Dogs and Boxing Gloves

I was going to write about buying boxing gloves, which is quite a trip here, but realized the real reason behind writing about that is a dog.

The one steady place for me to buy gloves in New York is G & S Sporting Goods, way down on Essex Street, south of Delancey, real Lower East Side stuff. It’s still a fairly grubby area, with the Seward Park projects a few blocks south. Walking around there is very much an “old New York” vibe, but don’t let the graffiti and grime fool you. I couldn’t afford a Port-A-Johnny in that neighborhood; most people couldn’t. Manhattan has gone so haywire that even the rare grubby neighborhoods like this are outrageously over-priced. The only people living there on the cheap are in the projects or "20 immigrants in a two bedroom apartment" set-ups, which is true of all white Manhattan now. (And a waste of time trying to explain to anyone under the age of 40 that working-class white people used to live all over Manhattan, once upon a time.)

But G & S is down there, so once or twice a year, I get on the F Train to Delancey and walk down a few blocks. It’s a great old store, only a store-front and storage area in the back, featuring mostly boxing equipment: gloves, head gear, shorts, shoes, bags. And a large selection of baseball hats behind the counter, which I’m guessing are big sellers with the neighborhood kids. And a smattering of other sporting goods that apply to city life: basketballs, baseball gloves and bats, small things like that. Stores like this don’t exist most places in NYC – they don’t exist much anywhere, the kind of small, quiet, neighborhood place where you walk in and deal directly with the owner, who is always there and never a prick.

It’s not that I seek out places like this – it’s just that it’s hard to find good boxing gloves in Manhattan. You can buy shitty Everlast gloves at any Modell’s. Their top of the line bag glove goes for about $45 and just sucks: bad padding, lousy fit, doesn’t last more than a few months. There used to be a good martial arts store by the Midtown South police station in the high 30s where I could get good gloves, but they closed down 2-3 years back. And there’s another martial arts store in the West 40s, but I got bad gloves and service from those folks and won’t be going back. I haven’t tried Paragon, the big indie sporting goods store just north of Union Square on Broadway, but I only like buying jock straps there for some reason, just don’t like the place.

So, it’s down to G & S. I’ve bought some bad gloves with them. Just went through a pair where the left hand, something about the way my hand sat in the glove, my left index knuckle had been fucking killing me for months, literally arthritic type pain. I thought it was an aging issue with me, and my hands in general felt stiff the past few months. Little did I know it was the gloves. I bought a 16 oz. pair of their best gloves, at $65.00, this past visit. Been using them for two weeks now: pure heaven. My hands feel great, knuckle is totally healed, and no more will I buy anything less than their best pair of gloves. It should be a once every 9-12 months visit – I box three times a week, not every day, but I do hit hard, so these things wear out over time.

But what gets me most visits down there is the dog. He wasn’t there last time, which has me worried. But his picture was. It’s this old, mangy mutt who wanders around the store, an ancient dog: fat, white and old around the eyes. Tail always wagging. Kind eyes. Just a great dog for petting and saying hello to. His picture has him in a Mets sweater with matching black Mets cap with blue brim. It would figure a dog like that has a Mets fan for an owner. Usually that’s a woman who’s there, not sure if she’s a relative (wife, sister, or what) to the owner, or just some woman who lives in the neighborhood and likes bringing her dog around there to visit.

All I know is I usually walk in there, and a few seconds later, I’ll hear a scratching on the floor behind me, and there will be that old mutt, wagging his tail shyly and raising his head to be petted. The woman always gives the same warning: “If you pet him, awls he’s gonna’ do is bawk at ya.” Which is true, once you stop petting the dog, he starts in with these nervous little yaps. But she shushes him, and he eventually goes back to his place by her on a chair in the corner.

I always note my interactions with dogs in New York because I miss having one, having always had a family dog back in PA, before the era of cats descended upon our family. Funny thing happened to me though in my early 30s. I started noticing that every time I went home, I would get sick. Not full-on sick – “beginnings of a cold” sick. And I’d sometimes notice the same visiting my friend C in West Chester, PA, with three dogs in the house. I’d later realize I had somehow developed allergies to animal hair – much worse with cats, but still with dogs, too. When I go back to PA now, unless it’s warm weather with open windows, I find myself on sinus medicine after the second day of my visit. I don’t like this – anything that messes with my health I’m against.

But what to do. I’d say at this point in my life I’d rather go petless and healthy than get a dog or cat, and deal with constant sinus issues and the medications that go with them. Besides which, the landlord is staunchly anti-pet. Which is OK by me. Cats are surely out, and I can’t figure having a dog in a studio apartment with me at work all day – just doesn’t seem fair or right for the dog.

So when I get a chance to pet a dog, I’m on it. On the street when I’m sweeping. In a dog-friendly bar. Man, there’s nothing like having a good dog around when you’re getting drunk. They somehow “get it” that you’re getting inebriated and tag along for the short, joyous journey. I have good memories of taking my own dogs for walks after dark back home, the night air in the cemetery, the dog over-joyed to be out and about, the feeling of no one else around and the quiet. This was especially good in winter when everyone gets cabin fever and needs to get out. You can’t walk cats, just not the same thing.

But seeing that tired old hound in G & S Sporting Goods always reminds me of my second dog, Butch. The first, Smokey, was a big black Collie mix, and I learned dogs are on some higher plain as I’d abuse the shit out of that dog as a toddler (tail yanking being the worst), and he only nipped me once or twice, sensing I was a small child and treating me as such.

But Butch was special. Look at him. Nothing special. It was how he came to be. My mom grocery-shopped at the Acme, at the bottom of town in Ashland. The store is still there, save it’s changed hands and is now Boyers, a slightly rundown local chain market. (New Yorkers, think C Town.) The memory is stuck somewhere in the back of my mind, but it’s there in some gray cloud I can’t pull it from, the night we found Butch. It felt like winter, must have been 1970 or 1971. Don’t think it was snowing, just cold.

This doesn’t happen as much back there, but back then, people used to abandon animals in the parking lots of places like this. Of course, it takes a real scumbag to do something like this, but I can assure you, this type of thing happens all the time all over the world. People simply dump off their domesticated pets somewhere where they can’t find their way back home and leave them to fend for themselves. Just the worst kind of shitbag people you find in the world.

Well, one winter night, Mom was at the Acme, and saw this tired old dog in a cardboard box by the ice bins. Shaking, cold, afraid … clearly abandoned. An older dog, too, which made no sense. But Mom could tell you tons of things about this topic. She’s helped out a local no-kill animal pound that is constantly over-flowing with abandoned pets, just never enough room to keep them around. The place is never less than capacity – been that way for decades. So when we were growing up as kids, Mom would always be taking in strays, which would invariably show up in the neighborhood, and she’d feed them with food we had for the family dog, invite them into our home for a few days, and usually give them to this local pound she favored over the SPCA which quietly euthanized dogs and cats it no longer had room for. (This is a terrible thing, but happens all the time … just a hard reality of strays and the assholes who abandon and don’t properly spay pets.)

She saw Butch, left for dead on a winter’s night in a supermarket parking lot, and she brought him home. Immediately, we could sense the dog was loving and a wonderful pet. He looked like shit: beat-up, tired and lost. But we took him in. And he turned out to be that one dog I’ll always remember above all others, maybe because of the timing (Smokey was around before I was born, so Butch was my real childhood dog). But he was just the kindest dog. The one after him, Duffy, was a sparkplug, a bit of a wild dog in comparison, but that was also because he came around in our teen years, and we treated him like a nut, so he responded accordingly. Not a bad dog … just not as good as Butch. (Duffy was so excitable that if I would say “Wanna” … that fucking dog knew I was going to say “wanna go for a walk” and he’d get nuts. The ecstasy that dog would go into when I finally got around to pulling out the walking leash …

I briefly described his passing in a previous post about Grandma – just a terrible early morning that is burned in my mind. But it’s worthwhile for me to remember the whole story, Mom pulling this doomed, poor bastard from certain death and giving him a safe, loving home for the rest of his days, which was only about three or four more years from that night. May seem like goofy, sentimental nonsense to some people, but think about it, not everyone does this. I know when I see strays walking the streets around here, I let them be … because I just don’t have the time to coax them back to the apartment, feed them, and put them up for X number of days or weeks before I can move them on (to what would probably be certain death at a city pound). I did this once with a three-legged cat in a very cold Bronx winter (recounted here), but that was a one-time only thing I just couldn’t avoid. A three-legged cat abandoned in the Bronx? Shit. How much harder does it get than that?

So I think about a lot of things when I see dogs on the street, and the mutt down at G & S in particular. Things that are gone, or on their way. And things that still hang around, against the odds, but I’m glad as hell they’re still with us. Especially when it comes time for me to hit things and not ruin my hands.

Alex Chilton

Alex Chilton died this past week, apparently from a heart attack at the age of 59. I strongly doubt most people under the age of 40 know who he was. And I’d have almost as hard a time finding people my age and older.

But a lot of people did know who The Box Tops were and surely recall 60s pop hits like “The Letter,” “Soul Deep” and “Cry Like a Baby.” Chilton sang lead for the band, don’t think he wrote those songs, but I’d wager that’s how most people know him.

When The Box Tops broke up, he moved onto Big Star in the early 70s, a band that went absolutely nowhere in their time. It might be hard to believe that as the band became legendary long after their demise (surely beginning around the time I spent in college in the mid-80s, thanks to The Replacements having the song “Alex Chilton” that scored big on the indie scene at the time).

You’d think everyone knew about Big Star back then. But not quite. I recall discussing this with my newspaper editor in the mid-90s, who had been writing about music in Baltimore when Big Star was around. His recollection, roughly: “They were born over-hyped. Next Beatles and shit. Badfinger was the next Beatles, and they went belly-up. Didn’t leave much hope for these guys.”
I can’t vouch for the hype, but he was right about their fate. Beatlesque pop bands, no matter how good they were, just didn’t break through in the 70s. Kids’ tastes had morphed into hard rock, folk rock, prog or frilly pop aimed at pre-teens. Even a band as great as Roxy Music didn’t cut it in America at the time because no one knew how to classify them. The Raspberries were the most successful of the power-pop bands of the 70s, and they were by no means huge. Their lead singer, Eric Carmen, was much more successful going solo with “All by Myself” … and the reality is, that song is as good as anything The Raspberries did, and better in its pop sense and Carmen’s desire to craft a major hit that would fit in with the times (as opposed to rehashing a 60s pop fantasy, which they were great at).

No fucking way was Alex Chilton going to do that! And that might be why far more people know who Eric Carmen is, and no idea who Chilton was. He surely tried with Big Star, a band I knew nothing about throughout the 70s. I suspect their real fans numbered in the low thousands. I never heard all of Big Star’s first two albums until around 1990, when I bought that single-disc compilation of both, and of course it blew my mind with how good it was. (Their third, Sister Lovers, was comparatively bleak and depressing compared to the first two pop albums, so bleak it sat in the can unreleased for a few years. I guess it was Chilton’s version of “All by Myself” … his version being songs like “Holocaust” … title indicative of a ballad suggesting someone sitting in a bathtub of cold water with a razor ... not the kind of shit that inspired lighters flickering on in the audience.)

I’ll often cite Graham Parker as an example of a recording artist who marred his career because of his attitude towards record labels and executives. Not in any artistic sense, but marred in the sense of taking the shitty way the business operates personally, and letting that hold him back from recognizing it is a business and has to be worked at as such to succeed on a certain level, no matter how talented you are as a musician. Talented artists who make a name for themselves, but have a combative/negative view of the people trying to sell their product … just don’t make it past a certain level.

Which, I gather, suits most of these artists fine so long as they can make a living. But also prevents them from acquiring legendary status or lasting profits (which make a lot more sense as you age). They become cult artists, without fail, critically-acclaimed and putting out consistently good material. But simply artists not a lot of people know about, save for a dedicated fan base.

Such was Alex Chilton’s fate. After Big Star split up, he went through what many consider a dark period of the 70s through the mid-80s. But damned if my favorite solo albums of his, Like Flies on Sherbert and Bach’s Bottom, didn’t come out in that time. He was seriously fucking around with pop music structure at the time. I read a review of Sherbert where the writer chastised Chilton for being unprofessional, but that was the point. He could play better than that – he was purposely skewing the music to sound like it was coming apart at the seams. Imagine a soul band playing a frat party in the 60s in the deep South, late at night, everyone, including the band, drunk off their asses, and the band falling through one song after another, barely able to play. THAT was the sound and vibe he got on those records, and to me, it still sounds fascinating, what he was getting at. Of course, all of this stuff went totally unheralded at the time, and I’m not quite sure how the guy made a living.

And all this happened quietly. If you were a fan at the time, Christ, you deserve a medal, because you were there with very few people. I came in during his mid-80s renaissance, when he hit slightly bigger with the EPs Feudalist Tarts and No Sex, and then the album High Priest. As far as I’m concerned, this was his golden age. Moved to New Orleans, fell in love with the music, added it to his repertoire of pop and soul. I can’t recall which came first, The Replacements song with his name, or these recordings. (A little research: those recordings were 1985-87; the song “Alex Chilton” came out in 1987.) The albums had a lot of covers mixed with the originals, but he played them so well. I got particularly stuck on the song “No Sex,” about AIDS, with the chorus: “Can’t get it on or even get high/Come on, baby, fuck me and die/No sex/Not anymore.” That song nailed the mid-80s in every way possible: a perfect pop moment -- I liken that to the times the way most people do something like "Hip to Be Square" by Huey Lewis and the News. And “Come by Here” -- a cover of an old gospel song that sounded great with his white Memphis soul shading on it.

I’d see him play in New York a few years later, I think 1989 or 1990, at The Knitting Factory when it was that small living-room size space on Houston Street. I note this, because I got there early with brother J, who was visiting from PA to see Chilton play that night. I was pretty unafraid to approach musicians I was going to see at a show – had a fun time earlier that year hanging out with Mojo Nixon and Skid Roper at The Ritz pre-show, while Mojo laughed it up over brother J’s K Mart worker horror stories.

Well, we got to The Knitting Factory way too early, by about two hours, but it was a functioning bar, so we decided to hang out and have a few beers … as it turned out, sitting right next to Alex Chilton while he had a beer and a smoke. An arm’s length away. But there was just something about the guy that said, “Don’t approach me.” Wouldn’t even call it unfriendliness – he just put out the vibe that he didn’t want to be bothered. And I was learning that talking to many of these guys pre-show wasn’t some magical experience; they often had no warmth and wisdom to impart. Not sure why I thought they would, save for being raised in the age of rock gods and the bullshit aura we attached to them. Even when it was removed, and you were sitting next to a cult artist in a bar in New York, it still felt intimidating.

He was known for being cantankerous and moody, but I have to say, he put on a joyous show that night, half of it was oldies he was clearly having a blast playing, and instead of yelling at the soundman who kept screwing up, he worked out instructions to sing to the guy during his cover of “Volare” to help him get the right sound mix – it was pretty funny stuff. If 100 people showed up at The Knitting Factory, the place was packed, so the place was jammed, ecstatic, and I got the vibe Alex Chilton could do no wrong when he played New York.

That time in his musical career means more to me than Big Star, because I was there for it, and it played such a direct role in my life. That matters to me, because I feel like a half-assed hack writing anything about Big Star or his early solo career. The truth of the matter was I missed the boat on that shit, as did just about everybody else, and it feels a bit hollow to me now to go back and reclaim that music, despite the fact that it is well worth reclaiming.

An old college friend left a comment here that the death of Chilton brought her straight back to those college days, people she knew and The Replacements song, and I know that vibe, because that song in particular does sound very much of its time. If you were a kid in college and aware, it perfectly defines a certain vibe that is long gone, for us as adults and as a specific time in music. I can’t say it depresses me or that I long for it. The odd part is The Replacements have become almost as faded as Chilton’s legacy. Fans of the band from the time and Westeberg's solo career would disagree … but that's what I'd call a shrinking fan base, and is there anybody else out there? I strongly doubt it. And like Chilton, Paul Westerberg seems to be fond of the “fuck it” attitude, maybe even perfected the art form in his time, but as noted, you do that, it sort of freezes you in time as a recording artist. The artist and his fans age, and we move along with him, buying the albums, and keeping track, but, honestly, no one else seems to give a shit. We somehow stay stuck in that minor period of fame even while we move forward. And that present reality makes me feel a vague sort of sadness, as opposed to the good memory of “Alex Chilton” the song. In boxing, muscle memory is training your body so much that your muscles just respond accordingly, better and faster, as you endlessly repeat the training. That song feels like muscle memory!

That wasn’t my last minor scrape with minor fame and Chilton. I didn’t buy any of his stuff through the 90s and beyond, but was glad to see Big Star and then The Box Tops reform, play live and pick up some new fans along the way. That was a very cool thing to see happen, but something odd happened to me in the late 90s. I was part of an internet group that was heavily into music via a DJ’s show in New York. One of my posts to that group was about finding a CD that was nothing but 60s pop-rock artists recording jingles for Coca Cola radio commercials – I’m not even sure if I still have the disc. But I remember mentioning The Box Tops as one of the bands being on the disc.

A year or two passes. One day, I get an email from a stranger … who turns out to be a member of The Box Tops who read the post online doing an internet search for those Coke jingles they recorded back then. (My email address was my screen name.) He was overjoyed that these recordings existed, had heard rumors that they did, but never could track down the CD on which they appeared. (What I had was a bootleg, but I think the CD was officially released a few years after that.) If I’m not mistaken, I sent him the disc, or at least a copy of it – can’t recall, but I just went over to my CD drawer and couldn’t find it.

What I remember most about the email exchange was the way he described the band at the time, flush with success, acting like rock stars, in New York to play that night, and they got called into the studio by their manager to do this silly-assed Coke jingle that no one wanted to do, but they rolled along with it, in their frilly pop-star duds, just a bunch of kids making fun out of what could have been a drag on their time off while touring. And I sent this CD to him while the band was rehearsing again as the reformed Box Tops for some reunion shows. So I can guess that he brought this CD to rehearsal one day and blew everyone’s mind. From the way he described Alex Chilton, it sounded like they were all on the same page, having a blast, and simply enjoying the act of playing music together again after decades apart.

And maybe that’s where this should end, pretty much where it began. I tend to feel a big question mark when I ponder Alex Chilton and his life, but I honestly didn’t know the guy, came to a lot of his music after the fact, and the stuff I didn’t rang really true to me at a time in my life when music does that. I’ll probably go on a jag now and bust out all those discs to get re-acclimated now that I’m thinking of him. Used to think that was a half-assed thing to do, but the sooner the guy’s music lives on, the better.

Injured Reserve List

Just coming off a nasty bicep strain that’s been going on for a few weeks. Got it trying to heave up a particularly large, round heavy bag in boxing class three Sundays ago. I felt it immediately, like in high school when some rough-housing jackass twists your arm too hard. Finished the class, but later found that little things like turning door knobs and buttoning my shirt were groan inducing.

Felt a little better last Sunday after blowing off two weeks of workouts, so I went back to the same class, lifting same bag, and the same fucking thing happened again! So on top of the horrible weather we’ve been having, blizzards and such, I get this. Past week has been a slow rebirth. Shoveling 20 inches of snow on Friday went a long ways towards rehabbing the bicep. And I took the class again today, letting someone else heave up that lousy, cursed bag. Made out all right, a little rusty, have to lay off really wailing on the bag until I’m 100%, but it was a joy to do a strenuous workout and not walk away in agony.

A bad feeling to be out of it physically during the Winter Olympics. It’s one of those odd things that I feel I have to tag along physically with the games and have really hard workouts … like I’m going to qualify for something down the road, or feel inspired to turn things up a notch. But I have such mixed feelings watching this stuff now that I’m older. What we all see is the end result of a ton of training and outright luck in a lot of cases.

We don’t see the 6-8 hours a day spent training in relatively nowhere locations, econo-apartments, no life outside of training unless one purposely stops along the road to have a kid or two. A lucky few becoming marketing sensations and make a ton of money. But I think most just quietly go back to their lives of constant training and fade out by their early 30s at the latest, hopefully with a solid Plan B. And we’re talking sports where the difference between 10th place and first is often determined in less than a second, or one minor error in a routine.

I guess on some level I’m recognizing the futility of competitive sports as one goes through adulthood. This shit is meant for kids, people in their 20s in the latter stages. Winning or losing has never really mattered to me – of course, I’d rather win. But losing is part of life; everyone does it. That’s not a defeatist attitude – simply recognizing how the world works. Much of life has nothing to do with winning or losing – you just live it. Feel like a winner? You’re probably not. The same goes for the “losers.” You’re doing both at various times and in many ways, whether you can recognize this or not.

It just seems like such a childish way of seeing the world. And when you run into adults still grasping on to that win/lose mentality … ugh. Either mentality is just too much dead weight to carry. You see yourself as a winner, that attitude and mentality become the main focus, and everything surrounding it just the decorations that go with the image. You see yourself as a loser, everything turns to bullshit, nothing matters, and you live life with a sullen 19-year-old’s slow-burning rage.

I think I do boxing training because it was something I always wanted to do as a kid, but was simply in the wrong place to work on it. There were no boxing teams at school, no programs in the various towns. You had to shoe-horn yourself into key sports (football/baseball/basketball mainly), which I did, but got tired of them all eventually. Didn’t get into it out of some desperate urge to kick everyone’s ass. I haven’t done that at all. Probably have picked up a lot of physical confidence, but also recognize there’s no end to the “tough guy” routine, the quest to find someone tougher than you, and you probably will, much sooner than later. So at some point you just drop that stance all together.

What I thought about boxing before I did it turned out to be true: the act of physically hitting something is simply a great release of frustration. It’s a minor soul cleanser, really empties you out physically and emotionally for a little while. Of course, the well of problems and issues we all pull from never runs dry, so I find it’s always worthwhile to check in routinely and beat a few of those things out. Better than weightlifting. Better than running. And it’s a test of physical endurance, which makes sense to me.

Every now and then in gyms, you run into people on a whole different level physically, the kind who are in Olympian-style physical condition. Always in their 20s. If you talk to them, you understand that they work out hours every day. Unlike Olympians, most aren’t in any competitive training – this is just how they live. Most either are or want to be physical trainers, and are in phenomenal physical condition. I get along well with people like this, because I’m there to bust it out, too. But only to a certain level – some of these guys, you can tell, there’s something more at stake for them.

Exactly what, I’m never sure, but I suspect if you come back in a decade, their stories will be different. Life, marriage, work, kids, what have you. Very few people over 30 want to work out over three hours a day for any reason – one is more than enough. But I think you also see reality when you stop pushing yourself like that. You shouldn’t be working out that hard unless it is for some physical goal like the Olympics or a professional sport. Otherwise, it’s just overkill. There was a guy I used to work with who used to use his age (then late 30s) as an excuse for not working out. Why bother, he’d say, people lose so much as they age, I could never be very good at anything.

That’s one of the bigger fallacies of working out. I’d say that’s true on an elite level of most sports – you’re probably shot or well on your way there by your early 30s. But an average guy working out? And I mean working out hard, like these boxing classes, or any other type of hard-assed training gyms provide? You’ll find you can maintain a pretty solid level of physical fitness all your days, comparable to any other time in your life. Which is to point out you were never really in that great of shape to begin with! A shocker to most, but as with my previous basketball post, at some point in your chosen sport, it dawns on you that you’re not the chosen one – could happen in high school. Could happen after a year or two into the pros, and simply realizing the best you can hope for is warming a bench.

But you go on from there with that knowledge, and if you’re halfway sane and don’t hate yourself, you do well physically. Try different things, but always keep moving. I think the cool part about gyms is meeting people like this, who are in good physical condition, but obviously not uber-competitors, just people who want to gun it to the best of their abilities and maintain some recognizable level of fitness. You’re only in competition with yourself in a situation like that, and that’s a greater reality of life that makes more sense as you watch people pass on around you. There are no winners or losers in coffins, only the dead.

Are we having fun yet? I don’t mean to get too heavy, but these are the things you think about when laid up with a painful injury, knowing that you are not being held back from any grand public display of your talents, but you are being barred from doing something worthwhile you enjoy doing, that you’re actually paying to do if you’re in a gym, and you miss doing it. After all this, I’m even more serious about getting into some type of flexibility-based workout like pilates or yoga, simply because I recognize a body's range of motion is the main difference between youth and senility. Probably pilates because I got no use for the spiritual malarkey associated with yoga. I want flexibility, not a third eye in my forehead.

So, I’m watching the closing ceremonies of the Winter Olympics, which always seem as if they were conceived by a flamboyantly gay man on magic mushrooms. The one moment that stuck with me these games was the young speed skater from Denmark, Holland, one of those places where people wear wooden shoes and smoke hash. But the guy was obviously late teens/early 20s, on his way to skating for a gold medal, when his coach inexplicably got on the edge of the track and waved him into the wrong lane, thus disqualifying him and losing the chance for any medal.

The kid was beyond distraught. Cursing violently. You could see his head jerk with each word. Fellow team-mates tried to console him, but he brushed them away, and not in any sort of friendly or polite manner. He was a real sore loser: a shithead. But then I thought about it. This guy had probably spent the past decade of his life living, breathing and eating every moment of his life to lead up to that moment where he could win an Olympic metal. No wooden shoes. No hash. No pussy. Just a drab training facility in the middle of a gravel parking lot where he’d go every day, like a thankless job, and work at this thing for upwards of 50 hours a week.

Should he have held his head up and been more stoic? Maybe. But we’re talking a 20-year-old kid who’s done nothing to raise his maturity level past that of a 14-year-old, has had no life experiences to balance this failure with, and is giving a pretty honest reaction to being screwed over. (To which I’d reply, get used to it, kid, this won’t be the last time.) I should have disliked this guy for being such a little brat, but his reaction was just as honest and even more human than someone exploding in triumph at the end of a perfect run. It touched me more than the winners.

Jesus Christ, now Neil Young is singing. I’m getting out of here.

Endless Summer Ends

Last summer, I was having dinner with an old friend, BG, just down the block from his recently-moved, small printing shop in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. BG had given me some much-needed temporary work in his shop a few years earlier, which back then was in a gritty part of downtown Brooklyn on Flatbush Avenue, a few blocks from Junior’s (home of their world-famous Cheesecakes).

What was notable about this dinner was the couple sitting a few tables away. Carroll Gardens is one of those neighborhoods where gentrification has changed everything: from an old Italian neighborhood to a far-more yuppie-friendly (and costly) outpost. By mid-2000’s the deal had been done there, this neighborhood had flipped over. If you were old neighborhood types or were lucky enough to own your property, you hung in there, despite feeling clueless about your new, often snotty neighbors. The couple across from us from was old neighborhood, but young, probably living at home, and they clearly thought BG and I were yuppie interlopers of some sort.

The woman glared at me. This was killing me, as I had spent a decade in a part of a Bronx this bitch wouldn’t drive a tank through, and had been living in Astoria with a reasonable rent for years, AND on the front end of the exact same gentrification pile-drive that her neighborhood had gone through. I was wearing a black t-shirt, bermuda shorts and sneakers, like I have always worn in summer. But there’s something about me. I’m friends with soap and deodorant. I brush my teeth. I look smart. And as much as I try to look harder, I’m always having people walk up and ask me for directions, even now. 718 types can spot me as an outsider a mile away, whereas I’ve found the newer arrivals in my neighborhood think I’m an “old neighborhood” type … I’m in some sort of limbo here, as no one seems to grasp who I am, with 20 years of rural life under my belt that's far more neighborly than any neighborhood-type could possibly grasp in New York.

Nothing really happened. This woman and her asshole boyfriend just kept making google eyes at BG and me, like we were going to get up and leave because we were in their nice little Italian restaurant, but it wasn’t happening. And I didn’t feel like lecturing her about manners, or lack thereof. Her life in Carroll Gardens is going to be miserable if her attitude towards outsiders is so hard she was bad vibing someone who clearly wasn’t money in any sense.

But this was not the first time I had been in Carroll Gardens. No, there’s a story here, back in 1989, of when I first set foot in the neighborhood.

It starts in a now-defunct medical publishing house where I got work after being unceremoniously dumped from my first job in NYC at a large ad agency. It didn’t take me long to find work after that lay off (which it was, me and a few dozen other people just before Christmas of ’87), despite that being a fairly dark financial period just after the great Wall Street Crash of the previous fall.

I liked the place immediately – more laid back, no dress code, a lot of eccentric editorial types. I was working for an asshole, but what else was new. The company in general was low key, and my job normally so busy that I didn’t spend much time dealing with my boss, who was constantly getting reprimanded for making female coworkers cry because he was such a prick. I took advantage of the more-relaxed dress code. My favorite outfit was a large bowling shirt and jeans with a rope belt … based on Jethro Bodine from The Beverly Hillbillies. This was also the era of Salvation Army stores, where my body was such it would fit a ton of great vintage items on their racks, namely suits from the 1930s and 40s that were piling into their stores routinely with that generation starting to pass along. One of the mailroom guys told me he thought I was “a fag” because of my wardrobe. But I knew what he meant – I was wearing all kinds of shit, high and low brow, and getting away with it.

The job was mostly processing orders and editorial content for a medical reference book similar to the PDR (Physicians Desk Reference book), but I gather you can probably find this stuff all online now. Back then, it was a booming business with MDs, like being encyclopedia salesmen for the medical industry. It wasn’t a hugely lucrative business, but it was a niche market that managed to keep about 80 people employed.

My second summer at the job, Jenny started in another department as a temp. Every workplace has gone through this: a really hot woman starting there, and all the guys catching wind of this and finding excuses to talk/hang out with her. But I was on her like a cheap suit … and I probably was wearing a cheap suit, too, that may have smelled vaguely of mothballs. I somehow won the lottery with her, probably because I was at the height of my physical attractiveness, and I made it clear that I wanted something to happen here.

Jenny was a looker. Blonde hair, blue eyes, well-built, dressed to show off her attributes. She was trying to be a singer/actress, but finding it hard-going. She came from Ohio and had been in New York a year or two, living out in Flatbush, a pretty sketchy part of it, too, with a guy named Jake who played bass in a punk rock band. Very much a midwestern person – genuinely friendly, open. The kind of person this place either chews up in a year or two or allows her to ride the wave to something better.

We started going out, which at that point in our lives meant going to bars and getting hammered. And, boy, did she get wild with a few drinks in her. I can still recall her picking out Cher songs on a jukebox and then getting up on tabletops to sing along, usually to wild applause afterwards. I guess it was her way of getting the accolades that weren’t coming with grinding, nowhere auditions and such.

But each night turned into a drama, as it always goes with a really drunk pretty woman. The first few times we went back to her place, Jake wasn’t around – on tour. I noticed the place only had one bed, with an upturned eyebrow. Oh, no, she said, we both sleep there, but we’re just friends, he stays to his side and I stay on mine. Don't worry about it.

Well, I’m older now and know what a load of bullshit that is. But when you’re 23 and nursing an all-night erection, you go with the flow. To be honest, I didn’t know what I was doing. As mentioned earlier, my college love interest had been a well-meaning but nutty young woman who would go on to be a Born Again Christian. In other words, I didn’t get laid. So when it came to this situation, I was awkward as hell. She must have thought, “What have I gotten myself into.” But by the same token, I was a nice person, attractive to her, and she could have easily rolled along with my inexperience and have this thing grown into a nice situation. It wasn’t bad at all, but I could tell she was used to older men who had been around and was let down that I wasn’t taking control of the situation.

Well, the summer started that way, this series of weird, drunken dates that always ended back at her place. And I’d usually find myself leaving to go back to the Bronx late in the following the afternoon, and that’s very much a summer memory for me. All I can remember is that she was suddenly heartbroken to see me leave, and we’d look out the window of her dumpy, shared apartment, at old Puerto Rican guys playing dominos on card tables in the courtyard while their transistor radio blared bass-heavy salsa, with its glaring horn sections. She’d see me off to the train, the entrance to which was overgrown with weeds and bushes, and then I’d wait there in the evening sun, getting over a night of drinking and carousing, breeze blowing against my face. The above-ground subway track on that line was such that you could look in either direction and see nothing but straight tracks with bushes and trees lining the sides. It was like looking at the ocean on a summer’s day and seeing that line on the horizon. I couldn’t believe I was in a major city – it felt more like I was in the middle of nowhere, waiting for a train that would take me a long way back to the Bronx. It was a floating feeling, an odd mix of hangover, longing and some kind of relief. I felt raw and mangy, but satisfied. This song nails the feeling I had looking down those train tracks.

And then Jake came back from his tour. I didn’t know this until the night of my birthday. Jenny had suggested we go out that night, I think it was a Saturday. I decided this was going to be a big night, the usual drinking, but a horse carriage ride in Central Park followed by dinner. We arranged to meet up in Union Square late in the afternoon. As I waited there, an older woman came up to me and offered to do a charcoal portrait of me that I could either pay her $20 for, or she would keep as practice as she was just learning how to do this. Why not, I thought. She proceeded to do a nice little piece showing a dashing young man in a suit waiting for his lady friend on a park bench. I paid her the $20, and later on that night, in a drunken haze, I left the sketch in the back of a cab.

But before then, Jenny and I met up, told her I had a surprise, we got on the subway, headed up to Columbus Circle, got out, and when I told her we were taking a carriage ride, she hedged and said we really shouldn’t. Well, right there, I knew something was up, because a few weeks before, this would have been a slam dunk. So we went to dinner, got tipsy, then headed back to her place in a cab, business as usual … only to get back there and find Jake splayed out on the sofa watching a bootleg video of T. Rex television appearances.

Jenny had shifted gears throughout the night, starting from the carriage-ride refusal up to this point, to make it clear that a type of wall had been thrown up. As it turned out, Jake and I hit it off immediately. Despite the intimidating punk-rock front, he was a very friendly guy, old New York type, apparently worked in a local factory but had this nice sideline of playing bass in a minorly-famous punk band that toured regularly. It helped that he was into T. Rex, one of my favorite bands, so we had a bonding moment to start us off.

It became clear that I was going to sleep on the sofa, in my spiffy suit, while they went in and slept on the bed where I had been hoping to have some fun later. So much for that. I could hear them whispering and giggling as I dozed off. What the hell. Whatever was going on here, it was weird. But since I was there, and far from my place in the Bronx, I had to go with it. The next afternoon, after a morning of all three of us lazing around and watching more T. Rex, Jake excused himself for a band rehearsal and left Jenny and I there. I felt like a nap, said as much, went into their bedroom and dozed off, only to wake up and find her spooning against me. Where in the hell is this thing going, I asked myself? I should have asked her, but suspected I wouldn't get a straight answer.

As it turned out, Jenny had to meet up with Jake later at Coney Island, and she wanted to walk down there from Flatbush, which was a long, long walk, at least a few miles. But it was summer, so why not. I can still recall those fading parts of Brooklyn feeling like another country, like the non-tourist areas of a major European city. Each set of blocks would be different. One would be a treelined, immaculate street of single-family homes with lawns. The next would be a ghetto. The next would be an Orthodox Jewish enclave. The next, guys in turbans sitting in front of coffee shops while a soccer game played on a TV inside. It kept changing in a matter of blocks, the only constant the evening sun hitting off the white concrete and creating that glowing light. It was a dreamlike walk.

When we got to Coney Island, we got our picture taken together in some type of king’s chair on the boardwalk – man, that one’s been lost to the ages. But I recall her on my lap and me sitting there with a “what the fuck” grin. I was King of Nothing Much At All, knew it, but was going along with it anyway. We took a ride on the Cyclone, and I nearly shit myself as the scariest part of that ride is you think the thing’s going to fall apart with you on it – I could practically see the bolts shooting out of their railings every time we hit a hard curve. But eventually she met up with Jake and his friends, and I excused myself to go home as I was fairly exhausted and mildly hungover.

That’s pretty much where things cooled down. I do recall a few weeks after that taking her to go see Jake’s band play in the East Village. We had to go to her place first, and again, that strange vibe, I laid there on her couch, hands folded behind my head, and pretty much watched her strip off her work clothes, get naked, and get into her party clothes. Digest that sentence for a moment. This is not something you do with a casual acquaintance. It felt like we were a couple headed out for a night of fun. But as noted earlier, she had put up a small sort of wall once Jake got back into town. I got the vibe that I could have jumped on her at any moment and things would have worked out nicely, but I was also thinking at that point, why bother?

We went out that night, and Jake’s band sort of sucked in that way all punk bands do, but they did work in a few cool Elvis covers that had all the hard-core punks going to the bar because they weren’t into anything but straight punk. That kind of crowd. When we left, Jenny had forgotten her coat inside, so I ran back in, and ended up pulling it off the back of a punkette who had draped it over her shoulders. She gave me a look, I told her, it’s not yours, and walked out. A chivalrous moment, all for naught. We went back to her place, once again, and that was the last night I spent on Jake and Jenny’s sofa while they giggled like small children in the bedroom.

The story didn’t end there. As the summer went on, she was making it clear how much she hated Flatbush, and their apartment building was a roach nest. I should also mention she kept a pet rabbit in a cage, which made no sense to me. She wanted out, her own place.

This is where a coworker named Jim came in. Jim had my job a few year’s earlier and had moved up into a more computer-related position. He was infamous for having published a spy novel in his 20s – he was in his late 30s or so by the time I knew him. He was a strange guy, but good strange. He was slight, had piercing blue eyes and a walrus mustache. What was most notable about him though was he seemed gay. How could this be, though, as he had a wife and two young daughters?

Well, we later found out, he was at least bi, as the story circulated that he gave a blow job to one of our male coworkers at his desk after hours. The guy just seemed gay – that sort of compact, fit dancer’s body a lot of gay guys favor, and he had the accent and the mannerisms. I don’t know if he was from that previous closeted era, or if he was genuinely bi – but his wife didn’t seem to mind, and they obviously got along very well. His kids were pretty well-adjusted, too – artsy in that Brooklyn private school sort of way.

As it turned out, Jim had bought a house in Carroll Gardens a few years earlier to settle down with his wife and kids, and he had ragged stories of going to the local bar and watching everyone quietly file out when the local mafia kingpin appeared in the doorway – people just knew to leave. Or guys in wifebeater t-shirts beating their wives in the shadows of their Virgin Mary statues on their front patios. It was a deeply Italian neighborhood back then, as it had been for decades, and I guess Jim and his family were among the first of the new landed gentry, although this was way before yuppies started piling into Carroll Gardens en masse.

As it also turned out, Jim was renovating the top floor of the house into an apartment he could rent out for some extra money. He was quoting a pretty expensive price for the time – I think $800/month, which was A LOT of money for rent in the late 80s – but the neighborhood was basically nice and clean, with the occasional Italian-American outbursts of violence previously noted.

Well, Jenny caught wind of this, and our last “date” together, probably in late July of that summer, was going to check out Jim’ apartment. I got to hang out with his family in their backyard, which was a blast, and Jenny was clearly sold on the place, save that it was about three weeks away from being fully renovated. I knew things with us were pretty much over, but Jim said he needed help on the weekends to finish off the apartment. He had already talked one of the mailroom guys into helping, and he asked me, too, so I said yes. Hell, I’d be getting paid, and also hanging out with this beautiful woman who I could tell was in some strange place emotionally.

Those next few weekends, I rode my bike down from the Bronx, which was a hell of a long ride, from the Bronx, through all of Manhattan length wise, over the Brooklyn Bridge and into this neighborhood that was about a mile into the borough from the bridge. It was an adventure, and an intense workout in the summer heat. I can recall getting off the bike on the Brooklyn side, buying a half-gallon jug of water and drinking it in five minutes.

And so I helped renovate the apartment, with Jenny buzzing around like an expectant mother. Jim would cookout each afternoon, so that helped, to get paid and have a nice meal on top of it. Every now and then, Jenny and I would find ourselves just looking at each other and smiling, but it seemed like that was the last real contact we had. We also took a few walks, over to the “wrong side of the tracks” which meant going into Red Hook, which at that time was a very down-and-out neighborhood. (It’s now a hipster enclave where I couldn’t afford a Port-A-Johnny.) But walking around Carroll Gardens felt nice. It was still a working/middle-class neighborhood, with those kind of people. They kept it nice, and it had a good ethnic feel to it (the kind of thing that’s disappearing from New York by the second now). She’d be happy here.

Of course, I later found out Jake moved in that fall … presumably to help with the rent, but I gather, as well I should have, that they were a couple, too. I later learned this when a friend at the paper I wrote at, talking about a band from that time period and the people that hung around that scene, mentioned Jake and Jenny by name and just assumed they were a longstanding couple who had been living together for years. Boy, did we have an interesting talk about that. But Jake was a genuinely good guy – when I met him, even in a circumstance that could have flared up into an antagonistic showdown – he was low-key, funny and decent. Shit, I probably should have befriended him and left her behind! But as it was, I let the situation go at that.

We still had that “let’s just be friends” talk some time in September, even though I was pretty much leaving her alone by that time. I guess she thought she owed me some kind of explanation, but none was necessary. Ladies, never give a guy a “let’s just be friends” talk. A majority of the times, you’ll be giving it to a decent man you’re just not interested in, but want to keep in your life because you recognize he’s a good person. Well, the guy has a set of balls, too, and he wants you holding them, so take that into account with this infuriating little speech. Why can’t good guys ever get the “let’s just be friends and fuck” speech? Has anyone ever gotten that speech?

Well, you can guess, my attitude during that speech was “let’s not be friends” and I pretty much let things slide. When the receptionist, who was like a concerned Italian mother to everyone who worked there, heard of my situation, she called my aside one day as I was going out to lunch and whispered to me: “Billy, let that girl go. She’s no good. You don’t know this, but I do. She’s been dating Len from the Accounting Department for the past month. Behind your back. Get yourself a nice girl. That girl’s no good. Here’s what I give her.”

She then pointed at her eye and glared, to let me know she was giving Jenny the evil eye every time she passed the reception area. So, she was banging Lenny from Accounting! Lenny was a good guy, too, young like I was, very good looking. All I could think was, what was Jake thinking? First this one guy from work on the sofa, now this other guy. Who’s next, the president of the company?

But I didn’t have much to worry about with her. She got laid off by late September, which was a relief to me, to not have to see her all the time. And the following spring, the pricks from the corporation who bought the company a few years earlier decided to sell the place to a company in Minneapolis. Which didn’t mean everyone was moving to Minneapolis. It meant the company would be dissolved and the staff laid off over the course of the next six months, with only a handful of the top editorial people being asked to stay on and move (which none of them did, from what I heard). So I got laid off from there, too, albeit with a nice three-month nest egg to live off of for awhile, as opposed to the “thanks for nothing” shit-can I’d gotten earlier from the ad agency.

But that was where the story truly ended. Had not set foot in Carroll Gardens since the summer of 1989, leading up to that dinner invitation from my friend BG about last summer. And I guess as I sat across from that glaring neighborhood creep in that nice restaurant, I was thinking about Jenny and Jake in the back of my mind, and how much things had changed since then.

90s Nostalgia

I can’t believe it, said it could never happen, still don’t think it has in any traditional sense, but I can’t deny it: lately, I’ve been feeling some sort of half-assed 90s nostalgia.

I hated the 90s. Man, I just hated that decade. So many things went wrong that decade, especially in music. But also, political correctness fully-flowered, as did this shithead Democrat/Republican, black/white way of seeing the world. People surely felt that way before this, but the second term of the Clinton presidency, in which blow jobs and the meaning of word “is” became hazy in their definitions, was surely when all this kicked in, spurred on by the success of Rush Limbaugh and such on the conservative side.

The thing with nostalgia, though, is it disregards politics and the state of the world or nation at the time. The most nostalgic time of my life, my childhood in the 70s, had virtually nothing to do with “the tenor of the times.” I was a fucking kid; I didn’t care about Nixon or Watergate or the gas crisis or inflation or whatever. Since then, I’ve realized there is shit going on in every decade that inspires “end of the world” scenarios among intelligent people. Even something like the ’72 Olympics … I have great memories of emulating those games with other kids in the neighborhood, along with the birth of modern-day terrorism that occurred there. We all get by somehow.

The 90s started for me in my mid-20s and ended in my mid-30s. That was pretty much my first adult decade, nip to tip. It felt ragged in many senses. Getting adjusted to real adulthood is a mouthful of shit sandwich those first few years. When I moved to New York, I was living in the Bronx, which may as well have been Mars to most people I knew, and did have an isolating effect on my life in that sense. Opened me up in many other key ways, and taught me about the city in ways most white folks don’t get. And it took me awhile to acclimate to white-collar work – something that’s second nature to me now. But it’s still a way of life I can’t fully embrace with its meaningless rules and deranged money-based value system, despite making reasonably good money doing my thing. Being organized and calm has always served me well in NYC.

I don’t mean to paint the decade as wall-to-wall depression for me. In fact, I was happy most of the time. I learned how to keep my head on straight and recognize the best attitude was just to live life, not pass judgment on myself or sink into depressions based solely on negative self perceptions. Frankly, it was pretty easy as NYC is home to so many manically depressed people, and they set a bad example that’s obvious and preferable to avoid at all costs. Really no different from my childhood and teen life in Pennsylvania: never had much to begin with, never had much to lose, when they put me in a box (hopefully) many years from now, all I’ll have will be my body, and even that will go.

It was an awkward time, which is good for me to remember, as I look at photos of myself in top physical condition and wonder where in the hell that went! Still in good shape – honestly, better physical condition now than I was then – but built more like a wide receiver than a middle linebacker. So when I see those pictures of me smiling in the sun, I can also recall I had my nuts in a twist over some woman who was just as crazy and off as I was. People tend to forget the 20s are very much a learning decade, learning how to be an adult, and it seems like as time goes on, that age of adulthood keeps veering closer (and maybe even past) 30 as opposed to 25 or 26. I can see this now in twentysomethings, especially the more arrogant ones, thinking you can’t fool me, douchebags, I know how insecure and lost you really are … because I was the same way, only much less of a prick!

Musically? I can remember being just on the wrong side of Nirvana. Still recall seeing that album cover for the first time, in the now-defunct Record Warehouse (or something warehouse), this cheapy knock-off chain in Manhattan, their store on 42nd and 5th, where I bought the first Stax Volt box set even though I was unemployed and hurting financially (perhaps the dumbest thing I did in the 90s, albeit with the best consequences). But that Nirvana cover … the naked baby, underwater, going for a dollar bill. Very cool stuff.

So imagine the let-down when I finally heard the music and realized these guys weren’t all that different from the indie stuff I had worshipped through the 80s. Only that stuff was better – less pretentious, more real in its emotions, less directed at impressing depressed teenagers (although Cobain was roughly my age). That’s what I disliked most. Kids tend to get depressed enough without having it culturally validated like it was in the early 90s with Nirvana and the following wave of grunge. That whole scene felt bloated and deeply pretentious to me from day one, a put on, a marketing scheme, whether or not it was sincere, and I believe Cobain was serious as a heart attack. Just a lot less fun than The Pixies. A lot less honest than The Replacements. Not as good an indie choice to make it big as REM was.

I knew things were out of control when I went to visit my friend J in Delaware, and he was blasting Nirvana from the stereo of his rented jeep as we tooled around that weekend. It wore me out on Nirvana, fast! When “Lithium” came on, we’d both be shouting that prolonged “Yeahhhhhhhhh” … J seriously, me in jest. I knew he was locking in on this stuff because it was immediately trendy … and I don’t doubt he genuinely liked it, too. But he knew, and I knew, we were slightly long in the tooth to be listening to this stuff that was aimed at kids, by someone our age wandering around in Salvation Army sweaters while we became adults the hard way (i.e., getting up at 6:30 am and going to work every day, hi-ho, hi-ho).

He’d later do the same with the first Snoop Dog album. I recall at the time he was living at the Cavalier Apartments, a dumpy complex filled with younger folks like him. Every time we’d drive by and he was saying something, I’d respond, “You know, that’s a pretty cavalier point of view you’re espousing.” And he cracked up, knowing that I was making a reference to that crappy complex. He was blasting that god-damned album all weekend, the worst being at 8:30 on a Sunday morning when we got up. I’d go over and turn it down, he’d get pissed and turn it up, I’d ask don’t you worry about bothering your neighbors, he’d reply fuck the neighbors, and I’d just shake my head and give him the silent treatment until we drove off to Denny’s for a gut-busting breakfast.

I doubt he still has the pictures, but at the time, he had a black afro wig that was extremely weird. I put it on and laid on his floor with no shirt on, pretending I was passed out when he came back from the grocery store. It was good for some big laughs. He told me he and his nephew used to drive to convenience stores around that part of Delaware and wear the wig into the store – everyone in there completely freaked out and waiting to get robbed by the weirdo in the afro wig and shades – but he'd just buy a gigantic Diet Cokes and walk out, cracking up the whole time.

As I recall, J got smoked out of that apartment – can’t recall the exact circumstance, but there was a smoke condition in the apartment that ruined most of his clothes and furniture, that was luckily covered by apartment insurance.

But that’s indicative of the kind of weekends I’d have in my 20s. I visited friends in the northeast much more than I do know. Delaware, West Chester, PA, New Haven … in the first two cases, both guys moved away and in the third, that girl just got weird and wholesale dumped a few people from her life, me one of them, so what the hell. That was a big part of my 20s to me – figuring out novel ways to spend weekends. Whereas now I’m more than content to kick back, do some yard and sidewalk work for the landlord, hit the gym both days, make a big meal Sunday for the rest of the week … shit I never did in my 20s. When people ask me at work what I’m doing for the weekend, well, I don’t like answering simply because I’d rather not share that much with coworkers in general, but the truth is I’m rarely doing much but recovering from a crazy week of work and recharging my batteries in a good way.

But I think the 90s nostalgia I’m feeling now is much more tied into music, as I pretty much ignored anything that was popular at the time, which wasn’t hard, as most of it sucked. Hiphop should have died out by the early 90s, but it kept going, like a brain-eating zombie that still wanders the land today. Grunge was a pile of shit for the most part that turned rock into a morose “daddy doesn’t love me” pity-fest of the worst kind, a gob in the face of true rock and roll, which was a celebration of teenage fun once upon a time, starting with Chuck Berry and Elvis, and leading straight up through the Beatles and Stones, Springsteen, and Cheap Trick, and The Ramones, and well through the 80s. “Fun” became a bad word to these dipshits, which was a radical error in rock and roll.

Still … why is it that I’ve found myself lately downloading a lot of Soul Asylum, Lemonheads (who were actually a very good pop band I skipped on because of their popularity), Stone Temple Pilots, Nirvana, Collective Soul, Sugar Ray, Alice in Chains … fuck’s sake, even Candlebox! I assure you, I HATED this shit at the time. But even that Candlebox song, I can hear now, it was just a reasonably good pop song, despite it’s heavier/dopey leanings. “Seasons in the Sun” was a pretty morose, dopey song, too, and I somehow wrapped my mind around that when I was a kid. I think the problem with the 90s was I was becoming an adult, with serious indie rock credentials from the 80s, and in some senses, I felt left behind by this newer stuff (but time has shown me that wasn’t true at all). It made sense for me to not like it at the time – it was out of my context and against my more broad taste of what rock and roll was meant to be (i.e., a range of emotions, as opposed to full-on angst and depression). I found a lot of that music offensive at the time in the previously-mentioned intent to make kids even more melodramatically morose than they already are naturally. Just seemed like a shit deal to me.

And it was. But within that shit deal, I can hear now, some good music, go figure! Jonathan Richman has a great line in his song “That Summer Feeling,” in which he puts forth about why that feeling will haunt you the rest of your days, as opposed to filling you with hope and joy. The line: “Do you long for her/Or the way you were?” That pretty much says it all about any kind of nostalgia. You don’t miss people and places, so much as who you were at that fixed point in time. Not realizing time keeps moving, and there is just as much to pine over about yourself now as there was then … and you probably will in your 60s and 70s! The weird thing about this 90s nostalgia is I don’t miss how I was then – maybe physically, but that’s about it. I don’t even miss the music. Maybe nostalgia isn’t the right word, but I don’t know what that word is in this case. As enigmatic as one’s first tattoo that looks like a meaningless blob of ink 20 years on.

The Depression?

There’s been a lot of talk over the past year whether this financial quagmire we find ourselves in is a full-blown depression, or just a deep recession. For anyone out of work for awhile and having a hell of time finding a new job, it must seem like a depression. I know a few people in this boat, but can also add that one of them checked in last week to say she’s had three job offers in one week, so hers is about to end.

All other arrows point to a very bad recession. I’m not going to get into particulars because frankly I’m not qualified. I gather most qualified people on financial TV shows are the kind of folks who would stick it in and break it off, so I’m not sure who you should trust. But I can tell you that while I don’t know what this thing is, it is surely not a depression.

How do I know this? For one reason only: my parents lived through the Depression, were kids at the time, and the views they have on money and spending, as a result, are nothing, and I mean NOTHING, like anything that’s come before or since. I’m a pretty frugal person in general, thanks to their lectures and examples, but compared to them, I’m a spoiled brat who may as well be lighting cigars with $100 bills.

Dad would often tell the story of he and his brothers having one baked-bean sandwich in the morning for breakfast, and then no food until dinner that evening … which invariably was another baked-bean sandwich. Baked beans were cheap, and both that and bread tended to make them feel full. He wasn’t bullshitting – one day in my late teens, when I was at my thinnest, I found a pair of Dad’s army pants stored away in a closet in the attic. He had a 26-inch waist! I had a 32-inch waist at the time and couldn’t get those up past my thighs.

Apparently, his father, my grandfather who died before I was born (in his 50s, not unusual back then), worked in the coal mines (not “in” them but I think his job was right at the entrance, doing exactly what, I’m not sure), which during The Depression meant working two days a week like all the other workers – just enough to house and feed a family of seven with minimal amounts of food, but never save a dime. There was no work for the kids. Dad let me know, growing up, that mowing lawns for money was a luxury he didn’t have. So I was made to understand that busting my ass in the hot summer sun for a few hours, while hard work, was hard work for money, and something he and his brothers would have killed for in the 1930s. (We seemed like extravagant pansies to him in comparison. We were. Almost anyone, unless they lived in third-world poverty, would be. He always had that unbeatable trump card as a father.)

Mom’s stories are much the same, although she was born just after The Depression started and has her memories of that time rooted in early childhood, much like I have mine in the 60s. (I remember bits and pieces of the 1960s but very little. Most memories I do have of that time are elemental and not culture-related, i.e., I remember childhood experiences, but few things directly tied into the 1960s.) No matter, because Mom’s spending habits, to this day, are a constant reminder of The Depression and what it meant to people who lived through it.

It’s still quite an experience to go grocery shopping with her. My favorite occurred about a year ago when we were going down the candy aisle, and she gazed over the small bags of individual chocolates. I could see all the Hersheys stuff was on sale and said, “Ma, I know you like a bargain, why not get a bag of kisses.” She frowned at me, “After what they did to their workers when they moved their factories to Mexico? I’ll never eat another piece of chocolate from Hershey again, those bums.”

And she meant it! Beyond that, every item she bought was measured against the item next to it on the shelf. If it was a cent or two cheaper, get the cheaper item. Donuts? Get the stuff near or past expiration as it’s marked down. Ditto bread, or any perishable item on the shelves. Keep the coupons handy, because a lot of them will be doubled at the register.

It made me think of my own spending habits, which are pretty in control, but a good example of our differences would be in how we make chicken soup. Mom will buy the cheapest canned broth out there, because it’s the cheapest, buy whole carrots, the generic-brand string beans, corn, lima beans – all in cans – and find the cheapest chicken meat in that section. I’ll buy the good broth, in cartons, baby carrots that cost a little more, but mean less chopping, and the more expensive boneless chicken breasts as I like that meat better and don’t want to be bothered with bones. Don’t pay much mind to the difference in cost of canned vegetables either, save to say I avoid the generic store brands that Mom favors. I’ll buy the big white onions that cost a little more as opposed to the bags of smaller onions. I’m sure if you totaled up the bills of our preparations for chicken soup, mine would come out anywhere from $5 to $10 more. But you know what? That will feed me for a work week (with Friday off to relax and buy some local Chinese or Thai). Mom always buys with the concept of X number of mouths to feed (seven when I was growing up, three now) and will pinch pennies at every corner in terms of meal planning.

There’s one thing I would criticize my parents for, and there are damn few things I’m willing to do that on these days. But that would surely be buying the cheap shit in a supermarket when buying slightly more expensive, healthier stuff would have done us kids a world of good. I have a sweet tooth now that I can surely trace back to childhood, and the concept of making soda the official house drink. I can see the draw in the supermarket, especially with four kids. It’s cheaper than healthier drinks. When I go back to visit now, I have a hard time with how little there is to drink in the house as it’s soda or milk. The odd part about the 70s was my parents would cave in and buy the most sugary, most expensive cereals (Lucky Charms in particular) and ice cream, I guess because they knew in a small way that they were special treats they never had as kids. For once, I had wished they would have busted our asses and made us stick to fruits and vegetables … which were never as plentiful in our house as nearly every permutation of junk food, Little Debbie, be damned.

There’s a flintiness to people like my parents that’s noticeably absent in people now. A good word, flintiness. Hard people created from harder circumstances. So many people are spoiled now, mislead to believe their lives are gauged solely by status and wealth. When you come across people who, as a generation, didn’t have any of either – most people were in the financial shithouse in 1930s America – you get a broader sense of life. I try to be like them as much as possible. Not so much as a tribute to them – just because I know they have it right to see the world this way. Understand how hard it is from the get-go, as opposed to being raised in a cocoon. And spend the rest of your days knowing your value lies in things that can’t be bought. Of course, self-made millionaires are made of the same stuff, knowing they never want to go back to how hard things were. But many more people took that hard upbringing and nurtured it, as opposed to putting it in a rear-view mirror as something to be feared.

I’m not getting that “no bullshit” sense from most people these days. I gather what’s going on now is a speed bump in the grand scheme of things. That this system we built is so foul that the only way it could possibly change would be to have it come crashing down which, as we’ve seen, can come pretty close to happening, but never does. I’ve been reading lately of how the real estate market is recovering when the reality is we’ve just missed a golden opportunity to unwind decades of bullshit, go on having reduced property values and rents, and allow people to live halfway sane lives where they’re not killing themselves just to make their monthly nut. This industry recovering is good news only to people who want to sell their homes for a profit … a concept that always seemed unsavory to me, unless it was a cash-in near the end of one’s days to pay for the remaining few and leave a nice present for the kids. Most people I knew in 1970s Pennsylvania bought their house for one reason only: so they could die in it one day many years later and let their kids take it over afterwards. Not cash it in like a winning lottery ticket.

If you had explained that concept to millions of Americans in the 1930s, that one day it would be a common practice for people to buy houses just so they could sell them again, they’d have laughed at you. That sort of frivolity was hard to come by when so many people had lost their homes or were hanging onto one by their fingernails.

But I suspect a lot of what goes on today would strike your average American from that time as complete insanity. With Mom and Dad there is one issue that I can see they split on, possibly because Dad was the one making money while Mom ran the house. When Dad and I started talking more, in my 20s, when he’d come pick me up from the bus station and give me a ride back to the house on my PA visits, we’d talk about work. And he was always over-joyed when I told him I was making good money which I think he assumed was much more than it really was.

That may have been parental pride on one hand, but on the other, I could sense the he felt he had let his family down by not making more in his life. Or at least he’d occasionally drop comments to the effect that if he had more money, life would have been a lot easier. Not quite realizing that the concept of Dad with immense wealth was just as ill fitting as his size 26 army pants on me.

Unlike me, Dad has never spent serious time around people making bucket loads of money and never got to see how miserable and nuts so many of these people are. Because of their money, and the mental illness they have in terms of maintaining that status and pushing hard so that they get more. Don’t get me wrong – I think money surely serves a purpose in our lives, and having a lot of it, if you know how to make it last, must be a good thing. The problem is most of the people he perceived as being well off really weren’t all that well off. They had money, but they also had to work like fiends to get it and keep it. I’ve been around these people for decades now and can see they tend to bite off much more than they can chew, are constantly in debt, have self image issues because they can see so many people out there much more wealthy than they are (most of them simply born into it), and a vast majority of the time, have elemental “Daddy” issues that leave them seeking the approval of some miserable father figure incapable of offering approval. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen that in NYC offices.

Meanwhile, Mom has always grasped the zen of being happy with what you got, not longing for someone else’s wealth. Sure, she played the lottery for years, and complains about utility bills now, but beneath that surface yearning is someone who has always seemed pretty comfortable and happy with her way of life. Dad was usually smart enough to see that, too, but as noted, every now and then he let on that he thought he missed out on something by not having more money. Maybe he did. Maybe I am now. But it’s not something I lose sleep over.

When you’ve known people like this who lived through The Depression – not so much in the things they say but more so in how they are – you get a sense of people who understand what it means to have nothing, and the ability to go on living with nothing. These days? I’m sensing the ability of people who pretend they have everything to go on bullshitting themselves that they do, even with warning shots that imply all the things they believe in are absolute bullshit. But to acknowledge this would be to stare into a huge void within themselves. And that might be the main reason why this sure as hell isn’t a Depression we’re living through right now. A lot of depressed people, but no Depression.

The "Angry" Lottery Loser

The first Saturday of the new year was one of those mangy sweep-up days on the sidewalk. Not as bad as the previous Sunday, the first sweep-up after a blizzard. I don’t know what it is about blizzards that brings out the wet, floppy pieces of cardboard. But every time we’ve had a major snowstorm, the following thaw always deposits huge chunks of blown cardboard on the sidewalk. On top of the rock salt and dogshit.

But the past few days had been a wind tunnel with sub-freezing temperatures. Any time we have high winds, forget it, there’s all kinds of stuff on the sidewalks. Living near a night club, a few blocks away, there was some of the usual stuff. I’m always seeing the remnants of cigars pulled apart so the user can stuff the inside with marijuana and smoke his big ganga stogy before, yo, goin’ to the club. Usually the cigar box, too. And the plastic bag that held the pot. But it’s always the torn-up cigar innards that get me. There’s the usual small empty zip-lock pouches that held designer drugs like X – not tons, but enough to let me know some Jersey Shore-style douchebags were out there last night getting tuned up in their car before, yo, goin’ to the club. (Sidenote to New Jersey readers: I recognize the irony of this show's title, that these people aren't from New Jersey at all and, in fact, tend to be NYC-based guidos renting beach houses. Just goin' with the flow, know what I'm sayin'?) And someone has to fill me in on this, as I found this, too: a clear surgical glove? Not the first time, and I live nowhere near any medical facility. I’m guessing a woman is getting funky with a guy’s ass and doesn’t want to get her fingers dirty? Sorry if my imagination is too vivid, but why am I occasionally finding clear surgical gloves on the sidewalk?! I’m assuming doctors aren’t getting stoned in their Mercedes out there.

And there was the usual junk: plastic bottles, shopping bags, fliers, cigarette butts, beer bottles, a lot of Dunkin’ Donuts detritus (cups, container tops, napkins, bags) … one opened up recently an avenue block south … and I’d say the most common form of junk now on the sidewalk is Dunkin’ Donuts dumpings. The Dumpin’ Douchebags. Which unfortunately underlines my theory that the more fast-food/generic the eating establishment, the bigger the slobs who consume there. You can see this if you pay attention near any urban fast-food establishment: their junk will be all over the sidewalks in the immediate vicinity, even if public garbage bins are plainly visible.

But something really caught my eye this time. It looked like a scrap of cardboard, some type of form, but there was a black magic-marker message scrawled on it: “fuck you god and your bastard child.” It was on the back of a Super 9 Lottery scratch-off card. Well, someone’s a sore loser, I thought as I deposited it into the garbage bin.

Fast-forward about half an hour. I’m in the middle of laundromat loads, hustling back from the supermarket to my place so I can dump off my groceries and catch the load coming out of the dryer. I’d just left the supermarket, in front of the marble-cutting factory up the block, ready to hit the small hill leading up to my place. When I notice something on the ground: a Super 9 Lottery scratch-off card. It can’t be, I think. But I kneel down and flip it over out of curiosity’s sake. Sure enough, the same message: “fuck you god and your bastard child.”

This changes everything. It wasn’t just some one-off angry lottery loser … it was a conspiracy. Someone had it in for God … and His “bastard child.” A few thing I could already establish. This person was a Christian, no matter how bitter. If you don’t believe in God, then you don’t curse Him – He’s a non-entity if you’re an atheist. And this person was a pretty dumb Christian. Christ wasn’t a bastard. Mary was married to Joseph. You could make the case the Joseph was cuckolded by the Almighty, and must have had the patience of a saint to roll along with a deep WTF situation. But I gather you’re not too steamed when you’re poor as dirt, wandering around with your knocked-up old lady on a jackass, the only place you can find to settle down for the night is a dirty manger (must have been convention week in Bethlehem for the “no room at the inn” treatment they got all over town), and out of nowhere, as your wife is giving birth, three kings show up and start laying out expensive gifts to the son you know isn’t your own. I think at that point, you just throw your hand up and say, well, I’m not happy that the old lady is having someone else’s child, but I don’t have a pot to piss in, and this is all getting very interesting in ways I hadn’t anticipated.

I’d like to picture some middle-aged guy, angry with the world, buys a handful of lotto tickets, scratches them all off, lost again, and in his anger, at the world, at himself, at his poverty, angrily scrawls out “fuck you god and your bastard child” on the lotto cards and throws them randomly on the sidewalk in hopes that other people out there will find his bitterness, like a message in a bottle, and perhaps take a moment, and think, “Yeah, fuck you god and your child.”

But I suspect the reality isn’t quite so romantic. For one thing, the handwriting wasn’t so angry. It was carefully crafted, as though someone took his time to write the words clearly and concisely, slowly working the magic marker over the slim piece of cardboard. The person put thought into it; he didn’t explode in a moment of rage. For another, that sort of shadow figure whom life has forgotten, skulking around in his shadow world of broken dreams and mild rage, gets harder to find in this neighborhood, replaced by the spunky girl with an iPhone who peppers “you know” and “like” and “totally” in her cellphone conversations while discussing boyfriends named Chase and Dylan.

No, I’d picture the darker side of the brat pack who’ve been moving here en masse. The aging wigger who just ditched the nose ring two years earlier because you don’t wear those kind of things in the office. Faded family pictures from Christmas 1999, Dad, Mom, little sis with a smiley face, in front of the gaily-lit Christmas tree, and Vanilla Ice, yo, in a size XXXL Atlanta Falcons football jersey and sideways baseball hat, arms folded, fingers held in gang signs, glaring at the camera as if he was America’s Most Wanted, vainly trying to grow the wisp of a peach-fuzz goatee. This picture, of course, no longer exists because he made sure to tear it up Thanksgiving 2006, a few years after he dumped the gangsta pose, and the evidence of his growing pains slightly pre-dates the digital age, thus there might be some negatives buried deep in a drawer back home, but they’ll stay there, hidden and gathering dust.

That’s the kind of guy I picture scrawling such a message on a lotto card. And not so much because he’s angry with the world. More because he’s angry with himself, feeling himself drifting further away from that culturally-fueled teenage rage that pushed him straight through his mid-20s, but seemed out of place and childish at his 10th high-school reunion. And now he’s an adult, for lack of a better word, and that anger has no place to go. It has to die, and hopefully come back as some similar form of adult rage, although never felt as strongly. Pissed off at the boss. This job sucks. How about those (insert political leaning here that somehow offends your sensibilities). It’s always something. But never the same as being 19 and pissed off at everything in sight.

God can take it. His bastard child can, too. Just dump it on them, they’ll absorb it. World’s big enough for you anger, and then some. They get it, too. Angry message scrawled on the back of a losing lottery card. Good one! Scrawl it again. Spread the word. Drop this wondrous message on the sidewalk at various points in the neighborhood. Viral marketing. Nothing personal, God. Don’t really care about You. You’re just a pawn in my game here. But somebody’s got to take the hit for me here.

Of course, if the real culprit of this infantile crusade was found, it would probably be a 13-year-old kid from the neighborhood who’s pissed at his Dad for making him go to Catholic school! Found worthless, scratched-off lotto cards in the garbage bin, and the lightbulb went off over his head. Who knows. But I find people sincerely angry, truly enraged with the world, generally aren’t this calculating. This felt more like a failed art school experiment by someone with a mediocre mind and just enough education to be stupid. The sort of folk who’ve been piling in here lately … pining for a Trader Joes to open up just like the one back home … missing those Pita Puffs with Sea Salt so much it fucking hurts … ah, Trader Joes, Walmart for the baccalaureate set. That’s how it works in the city these days. If you build it, they will come? Nah, if they come, you will build it. And I just saw two fliers the other day heralding the rapture.

Baby Made Boom Boom

I’ve heard New Year’s Eve described as “amateur night” many times over, referring to partiers who can’t handle being drunk and act buffoonish as a result. But when you think about it, every night is amateur night in bars everywhere, and a lot of those amateurs are alcoholics. I’ve never walked into a bar to find "a professional": some suave, middle-aged man in a cummerbund or cravat, sipping aged whiskey and putting forth like Oscar Wilde. If I did, I’d assume I’d stumbled into a gay bar, and one that specialized in old queens.

I’m sitting here, snug and warm in my apartment, after having a ragged-ass day at work because a few people are out next week and used today to gun out whatever they could. No intentions at all of going out. I work in the western part of midtown Manhattan; they’ve had the parade iron gates lining up each avenue the past two days so that you can’t jaywalk, not quite realizing things get dangerous when you have hordes of tourists making it impossible for sane people to get around them. It’s been a bad scene all week with people who really ought to go the hell home instead of coming here, not quite realizing it still isn’t Disneyland despite Guilliani’s efforts in the 90s to make it so.

And I wasn’t spared my one amateur. Got on the train about 4:00 pm, just beating that undefined time when the cops lockdown midtown and start putting those metal gates all over the place and guiding people away from subway stations. As I did, a twentyish guy, long and lanky, got on at the Times Square stop with me. Seemed normal. Stood by the door. Train wasn't crowded at all. Two stops later, we found ourselves sitting next to each other, albeit with a long bar in the middle of the subway car between us.

He was drunk off his ass, listening to hiphop on his iPod. I could tell because he had earphones that rested on top of his ears, and I could hear the sound bleeding out. The paper bag in his hand turned out to be a beer … which was such a throwback to the “old” days of New York when it was easy to walk around in public with a can of beer and not get hassled. (You now will for breaking open container laws.) I could respect the guy for being so brazen, but that’s where it ended. Like so many dickheads listening to hiphop, he was gesturing with his arms while he listened, you know, the phony jabbing of fingers, the hand signals and swaying of shoulders, like a five-year-old emulating his take of bloated adulthood.

He was drunk, no need to bust his chops or get weird, so long as he kept it relatively under control. About all he did was rub up against me by accident a little too much, not enough to act offended and make a scene, but enough to make me think, “Get off the train, you drunken prick.” Every time the train hit a turn or quicker stop, he’d lean too far against me, like someone does when he falls asleep on the train. Again, the key to surviving in New York is quietly riding out situations like that. If it gets too weird, find some way to walk away, or act out, quickly and decisively. I surely had him in the corner of my eye.

But then, this smell … he shit his pants! I know he did. I suspect he knows I know he did. The smell just sort of came at me in a small wave, but I’ve been around enough homeless people to know – if I had kids in diapers, I could assure you, it would be the same smell. Not a full-on dump. He probably squeezed out a small turd by accident on one of those sharp turns. You couldn’t see it. Man, you could smell it. Again, not an over-powering stench, but enough to let me know baby made boom boom. I know after that smell, he stopped futzing around with his “white rapper representin’, yo” routine he had been putting on. That tends to be the case when you have a load in your pants!

He made it past Roosevelt Plaza, the first above-ground stop in Queens. But, luckily, he shuffled, and I mean shuffled, like a penguin, towards the door at 39th Avenue, the next stop and leaned off the train. He was so drunk he stumbled towards the subway wall and crouched against it, with his back to it, leaned over. I assume he was getting ready to puke to go along with his boo-boo.

But the doors shut, and the train pulled away. Man, what a New Year’s that guy must be having. Who knows, maybe his girlfriend dumped him, he lost his job, one of his parents passed on, D, all of the above, who knows. He wasn’t a happy, kazoo-blurting party drunk in a plastic hat tossing confetti. He was a drunk, lonely kid on the train who shit his pants, getting off on a train stop that’s still a bit dicey in terms of safety. Happy New Year! I hope his day got better once he got off at 39th, but who knows. He seemed harmless enough, but it’s my firm belief that anyone listening to an iPod and “acting out” the music, whatever kind of music, has to be a horse’s ass on some deep, abiding level that I don’t want to contemplate. Paths cross, assholes fade like tail lights in the dark, life goes on.

Such is life in the big city. The night before, my old friend Fred came into the city for a visit while staying with his extended family in a Jersey town this week. (This is the same guy from this post detailing our crazy “NYC in our 20s” days.) I haven’t seen Fred in years, maybe a decade? It’s been a long time. The dude hasn’t changed physically one iota since his college days. Maybe his pants size are up a notch or two (unlike six or seven like mine!), but he still looks physically healthy, hasn’t gone gray or lost his hair, and despite a high-pressure job in a major city, doesn’t have that sort of stress he must feel routinely showing at all in his face. I’ve seen this way of life age people in dog years. Fred must be a vampire, drinking blood in the dead of night to maintain this Dorian Gray personage. I don’t know what he’s doing, but it’s working.

We had some dinner and drinks down in the East Village, Alphabet City to be exact, one of Fred’s last stops before he moved out to Staten Island, met his wife and eventually left New York. If you’re unfamiliar with New York, this is an area on the Lower East Side that has changed drastically in the last 20 years, going from a rundown, anarchistic squatters paradise with burned-out buildings and a thriving drug trade … to an obscenely-expensive, highly-exclusive residential area that, I guess, must have started as geared towards the young and hip, but you can’t be too young and hip these days and still afford the sky-high rents and real-estate values down there. That goes for all of white Manhattan. Parts of it used to be a genuinely intriguing mix of people across all social strata. Now, you’re going to find smatterings of projects housing the very poor, or people with A LOT of money, with very few social classes in between. No struggling writers, artists, or poets, or musicians. Most of them have gone out to Brooklyn and are in the process of being priced out of most of those neighborhoods, too.

I don’t know who lives down there now. I do know you still have sizable projects when you get over to Avenues C and D (this area is called Alphabet City because it’s a large, rectangular block of a neighborhood intersected north/south by Avenues A through D). So things can still feel hairy down there depending on where you walk. But, man, nothing like in the 70s and 80s, surely up through the mid-90s when things changed rapidly along Avenues A and B. When Fred and I sat down for dinner at a nice “American” style restaurant (with prices better than what I find in my neighborhood in Astoria!), it was nearly empty just after six, but filled up fast, most of them a younger crowd. No way on earth could they have lived around there. They were probably like me – in the city for a night of hanging out. I neglected to mention to Fred, who had been asking what happened to all the old clubs and great places to see bands we knew and frequented, there still are a few places like that around, like The Living Room, Bowery Ballroom and Mercury Lounge just south of where we were. But not many.

That was our main draw to hanging out downtown back then, the allure of seeing good music in a small club, which we did dozens of times, at places like the old Ritz on 11th between 3rd and 4th Avenues, and The Knitting Factory when it was on Houston Street. A bomb has gone off in Manhattan though in terms of night clubs, and most bands now, when they come to New York, head out to various small clubs in Brooklyn to make their small legends. You saw people like us wandering around downtown, most of the time we were out to see bands. Those days are just about gone in Manhattan.

It was a kick to later walk the streets of Fred’s old neighborhood and gawk in disbelief at what it had become in the past 20 years. Understand that before I moved to New York, the two or three times I visited Fred in his cramped/shared apartment just west of Times Square, whoever was up for it, we’d all get on the subway down to the East Village, get cans of beer in paper bags at the nearest bodega (much like the dude noted above on the train today!) and just walk in the night. Man, just walking around New York in the 80s, you could still feel “that vibe” – a wonderful feeling, like sparks. The place felt so alive and vibrant. Run-down as hell, sure, but that was part of it. I’m sure part of it was being a bit of a rube and feeding off the different kind of energy a major city provides after dark, but with New York, it was something else, too, something much larger. And I should point out we weren’t acting like “frat boys” or in any way kicking up a fuss. Just walking and taking it all in. Pass a bar? Man, let’s go in and have one. The night would piece itself together like that until we got back on the train, exhausted, and went back uptown to sleep fitfully on hardwood living-room floors.

I guess Fred and I did roughly the same last night, save we had our beers in the restaurant and just walked, particularly down the block that was his last living space down there, a dumpy apartment building on 13th Street between A and B. I remembered that place. Every time I went down there to see him, someone on the first floor would be wailing away on a drum set and sounding terrible. Fred noted that his most vivid memory was the night there was a fire in the building, and everyone filed in their pajamas and blankets, huddled in the water and smoke-filled street in front of the apartment building, dazed and half asleep, not being able to go back in until later the next morning and the whole place smelling like smoke.

It still looked dumpy, as some apartment building always will. But just across the street was a palace, a very nice-looking building with arty lanterns and such hanging from awnings and immaculate brickface on a building that looked like a grand old hotel that had been there for centuries. Well, Fred informed me, that was a squat back in 1989. A burned-out hulk of a building with no windows, graffiti-covered, runaway kids and older boho artist types making a stand there because whoever owned the building had let it rot, so these people moved in and made a go of it without any heat or running water. They’d tap into electricity from street lights in front of the building. This was the urban version of “off the grid” people you’ll find out west living on the edges of deserts and in the deep woods. Some good people, some crazy and lost, all trying to make lives for themselves outside the rule book.

Who knows when that particular squat shut down, but they all did down there, and there were surely dozens, as that whole neighborhood changed in the early 90s. The Tompkins Square Park Riot of 1988 was probably the last hurrah of the rebel side of the neighborhood, where the various forces at play in the neighborhood came to a head, and “law and order” prevailed, thus paving the way for gentrification. Surely, when Fred lived there circa 1990, it was still rough, but I’m sure signs of the impending changes were taking root right then. It blew his mind to look across the street from his old building in 2009 and see this beautiful art-deco apartment building standing where what you might call a black hole of hope once stood.

As Fred noted last night, what the hell, you can piss on gentrification all you want, and for good reason, but by the same token, drugs, squalor, shootings and general mayhem going on all up and down the block at all hours is hardly an ideal living situation, even for a young guy looking for a grittier alternative to wherever he’d just been. I don’t like gentrification at all – in fact, find it horrifying in some senses now that I’m actually living in a neighborhood where I can see how insidiously it works – but when you see the end results, years later, you do get that deep “what the fuck” moment and realize you, as a small person in a set place and time, are more like a cork bobbing on a wave in the ocean than anything else. Shit happens in place and time, and you move along with it, sometimes rolling along nicely for years, other times being swept away for various reasons, in best cases, of your own choice.

And I guess that applies to our lives, too, which is I what I got from walking around with Fred last night. You just roll with the waves and see where they take you. At least that’s how I’ve lived my life. Which must sound like a nightmare to a go-getter with everything that’s going to happen in his life laid out in outline format. Well, outline formats always come up with unanticipated sub-numbers that tend to spread out the broadly-stroked Roman Numerals of Big Shit Happening. You roll with things. And as I told Fred, last night, like a grumpy old man laying out the mystery of life while I clutched my newspaper and harrumphed: sane, healthy and solvent … the rest takes care of itself. You just take whatever shit rolls your way – good, bad or indifferent – and improvise to the best of your abilities. I think I realized this walking around last night, and the vibe was virtually no different from the one we had back in 198X roaming around as kids looking for sparks, as opposed to middle-aged guys who had found them in some sense, and watched some of them die, others go on glowing in the night.

I think the key to life is to simply not shit your pants on a subway train in New York!