In the Belly of the Box

The other day, I attended a work-related seminar in a swank midtown conference room. These things are always the same: stiffness, awkward, forced laughter, stifled yawns, sage nodding of the head, left finger posed thoughtfully under the chin with crossed arms. That look of corporate serenity you hope to have in your coffin: yes, I understand that I’m dead, and this is the last major roman numeral in the outline of my life.

One of the speakers actually was very good, guy in his 50s, really spoke with a down-to-earth, “seems like I’m just winging it but think about all the details I’ve imparted” sort of vibe. One of the things he did stuck with me. He stopped and asked: “All right, so you’re at a barbecue, kicking back, beer in one hand, burger in the other, and someone asks you, ‘What do you do?’.”

When he asked the rhetorical question, he stopped and looked one person in the eye, as if he were play acting and actually at a barbecue. Slight, uncomfortable silence, nervous laughter, maybe people don’t get it. So he said, “I’m a Vice President at a Public Relations firm … what do you do?”

The concept was to get the person to say something more basic than “I work in a museum.” To look at a question like that as a networking/business opportunity. “I work as a loan officer in a community bank.” “Oh, you know, my brother is looking to take out a loan for his small business.” “Well, here’s my card ..” Etc.

I only had one small problem with this: if you’re the kind of person who goes to a non-work event and immediately starts in with work-related junk, I walk the hell away from you. I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want you asking me “what I do.” I don’t care what you do – profoundly so. No one does. We’re there to hang loose and enjoy each other’s company. I’m not there to shake you down for a job. You’re not an object for my financial gain. I won’t make you feel small if “what you do” doesn’t subscribe to some bullshit standard I hold. The only standard I’ll hold in a situation like that is whether or not you’re interesting and likable enough to hang around and talk with for awhile, maybe even become friends if we really get along.

And chances are if you’re networking, I’ll smell it like a hard-boiled egg fart and evacuate the premises in exactly the same manner. Of course, I picture the guy who was speaking, his world is that kind of suburban barbecue where a bunch of uptight guys walk around in polo shirts and $90 shorts talking nothing but work and the amounts of money they make. If not directly, then indirectly by listing thing like international vacations, cars, second homes, wives’ shopping habits, kids’ Ivy League affiliations, etc. If it’s not money, it’s what money can buy. Not who you are. Who you are is generally buried underneath tons of carefully-piled debris, like a doll in a garbage dump.

(Sidenote to “what do you do” way of life: This always makes me think of old friend John S. in high school, when the topic of “what we were going to do with our lives” came up. I can’t recall the class, but a teacher asked us just such a question. Most kids gave the same stock answers: doctor, lawyer, carpenter, nurse, etc. The teacher knew when he got to John, things were going to get strange, so he saved him for last. Finally, he says, O.K., John, what do you want to be when you grow up? John says, “I have it narrowed down to two choices: a gynecologist in Hollywood, or hot-dog vendor on the beach in Maui.” Of course, he was lying. “Cindy Crawford’s bicycle seat” was the stock answer we gave back then to this sort of question.)

I always feel like a spy at these sort of corporate seminars, because this isn’t me at all. Of course, I realize, you go around the room, and the thought balloons over most people’s heads will be saying, “What the fuck am I doing here? Not just this conference room, but this place in my life? How did I get here? Why do I stay? Do they stage these things so I can have these desperate moments of quiet crisis and make me feel like I pussied out on my life and have turned into some kind of corporate cyborg?”

The answer, of course, is money. And free donuts. Free alcohol if you’re really lucky. But I’m assuming most people in that room are doing what I’m doing: putting on the work face for work. Although you’ll get that glint in more than few people’s eyes, the true believers. And I don’t fault them for that. These displays of public disaffection are meant solely for people like them, who buy into whatever’s being sold and believe in it with a religious fervor. They’re the ones who are perfectly at home in an environment like this, and people like me are intruders in a sense, who may never openly balk at this sort of nonsense, but surely roll along with it as it’s part of the deal of making money.

Something about these things always brings out my inner 19-year-old. That’s roughly the age, for me at least, where everything seemed like bullshit. Strung out between childhood and adulthood. In college? If not, working one’s first job, probably living at home, thinking, “Is this how life works now that school is out?” Teenage kids seem like assholes. Adults seem like assholes. Your friends seem like assholes. You seem like an asshole. Everything’s a joke. Who are you doing this for? What are you doing this for?

I have a few friends with kids right at that age, and, man, do their kids seem lost. Not in a horrifying way – actually in a pretty typical way most people go through. But I can see, you have any romantic notions about being a teenager or young adult, you should eavesdrop on a family that has a 19-21 year-old kid who doesn’t quite know what to do with his life, and that awkward lack of direction will kill that nostalgia. It doesn’t look like any fun – more like a teenage purgatory, stuck between that carefree, private lifestyle they’ve had the past few years and the approaching adult world they’ve been drilled to view with fear and disdain, but now it has to be breached somehow in the next few years.

And I wouldn’t know what to tell them, as if some magic answer will appear through the mist. It won’t. There will be things that suggest themselves, and more than likely, situations that just present themselves as a way to make ends meet, and they’ll often grow into some type of vocation. Some people will aim themselves like missiles to get through life, every step carefully planned and conceived. And I always get the feeling that everything else in their lives is secondary to that game plan. Marriages and children are part of the deal, but not the deal. You’ll find executives with three kids who don’t know a damn thing about child-rearing … because you can’t learn a damn thing about child-rearing when you’re working from 8:00 until 8:00 every day and lining up high-end social engagements every weekend that don’t involve kids. I got no problem with people espousing the way of life, but I wish they’d drop the illusion that they “have it all” in some sense when anyone can see through this charade that goes on with that lifestyle. People who work that hard love work. Whatever else they attach to it is not even a close second. I’d guess that realization becomes fairly obvious to the un-close seconds after awhile, and they either see the truth of their lives and accept it, or decide to kick up a fuss.

That’s what I’d tell these kids: you can’t have it all. You can give yourself the illusion that you can have it all, but you can’t have it all. Something will always be out of place. Something will always be out of balance. One thing will be greater than another. Come back a year later, and those things will have changed places in your life. Where they’re at now, everything looks like it’s out of reach. Not quite knowing they have youth, looks, time, a casual laissez faire attitude towards the future that people will spend years trying in vain to recapture as they age. They have a lot, but are not experienced enough to recognize its value. What they don’t have is that standing and sense of belonging in the adult world they’re un-easing into, which will come in time, but unrecognizably, like a disease that unfolds over the course of years. And as it spreads, that hang-loose vibe of taking life as it comes will disappear.

That’s all I could think of in that corporate boardroom. How does this uptight, nowhere feeling I have in the pit of my stomach have anything to do with that kid I was once, that loose sense of freedom I once had? Should it? On some level, no. When I was that age, I wanted to do nothing but be a writer, not quite realizing that it’s pretty rare that anyone gets to do nothing but write, and even more rare to write only what they want to. Usually there’s a lot of shit attached to that. Teaching. Senior editing. Day-jobbing it. You’ll get paid a $30,000 advance for a book and often not see much more than that. Try living on that for a year. It won’t happen, unless you’re depending on someone else for money. Try freelancing. Even the few people I know doing that successfully spend weeks or sometimes months sweating it financially as their assignments and late-arriving payments ebb and flow.

So I’ve had friends with the same aspirations go do the teaching thing. Only to find that they’re so burned at the end of each work day, and have papers to grade, that there is no time to write anything. Or the senior editors, who spend endless hours at work, I mean 12-hour days as a given, with longer for deadline days and weeks, that the concept of writing whatever they want to write disappears like a ghost in the fog. They surely do write, but nothing they want to. Throw in families on top of that, and the aspirations of a 19-year-old look only like a faded question mark in the backs of their minds. Not something to ever be taken seriously again. There's no time.

This is why I find the “thinking inside the box” paradigm sprung on me by someone who has always lived his or her whole like this bad cliché so offensive. Many of us have tried to live our lives “outside the box.” But live in a society where it really helps to have that box to get by. We need to resort to convention to make a living, while we chip away at things we really want to do. Very few people get to do exactly what they want to do, and I suspect their worlds are fraught with countless threats to their ability to go on doing so, which gives them a different kind of box that is a box nonetheless.

Sure enough, while that guy was speaking, he had another trick question where the object was to get us to “think outside the box.” I can’t tell you how rank I feel when I hear that phrase uttered in an office. The person uttering it invariably owes his existence to the box. I’ve known people who’ve lived outside the box, and most of them are dead or beat-down the way you’d get running into a brick wall repeatedly. I’ve trained my mind to think “outside the box that you live inside of” when it comes to people like this. Since I was bored out of my skull, I started entertaining my inner 19-year-old, thinking of how I should really answer this question if I wasn’t worried about losing my job in a shit economy, and walking away from this questionable way of life. And this is what I came up with:

I AM THE BOX. There is no thinking inside or outside of me. If I was, as you say, “thinking outside the box” – I mean really exercising true thought – I wouldn’t be in this room, nor would you, spouting a bad corporate cliché that tells me you’re really not all that smart beyond the blind ambition. If we were thinking outside the box, we’d probably be driving through the Badlands in a 57 Cadillac with a Yes album blaring from the cassette deck, high on magic mushrooms, on a death trip, one of our friends who had died a few days earlier from a brain tumor, wrapped up in plastic in the trunk, and we’re on our way to California to give him a viking burial at sea as his unofficial will stipulated, the one we verbally agreed upon when we were seventeen, drunk and gazing at the stars on the hood of an abandoned school bus at a bush party, but we wanted to get high and drive through the Dakotas first because he always wanted to see the Badlands, and we only have enough money to get us to Utah and will have to improvise thereafter. Motherfucker, THAT is thinking outside the box … not trying to make me feel like an asshole because I’m playing your game and need to reduce my mind to an uncomfortable place where I can figure out solutions to your wayward marketing campaign that’s going to be a piece of shit no matter how far anyone goes “outside the box” on this one.

Maybe the box is a casket and to think inside it is death? Maybe the box is this fucking job, this way of life, the irrational urge to pile hundreds of thousands of dollars into your life because you feel naked and weak without it? I need to think outside the box? Buddy, you don’t want to know what’s outside the box. You can’t handle it. You don’t want to. Last time you went outside the box was decades ago, and it scared the shit out of you, so much that you took that native intelligence, that spark of life you had, and twisted it around to some pre-defined career path because genuine freedom was something that blew your fucking mind and didn’t fit in with what your parents wanted for you, which sucked you in like a vacuum, and turned you into them, like you knew it always would in your little caste system world. So you’ll forgive me if I’m not all that crazy about spending time anywhere near your box because I need money to survive, but at least still have enough sense of personal freedom to wander around “outside the box” in ways you find counter-productive and childish, but I can assure you, no worse than the rampant insecurities and crippling fear that’s hidden beneath your fortress of solitude, you annoying, sell-out prick with enough arrogance to make Hitler blush, you putz.

And I know that tie is a clip-on!

The Defense Mechanism

I was talking to a guy in boxing class today about his other class: krav maga, the Israeli-based form of martial arts. He has a full-contact class that tends to get nuts. I jokingly call him “The Italian Stallion” and he says, ‘No, I’m more like ‘The Italian Scallion.’” He’s had a woman kick him square in the balls in that class and in general gets roughed up a good bit by over-zealous sparring partners, but wearing head gear, cup and mouth piece. Our boxing class is just hitting things, which I prefer. My advice is unless you’re good enough to be a professional or highly-ranked amateur, you should not allow people who really know how to hit routinely hit you.

It’s always a pleasure to talk with this guy, or most people in these classes, because no one is there to kick somebody else’s ass. Every now and then you’ll get a hothead, but he (always he) will rarely last. Like me, most people realize it’s just a good physical release to hit something, and the workout in general is designed to break you down physically, and will, unless you’re in astounding physical condition. (I’ve also found the better you get, the harder you workout. The harder you hit, the more energy you burn. It builds on itself.)

This often makes me think about what it means to hurt or dominate other people, not just physically, and what the point is. Want to hurt me? Got news for you. There are things I understand about myself that are darker, more ugly and more hurtful than anything my worst enemy could come up with. As life goes on, if you’re honest with yourself, you see your own darkness, and embrace it in some strange sense, forgive it whenever possible, try not to encourage it. By the same token, I see great things, too, that sometimes come through clearly, especially when I write.

Gonna’ hurt me? Physically, that’s surely possible, but otherwise, I doubt it. Or at least nowhere near as hard as I could hurt myself. It comes in handy to understand this when you put yourself out there for public consumption. And I’ve learned plenty of people who abhor physical violence and see themselves as miles above it, don’t think twice about trying to inflict the same emotionally and mentally. That’s one major thing I don’t get about adulthood. Kids grasp this instinctively. Adults feel some need to bullshit themselves about this.

That’s one of the interesting things I grasp about New York. The way you see yourself fluctuates constantly because you’re placed in so many situations that tempt you to be the worst you can be one moment, and the best a few minutes later. I’ll be seconds away from popping some nimrod on the subway carrying on about how much he hates white people, fully knowing white people are listening to him carry on with this sort of senseless, baiting crap. An hour later, I’ll take five minutes to help an old lady with a walking cane make it up the subway stairs. Come back in half an hour, and I’ll be contemplating kicking some jackass thumbing an iPhone down the same set of stairs. Aspiring saints should not live here: they'll be tested far too much to make the ecumenical cut.

Boxing to me serves as a defense mechanism against the world. For every man or woman boxing in our class, there tend to be a dozen guys out on the floor pumping iron, building their own defense mechanism. The bigger you are, the less people mess with you. It’s a pretty simple equation. It occurs to me, too, that this is fear in some sense. And I think to understand manhood, you have to understand fear. Because it’s a huge part of the deal. Traditionally, a man had to deal with fear in his world on a daily basis, instilling it in others or controlling it within himself. Life was about regular physical confrontation leading up to the last century or two.

Of course, it applies now, too. It will always apply, as it’s part of man’s nature to feel dominant in some sense. When I’m back home, Mom and I will often sit watching some war documentary on the History Channel. She’ll shake her head and say, “I will never understand why people have to always be fighting.” And I’ll shake my head and reply, “Mom, it’s the nature of men to fight each other. I’ll never understand how peace breaks out so often.”

But the older I get, the less I feel the need to dominate other people. I can understand it in a very base form, living in the most powerful nation in the world, with a standard of living that allows me to think such thoughts. But, really, you see a show on TV about a tribe living in the Amazon, what do they know or care about this kind of dominance? They care about food, and shelter, plants growing so they can eat, water running so they can drink, animals in the forest they can kill and eat. There’s something seductive about that way of seeing the world from my apartment in New York, just walking around with something covering your private parts and only worrying about food and shelter, as opposed to the endless mind games of society. The sense of male dominance in those closed little groups seems incidental to the larger sense of tribal community. Somewhere along the road, long in the past, we lost touch with that. Or more likely wiped it out on purpose.

This country was built on the concept of people dominating each other, and the tradition continues financially, so that we have a place filled with millions of people who don’t feel any sense of worth or happiness unless they feel dominant over just about everyone else they come across. It gets disgusting after awhile, especially in New York. Tiresome. Not something I want to base my life on in any sense. I was never like this as a kid. Or a teenager. Or a young adult. I’m sure as hell not going to start embracing it now. Thought we were going to catch a break on all this shit with the economy nearly collapsing and still ailing. But I can see now, that’s impossible. This system would have to crash for everyone to abandon it. To do so would be to openly admit how empty it is, and we are by extension, and you better believe the people benefiting the most from it will do everything possible to ensure that never happens.

Still, I can see my take on boxing is self defense, not dominance. I don’t walk around beating the shit out of people. I surely walk around thinking about beating the shit out of people – many of us do – but recognize doing so would be much more trouble than it’s worth. It would slowly corrupt my soul to do so (just dwelling on it is surely a minor form of corruption). And the ultimate truth: sooner or later, probably much sooner than I’d expect, I’d come across someone who could beat my ass to a pulp in a few seconds. As I’ve stated before, boxing is about recognizing your limitations. You hang around a gym and see a few guys who are high-end amateurs, it occurs to you, fast, that some people were made to kick other people’s asses, and chances are you or I aint one of them. Catch a few of Mike Tyson’s early fights on ESPN Classic: it’s like watching the perfect ass-kicking machine.

This next generation coming into adulthood, I don’t know what to think. On one hand, you have guys who, no offense, seem like women with penises. They’re all over my neighborhood. Guys who have never been in a physical confrontation and never will be, if they can help it. I’d applaud their pacifism if I didn’t also recognize there’s some key missing elements of manhood in so many of these guys. That flinty quality you’d get with war vets and mechanics. There’s nothing “guy” about these guys. It’s as though any vestige of manhood has been sucked out of or willfully abandoned by them, in favor of being these wimpy, sort of always smirking beings who, as noted, have emotional warfare down to a science, but have somehow erased traditional manhood from their DNA. (This New York Times commercial nails that vibe, that deeply annoying type of guy for me, in a terrible way. I want to kill everyone in this commercial, slowly, but particularly the men, and particularly the balding guy with glasses.)

If you don’t believe me, watch a few current movies, especially comedies, which seem to delight in presenting men as lovable losers who are always sensitive, funny souls life has passed by, but they learn some important life lesson through a strong woman or other like-minded guys, all to the tune of some dumpy indie music that espouses the same airy “let’s just chill, dude” form of quasi-masculinity.

And let’s not forget the “bromance,” i.e., buddy movies, which have been around for decades. The concept of platonic love between men has been discussed since the days of Greek philosophers. But let’s sum it all up now by attaching a vaguely gay slur to the concept of two men being friends … which seems like a neat summation of what I’m getting at. These guys are being raised to be so disdainful of any sign of masculinity that they turn it all into a smirking inside joke, nod-wink, we really know what’s going on here. Right. Abbott and Costello movies were bromances? Eat me.

On the other hand, you have these hyper-macho, heavily-tattooed, nose- and ear-ringed, Ultimate Fighting sort of guys who walk around like open sores waiting for someone to bump into them so they can blast off. It’s like a cartoon caricature of manhood, taking all the obvious physical elements – muscular signs of strength, marking up one’s body with foreboding drawings and designs, inserting metal into one’s face, ears, nose, eye brows, nipples and whatever else, head shaving, facial hair sporting in various awful configurations, glaring at everyone when not wearing wraparound shades …

All I’m seeing are guys who are very afraid of the world, and this is their defense. Constant defense: defense as a lifestyle. I saw a recent story about a champion ultimate fighter beating the shit out of his porn-star wife. So, the guy’s a champion ultimate fighter … who beats up women, too. You have the bravery of this guy climbing into a steel cage to beat another guy’s ass, mixed with the cowardice of beating a woman, particularly one he married and made vows to. So what does the ability to kick somebody’s ass mean in the context of manhood, when you can readily do both these things? What did this woman do to him to make him flick that switch and treat her like a male opponent in a steel cage? What weakness did she exploit so well that his only recourse was to kick her ass?

What’s even stranger are guys who mimic all these affectations, but clearly don’t lift a finger to acquire any of the physical necessities required to be a genuine badass. They’re either rail thin or beer-bellied fat, slobby in general, but ramped up with that “badass” look and attitude … that I can assure you, is going to radically fail somewhere down the road, hopefully not to the extent that the guy gets permanently damaged.

Which is worse, the nancy boy or the alpha male? I’m describing physical extremes here, but admit it, when I describe either, you know the type of men I’m writing about. Surely, most of us guys see ourselves as somewhere in between, with elements of both. I’m not convinced that abandoning any type of physical/strength training would be an answer to anything. It helps to have these skills. Even the weightlifters, it helps to be able to physically intimidate people, even if you have no intention of doing so. In and of itself, it’s not a bad thing: it’s a defense mechanism that is as healthy or harmful as you want it to be. And history is sprinkled with people (Jesus, Gandhi, etc.) who had no defense mechanism, were peace-loving and gentle, advanced souls, who had something greater to teach mankind, and held a different kind of power that’s far deeper than any physical show of strength.

We tend to kill those guys because we can’t handle what they’re saying. Look at us. Look at the world. Look at this country. I don’t mean this as any sort of harsh “we’re fucked” rhetoric. The world has always been this way and most likely always will be. These are just some of the odd things I think about as I’m putting on my hand wraps and slipping on those heavy-bag gloves. Of course, were I Mike Tyson, I would probably be thinking, “Kill! Kill! Kill! In way! Bad! Bad! Kill!” Instead of, “I should really say something complimentary to the pretty girl wearing the retro Led Zeppelin concert shirt on the other side of the gym.”

Mr. Welker

On a recent trip back to Pennsylvania, I opened the county newspaper and was shocked to find that Mr. Welker, my old high-school chemistry teacher, had passed on in his 80s. I’m usually not big on obituary-reading, but this one was right in front of me. I now know there’s no such thing as “natural causes” when elderly people die – that something gets you in the end, as opposed to this romantic notion so many people have of quietly going to sleep one night and not waking up … while doves and angels in gowns lift you up to heaven. Most of us are guaranteed a gravel-filled wiffleball bat ass-beating on the way out.

Mr. Welker was one of those love him/hate him teachers. Actually, most kids hated him at the time, but later admitted they learned a lot under this tutelage. When I forwarded the obituary to Brother M, the best he could come up with was, “Not one of my favorite instructors, although I think his intentions were good.” The rest was remembering how he’d dropped out of Mr. Welker’s class and had received a stern lecture about his (surely lost) future. Well, M did have logistical issues with adult authority figures in his late teen years, and Mr. Welker had his short-term future pegged. But M surely got his shit together at some point, and proved Mr. Welker wrong. I suspect if he had confronted Mr. Welker publicly years after the fact, Mr. Welker probably would have slapped him on the back and said, “I’m glad I was wrong about you.”

I got along swimmingly with the guy, or about as swimmingly as a goofball teenager could with a strict adult disciplinarian. He was by no means a nasty teacher. Just hard … my way or the highway, learn this, or get the hell out of my class. He was physically imposing, too, a large, burly man, with a pronounced forehead, and most noticeable of all, a strange orange tint to his skin. Like Homer Simpson. He felt like a space alien to many of us, a more intelligent being we couldn’t quite understand, but he was sent here to educate us.

About the only really bad thing I remember about him was his habit of injecting his personal politics into his class, which was Chemistry, i.e., had nothing to do with politics. I know you’ll find plenty of left-leaning instructors doing this (particularly in college), but Mr. Welker leaned right and was convinced every generation that came of age after the Korean War era was doomed. (I’ve since come to agree with him, but not out of any sense of conservatism, just the recognition of how much dumber and LCD society keeps growing.)

This was actually pretty funny when he routinely attacked “Hanoi Jane” Fonda, whom he despised equally for her Vietnam-era antics and her starring role in the then hugely popular movie, The China Syndrome. One of Mr. Welker’s auxiliary jobs when he wasn’t teaching was to help out at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Harrisburg, as he also had a strong background in Nuclear Science. Not sure exactly what he did, but he apparently knew everyone and was well-liked there. As you may recall, there was a core meltdown at Three Mile Island in the spring of 1979 … the exact same predicament detailed in The China Syndrome, which actually came out just days before the real-life accident.

When he’d go off on his Hanoi Jane tangents, man, he’d be on fire. Telling us what a nuclear meltdown was really like and how the movie totally botched it/blew it out of proportion. The problem was, I never knew if I could trust him as a valid source. Sure, he knew infinitely more than I did about the topic – he actually worked there – but how much of his bile (which was usually apropos of nothing, just him going off) was because he: a. worked there and had a professional stake in nuclear power being presented as positively as possible; and b. really hated Jane Fonda.

“All I can say is, by the year 2000, go talk to Jane Fonda when your electric bill is hundreds of dollars of month, and most of that is quietly being provided by nuclear power,” he’d say. From the way Mom carries on about electric bills back in Pennsylvania, he probably wasn’t too far off the mark. I’ll never forget once, though, raising my hand and somberly stating, “I don’t know, Mr. Welker, what you’re saying sounds like baloney in a nutshell.”

I had employed a double-zinger on him – using his two favorite catch phrases, “baloney” and “in a nutshell.” And he knew it, breaking into that weird, hard laugh of his, like a dog choking up grass, and said, “Mr. Repsher, if you don’t start paying closer attention, your grade for this class is going to be baloney in a nutshell.”

I can also recall one more hippyish female student blurting out, “Mr. Welker, are you telling us that Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt are wrong about this?” Those were two of the many pop-music “No Nukes” spokespeople railing against the nuclear industry at the time. Mr. Welker’s reply: “So it goes from Glenn Miller disappearing in a plane while serving his country in World War II to self-serving hippies spouting off about topics they know nothing about.” He threw his hands up and walked away, knowing in his heart we were all doomed, listening to frilly, careless rock stars instead of a guy who actually knew what he was talking about.

On that same note, I’ll never forget his reaction the morning after John Lennon was murdered. That was a pretty shocking incident for all of society, whether you were a Beatles fan or not. Kids my age at the time (16 or so), most of them weren’t really big Beatles fans, but surely knew of them as they were omnipresent in our pop-music culture, much more so than today (and I recognize they’re pretty present today). If you were a teenage kid into music, at some point, you went through your Beatles phase and really “got” the band, despite being a toddler when they broke up. It was just one of those things. Besides which, they were still putting out music. I was a huge McCartney fan and Lennon had just put out Double Fantasy. (Thought most of his songs were solid and Yoko’s sucked, but that’s how they wanted to present the album. He had enough material to put out his own album and should have.)

Well, that morning, we pile into Chemistry class, some kids like me, stone-faced and out of it, still in shock, but honestly, most kids not feeling too affected one way or the other. And Mr. Welker blurts out, “OK, everybody, let’s get over this ‘John Lennon hoopla’ and move on, I don’t recall people getting this upset over Glenn Miller’s plane gone missing, it’s only music, and this is chemistry.”

Most kids just sat there open-mouthed. I’m sure I was one of them. Just made no sense to take a swipe at Lennon hours after his passing, but again, in retrospect and taking in Mr. Welker’s politics, I gathered he was getting a bellyful of John Lennon all morning on the news and from everyone around him, and he’d had enough. I hated him for a few days after that, but it wore off. Frankly, what he had said wasn’t much different from what our parents were saying. But I suspect Mr. Welker’s discomfort wasn’t provided by or aimed at students. Most of the teachers at our high school at the time were relatively young, in their 20s and early 30s, and thus were children of the 60s and surely Beatles fans. So I suspect he was sitting in those smoke-filled teacher lounges and getting an earful of other teachers carrying on about John Lennon, and was thus offended.

His class normally wasn’t that controversial. It was Chemistry. And he drilled it into us, having us memorize the periodic table, key formulas and calculations, the whole shebang. You either learned that stuff by rote, or you got the hell out. To get an A in his class was a monumental achievement and generally indicative of someone who was headed towards a science-based career. I was a pretty solid B student in his class and didn’t even like science. It was that sink-or-swim. If you were a smart kid, like I was, it was a gut check to see how much of this stuff you could inundate yourself with and how well you could process it in a test situation. I passed, nearly got an A too, but didn’t push myself that hard.

A typical Welkerian touch: he loved this particular Texas Instruments calculator that did logarithms, which was a big deal at the time, as he recalled doing this shit on an abacus and such back in the 40s. (I can even recall him having an abacus in the class room and teaching us how to use it!) The Texas Instruments calculator with logarithm function? Shit. For him, it was like the invention of the iPod. He demanded that we all go out and buy that same calculator, nothing else would do. First he would teach us how to do the calculations manually so we grasped the principle, but then we’d use the calculator to save time.

Calculators at that time, turn of the 1980s, were just coming into vogue. You could get a basic one (add/subtract/multiply/divide) very cheaply, under $10, but always battery-operated, as solar panels on small devices like this had yet to go mass market. The Texas Instruments one was special, and as I recall, cost upwards of $20, but probably not much more. I think I still have mine back in “my” drawer that my mother still keeps in the living-room desk. It sits there in its denim-blue carrying case, out-moded by smaller, faster, solar-panel calculators that came in its wake. I also recall the buttons clicked when you pressed them.

The thing with this calculator, though, was that blue, soft leather case came with a loop so you could attach it to your belt. “Now, I’m not going to tell you people how to dress,” Mr. Welker said that first day in class, “but if I were you, I would attach the Texas Instruments calculator to your belt, much like I have these pens and pencils in my pocket protector, and keep it there, because you’ll be using this calculator constantly.”

You could generally tell how much of Mr. Welker’s Kool-Aid a kid drank by whether or not he wore his calculator on his belt … like a gunslinger. Forget about pocket protectors -- a teenage male would get his ass kicked on principle for wearing one. I don’t recall one single female student doing this. I do recall a handful of guys, who were generally not the smartest kids in class, but we really taken in by Mr. Welker’s sales pitch. As with so many nerdy things in high school, you may as well have worn a white t-shirt with the word “DICK” emblazoned on the chest in gigantic ALL CAPS scarlet letters. A kid who did that would take endless shit. The usual gag was to temporarily strap your own Texas Instruments calculator to your belt and pretend to have a gunslinger showdown with the kid, both of you unzipping the case, drawing out your calculator, flicking it on and seeing who could find the square root of 586 first.

I had two legendary incidents in Mr. Welker’s class, along with all the hard work and studying. As noted, we got along pretty well. I had two brothers and a sister pass before me through his classes, so he got the impression he could trust me as a student. Brother M came off as an under-achieving charlatan, while Brother J and Sister K diligently B’d it through his class (the same way I would). I was a “good kid” … and I really was, which wasn’t necessarily a blessing as a teenager. I may have chafed at Mr. Welker’s politics and discipline, but I somehow saw through the BS and took to whatever he had to offer as an instructor.

The first incident was Dress Up Day, which the school would have once every semester, a chance for kids to dress like adults, for guys to put on ties and suit coats and girls to wear nice dresses and such to school. As opposed to our normal uniforms of concert t-shirts, flannel shirts, cruddy jeans and sneakers. (Does it say something about me now that I don’t even own a pair of jeans? I can’t stand denim as a fabric.) It was a big deal to put on the dog in high school, save for that small cache of students who always dressed well.

Well, Dress Up Day, Chemistry class, and Mr. Welker has scheduled some experimentation in the lab next to our desks in his classroom. We loved doing that stuff, because it could be dangerous and risky at times if you didn’t do things right, and shit was always happening, phosphorous burning too much, sulfur smells emanating from mixed liquids, etc. He drilled us on how to use bunsen burners, as you could imagine the danger of 20 or so teenagers lighting these up simultaneously without any training. We all had our hand-held flint devices. And our burners that we’d hook up to our individual gas pipes. Turn on the pipes, hear that telltale hiss, then flick the burner on with the flint.

I must have been groggy that day because I did something unforgiveable: hooked up my bunsen burner accidentally to the water pipe adjacent to the gas. I was dressed up that day. Everyone around me was. I turned on the pipe, didn’t hear the gas, picked up my bunsen to burner to see what was wrong, and when I did, pulled off the small hose leading to the pipe, spraying water over everyone within five feet of the pipe.

Of course, the class went nuts. Understand that kids had lighted their burners, and scattered when they got splashed, nearly burning themselves on the lit burners in the process. It was mayhem for a few seconds, but blew over quickly, although I surely pissed off those kids around me. To Mr. Welker’s credit, I don’t recall him punishing me, just giving me a stern warning. I’m surprised this didn’t happen more with the gas and water pipes right next to each other and not labeled accordingly.

The second incident was a test we had in the last semester of our senior year in Mr. Welker’s Nuclear Science class. That class was a mistake on my part as I hadn’t anticipated how lackadaisical I’d feel towards academics in that last few weeks of high school. (I felt the same way my last semester of senior-year college, too.) I was cruising towards the finish line, already accepted at Penn State, really felt I had nothing to lose. Inject into this mindset Mr. Welker, teaching a relatively new and very difficult class that he had a burning passion for, and it was an educational disaster.

Even the kids who were good at Math and Science were tanking the class. It was fucking hard! Unlike his earlier Hanoi Jane rants, this was actual Nuclear Science, the study of it, and most of us just weren’t cut out for this stuff. I recall two girls really taking to it, and sure enough, both did pursue Nuclear Science in college. But most of us were totally lost in this class, from the first week on, and since it was our last semester and all of us were already college bound, no one was sweating it, save those kids who kept desperate tabs on their Grade Point Average.

I wrote about this class earlier in a posting about The Kinks, that great field trip we took to a nearby power plant, and my discovering that two of the more popular jocks in school were closet Kinks fans. I don’t know why that field trip sticks in my head – sure, it was the Kinks connection, but there was something about the whole thing, being 17 or so, May of 1982, and it’s just one of those “young” memories I’ll always have, walking around that plant in a hardhat with all the other upper-echelon smart kids and having a blast away from the school.

The last week of school, we had our final exam, which was an all-essay extravaganza as opposed to the usual sections of Multiple Choice, True/False and such. Normally, I’d be over-joyed with this development, as I ate up essays and could write them in my sleep. Even if I didn’t know too much about a subject, I could generally feel my way into it as a writer and make it work. But I had two problems here: I was totally flummoxed by Nuclear Science, and my study habits were completely shot with freedom from high school so close we could smell it like blossom on the wind.

That was probably the last test I took in high school, and in uncharacteristic fashion got a C Minus on it … which was cause for great joy. Because I knew jackshit about the topics at hand and truly deserved an F. I can’t recall the exact questions, but each one I turned into a free-form exploration of the universe, gearing the first and last paragraphs towards the question at hand, but in between just rambling a cut-up style of writing much like William S. Burroughs used in his novels. I had just read Naked Lunch earlier in the year and was entering my Beat Writers phase with Kerouac, Ginsberg, etc. It didn’t take me long to realize writing like that wasn’t my forte, but you have to do these things first to realize you’re not good at them.

The one question that stood out was the last: Explain in detail the theory of Black Holes. We all know what black holes in space are, but I recalled we had a special class and film about the topic which went into great detail about their discovery, the differing theories about what they were, what it would be like to enter one, etc. Interesting stuff, but I was zoned out at the time and not paying attention at all. Not studying a lick either. Those few weeks, every night found me shooting pool at near-by Holiday Lanes with pal George, who was much better than I was because he had a pool table in his parents’ basement, so I had to practice really hard to beat him. I spent much more time shooting pool that last month of school than studying … a malady many of classmates suffered from their entire high-school career.

I somehow found a racial component to the Black Hole Theory, tying in the Civil Rights movement and the band Earth Wind & Fire into what happens when a burned-out star enters a black hole. I pictured the Black Hole as nightclub in Harlem, and the burned-out star being singer Tom Jones. And so it went … I think I had Tom and the members of Earth Wind and Fire beating up a gang of KKK rednecks from the 1930s who had slipped into a time-space continuum and ended up in their black hole. The essay ended with me clicking together the heels of my black Chuck E. Taylor Converse hightops and chanting “there’s no place like home” tying into my theory that Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz had actually been in a black hole, and that movie was what really went on in there as opposed to gaseous explosions and super novas.

It was a tour de force of “no longer give a fuck” babble from a kid woefully unprepared to handle that or any other essay question in a test. By all rights, I should have flunked. But Mr. Welker gave me a C Minus, on the test and in the class. Not just that – I had friends in that class who studied their asses off for that test and got C Minuses, too. I guess they simply had the wrong answers, as opposed to imaginatively wrong answers like mine that at least demonstrated some type of creative thinking.

Whatever the case, I’ll never forget how nice he was to cut me that slack on the way out. I tend to remember the good things more than the bad with Mr. Welker, or with anyone who passes on whom I haven’t seen in years. He once told us the story of how he and a few of his friends, back during the Depression, had swiped a shipment of potassium from the lab for the sole purpose of throwing it into a nearby creek to watch it explode. This had to be done carefully, constructing a slingshot, as just throwing it by hand into the water could result in an explosion they couldn’t escape. He detailed the whole thing, how they set up the slingshot between two trees, set up two large rocks they could hide behind, constructed informal mirror/cardboard periscopes (another thing we did in his class …) so they could watch, and communicated the joy they had in blowing the shit out of that creek, although none of them had anticipated the number of dead fish their depth charge would unveil. Again, that dog-choking laughter and twinkle in his eye as he told the story.

I couldn’t help but get along with somebody like that. A few people I know have told me he was like that out of school and after retiring – a fun-loving guy, always with the “devil in his eye” glint of someone looking to pull a fast one. It would have been nice to know him like that, but I can live with the memory I have.

Dentist Office in Buenos Aires

I can tell you how it feels to discover new music because I never really stopped. Granted, I don’t go far out of my way to find this stuff; it’s more like stumbling across it. I hear a song in a movie or somehow by chance, know it’s a certain style that I don’t know much about. But I like what I hear. So I pursue it. Thanks to relatively cheap services like Emusic and Amie Street, and great places like the New York Public Library, I can educate myself in a hurry on any style of music.

It’s like being near the ocean on a summer day. You can smell the ocean on the breeze. Feel the sun. It’s there, you know it, but you haven’t seen it just yet. Then you start walking, and you can see sand creep into the cracks on the sidewalk. And you can now hear the ocean, a soft roar just out of earshot. You go down a few more streets, and you can see a beach head on a dead-end street with a wooden boardwalk, You walk up the boardwalk, and there it is, the ocean, stretching out as far as the eye can see. It’s an exhilarating feeling, no matter how many times you’ve seen it.

At least that’s how I feel these days when I get into a new kind of music I never would have considered as a pop-rock teenager at the turn of the 1980s. And some of it is just as good or better than what I already love. Such has been my “discovery” of Bossa Nova music. Or Samba. Or “Brazilian.” I’m not quite sure what to call it. But it’s a very light, breezy sounding music, generally from South America, that has a certain descending, shifting chord pattern played on an acoustic guitar, that sounds both relaxing and vaguely sad at times. It’s the lightest music I’ve ever heard – like a breeze. It sounds like summer in a way The Beach Boys don’t quite get. (But I love The Beach Boys for the way they do get summer.) I’ll include a few samples of what I’ve turned up at the end of the post.

Sometimes the net effect of listening is like being in a dentist’s office in Buenos Aires, at least for the older, more orchestrated music from the 50s and 60s. A fellow fan told me he dreads the inevitable flute solo many of these tracks have. And he’s right, that ubiquitous, mellow flute, not quite Zamfir’s pan pipe but too close for comfort, comes wafting in. If you can't handle Easy Listening music, then you won't be able to handle a lot of Bossa Nova. The best stuff for me is stripped down to acoustic guitar with light percussion. The words are usually in Portuguese or Spanish, but I’ve found a fair amount of songs in English, too, and plenty of instrumentals.A lot of stuff that sounds like good pop rock, save it’s in another language. And that doesn’t bother me near as much as I thought it would.

I’m trying to remember how all this started. Not listening to music. The act of going outside your prescribed American teen listening sledgehammer of pop and realizing there’s plenty of other stuff going on, and always has been. As noted in my last post, we had music class in grade school which introduced us to music nearly all of us agreed was fruity. About the only cool thing I recall from that time period was dancing around to songs like “Yummy Yummy Yummy (I Got Love in My Tummy” and “1-2-3 Redlight” in kindergarten during those jump-around sessions the teacher employed to wear us out for nap time on the wrestling mats.

And there was Lawrence Welk every Saturday night on PBS, which our parents made us sit through to get to the World at War documentary series. This was bad Big Band music – schmaltzy, sterilized and hammy. I’ve come to appreciate Big Band music with passing time, but this show put a decades-long dent in the learning curve. About the only cool thing Lawrence Welk did was his version of “Baby Elephant Walk” (which my friend George would play on a lark every time we drove into a new town at night in his ’76 Nova with flaming tailpipes).

I think the simple answer is Oldies stations, which in the 70s meant 50s and early 60s pop rock. Which was the first forbidden ocean I laid eyes on. By forbidden ocean, I mean how rigid and claustrophobic so many teenagers are in terms of their listening habits, and how much of that was determined solely by radio play, Top 40 popularity and sheer lack of listening experience. And in the 70s and 80s that also meant “rock” popularity. Rock music wasn’t necessarily the most popular music of the time, especially for various heavy metal bands, but they’d be hugely popular with subsets of outsider kids, and thus the barometer of real cool. Led Zep and Pink Floyd were by no means Top 40 pop bands … but were massively popular with teenagers in the 70s. This was thanks to AOR (Album Oriented Radio) stations playing their non-single album tracks to death. A lot of us were raised entirely in that rock/album culture, the same way we were raised with religion.

And you’ll find those same kids now, adults in their 40s and 50s, listening to the same shit and nothing more as if it was still 1975! On one hand, I can respect that sort of stubbornness. Hell, I still listen to all those all bands, too … and a ton of other shit that came before and after. That was the spirit of the day, wasn’t it? Everything is NEW, and we’re IN ON IT, and this is OUR MUSIC, and we’re ALWAYS GOING TO FEEL THIS WAY.

As you can tell by the all caps, I’ve come to realize these concepts are questionable, at least in regards to how people age with music. If you do, you abandon that fortress of false cool you construct as a teenager and take off for the hinterlands to see what else you can find. (And you find that your fortress was very small, and there’s just no way you can take in all the music out there. You won’t even have time to find or listen to all the stuff you like.) When I hear a teenager talking like that last sentence of the previous paragraph, I know he’s full of shit and won’t be listening to music in any real sense 10 years down the road. An adult? That’s someone trying to sell something … to someone he assumes is a complete moron, i.e., your average teenage kid. It’s an exclusionary, small-minded sales pitch as cynical as any you’ll find in other markets. And what’s turned the recording industry into a child’s playground since Elvis Presley, maybe even Frank Sinatra if you think about it.

So why do so many people not just buy into this, but then pick it up and hold it to their chest like a worn teddy bear they carry the rest of their days? Well, because it’s music, good or bad, and tied into emotions, particularly emotions regarding youth and some sense of freedom. Freedom compared the responsibilities of adulthood … although I feel more free as an adult than I ever did as a kid. At least in important ways: how I want to live, where I want to live, whom I want as friends, etc. We didn’t have to worry about making money and supporting ourselves as kids, but otherwise, the major downsides I recall about childhood was the curtailment of these personal freedoms. And I know kids think about this all the time, as they imagine how their world is going to change for the better when they grow up. In some ways, it does. Youth was about moments of freedom – sometimes hours, days or even weeks of freedom – but adulthood is more about less obvious personal freedoms. I’d love to have both! But life hasn’t worked out that way, as it doesn’t for most people.

So, in that context, you can see why music is such a big deal. Not so much the music itself. The act of using it as a form of identity. An idealized identity, too, in terms of that freedom and a sense of wildness. And not just personal identity: group identity. That’s the one thing that seems to be decreasing over time with no central music cultures “taking over” as they did in the past. Save the ubiquitous Top 40 crap, that I can usually avoid, even in the gym on Saturdays, so long as I bring my iPod and drown out all the gimmicky, crappy, soulless songs with auto-tuned vocals and dentist drill beats.

I don’t want this to feel like a sermon on the mount from a music lover. Most people I know, as adults, back off from music as time goes on, even though they listen to it all the time. If they have cars, they listen on car radios and CD players, sometimes even going so far as to get satellite radio because it’s so much better than commercial. They’ll buy CDs every now and then. Someone may have bought them an iPod along the way, and they’re familiar with the whole process of purchasing and listening to digital music. (But not in the same way a maniac like me is – because if you’ve grasped what’s gone on with digital music in the past decade, you know this change in music is cataclysmic and paradise for a music lover.)

When they ask me what I’m listening to, I don’t know how to answer. I have an iPod with 20,000 songs on it. I download 100 songs a month from Emusic that span many genres; keep a running account with Amie Street and occasionally buy albums from online stores like Amazon and 7 Digital when they have good sales. I poke around websites and pull down hard-to-find and out-of-print albums routinely. A downside is I listen to so much music now I just can’t absorb and internalize it the way I once did as a kid and young adult. But I was leaning in this direction with CDs through the 90s, buying anywhere from four to 12 a month. That process is a lot quicker now, going into albums online, sampling the tracks and choosing what I want. It’s a whole different way of understanding music that has its ups and downs. I don’t live with it the way I used to … but I surely do live with it. And in volumes and styles I never could have imagined even a decade ago. I sometimes feel like I’m skiing down an avalanche that never stops, and rather than feeling like I’m about to die, feeling like I’m just starting to live.

I guess I tie-in music appreciation with a general curiosity towards life, which should never end. If I can look into other people’s lives and see something, anything, about the person that suggests a similar passion and curiosity, I feel like I can understand and relate to that person better. I don’t care what it is. Football. Macramé. Stamps. Nascar. Fishing. Yoga. Whatever. Something that shows me they’re “really into this shit” and care about something more than obvious things like money or status. The problem I see with a lot of adults is they’re just not into anything but getting through life. Which I am, too, but you need to set-up small areas for yourself to roam around in and have that same sense of wonder you did as a child.

Conversely, I would be bored as hell listening solely to the exact same music I did as a teenager. Thus, the branching out. Started with Oldies, but the next big one was Country. You listen to stuff like “Dead Flowers” by The Rolling Stones, and as a rock fan, you think, that sounds cool, where did they get that sound from. And stumble across Hank. And Johnny. And Merle. And Willie. And before you know it, you have a few hundred songs on the iPod that really give you a good understanding of Country Music in general. And you pick up more stuff as you move along and learn, connecting the dots, stumbling onto similar artists, discovering new ones, reaching back for older ones. Same thing has happened to me with Celtic, Soul/R&B, Blues, Reggae, Big Band, Classical, some Jazz, and now this Latin-based stuff. Will happen with African music, which I have a little of, but have a disc of MP3s from a friend that I’ll use as a starting point when I get more into this later in the year. And I’ll find what I’ve always found: great music that appeals to me. Not age-based. As the phony battles lines have been drawn in our fractured musical culture.

It takes work to do this. A lot of research and listening. Time. But really, nothing like the amount of time it would have taken a decade ago when I’d have to go buy dozens of CDs, or get educated enough to pull the CDs from the library, and slowly feel my way through them to pull what appeals to me. I guess the key change is the sense of ownership of music. I surely own digital music, but that ownership is now invisible and comes in bits and pieces that I pull from whole albums. In the past, I would have to purchase whole albums and keep them. I have a six-dresser drawer filled with CDs, probably about 3,000 of them in slimline sleeves. (The cases were too bulky to keep.) You could visibly see my passion for music.

Now? I got a laptop with iTunes on it, a 500 Gigabyte external drive to back it up, and an iPod. A vast sea of music on this little thing I can hold in the palm of my hand. These are incredible times, folks. Jaw-dropping stuff to a kid raised with eight-track tape decks and tinny, handheld AM radios. A time of wonder. I guess it always has been. All I recommend is having that feeling towards something in your life, because it seem to me losing that sucks. I can understand life beating that out of you, but I don't understand willfully abandoning it, as so many people do with their love of music.

So, here are some of the tracks I’ve been listening to:

“Girl from Ipanema” by Astrud Gilberto (with João Gilberto and Stan Getz). If you only download one track, make it this one, the holy grail of Bossa Nova. A perfect pop song, too, which is hard to pull off for a five-minute plus song. If I had to give an audio example of summer to space aliens, I’d play this song.

“Patience” by Sixth Finger featuring Dew. This is a sample of the many cover versions I found in my travels. Most of the Guns & Roses Bossa album was terrible, but I thought this sounded great. Nouvelle Vague is surely the best of the Bossa cover bands, with their tilt towards 80s pop, but there are whole series of CDs for “Bossa does rock” music. And, on each of those, you’ll find that same breathy, vaguely Scandinavian-sounding female lead singer phonetically botching lyrics and singing with about as much soul as a vacuum cleaner. I say that like it’s a bad thing … but sometimes it works! Mileage varies wildly, even within one CD, but I’ve come across some great covers in this genre.

“He Vinido” by Los Zafiros. Picked up on this from a recent episode of the AMC series Breaking Bad. Cuban doo-wop from the early 60s. Not all the stuff I found was Brazilian, although I purposely avoided a lot of Mexican music as it’s too loud in comparison. Ditto salsa and merengue, two forms of music I am never going to like (and have had endless exposure to via a decade in the Bronx). But, man, “He Vinido” is just a great song. I find that a lot of southern hemisphere stabs at rock and roll, past or present, tend to be pretty legitimate, if you can handle the non-English lyrics.

"Concórdia" by Elza Soares. Not Bossa Nova, but Brazilian. I can't describe this track. Sort of like "Guitar Man" by Bread with a more funky beat and raw female singer. There's a lot of cool stuff going on in this song. The best Brazilian stuff is either bare-boned Bossa Nova or weird mixtures of influences like this.

"Aguas De Marco" by Bossacucanova. The waters of March. A perfect Bossa Nova song, and in English, too! That signature acoustic guitar riff, the way the song keeps flowing. If songs like this don't float your boat, then you're just not into Bossa, man.

Around the Neighborhood

It happened again this year. Was out sweeping Saturday morning and feeling a bit pissed. Couldn’t do my laundry because the laundromat was over-run with strangers, by which I mean people who were randomly doing their laundry. I do mine roughly the same time every week and know the other regulars. The place has been near empty the past two weeks. This week, it’s like they’re giving out $100 bills.

But I’m out there, windy/sunny day, and I notice an unusual amount of cars driving like maniacs through the neighborhood, meaning there’s some kind of traffic blockage nearby. I often look at the faces of the people driving this dangerously, and it’s always the same dumb, blank face gazing out the window. These people aren’t in a hurry because they have brain surgery to perform later in the day. They’re just typical Queens drivers who feel some burning need to get where they’re going in eight minutes instead of 10. I can’t stand the false urgency, the self importance, the gigantic vehicles, the lack of concern for anyone around them. These people get tiresome after awhile, but let’s face it, they’re everywhere. (And I spoke too soon, as later in the day, I saw a woman do a full 360 turn in the middle of an intersection, three times, in an SUV, I guess because she saw an open parking space she would have to back into and couldn’t make up her mind if she wanted to take the time to maneuver into it. It was like watching a dog chase its tail … a three-ton dog with the brains of an ant and the ability to crush me.)

But then I hear it on the breeze. A lone bagpiper playing “America the Beautiful.” The sound keeps falling in and out of earshot with the wind. That can only mean one thing: the annual Little League parade on opening day. The playing fields are about five blocks down on the back avenue. Sure enough, the bagpipes grow stronger, and then the kids appear in the distance, marching determinedly down the back avenue, in rows with their uniforms, parents shuffling along with camcorders and digital cameras.

I love seeing this and feel bad when I miss it. Any sign of normalcy in the city, I’ve learned to appreciate and nurture because I fell off the “let’s be ‘out there’ for the sake of being out there” bandwagon a long time ago. It’s nice to recognize that underneath some layers, this is just like any other town in America.

**

Speaking of out there, saw something weird on the street the other day. Another sunny day, coming home from work. It was one of those days that the gutters were filled with cherry blossoms, mid-April, all this stuff coming off the trees when the wind blows hard, such a nice thing to see blossoms in the gutter as opposed to dogshit or Dunkin’ Donuts styrofoam cups. But as I was cutting up one of the side streets from the main drag, I heard someone playing a piano. It was some barrelhouse-sounding stuff, rolling chords, Mead Luxe Lewis.

A few yards down the block, I could see who it was. A white guy in his 20s, not particularly hipsterish, just a guy, who had dropped his backpack and was playing a beat-to-shit upright piano that someone had put on the sidewalk for trash pick-up the next day. He was having a blast, and the piano was way out of tune. This is the kind of quirkiness I can live with, as opposed to the canned junk of flash-mob pillow fights and such. The guy was walking down the street, knew how to play the piano, was obviously feeling good on a sunny day, saw a golden opportunity, and started hammering out some old boogie woogie number he knew.

Sure enough, a minute later, an old Greek woman comes barreling out of the house with a broom, shuffles down her stairs and starts swatting at this guy, cursing him in Greek. But he was laughing too hard to take it seriously, picked up his bag and started jogged down the block. Again, we could use more guys like this in the neighborhood, as opposed to the ceaseless wave of muttering zombies with iPhones and left hands glued to their ears.

**

It’s been weird in the neighborhood. One depressing thing that keeps happening: film crews showing up all over the place for TV shows and movies. This is a terrible sign; they’re not choosing this place because it’s a slice of life. They’re choosing it for hipster quotient which is just another sign of the gentrification apocalypse that has been going on here since the turn of the century. There have been movies filmed here in the past that were neighborhood specific, or geared to recall a different time in New York (a lot of the neighborhood recalls 1950s/60s New York in terms of the housing), but what’s going on now is just bullshit. People who scouts locations for movies move to this neighborhood because it’s been deemed a hip/pricey place to live. So, obviously, they start looking around where they live and decide certain places in the neighborhood would look great in the show/movie.

I just wish they’d get the fuck out, the whole crew of them. Last night coming off the train was like being in A Hard Day’s Night. I’ve noticed there’s been a film crew by the subway train the past week, and don’t get me started on these douchebags. Don’t know what it is about film crews – the self importance, the arrogance, the total lack of respect for the people who live in a given neighborhood – but without fail, these people always conduct themselves like assholes, as if we should be thanking them for throwing off our routines, taking up space for days on end and bringing absolutely nothing to the neighborhood but more empty hype.

I’ve heard they’re shooting scenes for a new Pacino movie, but no one cares about Pacino anymore, it’s all about young co-star C_____ T_____, who must really play big with teenage girls. (I’m not printing his name lest a search engine picks it up. The only people who would be googling this guy are teenage girls and gay guys in search of this clown displaying his washboard abs on the red carpet. A blog like this would be like reading Chinese for them.) The subway station was mobbed with them, all giggling and carrying on, grabbing each other, squealing, pushing each other, making asses of themselves … the same way they once did for The Beatles and Elvis and whoever. It took five minutes to get out of a station that normally takes 30 seconds. No police presence, near fights, which would have turned into riots in no time with all these kids milling around … just a major annoyance.

But maybe this is just another thing like the Little League scenario mentioned above and I should take heart? These kids were acting like rubes who had never seen an actor or famous person before. I have. Anyone who gets on the train and goes across the river does, routinely. And when you do … you realize that they’re just people. Some of them are incredibly beautiful. (I recall seeing Marisa Tomei at an outdoor café near the Museum of Natural History one afternoon, and it was like she had a spotlight on her, the woman was just stunningly attractive.) Some really strike you with their presence when you randomly encounter them on the street, building lobby or elevator. But, honestly, after the bolt of recognition that lasts about 10 seconds, they’re just people, and you get over it. I surely wouldn’t hang around squealing in a subway station to see one. I wouldn’t hang out anywhere to do so. I’m not sure what looking at a celebrity is supposed to do for you? Touching one? Getting one to sign a piece of paper? Honestly, no one gives a shit, least of all them, for which this stuff becomes a routine annoyance. And I see beautiful women every day, probably with a lot less baggage than any celebrity.

But look at our culture. This shit is as bad or worse than it’s ever been and grows more vapid by the minute.

**

The public school next door has been weird lately, too. Weird in the sense that a few months ago, someone thought it was a great idea to install a loudspeaker somewhere on the outside of the building, so that the entire neighborhood is now privy to all the sounds that come from a loudspeaker in a school. Mainly beeps signaling the beginning and ending of class periods. But, without fail, the morning announcements, too, which go on for about five minutes.

They happen just as I’m getting ready to leave my apartment at quarter after eight. And, man, I would hate to be a kid in that school. I’ve gathered the principal over there is a woman, and from these announcements, she sounds batshit crazy, or treating 12-14 year-old kids like infants as opposed to humans. Her tone of voice is always a little too “and that’s why the sky is blue, little Johnny, now isn’t it beddy-bye nappy time, boo-boo.” The worst came a few weeks ago when she made up new lyrics to Queens “We Will Rock You” to match some recycling campaign the school was apparently running. Imagine a middle-aged woman in a dress suit braying “We Will Rock You” into a microphone in a school office. I was 13 or so when “We Will Rock You” came out … and never would have predicted that something so stupid would one day happen, or be considered in any way normal. She’s trying to reach kids … by warbling out a horribly uncool version of a 30-year-old rock song that was popular when she was kid. (But I’m guessing I missed some newer TV show aimed at kids using “We Will Rock You” in one of their episodes.)

Imagine answering to this woman, and I guess you can gauge why NYC school are such a mess. Other days, what sounds like a drunk janitor is braying out “Happy Birthday” in Bill Murray's insincere lounge singer voice. I’m assuming picking out a hapless kid, or favorite teacher, to serenade. The effect to people outside the school listening to the loudspeaker is to think the place is being run by heavily-medicated inmates in a lunatic asylum. Which is probably your average New York City public school in a nutshell.

**

Last bit of weirdness. I usually don’t bother people on the subway train … how hard is it to sit still and mind your own business … but I’ve noticed an odd thing with some women lately on the train, something I’ve seen at least a dozen times over the past few months. I hate to single out women because guys tend to be complete assholes on the subway train: the grapefruit testes leg spread, the “little big man” act of taking up too much space, the pole leaners, the fingernail clippers … basically describing grown men showing they were raised fatherless (even if they had one). They are legion compared to the women with issues on a subway train.

But I’m starting to notice the neuroses with women a lot more lately. There’s the usual: women who appear to be bag ladies with the number of bags they’re carrying, save they’re dressed for office work. I don’t get it. What are they carrying that’s so important? And when you think it’s maybe a one-off thing, that there’s some special event at work they’re carrying all these bags for, you see them the next day and realize, no, this woman carries four bags on the subway train to work every day. Which normally doesn’t bother me, save they’ll hover over any seated person with an air of expectation that this person must give up his seat because she’s so over-burdened. Yeah, well, as noted, I know the “bag lady” routine, have seen it possibly thousands of times now in my NYC life. If I got up every time someone tried to manipulate me out of a seat, I’d never sit down on a subway train.

But this is a new one on me. I like sitting on the end seats of the newer subway cars because they’re wide enough to comfortably fit two people. The only times I get crowded are when a guy roughly my size will try to sit in one of those seats, in which case both of us are uncomfortably crowded. I’m assuming these guys are new to city life and don’t recognize you should just go on standing in a situation like this, or they’re just douchebags. Probably both. I size up every seat before I sit down, and if it looks too cramped, I stay standing.

But these end seats for two are great. Even large women aren’t a problem in them as they seem to position their bodies differently (smaller shoulders). Some people don’t like those seats because homeless people tend to favor them when they camp out on a train. But from what I’ve seen, routine trainriders can be just as scuzzy as any homeless person. So unless there’s some residual stink on the seat (which does happen sometimes) from a homeless guy camping out there, I grab that seat.

And a woman will sit next to me. A small woman, which suits me fine as it gives both of us more room. I’ll notice in the corner of my eye that she looks slightly nervous. Nothing horrible, just a person who has a lot on her mind. She’ll break out her make-up case and start doing her make-up on the train … which seems like a real bad idea, but hey, people run late and this takes a good 5-10 minutes. (I’ve also noticed, unfortunately, that beautiful women never apply make-up on a subway train; it’s always average to homely-looking women. I sometimes feel like grabbing their whirling hands and saying, “Stop, it’s not working” or “Stop, you’re already beautiful” depending on how the situation breaks.)

A woman putting on make-up on the train is in constant motion. Her arms are jerking back and forth, her hands are constantly moving over her face. It’s annoying to sit next to someone in any situation who moves that much. On a crowded subway train? It’s even worse. Again, it gets tiresome after you’ve seen this repeatedly for years on end. But after a few minutes, the woman gets her make-up on, and I think, good, now this woman can relax and take it easy the rest of her train ride.

But no. She opens her purse, gets out her iPhone or Blackberry and starts tapping out a message. As we all know, it takes a good five minutes to send out a text message of any length. Again, constant thumbing, this woman has been a non-stop flurry of motion since she sat down.

She gets done tapping out the message, puts her iPhone away, and I’m thinking, finally, she’s done monkeying around.

But no. She opens up one of her three bags and pulls out one of those god-awful free newspapers you can get at the entrance of any subway station. (If you’re reading these things, you should stop and buy a real newspaper.) It’s always the free newspaper. Always. And she starts “reading” it, but she’s not really reading it. She’s flipping through it, absorbing god knows what. She gets done the paper, and I’m thinking, finally …

But no. Her leg starts twitching. She’s sitting with her legs crossed, which takes up more space on the train than I do at twice her size, and does that until it’s time for her to get off.

In short, the woman is a nonstop blur of neurotic activity that is one small step from sitting next to someone with Tourette’s Syndrome. The fidgeting is endless, and I wouldn’t be noticing this, save I’ve seen this a lot lately, much more than usual. But I’m thinking, the same way I’m psychologically drawn to these end-cap seats on a subway train, because they’re roomier than the bench seats in the middle of a train, these women are probably drawn to them, too, so they can indulge in their routines on the train, knowing they’ll have more room to move, even with a big guy sitting next to them.

So, I just sit there, motionless save for clicking to the next track on random play on the iPod, or checking my watch, or looking out the window if it’s not too crowded. Knowing, like all things in life, that this, too, shall pass. It gets worse than this. And then the wandering mariachi band comes through the door and starts hammering away on “La Bamba” …

Hot Rod

Back in grade school, I had a very strange friend: Hot Rod. We were in the same grade, all the same classes. He wasn’t a tough guy by any means, but he took great joy in trying to beat me with branches during recess when we went outside. Our house back then was literally right next door to the grade school (now a daycare center). I’d go home for lunch some days. I recall eating french fries drenched in ketchup on a paper plate, watching cartoons, while Hot Rod would stand at the chain-link fence outside the living-room window, pleading with me to come out to play. Which invariably meant running away from him as his mind switched into some bizarre overdrive, a branch in one hand, a murderous look in his eye.

The odd part being, we were good friends. The branch-beating thing didn’t last long, probably a few weeks in the second grade, but it’s stuck with me all these years later. I wasn’t a mean kid by any stretch of the imagination – anyone raised with me can tell you that. I’m not a mean man – got my moods like everybody else, but I’m basically a kind-hearted person. Strangers see this in my face all the time. Not necessarily a plus in New York City. But I’m large enough that if you mess with me, I could harm you, so it tends not to be a burning issue.

But I’m still wondering why I didn’t try to kick Hot Rod’s ass back then: it would have been justified and made sense. Kids were always getting into scuffles, usually over nothing, like dogs marking their territories. I can safely say Hot Rod was a nerd. He had a tendency towards large-collared shirts and weird wire-frame glasses.

I can also recall us laughing our asses off on many occasions. His family was from Belgium, but he was American born. His parents had thick European accents, were very sweet people, but this set him apart from the rest of us. He’d often bring postcards and such to class to explain where his parents were from, most of which were urinating statues and naked guys in helmets – this stuff was comedy gold for grade-school kids, we would piss ourselves laughing over these postcards.

But above all else, Hot Rod was known for one thing: singing. The guy was just a natural performer, had a great voice, was taught how to use it from an early age. Music class would find most of us terror-stricken at the prospect of singing solo in front of everyone. It didn’t help that we had to sing retarded shit like “My Hat It Has Three Corners” and “Senior Delgado.” These songs were goofy and unfamiliar to us, but we learned them by heart as we sang them over and over, usually at our desks in a group, so you could mouth the words most of the time. When it came my turn to sing solo, I’d be up there with my head down, blushing redder than a rose, plaid bellbottoms, murmuring in a toneless soprano, the idiotic lyrics of “Billy Boy” or “Old MacDonald” … while the music teacher hammered away on an out-of-tune upright piano and wondered what in the hell went wrong in his life to end up there.

Hot Rod would get up there, and he may as well have had a beer stein and lederhosen. He always knew the lyrics, and he’d be emoting, waving his arms, walking up and down the aisles, and the kids would respond to him as a performer, smiling and laughing, in disbelief that this weird kid with glasses would turn into something else when he opened his mouth to sing. A more serious song, like “Stille Genacht” (“Silent Night” in German … we learned a lot of songs in German, don’t ask me why), he’d be leaning over the music teacher’s out-of-tune piano, Dixie cup of ginger ale in hand, gazing off into the middle distance as he effortlessly reproduced the hushed tone of the night Christ was born in a manger.

As you could imagine, after the class, at recess, the tougher kids in the school would sometimes have him in the corner of the schoolyard, in a headlock, muttering shit like, “Sing for me now, songbird.” At which point they’d make him sing something like “I like big dicks” in a clenched voice of a kid trying to breath with an arm around his neck. Tough guys were always jealous of guys who could sing, or dance. It wasn’t considered manly to kids. And maybe this is why Rod went through his tree-branch phase with me. He knew I was good enough a friend that I wouldn’t reject him for letting off that sort of steam, with the knowledge that most of us felt behind the eight ball as kids.

Flash-forward a few years, and Hot Rod is the star of the glee club, with his clip-on tie, ill-fitting blazer and peach-fuzz mustache. We went on being great friends straight through high school, into our early adulthood. I can still recall him doing those dicky glee club presentations. It wasn’t like glee clubs now, doing hip pop-rock songs from the 70s and 80s. (Check this out to see the way music class never was for so many of us … fucking Listzomania!) They were doing show tunes mostly, which was ghastly uncool to 99.9% of teenage kids at the time. That 0.1% percent are now out of the closet and living happily in major urban areas.

There was one weird thing he did that solidified his geek status. The concept of human beatboxes rolled around with rap in the 80s: guys imitating the sounds of funky drumming and percussion with their mouths. Acapella groups have always done that, but it became a fad in the 80s with early rap music. But Hot Rod was doing this long before the trend started, in the late 70s and early 80s. We’d be sitting there, goofing around in home room, when suddenly, Hot Rod would start beatboxing “Love Is Alive” by Gary Wright. To get that wah-wah guitar sound, he’d go “Diddle, diddle.” Along with all the hiccups and hard blowing to illustrate the shifting between beats and chords in the music. It was seriously weird, especially when he’d air drum along with his beatboxing. You may as well have put a sign next to our group of giggling guys, wearing polyester leisure shirts with unicorns on the front, that stated: “Ladies, don’t fuck us.” If one of us had shit out pants, it would have been no more or less enticing than this.

We were part of the faceless rabble in high school. Kids not weird enough to pick on. Too decent to pick on anyone. Not smart enough to be the elite brains (but close). Not into organized sports. Not into drugs. Not into popularity contests. We just had our little group of slightly misfit kids, who tried to have one foot in every camp, but never the whole body. Much like our adult worlds now, we realized the world was a ragged and insane place, and it made sense to band together in a small informal group that most people couldn’t identify if they tried. Even now when I meet people I knew in high school and we talk about who we hung out with back then, no one seems to recall my gang of friends. I don’t recall what we were doing as any form of defense mechanism – it was just gravitating towards people who “got” each other and quietly navigating that deeply fucked-up world of teenage American life.

No chicks in that group, of course! It was rare that guys and girls would be friends, or in any group of friends in high school. The stoners and jocks could pull that stuff off, but kids in the middle didn’t. You’d walk around the cafeteria before the first bell (when all the buses pulled in and deposited the kids to wait in there), and nearly every group would be all girls or all guys. If kids were dating, then you’d have boy-girl groups. Again, the jocks and stoners would fall into that category, which made them seem cool because they had bridged that gap of casually appearing to have good friends of the opposite sex.

Hot Rod and I didn’t get laid in high school – most of us didn’t. The few who did, the situations were awkward and forced, like throwing dicks at a dartboard to see where they’d land. Very few bull’s eyes. Usually just radically immature kids with raging hormones making all the wrong moves that would set the pattern for greater adulthood miscues and transgressions. Most of us fell into that category in some sense. I can see the hesitance and overly cautious consideration I had as a teenage male has been my basic M.O. in my adult life, too. And going for the “wrong girl” in some sense with my innate ability to pick out that one girl who’s unavailable in some discrete sense but presents herself as clear and open as the ocean on a sunny day.

I say all this, because Hot Rod was a desperately horny guy. He really wanted to get laid, as we all did, but it was a burning passion for him. I can’t recall if he met Cindy in high school or college. It had to be high school, because she was in ours, a few grades lower. I recall thinking she was a pretty average-looking girl. Hot Rod knew her through various church-related singing functions. I don’t think Rod was a burning Born Again Christian, but he was part of some church groups that surely leaned in that direction. And the kind of groups who always had hip young kids singing Christian-themed pop music as part of their introductory offer.

So I’m sure it came to pass that Hot Rod was doing his songbird thing when Cindy laid eyes on him and saw her own little Elvis. He was a funny, charming, guy, too, so that didn’t hurt, nerd or not. He was older, too, which a lot of nerdy/unattractive guys played to the hilt in high school with younger girls. But it wasn’t until our first year at a branch campus of Penn State that they started becoming an item, and then he’d fill me in on the wacky stuff.

As detailed earlier, I went nuts for a soon-to-be Born Again and had that experience shade nearly my whole college experience, when I should have been banging everything in sight instead of walking around tangled up and heartbroken half the time. Cindy was a Born Again … but one of those fairly typical Born Agains who swung that way because she was a naughty, naughty girl. I recall Hot Rod telling me of a routine date: “Her parents were at a Christian retreat last weekend, so I went over to her house. Knocked on the door and it didn’t seem like anyone was home. So I let myself in, walked over to the stair, and looked up. Cindy was standing at the top, naked from the waist down. The way she was looking at me, I knew to go up there. I ate her out on the staircase, and she returned the favor on the living-room sofa.”

Why couldn’t I have run into a Born Again like that? Hot Rod hit jackpot every time he pulled the lever. I wouldn’t call either a nymphomaniac, just two horny kids made even crazier by that thin patina of teenage pseudo-Christianity. He’d give me the weekly lowdown on their escapades, and I couldn’t help but be jealous. Cindy didn’t seem particularly bright or college-bound. I’m not sure where she went after high school, but it probably wasn’t the same direction as Hot Rod. He didn’t look a gift horse in the mouth, that much was certain. That first year out of high school, he was the one guy I knew who was blissfully happy in a no-bullshit relationship. Most guys with girlfriends already had that sense of a very heavy anchor around their necks, with what I’d wager were very choppy sex lives based on that “wait until we’re married to really get into it” promise … that really meant “this is as good as it’s ever going to get as I find penises and sex as desirable as football and the band Rush.” Cindy loved sex, Born Again or not.

I recall her being argumentative, too, so I guess that would explain the short-term super nova effect she had on Hot Rod’s life. I don’t doubt that wherever he is now, sitting in an armchair, big-bellied, pondering his choices in life, he thinks back on that one with a genuine smile. That had to be the one relationship where everything spiraled out of control, but he hung on for as long as possible, knowing in the back of his mind that this was like a star flaming through the night sky that wouldn’t do so again for another 50 years, by which time he’d be dead or too old to care.

Hot Rod held on, but the flame went out. I recall some pretty raw years right after that. He didn’t go up to the main campus with me, where I had a blast and blossomed in some sense with a whole new pack of friends and ideas. He got a job as janitor at our old high school: sanitation engineer to be exact, when he had been studying engineering at a college a year earlier. He’d tell me of scraping dried, bloody tamp-ons from the ladies’ room walls with a paint chipper. His stories about female hygiene, and the much worse practices of women in their respective restrooms, were legendary. Strange part was, he really like working there!

Things got better after that, but that’s also when we started losing touch. When I moved to New York in the late 80s, the only times I’d see him would be when I came home and went to the firehouse, where he was a volunteer fireman in his early 20s, along with a group of a dozen or so other guys who forged a tight little drinking group down there for a good few years. It was a great place to hang out and get bombed on a Friday night. The place would be empty, so we’d sit in the main hall, where meetings and Bingo normally took place, and drink at the bar, cheaply, putting a dollar or two in the till for every bottle of Yuengling or Miller we’d pull from the fridge. There was a pool table in the next room, and I can recall more than a few fun nights hanging out with the guys, in a place that felt like a clubhouse we never had as teenagers.

And, of course, it was a guy thing, so there was that ongoing sense of all-male camaraderie we had worked to perfection in high school. Not a bad deal in high school, but being at the firehouse routinely also meant no one was getting laid or moving on to relationships, so I can see that time as a sort of holding pattern/refusal to grow up in some well-meaning sense. That should serve as a mild warning to guys in their early-mid 20s who are living the high life with their buddies and think those days will last forever. They just don’t … as well they shouldn’t. A few years later, guys get married, have kids, get real jobs, move away, etc. The loose ends get all tied up, one way or another.

I think that’s what happened with Hot Rod. I know he did go back to the branch campus, got his Associates in some type of Engineering, and then got a job as an engineer at the plastics plant my father had worked at for decades before retiring in the early 90s. Being an engineer in that place was a pretty good deal – slightly better working conditions and pretty good pay if a guy stuck with it, which I’m assuming Hot Rod did. I’d also heard he started singing in a country band with his older brothers, which sounds like the exact thing I’d hope he do in his life. Obviously, not appearing on CMT any time soon, but professional enough to play covers at bars, county fairs and weddings for good money in his spare time.

So I can see Hot Rod up on stage, probably a burly guy now, some permutation of facial hair, be it a handle-bar mustache or goatee, plaid shirt, jeans, cowboy boots and hat, with two guys who look just like him, blasting through “Friends in Low Places” while the crowd two-steps away and cheers loudly afterwards. Who knows with Hot Rod. I guess it would be easy enough to find out as there are a few people around who are still in some kind of remote touch with him. I get the vibe the life I imagine for him in a good way wouldn’t be too far from the truth.