like sit in a theater and watch the movie of your life play out?

Satan: Even I have a heart. That would be hell for everyone. You don’t realize how much time you spend on the toilet and sleeping. You really want to sit in a movie theater and watch that? My ass gets sore if I have to sit and watch a three-hour movie, much less an 80-year long one. Yours does, too.

Steinbrenner: I see your point. But why not a highlights reel?

Satan: Because, Mr. Steinbrenner, hell is not This Week in Baseball, and I’m not here to please you. You work for me here. And I don’t take requests, unless they’re to make some other sinner’s time here more harsh.

Steinbrenner: I’m not the kind who takes orders from anyone!

Satan: (laughing) Oh, I’ll never give you any orders. I’ll just give you this illusion and make you repeat it for eternity. Yell and scream if you want. Make threats. Try not to do it. But you will do this every day and night here. Your office only has a beat-up window fan, and it’s always 87 degrees with 75% humidity. You thought Billy gave you a hard time in New York with a great team? Try it in Pittsburgh with a team batting average of .241 in a stadium where you can hear drunks in the upper level shouting obscenities in Polish at the players.

Steinbrenner: Right off the bat, I have to ask. How do I get to heaven?

Satan, Billy Martin and Richard Nixon erupt in a blaze of laughter, doubling over and slapping each other on the back.

Steinbrenner: What’s so funny?

Billy: George, man, don’t you get it? It doesn’t matter what we thought of ourselves when we were alive. Even Hitler thought he was a great guy. You’re here for a reason. Probably a lot of reasons. I know I am. And you have all the time in the world to think about them. After awhile, it all sinks in.

Steinbrenner: No. This can’t be. There must be some mistake.

Nixon: Take it easy, George, we’re not going to pull a congressional committee on you. We’re not here to judge. We’re all just doing our time. I have no idea what heaven must be like.

Satan: I do. It’s over-rated. Why do you think I left?

Steinbrenner: Well, if it’s so over-rated, why not let me go there instead?

Satan: Mr. Steinbrenner, understand I rule down here. But I’m not running the whole show. Much as I hate Him, I answer to God. We all do. He sent you here. All I did was open the door and let you in.

Steinbrenner: Can I talk to God? You know, I talked to Him all the time when I was alive. In prayer. Or just when I needed help. I know He was listening.

Billy: Well, you must have called Him an asshole or something, because here you are.

The PA system starts to play “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” by The Charlie Daniels Band. George gets a glimmer in his eye and sits down at the card table with Billy Martin, Richard Nixon and Satan.

Steinbrenner: Satan, I have a proposition for you.

Satan: Wouldn’t be the first one I’ve heard or the last. Go on.

Steinbrenner: What if we had a poker tournament, right here, right now, and if I win, you let me talk to God.

Satan: And if one of us wins?

Steinbrenner: You decide. Make me go to Woodstock for eternity. Give me the Cleveland Indians to run, and make Abbie Hoffman the coach. I don’t care. Just give me the chance.

Billy: Satan, don’t listen to him. The man’s a born liar. I know you’re good, but you might lose.

Satan: Billy, you know I never lose.

Billy: That’s the truth. Only thing I think about when we play is how close I can get to winning without it ever happening.

Satan: I’ll take you up on this wager, Mr. Steinbrenner, but understand you will lose. I’m not even worried about introducing you to God. It won’t happen. And even if I did, more than likely, He would tell you why you’re here and be done with you.

Steinbrenner: Just keep your word, Satan. If I’m lucky enough to beat you, you let me worry about God and what to say. If I can sit in a conference room with Reggie Jackson and Billy Martin screaming their heads off and come out on top, nothing scares me after that.

Billy: (burps, opens another Billy beer) Fuckin’ A.

… the scene fades out as Nixon and Steinbrenner pull up their fold-out metal chairs to the card table and Satan shuffles the deck of cards.

… fade back in through a white cloud. A celestial choir. Through the mist, Billy Martin appears, dressed as he was in hell, save he now wears a Yankee’s cap. He’s sitting at a small rectangular white desk on a cloud, in front of large set of silver gates. He’s drinking a can of Budweiser. An elderly woman appears through the cloud and approaches Billy.

The Woman: Who are you? Am I in heaven?

Billy: Who the fuck are you? That is the question, mama. Who the fuck are you?

Disembodied voice: Billy! Language! You know not to speak like that to angels.

Billy: (mumbling) California fuckin’ Angels, should have kicked Jim Fregosi's ass when I had the chance.

The sound of footsteps. It’s George Steinbrenner, in a white suit, and he appears through the gates behind Billy Martin, opening the gates.

Steinbrenner: You’ll have to forgive, Billy, ma’am, he’s still a little rough around the edges. I just traded Mother Teresa and St. Peter to Satan for Billy, $500,000 in cash and a soul to be named later. He’s still learning the ropes here.

The Woman: Is this heaven?

Steinbrenner: Yes, this is heaven. When you pass through these gates, you’ll transform to the best you ever looked in your life, remember only happy times and be reunited with everyone else here that you knew in life. This is heaven!

The Woman: (weeping) Oh, thank God!

Steinbrenner: And me, too, George Steinbrenner!

The Woman: I wasn’t expecting anyone famous to meet me here.

Steinbrenner: Well, I’ve only been here a few days.

The Woman: But you died a few weeks ago, didn’t you? Where were you?

Steinbrenner: Well, long story short, I went to hell. I didn’t like hell. Hell was the worst thing you could imagine for yourself, repeated for eternity. I don’t want to talk about it. But when I was in hell, I challenged Satan to a game of poker with the stipulation that if I won, I could talk to God. Well, we played for two weeks straight, and in the end, I had Satan down to a pair of underpants and an IOU for a ’57 Chevy. So, he got mad, and made a lot of noise, but in the end, he let me talk to God.

The Woman: Have you seen God?

Steinbrenner: No. No one ever does. But you can talk to Him. And up here, He’ll answer you. So I talked to Him. Explained my situation. That I had done a lot of wrong things in my life. Really turned the game of baseball into a mess. Treated many of my underlings with extreme disrespect. But at the end of the day, the good outweighed the bad. And I should have gone to heaven, not hell, there must have been some kind of mistake.

The Woman: And what did God say?

Steinbrenner: He said no.

The Woman: So, why are you here?

Steinbrenner: Well, we kept on talking, and God was pretty straightforward in telling me He was tired of running heaven by Himself. Needed some help in the logistics: concessions, budgeting, the ability to shift around key personnel to suit their skill set. I told Him that if He let me run heaven for a year – not the heavy stuff, just the numbers – and it worked out, I could stay and not go back to hell. I could also trade souls with Satan at my own discretion, as He had heard of my acquisition skills and greatly admired them.

The Woman: You’re not going to trade me to Satan are you?

Steinbrenner: Oh, no, I’d never do anything like that.

Billy (whispering to the woman behind his hand): You better get that in writing.

Steinbrenner: Billy, open the gates. Let this kind woman in. She’s earned her way into heaven. Come on in.

The gates swing open, and the old woman enters heaven, magically transforming to a beautiful, raven-haired woman of 23 in a white robe. The heavenly choir breaks into “New York, New York.” In the distance a silhouette appears behind a cloud: the outline of Richard Nixon.

Richard Nixon: Checkers! Here, Checkers! Come here, boy. Pat, help me find Checkers!

The gates swing shut, and Billy Martin is left alone with his can of Bud. He lights another cigarette and stares off into the distance.

Billy: Fuckin’ Satan was right.

Angelo's Gone

I’ve learned that most of our lives are rituals. Probably always knew this, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned to appreciate it. 9/11 went a long ways towards opening that door. Those few days after that were devoid of ritual in New York, a dark gray haze of slow passing time, and all I know is that going back to my normal schedule felt heavenly in comparison. Same with Dad passing on – the ritual of going back to work a week later felt all right, after days of darkness. The darkness didn’t magically disappear, but you learn, it never does. Ritual means you’re moving forward in some sense, even if it feels like the exact opposite.

Sunday mornings, I go out boxing. My regular instructor is on vacation, so I always worry about his temporary replacement. Turns out it’s a younger white guy, really leans hard on the calisthenics, but overall, entirely acceptable, so I’ll keep going for the next two weeks. The big ritual when I get off the train in the early afternoon is to grab a newspaper, some bread, some ice tea, all at Angelo’s Food Emporium on Ditmars. Head home, kick back, take it easy for a few hours, usually until I make that big Sunday meal that will feed me for the next few days.

The reason I’ve gone to Angelo’s is because Angelo is a good guy: an older, bespectacled Greek with a kind face who welcomes everyone into his store. Most delis, I walk in, and it’s business as usual, shopkeepers who don’t seem particularly warm or friendly, selling the basics. Angelo sells the basics, too, but he’s always been unfailingly kind and friendly, from the first time I went in there to the last. So why not give him my money?

I actually felt guilty about a year ago when I started buying mixed nuts from a competing deli down the block on the other side of the street. The place opened up with a more “European imports” vibe about it, no doubt aiming at the new moneyed gentry with their selections, and I blew it off for weeks when it opened. But I saw after awhile that they had a pretty substantial nuts and dried fruit section at the front of the store. And I found that it’s a killer selection of stuff, fresh, reasonably priced, much better than Angelo’s ho-hum selection of cashews and such. So, every few weeks I stock up there, but give Angelo the vast majority of my deli visits.

The last few times I was there, Angelo seemed uncommunicative – tired, sitting in his folding chair at the end of the counter and not really talking to anyone, a glum look on his face. He let the young Mexican guy he has working there run the show, and I get along fine with that guy, too. But I had to wonder what was going on with Angelo, as I saw this routine three or four times over the course of weeks, which was unlike him.

Well, last two Sundays I’ve been there, Angelo’s gone. His signage is still on the front of the store, but he’s not. Last week, I was hoping maybe he’d just gone on vacation or something, and he had friends helping him out. The guy there now is another older Greek, with his wife and what appear to be their son, and don’t seem to be bad people. But not Angelo. The young Mexican guy is gone, too.

This week, I don’t know. I started noticing re-designed looks to the store’s layout, a lot of the Greek sundries Angelo had on the counter removed. Different kinds of ice tea in the coolers. The worst part: they fucked up the Sunday paper two weeks running. The paper had the right outer wrap, but last week there was no “news” portion of the paper (just the arts guide), and this week, they stuffed the Saturday edition of the paper into the Sunday outer wrap … which really pissed me off. I could handle the weird vibe of Angelo not being there, but knowingly selling me a shit copy of the newspaper two weeks running without a word of warning is one of those “dealbreaker” things I won’t put up with from a deli.

But, of course, the worst news for me is Angelo appears to be gone. Dead? I doubt it. There would have been candle memorials in front of the store. Gone back to Greece for a month? Possible … but why the sudden minor store re-design? As noted, his signage is still on the store, so I have to wonder what goes on there. I’m afraid to ask! Because I suspect what happened to Angelo is what will happen to most every small business on that main drag: once the 10/20/30-year lease comes up for renewal, the new monthly rent will be astronomically unaffordable, and the original owner will have to leave, usually after decades of catering to a working-class Greek/Italian neighborhood that’s turning more yuppie by the minute.

That’s the most logical explanation. But usually when this happens, there’s a warning, the owner let’s you know he’s leaving, there’ll be signs stating as much, and the store front goes dark, around here, for months usually as no one in his right mind is willing to pay the cut-throat newer rents local real-estate barons are charging for these places. And eventually, a Dunkin Donuts or such will move in.

I have to believe the man is gone. Where, I don’t know. Hopefully, he made enough over the years to be ready for something like this. I’d have no idea how much a deli owner makes in an outer borough of New York. I doubt Angelo was getting rich doing what he was doing. But he had such a feel for his customers. Spoke Greek. Hired an even-keel Mexican kid because he could relate to the Spanish-speaking customers, and Angelo spoke Spanish himself. I remember going into his deli when we had a deep-summer blackout for a few days, only because I wanted to give him some of my money, and his first words were, “My old friend, how are you doing in this hell? How can I help you?” And he wasn’t joking about hell – this post covers those few days. Going without electricity in a major city in 90-degree heat for days on end aint no joke. Angelo's freezers were shut down, his meats were gone, and he was only selling canned goods and bread.

What does it mean? I’m not sure. But Angelo should know, if the store he runs is no longer there in any real sense and he’s gone, that he will be missed. Things like this seem so inconsequential until they happen. It’s just a deli. I only walk in once a week in general, unless I’m desperate for some Bounty or mineral water. I never hung out there for hours, exchanging stories and bantering with other locals. I’d walk in, chat with Angelo, buy my shit, and walk out.

But he made it clear to me, every time I was in there, that this was his store, that was his name on the front, and he wanted you to know, with every fiber of his being, that this is what he stood for, this was his life, and he cared that you were in there putting money in his pocket. So that’s what disappears when someone like Angelo is gone. Someone who gives a shit about something and let’s you know it. I don’t like seeing people like that getting shit-canned for any reason. That’s why I went there in the first place. The Indian deli just up the block, the first time I walked in there, the girl behind the counter glared at me and barked, “In the future, please pay for your newspaper BEFORE you pick it up outside.” I can’t recall exactly what I said, but it was along the lines of “There is no future. Keep your fucking newspaper, asshole.” In fact, that might have been the first time I walked into Angelo’s, that day, when I was so incensed to be treated like a jackass by someone with zero sense of customer service. (And not to knock Indian store merchants – most of them I’ve dealt with here have been just fine, with a few just as friendly as Angelo. That particular one happened to be an asshole, and Angelo would often tell me he suspected they’d steal his bundle of newspapers if he didn’t get there early enough in the morning. Come to think of it, that’s probably what’s happening now with Angelo gone!)

This bothers me, much more than I thought it would. It also doesn’t help that we’re in the midst of a heat wave, temperatures above 90 most days last week, with the daily high set to never fall below 85 for the upcoming week. It’s “mumbling to self like homeless person” type weather that really wears on your average New Yorker, me included. Just too fucking hot for this sort of nonsense.

I guess this thing with Angelo is like any situation where someone goes missing. It reminds you of your own mortality, if not in that final life/death sense, then in the sense of your lease coming due one day, too. Most of us who’ve been in Astoria for awhile are either going to get priced out one day or pay way too much money to hang around an ever-increasing population of careless douchebags pining for a Trader Joes to open up here and complete the gross suburbanization of this neighborhood. That desire is like a freight train that doesn’t stop for anything or anybody. I fear it just ran over Angelo, but I’ll be sure to glance in his store window over the next few weeks, against all hope, that maybe he just went on vacation. In a better world, a man with that sort of dignity and dedication would have the chance to call his own number, instead of getting mowed-down in a sleazy numbers racket that benefits very few people in this town. Or world, for that matter.

Paypal Button: Hands Up

Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen ...

Anyone who's used the New York City subway system for a long period of time knows that line ... it's what every homeless person says upon entering a train car and launching into his spiel to get subway riders to part with their change. Cup in hand. Raspy voice. Making eye contact with everyone possible. Stories of burned-down homes, time spent in prison, children in need of operation, can you help a vet, I'm not stealing, etc.

Money for nothing but the asking is a nice concept that doesn't go over too well with most subway riders, me included. Nor am I too crazy about people who "perform" for their money, the teenage kids with beatboxes doing their incredibly annoying street dance routine on a narrow subway car, blind guys with accordions, the homeless black guy doowop groups, etc. You get on a subway, all you want to do is sit down and be left alone until you reach your destination.

I decided to put a Paypal button on the site as an experiment. To this day, I have no clue how many people read this and don't want to know. Probably not a lot, otherwise I'd be getting deluged with responses from people who do nothing but respond to websites with Twitter-syle gibberish. Then again, to avoid getting my ass spammed off, I make people sign in to leave comments, which surely dissuades a huge bulk of that sort of random response. This is like a newspaper -- you should have balls enough to state who you are, or at least present some sort of identification, to leave a comment. Most people do who respond here, I like it that way, and all responders are surely welcome here, even if you don't like me.

Advertising is out of the question -- it would make no sense with a site like this. Those Adsense ads respond to subject matter and catch words/phrases. I write about whatever I want, so I'm sure any ads placed on here would be utter gibberish based on a one-off catch phrase used in a line of text. Besides which, I hate advertising and never click-through when I see it on websites ... so why would I make people suffer through the same blinking, annoying crap?

I don't "need" the money per se. Yes, we all need money, but I have a steady job, make reasonably good money, live sensibly, save. I write this thing because I love writing, always have, always will, would be great to make money at it, but it's not the driving force. Still, why not put a discrete Paypal button on there, let people drop in some money if they feel like it. If they don't, no big deal either. I guess I'm shooting for that one unhinged reader who's so touched by something here that he/she drops in $10K in one shot ... before tracking me down with the chloroform hankie to take me back to the brick-walled pit in the basement of a dilapidated Victorian home in a rural town in Ohio. I know you're out there! And I got no problem putting the lotion in the basket!

So, go on reading, nothing else will change, don't feel put upon, my only expectation is that you read along. And give me all your money. Because the plate in my head is picking up AM radio again. And my crack-addicted love child needs new shoes. And that carpentry job my brother-in-law promised in Schenectady fell through. And I had a rough time, fighting for this great nation in Grenada so we could all be free. And that new state sales tax now has a carton of cigarettes costing more than crystal meth. Brother, can you spare a dime for a cup of joe?

A Sport for Americans Who Don’t Like Sports

I blew off working out on Saturday to watch the US/Ghana semifinals World Cup match, which as we know now, was a mistake. Besides, it was 90 degrees here with the humidity hanging like a shit blanket over the city, so sitting tight wasn’t such a bad idea. Ironically, I’ve been right in the middle of sifting through tons of African music to create a new collection for the iPod, so I was doing that with the sound turned down. I didn’t really miss those droning plastic horns. (We had those when we were kids in the 70s: a deeply disturbing instrument that made much too loud a noise.)

It’s been easy to miss the World Cup in America. The viewing times are so awful (7:30 am, 10:30 am and 2:30 pm, daily) that most people are going about their days and not willing to break free. When I mentioned watching the match to brother J in rural PA later that evening, he said he didn’t even know it was going on. And didn’t care. The only World Cup that stuck in my head was in 2002, when I was unemployed that summer and had all kinds of times to watch these oddly-scheduled matches. I can safely say that was the only time I got into soccer on any real basis.

And I can safely say most Americans are in the same boat. You would not know that living in New York City, where it’s somehow been decided that soccer is the sport of the millennium, bars packed with fans, more ballyhoo than a Nascar rally in South Carolina.

But it’s for that reason alone – New York City – that I smell bullshit. Actually, there are a number of reasons. I think the most honest one is Lance Armstrong, who has nothing to do with soccer. But there’s something about Armstrong as an athlete that grates on me. He seems like the archetypal cyclist: slight, youngish, doesn’t appear to have a hair on his body once you get below his head, let’s not forget the “Livestrong” plastic wrist bands he sports and millions emulate, wearing his metrosexual biking pants, team shirt and bad sports shades. If you’ve spent time around bicyclists, you know the style and attitude: sheer arrogance. I know Armstrong is a great athlete, with or without blood doping, and overcame enormous odds to dominate the sport. So … why do I picture him as being such a dick?

I don’t know, but can’t you just feel it? And that negative vibe I get from the whole professional cycling world, emanates like rays of the sun from American soccer players. The most visible US player this time around? Landon Donovan. Would be sporting a duckhead haircut, maybe even a Justin Bieber, if he had more hair. You get the impression this guy gets angered easily, or at least he looks that way. He looks like the guy at work who eats salads, gets his body waxed, wears make-up at social events … and nobody likes.

For all I know, he’s a wonderful, down-to-earth guy who would make me do a 100% about-face if I spent time around him. But he puts out the dick vibe. Most of these soccer guys do, to greater and lesser extents. In America, unlike the rest of the world, soccer has the tinge of suburbia/upper-middle-class existence about it. If you were on a “good” soccer team in high school, I’m willing to bet you come from an affluent white suburb. Which is no crime – you probably also had a pretty good lacrosse team and one hell of a debate team – but there it is. It’s like wine, which is so common in Europe that towns people near vineyards will casually drive over to one and fill gallon jugs the same way we fill slushies and Big Gulp Cokes at convenience stores. In America, wine has been co-opted by overbearing shitheads to make the act of drinking it a class distinction. And I’ll give bicyclists and soccer players credit: they’re way down on my shit list compared to wine snobs. How something as basic and normal as drinking wine became this industry geared towards smug elitists, I don’t have a clue.

And as with wine, soccer as a sport has been geared towards a certain “higher” class of fan, who sees himself that way, too. I’m not questioning his fanhood – christ, if you’re an American soccer fan when this World Cup stuff isn’t around, more power to you, you really care about the sport. I don’t doubt there is a sports purity in a genuine American soccer fan, someone who gets the game, has been following it for decades, played it in high school, maybe even in college, probably as an adult in informal leagues.

But I’d also wager, most of these people spilling out of bars in New York the past week or two, damn few of them are these people. You’ll get your usual expatriates from other countries who are into the sport because it’s the national sport of their home country. No beef with these folks at all. Your disproportionately small contingent of American soccer fans. And a lot of guys who look like Lance Armstrong and Landon Donovan, acting like they grew up on a rainy pitch in Manchester and have loved the sport for years, here let me buy you another Lite Beer, but stop me at two because my girlfriend will yell at me if I gain three pounds a week before our trip to Belize.

It’s bullshit, based on class. The whole “why isn’t America more into soccer” issue is bullshit. We just aren’t; we and the world are no worse for wear. Our best athletes gravitate towards sports that are more visible/higher paying that what passes for professional soccer here. A lucky few go to Europe and make a name for themselves in premier leagues. I’ve noted this before. If we took the time and money to make soccer a national priority, and then went into each World Cup and cleaned house for 20 years straight, the world would hate us for it. They’d much rather look down on us for not giving a shit about soccer, “the only true world sport” as I heard some dweeb at the gym describe it the other day.

Utter bullshit. We have the summer and winter olympics to kick world ass at every even-numbered year. How many times have I heard the “America’s lack of interest in soccer is indicative of its insularity” routine? Too many times. If you don’t like America, just say it, it’s OK, no one’s going to kill you over this. The only people I hear saying shit like that are people who don’t like sports in general. And I gather they’ll latch onto something like soccer, or bicycling when the Tour de France rolls around, and pretend they really care about these sports. And they just don’t. It’s just another excuse to bash not America, per se, but the type of American they despise, i.e., white people the size of houses who really love football, baseball and Nascar. (Probably drive SUVs, vote Republican, listen to Rush (Limbaugh), etc. … we all know the drill by heart.)

It’s important to mention Nascar because fan-wise, it’s the polar opposite of soccer. You won’t find metrosexuals in #3 t-shirts piling into NYC bars to watch the Indy 500 on wide-screen TVs. If anything, they’d derisively laugh at the concept. Me? I hate Nascar. Also not big on hunting or fishing. From a small town. Know plenty of people who are seriously into all three. They’re fine. Nothing wrong with them. I will find myself goofing on people when they veer too far into Nascar country – sporting the truly awful and ugly t-shirts and head gear – but I respect the fact that this is their sport, and they genuinely love it. Millions of Americans do.

Why would these instant soccer fans in New York not grant the same sort of clemency to Nascar and treat the major races in the circuit as major events on par with World Cup soccer? I’d say it’s perception. These people perceive themselves as worldly people, in touch with other people from other nations, why, they vacation overseas regularly, have been to (insert major city in Europe/Africa/South America here), have “friends” all over the globe … soccer, like wine, is just something they indulge in to show their worldliness. Right?

I don’t understand why being a Nascar fan would make one any more less worldly … save to say it’s perceived in America as sport for rednecks, and to follow it, chances are good that you, too, are a redneck by extension. It’s just bullshit to me. Bullshit of the worst kind, to attach these extraneous social values to sports. But you better believe, doing so is just as much a national pastime as following the sports themselves. Most countries in the world, soccer is the sport of the people. All you need is a ball, an open field, four cones to set up for the goals, basic gist of where the sidelines are. I’m sure there are countless kids playing this game right now in Africa, or the slums of major South American cities, or in any European country.

They’re in America, too. Soccer will be a big deal in any suburban school district. Even the rural area I’m from in Pennsylvania, you drive around, and you spot soccer fields here and there. I believe there are soccer programs in most school districts back there, although football overshadows them as their seasons are concurrent.

But you know what? You get into cities and more working-class black rural areas, and I don’t think you see anywhere near as many soccer fields. If you do, kids aren’t using them, adults in leagues are. And until you see this with all kids – until the sport is that accepted and sought after at that elemental level – the US will never be a soccer power. Until you reach that part of America that fuels so many topline professional sports, soccer will be what it is here and has been for a long time: a sport for a certain class of people in America not known for producing champion-caliber athletes. (Or at least that’s how I feel every time I see lacrosse on ESPN. Can’t help but think if you put these burly “see themselves as badass” white college guys up against a team of linebackers and safeties from professional football with a month or two of training, you’d see how thin the veneer of that sport is.)

Every Sunday, in the schoolyard behind my place here, there’s an informal Mexican soccer league that’s taken over the asphalt field in the afternoon. More like morning. These guys show up around 10:00 am to make sure they get the field, and they stay until about 4:00 pm or so, playing each other. They go all out: uniforms, their own nets, even their own referees. The sidelines are filled with wives, kids, other players – there are probably 100 people in that lot back there at any given time in those hours. They set up a refreshments tents selling roasted corn, beans and rice, bottles of water and soda in coolers, etc.

I think the locals were a bit freaked out at first but later realized these people meant no harm. The cops made a show of force after this happened once or twice, had a talk with the guys running the league, made sure they cleaned up after themselves, and I can say these people are no more or less of a problem than the local teenage dickheads who hang out there playing basketball or baseball. Yeah, there is sometimes garbage left over, but per capita, a few empty Gatorade bottles for 100+ people, as compared to a few more empty Gatorade bottles for eight local teenage dickheads … do the math. A suburban youth hockey league commandeered the field a few years ago on Sunday, and the parents with those kids were always carrying on like maniacs, you could hear them yelling all afternoon. I’d take these immigrant Mexican soccer players over those boorish Long Island hockey parents any day of the week.

My point being, that field plays host to a bunch of immigrants who love the sport with a passion, who grew up playing it back home, love the game enough to form their own informal league, buy their own jerseys and equipment, and hang out for hours on a Sunday to make sure they have a place to play the game. This is it for them, the highlight of their week.

I’ll know soccer is a big deal when neighborhood kids go to the same lengths to play the game. I just don’t see it happening, especially with the advent of home video games. I gather the only neighborhood kids I see playing basketball and baseball around here are too poor to buy an X-Box. Until you get poor people of all colors on board with this thing, soccer will never be a major sport in America. And I think the disdain we’re trained to have in this country for the poor is greater than the urge we have to create another avenue for them to make a lot of money through sports. It’s odd how so much of sports comes down to money, but it surely does.

The Men's Room Mirror

For an office, the men’s room at my work place is fairly rank. It’s far too small for 50+ male workers with only two urinals (uncomfortably close to each other) and three toilets. I try not to spend too much time there, but with all-day fluid intake, I’ll usually be in there roughly four times a day. At which time, I will do my thing and get out.

There are few things in life I hate more than taking a dump at work, or any place I can’t do so in absolute privacy. Invariably, the toilet stalls are occupied. Even worse, there’s been rank stuff going on lately with guys tracking shit on the floor, somehow. I won’t point fingers, but I’ve seen some guys go in there with cups of water, which I’m assuming they’re using with the toilet paper, and someone’s getting drops of the stuff on the floor and then tracking it a few steps. On top of the usual: guys with big bellies inadvertently urinating on the floor when they can’t belly up to the urinal. I sometimes take a piss posed like Pete Townshend during a guitar solo to avoid the puddles.

So I surely don’t lurk there … and will never understand guys who do. The guys who take forever in front of the mirror. Grooming themselves, or just taking inappropriately long times to wash their hands, stare at themselves, or make small talk in a place where no sane man wants to small talk. And why is it that it’s always the most average looking guys who take the longest to groom themselves in the mirror? They think if they stand there long enough working the comb, they’ll suddenly become handsome? It aint happening.

But another more mundane thing has encouraged me to spend even less time there. The one thing they did do “right” with the bathrooms was put in industrial-strength lighting. It’s really bright in there, make-up mirror bright. As a result, and in my mid-40s, I keep noticing more gray hairs coming in on my temples. Used to be one or two, now it’s a hair here, and there, and there … hardly a gray fox yet, but this must be how it starts. I don’t see these in other mirrors as most places I catch a glimpse, the lighting isn’t that powerful. But that men’s room mirror is relentless, strips you naked in some sense, like having a light shone in your face during a police interrogation.

I guess I should be glad to have hair! Some guys aren’t as lucky, and that becomes a minor cross to bear, probably something they learn to live with once the reality of it sets in. The prospect of my hair eventually going gray doesn’t sit well with me at all, but it will happen. I’ve always prided myself on looking young in some sense for my age, and gray hair throws a monkey wrench in that ruse. Dad looked young well into his 50s – hair didn’t go gray until his late 50s or so, it seemed like. I look at picture of him in his 40s (which was my childhood in the 70s), and he wasn’t gray at all. I seemed to have inherited his hair, that high hairline, with weird tight/kinky hair. Not quite afro or curly, but even today when I got a haircut, the barber doing so couldn’t run a comb through it.

The first time I saw a gray hair two years ago, I freaked out. Hell, I know some guys who go completely gray by their early 40s, which I’m assuming is stress-related in most cases as opposed to genetics (which they’ll tell you it is). But most guys I’ve known like that are wound up in some sense. While my life is far from stress free, it’s a major tenet of mine to downplay stress and reduce it in my life (as I believe stress and how one handles it are as crucial a health choice as smoking or not smoking). It’s no accident that President Obama is starting to look like Old Man Moses after a few years in the highest-pressure job in the world – I’m willing to bet he’s knocking back a pack a day of Marlboros while he’s at it.

I still have the pack of “Just for Men” hair-coloring product I rushed out and bought that day. Opened, but not used. When you read the instructions on this stuff, man, you don’t want to use it. You don’t just rub it into your hair, and wallah. But that was my initial reaction: panic. I recall two women I worked with, in their 30s, with black hair, having someone point out that each had one gray hair, which was plainly visible when you looked as they both had long straight hair. Fellow female employees gathered around, fawning, oh, honey, nurture it, you’re a woman of wisdom and age now, what a wonderful thing. Yeah, well, I think both of them had the fucker plucked from their heads within the five minutes it took each to rush to the ladies room.

Now that I probably have a dozen or so of these stray hairs? Why bother. Most people don’t even notice. Of course, it makes me wonder about all these cultural icons, particularly musicians, who have full heads of jet black hair and such well into their 60s. Springsteen. Jackson Browne. Bowie. Browne and Bowie still position themselves as looking like teenagers in some photos – then again, both looked like teenagers well into their 30s. Very few rock stars have let themselves go gray – Jimmy Page being a notable exception (but I guess that somehow fits in with his witchrafty image). These guys have obviously been dying their hair for decades: it’s beyond unnatural. I work with guys in their 50s and 60s: nearly all of them have gray hair, either completely or well on the way. They look their age, not like teenagers with wrinkles.

So, I wonder how my vanity compares to theirs, and their inability to recognize nature’s way, whereas I’m seeing, even if you have slow-graying genetics and a penchant for youthful looks, your hair will start showing flecks of grays as you move through your 40s. I could surely dye it if I wanted to, although I’d probably go to the barber and pay him $20 to do it once or twice a year. But that’s not something I’ve seriously considered at this point – simply know it’s an option by reading the barber’s price chart as I got my hair cut earlier in the day.

Gray hair does wonders for some guys – I think George Clooney owes his career to prematurely graying hair. If you don’t believe me, check out the teenage George:













Which makes me want to get into a time machine to kick his ass just for fun. And a young-adult George:













Who sported a shaggy mullet long, long after it was considered in any way hip to do so. He looked like a huge Mr. Mister fan and probably still has the purple velour knee-length coat to prove it.

But give the guy a head of gray hair, have him talk in that condescending “everyone, listen to me, I’m in charge and my tone of voice is better than yours” manner that grates on me in so many of his characters, and you have a guy who’s probably coloring his gray hair even grayer to capitalize on that effect.

Last time I was home, I talked to an old high-school friend about aging and looks, in a bar, no less, at that “changing of the guard” hour, about 9:00 on a Friday night, when the local bars back there turn the lights down and switch over from the classic rock station to the crappy Top 40 one, at top volume so you need to shout to be heard. This woman was a knockout in younger days: I mean model material, just drop-dead beautiful. Now? She’s a pretty good looking woman, but just not on that “everyone stop and look” level of beauty she once had. Just passing time, no great crime. She’s still in great shape, just sort of lost that hard-edged beauty many of us had into our early 30s.

She leaned over and said, “You know how when you look in a mirror, you tell yourself your not that bad-looking, and you can still see how young you are, but when you’re walking through a department store, and see your image on a camera trained on a doorway, you always look like a bag of shit? I’ve come to realize, everyone else sees that bag of shit far more often than you see how good you think you still look in the mirror.”

Of course, as she’s saying this, we’re looking at us in the mirror across the bar. I thought, “I don’t look so bad.” But then I realized the effect she was talking about, how boxy and dumpy I look on a really bad video-cam, how fat I think I always look in pictures (which is why I take so few anymore), the lack of definition I in my face that I once had as a kid (which would be nigh on impossible to maintain, barring a sub-1,000 calorie per day diet). She was right – I’m thinking most people look at me and don’t have that sense of history to see me at 18 or 25, when I was in peak form – they’re just seeing some big-assed, middle-aged guy with zero back story.

Right then, one of the early twentysomething bartenders walked over and asked if I needed another beer. She was pretty, black hair, nice smile, kind eyes – and I noticed, she kept glancing over to make eye contact every few minutes from her seat, so I’m thinking what the hell, maybe I’m not so bad after all? (Or maybe she’s really banking on big tips tonight.)

Those are the kind of head games you play with yourself in your 40s. You’re balanced on the edge of no longer bullshitting yourself about being young, but can still maintain vestiges of youth to the extent that you can turn a young girl’s head if she takes a good look at you and catches the kindness in your eyes. Of course, you should then ask yourself, “What on earth am I going to talk about with a 26-year-old woman?” And realize you could play that game if you want, but there better be one hell of a connection between you and that person to bridge a whole lot of generation gap and life experience. And you also realize younger people have limited senses of aging – that girl could be looking at me and thinking, “He must be around 35 or so” … whereas a middle-aged woman could probably pin me down to within a year or two of my real age.

In any event, I’ve stopped gauging my self worth by how attractive I believe women do or don’t find me. If they do, great; if they don’t, great. It’s nice to feel like eye candy, I’ve known the feeling, but it ultimately doesn’t mean all that much. Our society seems to be based on such an overwhelming lack of self worth that I learned to turn my back on that shit long ago. I remember the days of competing for a beautiful woman’s attention in a bar, but can’t recall why it was such a big deal at the time. If we’re talking some Darwinian rule of attraction and strength, I’m just not grasping it in every-day life. We’re no longer cavemen struggling for survival, and the last guy who bought into that was Hitler with his Aryan fixation (despite not being Aryan at all himself).

It just doesn’t make sense to go around gauging every situation as if it was a globe spinning around your axis, because the world doesn’t work that way. Another life lesson that gets driven home repeatedly as you age. That’s an important distinction to make because it’s a major difference between youth and old age, that you’re just part of the story, not the story, and it helps to see your small place in the world, as opposed to believing you’re going to kick the world’s ass. I should have asked my friend, which do you prefer, a scene like ours in a bar when we were both 23, and she would have had every guy in that bar staring her down, tongues hanging out like overheated bulldogs, or now, just two obviously slightly older people, quietly having a beer and not really drawing all that much attention from anyone?

I guess it depends on how you want other people to see you, what you want from them. How you handle being invisible in some sense, when we’re all not-so-subtly conditioned to think there’s a spotlight on each and every one of us. I’d say passing time and aging are not the ass kickers everyone makes them out to be; they’re simply understanding the truth of how we deal with each other in the world, and what really matters, as opposed to chasing illusions of what we thought really mattered. So much of this comes down to insecurity and vanity, which we all have to some extent. The older I get, the less I care.