It’s often noted that people are drawn to the music of their youth, particularly their teenage years, sometimes to the extent of never again listening to any other kind of music. And that music is inextricably tied into memory, so that’s part of the reason why people get stuck in these permanent musical time warps. Part nostalgia, part memory exercise.
I’ve found that’s often true for people who aren’t really music fans of any sort. And the greatest irony of the recording industry, and what damages it so much, is that in their time, these people will be the financial engine driving the industry. All those kids buying Top 40 and such. In 10 years, or 20, or 30, most of them won’t be listening to any music at all … but they’ll have a greatest hits collection on the 2 GB iPod that recall a very set time period hearkening back to their teen years. When I say the music industry is being dragged around by people who don’t like music, this is what I mean. It won’t take long, less then a decade, to pan out the people who really love music and go on buying it for years from the people who won’t. And the people who really love music and go on buying it will be considered virtually invisible and worthless by the recording industry at large, as they're a much smaller marketing segment than senseless kids buying Top 40 crap. It's a short-sighted cycle of self destruction for an industry that needs paying fans desperately.
But I’m more interested here in memory. I’m not consciously aware of listening to older music from my youth as some form of nostalgia. I listen to it because I like it. Because decades later, it still sounds good. I don’t sit around pining for “lost youth.” I don’t listen to this music exclusively. I don’t really keep score. But I’ll always find myself popping over to certain folders and knocking out some old Joe Walsh songs.
Do I think that music is better than music now? Honestly, sometimes I do. There’s a lot more care taken in the vocals, particularly. And more time and money spent in the studio working on a sound. In pure pop/rock context, a lot of that music, simply stated, is a superior version of music that came afterwards, and the genre hasn’t grown or changed all that much over the years.
I know it’s a crime to say that for some music fans – you can’t acknowledge that music from your past is somehow better than music of the present – but I don’t feel any need to kiss that ass. There is still good music being made. Constantly. A never-ending stream from which I’m forever pulling new inspiration. And this isn’t apples (the past) and oranges (the present). I go on an artist-by-artist basis more than a time frame, and back in the 60s and 70s, a lot of great artists were in their prime. And I’m far from a lazy, middle-aged, pop-rock fan. I listen to a lot of new music (most of which goes right by me), across all genres, and I keep literally thousands of new tracks that range anywhere from good to great by my estimation. (The thing is, the great ones, will generally not be from great albums, from an artist not consistently putting out great albums. Maybe that’s what I’m getting at: consistency over a period of time as opposed to one-off shots of greatness. I’m used to the concept of artists having great bodies of work (or at least one astounding three-album run) … not a few stand-out songs over the course of albums.
It’s not a burning issue with me. I’m more interested in the concept of memory and how it ties into songs. What I want to do here is list out a few of those songs for me. The song, and what it means to me personally. May not have anything to do with the song, but something to do with my life. Supposedly the kind of thing people my age (in their 40s) do all the time … but this represents a very small fraction of my listening time and intent. Which doesn’t really matter, because I’m invisible anyway!
*
“Strange Magic” by Electric Light Orchestra. I don’t know why, but this song reminds me of summer, and mowing lawns. It’s a summer song. I should be thinking of romance, ocean breezes, a full moon. No. I think of bermuda shorts, tube socks, the smell of gasoline, pulling the chord on the lawn mower engine, watching the rows of grass fall in my geometrical progression, the smell of freshly-mown lawn and a $20 bill in my hand.
“Say You Love Me” by Fleetwood Mac. Another summer song, but this song reminds me of driving in the station wagon with my family, windows down, and we’re on a stretch of highway between Lavelle and Gordon, PA, the back road. We can smell the cow manure in the fields, over-powering at times. Sunlight, heat coming off the fields in waves, corn stalks, maybe even a pinwheel hanging out the window. We’re probably on our way to the public swimming pool at Hegins, down in farm country.
“Solsbury Hill” by Peter Gabriel. Lifting weights in the basement. Those cheap vinyl weights filled with cement. A shitty, no-frills weight bench bought at Sears (it’s still down there). No matter how much I lifted weights as a kid, I never got bigger. (Now I wish I could reverse the process, as I could easily make myself the size of a house with weights!) Stuck in my head because Brother M was playing this to death on his basement sound system, while he sat a few feet away, smoking and listening. I still don’t know how I managed to work out with someone smoking a few feet away from me, which happened routinely with us. The basement was his teenage domain, but I had no place else to exercise in the house. An uneasy truce. He didn’t like me being down there, but I didn’t bother him either.
“Love Will Keep Us Together” by the Captain & Tenille. My favorite song when I was 11 years old. Not the New York Dolls. Or Roxy Music. Or Led Zep. I was 11! This was the one song I recall listening to the radio constantly to hear, and I’d go nuts when I heard it. I never pasted myself to a radio like that before or since. I still think it’s pretty good for what it is. Only other song that had a similar effect on me as a pre-teen youth was “Crocodile Rock” by Elton John.
“Mistral Wind” by Heart. There are any number of Heart songs and albums I could pick for this, but all those mid-70s Heart songs take me back to Brother M’s car with the eight-track player. And driving around Point Pleasant, NJ on one of our summer visits. The ocean. Probably should have picked “Dreamboat Annie” as that’s surely the main connection. But when the drums and electric guitar kick in on this song, that’s like a time machine to a sandy beach road and the smell of the ocean circa late 70s.
“Joy to the World” by Three Dog Night. This song vividly brings back my second grade talent contest, in which all of us had to participate, and 80% of us did this song. Me, too. I was terrible. Chubby kid. Wearing red polyester checked pants. Skin tight in a bad way. Some florid dress shirt. Earth shoes and white socks. Dancing like The Brady Bunch in one of their show appearances. Warbling out this silly song in a cracking soprano as I tried not to shit those polyester pants. I suspect if this had been filmed and I saw it today, I'd go on a shooting spree.
“The Loco-Motion” by Grand Funk Railroad. Some nights in summer, kids would get together in a backyard with one of those Panasonic Hand-Pump Eight Track players, plug it in, and we’d get into our pajamas and dance in front of a blanket on a clothes line … the catch being all the other kids would have flashlights and would be shaking them wildly at the kids dancing, which would create a strobe-light effect. “The Loco-Motion” was the key song for this. I also recall another incident, while out collecting money for the Little League, in my uniform with all the other kids, doing our sweep through all the houses out on the main highway, this song came blasting out of a backyard, and when I went around to investigate, it was one of the girls from my class, dancing wildly in platform shoes, Daisy Dukes and a halter top in her backyard to this song … it gave me wood! So, there I was, with a hard-on in my Little League uniform, and this girl looks me straight in the eye and smiles as I peer around the corner of her house.
“Convoy” by C.W. McCall. All the kids in the neighborhood were carrying on about this song before I heard it. Carrying on so much that I thought I had to rush out and buy it to fit in. When I was buying it at Boscovs, one of the big mouths in our neighborhood was there by chance with his parents and saw me buying it – he somehow knew by the record label alone (think it was MGM with that lion’s head on it). Didn’t matter – he probably thought I was cool for doing so. But I rushed home. Pulled out the portable record player and plugged it into an outlet in the kitchen, I was so excited to hear it. And this hillbilly, piece of shit comes spilling out the tinny speakers! I was slackjawed. This stupid fucking song … they were carrying on about this like it was the coolest thing since Jimmy Page? I think that’s when I stopped chasing after whatever was deemed cool by other kids, recognizing other kids tended to be assholes.
“Black Water” by The Doobie Brothers. We played sports constantly in our neighborhood. Invariably someone would have a portable radio. Whenever “Black Water” came on, a kid in the neighborhood, George, would start singing the song scat-style in a strangely accurate Louis Armstrong voice, particularly that vocal breakdown part (“Take me by the hand pretty momma/Dance with your daddy all night long”). This song always makes me think of that 8-10 year old kid pulling off that perfect gargling baritone voice Louis Armstrong was famous for.
“Just When I Needed You Most” by Randy VanWarmer. This song doesn’t represent a memory so much as a realization. It was, what, summer of 1979? Well into my teen years, far into really good pop music like The Beatles, Kinks and Stones from the 60s, and Bowie, ELO, Queen and others from the 70s, the beginnings of punk and new wave with The Ramones, Elvis Costello, The Clash … so this song comes on the radio, and I love it! But can’t admit to loving it. It’s 1979. Man, I’m changing. Can’t have any more of this 70s ballad fluff. There were other songs like this that I couldn’t acknowledge liking in front of fellow teenage rock fans (“Heart of Glass” by Blondie and various ABBA hits), but this one really stuck in my craw for some reason. And just look at this guy in the video! That’s what 90% of all white males looked like in the 70s, and I was no exception.
Maybe it’s because I left this genre just when I needed it most? Nah. I’d go on in my teen years to be a sappy, lovestruck wimp a few times over, in ways that make this song come off like “Slow Ride” by Foghat. The strange thing about Youtube links: they let you know you’re not alone. When people aren’t carrying on like mental patients or pricks, they tend to be reflective in ways that can be overly trite, but they’re also just noting, this song floored them at a certain point in their lives. Could be a terrible song, which most seem loathe to acknowledge, but it doesn’t really matter. As noted, this type of listening experience represents such a small fraction of why I listen to music. And half the time, the memory is embarrassing! So maybe it’s good that I tie in memories of humiliation and awkwardness with youth, as opposed to glorification?
Monday, May 30, 2011
Sunday, May 15, 2011
The Cornsilk Ghost
This short story was dated 10/25/99 when I wrote it for the folks at Leisuresuit.net. I did a lot of online writing circa 1999-2000, and some of it, like this, sort of disappeared into the mist almost immediately. At the time, I thought it was a pretty good short story that would have made a good movie. Still do, although it would take some fleshing out of the main character’s back story, which would be easy. Many opportunities for obscure 70s soundtrack songs, too. And how many ghost stories are there about the 70s?
But I digress. I’ll give it another chance here, doing some minor editing, but pretty much presenting it as-is. Enjoy.
*
Last week, I came across a ghost story on my hometown newspaper's Web site. Living in New York now for years, I miss that small-town paper, bad as it is. Reading the condensed front page every day fills me with strange nostalgia for a life I don't understand anymore.
In the story, the parish priest, Father Malloy, noticed something strange after a Saturday Midnight Mass. He claimed to have seen an "eerie visage" of a teenage boy in a blue plaid shirt and jeans hovering in-and out of the edge of the cornfield.
"I could see right through him," Father Malloy is quoted as saying. "He moved like the wind was blowing him across the ground. But there was no wind when I saw him. He was shimmering--like a flag."
Father Malloy wasn't the parish priest when I grew up there, so I can't vouch for him. But there's little reason to doubt his word, as two sightings followed over the next few nights. The same thing: a teenage boy, not walking, but gliding, through the cornfield. And the assurance of both people, a retired postal worker walking his dog and the town's police chief on patrol, that this vision was not human. The police chief claimed that the ghost had shoulder-length black hair and was bone thin. The old man simply said it was a ghost, and that the only time he had seen his dog so spooked was the night they had come across a dead skunk.
No one knows the ghost's identity. Since there seems to be no religious significance to the ghost's appearance, the Virgin Mary crowd hasn't latched onto the story, or at least it hasn't gathered enough steam yet to get their attention.
The strange part for me? I know people back there are talking the kind of talk that never makes the papers. Just by the physical description of the ghost, I recognize my brother Freddy. Freddy killed himself in that cornfield 20 years ago.
It's far away now. Fred was two years ahead of me in high school. Not popular, nor smart, nor handsome. He got high a little too much and pulled straight C's and the occasional B. He wasn't into sports. But he was known around school for one thing: his passionate infatuation with his girlfriend, Tangie. They had been dating for three years going into their senior year, and everyone was sure they would be married one day. Tangie ran with the same crowd as Fred. They thought they were rebels, but they never seemed to do anything beyond getting stoned.
One day out of the blue, Tangie dumped Fred for one of the guys on the football team. Not a certifiable jock--one of those borderline party animals who kept a foot in both crowds. No profound reason--just one of those random teenage controversies that people talk about at the 10-year class reunion. Fred was devastated. He played Bread and Carpenters albums in his room at night--and this from a massive Black Sabbath fan. There was something really wrong with him.
I knew it. Our parents knew it. Everyone knew it. He wasn't the first kid to have his heart broken like that for no good reason and wouldn't be the last. He was quiet to begin with, and stoned half the time, so no one could tell if he had developed any "warning signs."
One morning, he didn't show up for breakfast. Our parents immediately notified the police, as they thought he might have run away. Later that morning, his body was found by a few of Fred's classmates cutting school in the cornfield behind the Catholic church. It was a popular place for kids to go get stoned at night. No houses were nearby, and they could park their cars a few hundred yards away on a side street by the firehouse and walk there through the back of the field. The farmer who owned it lived beyond a hill on the far side of the field and had no way of knowing if anyone was in it at night.
He left no note. They found him lying peacefully in a small clearing near the edge of the field, hands on his chest, gazing at the sky, with dried tear trails on the sides of his face. Empty bottles of quaaludes and Jack Daniels were found next to his body. An autopsy showed an overdose to be the cause of death.
The funeral, as all teenage funerals must be, was awful. One of the worst days of my life. Tangie must have been too ashamed to show. After she graduated, she left town, without the football player, and we lost track of her. My mother was hysterical, and my father was numbed. Two years later when I went to college, they moved to a suburb of Philadelphia. After college, I left, too, and ended up here in New York. I visit the town, and Fred's grave, every year in May, when he died, but I don't hang around long. I simply stay at the town's run-down motel for a night, drive around the next day, look at the house I grew up in and feel strange, go the cemetery, put some flowers on Fred's grave, then leave.
I've asked myself why Fred would come back. Or has he always been there, and it's only now that a few people have seen him? He spent many nights getting wasted there with his friends. I knew because his sneakers would always have corn silk on them. And he made a point of wearing his blue flannel shirt out, as it sometimes got chilly at night, and it reeked of pot smoke, a smell our parents didn't know.
Maybe it was the one place he felt he belonged with other people. I wonder if kids still get stoned there at night. And if they do, do they talk about Fred? He must be a legend. Stories like that always drive kids wild. I can see them now, in the field on a summer night, sitting in a circle, joints and bottles passing from one hand to another, and someone saying, "I wonder if that kid who killed himself over his girlfriend back in the 70's is here tonight."
And even if he isn't, when the warm summer breeze rustles the stalks, everyone knows Fred is there--a lost soul at a stoner's séance, forever young in a way they'll never be.
Fred would be happy to know he had made the paper, even if no one seemed to know him by name. I wonder if Tangie, wherever she is, read the same thing I did and felt the same warm thrill. My parents haven't read it, and I won't be telling them about it.
I've started dreaming about Fred--something I've never done before. It's always the same dream. I'm lying next to him on that night. I can feel the corn silk and stalks rubbing against my back and smell the soil. I can hear crickets and power lines humming. I look up and see the lines and scaffolding of the dark tower against the purple sky. I turn my head and see him. He's quietly crying. The bottles are already empty. The dream starts here, but I know that I have shared the bottles. There's nothing to do but wait until he closes his eyes. I feel like vomiting but keep the urge down, as I know I'll live if I do it. In the dream, I don't want to live.
This dream is the closest I've ever felt to him. We were never that close. We certainly didn't hate each other and got along fine. But in the dream, it's like we're twins who've decided to end it on the same night. Ten year earlier on a sunny day, we could have been laughing at a picnic, naming cloud shapes in the spring sky.
He turns his head, looks at me and smiles. I feel the same way I did when I had my tonsils out and woke up under sedation: stoned, like I'm lying vertically on a wall of grass. I'm floating in some sense. And then we talk. I can recall one conversation we had:
Fred: I don't want to live.
Me: I know. You kill yourself tonight.
Fred: Because there's nothing here for me.
Me: It's only a broken heart. It'll go away.
Fred: I'd rather go away.
He leans his head back and closes his eyes.
I'm never going back there again. Who knows, maybe in the next few weeks, a reporter will do some research, or one of the teachers at the high school will get a flashback, and Fred's gaunt face, maybe his yearbook picture, will magically appear on my computer screen.
Would Fred appear to me if I lay down in that cornfield on a warm night in late May? Would my dream become real? If I saw him roaming the fields, would he stop to acknowledge that we were once brothers, maybe with a certain smile or a wave of his pale, bony hand? What would he say to me?
I don't care. I could drink ghost whiskey from the same bottle, and I don't care. I don't need to see it to believe it. The dream is real enough. Even if it all comes down to a drunk priest, a doddering old man and a paranoid town cop, I believe Fred is out there. I wonder if, as with all those ghost stories, he's doomed to wander forever, never finding what he's looking for, or if there, in the stoner's cornfield behind the church, he's found his home.
But I digress. I’ll give it another chance here, doing some minor editing, but pretty much presenting it as-is. Enjoy.
*
Last week, I came across a ghost story on my hometown newspaper's Web site. Living in New York now for years, I miss that small-town paper, bad as it is. Reading the condensed front page every day fills me with strange nostalgia for a life I don't understand anymore.
In the story, the parish priest, Father Malloy, noticed something strange after a Saturday Midnight Mass. He claimed to have seen an "eerie visage" of a teenage boy in a blue plaid shirt and jeans hovering in-and out of the edge of the cornfield.
"I could see right through him," Father Malloy is quoted as saying. "He moved like the wind was blowing him across the ground. But there was no wind when I saw him. He was shimmering--like a flag."
Father Malloy wasn't the parish priest when I grew up there, so I can't vouch for him. But there's little reason to doubt his word, as two sightings followed over the next few nights. The same thing: a teenage boy, not walking, but gliding, through the cornfield. And the assurance of both people, a retired postal worker walking his dog and the town's police chief on patrol, that this vision was not human. The police chief claimed that the ghost had shoulder-length black hair and was bone thin. The old man simply said it was a ghost, and that the only time he had seen his dog so spooked was the night they had come across a dead skunk.
No one knows the ghost's identity. Since there seems to be no religious significance to the ghost's appearance, the Virgin Mary crowd hasn't latched onto the story, or at least it hasn't gathered enough steam yet to get their attention.
The strange part for me? I know people back there are talking the kind of talk that never makes the papers. Just by the physical description of the ghost, I recognize my brother Freddy. Freddy killed himself in that cornfield 20 years ago.
It's far away now. Fred was two years ahead of me in high school. Not popular, nor smart, nor handsome. He got high a little too much and pulled straight C's and the occasional B. He wasn't into sports. But he was known around school for one thing: his passionate infatuation with his girlfriend, Tangie. They had been dating for three years going into their senior year, and everyone was sure they would be married one day. Tangie ran with the same crowd as Fred. They thought they were rebels, but they never seemed to do anything beyond getting stoned.
One day out of the blue, Tangie dumped Fred for one of the guys on the football team. Not a certifiable jock--one of those borderline party animals who kept a foot in both crowds. No profound reason--just one of those random teenage controversies that people talk about at the 10-year class reunion. Fred was devastated. He played Bread and Carpenters albums in his room at night--and this from a massive Black Sabbath fan. There was something really wrong with him.
I knew it. Our parents knew it. Everyone knew it. He wasn't the first kid to have his heart broken like that for no good reason and wouldn't be the last. He was quiet to begin with, and stoned half the time, so no one could tell if he had developed any "warning signs."
One morning, he didn't show up for breakfast. Our parents immediately notified the police, as they thought he might have run away. Later that morning, his body was found by a few of Fred's classmates cutting school in the cornfield behind the Catholic church. It was a popular place for kids to go get stoned at night. No houses were nearby, and they could park their cars a few hundred yards away on a side street by the firehouse and walk there through the back of the field. The farmer who owned it lived beyond a hill on the far side of the field and had no way of knowing if anyone was in it at night.
He left no note. They found him lying peacefully in a small clearing near the edge of the field, hands on his chest, gazing at the sky, with dried tear trails on the sides of his face. Empty bottles of quaaludes and Jack Daniels were found next to his body. An autopsy showed an overdose to be the cause of death.
The funeral, as all teenage funerals must be, was awful. One of the worst days of my life. Tangie must have been too ashamed to show. After she graduated, she left town, without the football player, and we lost track of her. My mother was hysterical, and my father was numbed. Two years later when I went to college, they moved to a suburb of Philadelphia. After college, I left, too, and ended up here in New York. I visit the town, and Fred's grave, every year in May, when he died, but I don't hang around long. I simply stay at the town's run-down motel for a night, drive around the next day, look at the house I grew up in and feel strange, go the cemetery, put some flowers on Fred's grave, then leave.
I've asked myself why Fred would come back. Or has he always been there, and it's only now that a few people have seen him? He spent many nights getting wasted there with his friends. I knew because his sneakers would always have corn silk on them. And he made a point of wearing his blue flannel shirt out, as it sometimes got chilly at night, and it reeked of pot smoke, a smell our parents didn't know.
Maybe it was the one place he felt he belonged with other people. I wonder if kids still get stoned there at night. And if they do, do they talk about Fred? He must be a legend. Stories like that always drive kids wild. I can see them now, in the field on a summer night, sitting in a circle, joints and bottles passing from one hand to another, and someone saying, "I wonder if that kid who killed himself over his girlfriend back in the 70's is here tonight."
And even if he isn't, when the warm summer breeze rustles the stalks, everyone knows Fred is there--a lost soul at a stoner's séance, forever young in a way they'll never be.
Fred would be happy to know he had made the paper, even if no one seemed to know him by name. I wonder if Tangie, wherever she is, read the same thing I did and felt the same warm thrill. My parents haven't read it, and I won't be telling them about it.
I've started dreaming about Fred--something I've never done before. It's always the same dream. I'm lying next to him on that night. I can feel the corn silk and stalks rubbing against my back and smell the soil. I can hear crickets and power lines humming. I look up and see the lines and scaffolding of the dark tower against the purple sky. I turn my head and see him. He's quietly crying. The bottles are already empty. The dream starts here, but I know that I have shared the bottles. There's nothing to do but wait until he closes his eyes. I feel like vomiting but keep the urge down, as I know I'll live if I do it. In the dream, I don't want to live.
This dream is the closest I've ever felt to him. We were never that close. We certainly didn't hate each other and got along fine. But in the dream, it's like we're twins who've decided to end it on the same night. Ten year earlier on a sunny day, we could have been laughing at a picnic, naming cloud shapes in the spring sky.
He turns his head, looks at me and smiles. I feel the same way I did when I had my tonsils out and woke up under sedation: stoned, like I'm lying vertically on a wall of grass. I'm floating in some sense. And then we talk. I can recall one conversation we had:
Fred: I don't want to live.
Me: I know. You kill yourself tonight.
Fred: Because there's nothing here for me.
Me: It's only a broken heart. It'll go away.
Fred: I'd rather go away.
He leans his head back and closes his eyes.
I'm never going back there again. Who knows, maybe in the next few weeks, a reporter will do some research, or one of the teachers at the high school will get a flashback, and Fred's gaunt face, maybe his yearbook picture, will magically appear on my computer screen.
Would Fred appear to me if I lay down in that cornfield on a warm night in late May? Would my dream become real? If I saw him roaming the fields, would he stop to acknowledge that we were once brothers, maybe with a certain smile or a wave of his pale, bony hand? What would he say to me?
I don't care. I could drink ghost whiskey from the same bottle, and I don't care. I don't need to see it to believe it. The dream is real enough. Even if it all comes down to a drunk priest, a doddering old man and a paranoid town cop, I believe Fred is out there. I wonder if, as with all those ghost stories, he's doomed to wander forever, never finding what he's looking for, or if there, in the stoner's cornfield behind the church, he's found his home.
Sunday, April 24, 2011
The Bad Haircut
It’s amazing how much a bad haircut will knock you off your perch, if only for awhile. I haven’t had a really bad one for years … until yesterday.
Allow me to preface this by saying I’m no stranger to bad haircuts. God bless Leo the barber – he was a kind old man. But when Mom used to drag me into his barbershop in Ashland, it was always a bad trip. She was in the habit of letting my hair get long as a kid – not hippie long, but definitely shaggy. And Leo specialized in one thing and one thing only: crew cuts. You could sit there and give him five minutes of detailed instructions. Didn’t matter. You’d always end up with the same box-headed crew cut. He cut hair like The Ramones made music – two minutes, electricity buzzing, and you were gone. The only difference was Leo didn't count off, "One - Two - Three - Faw" before dive-bombing in with his clippers.
His son who worked with him was a bit better, but it was always a gamble which chair would come open first. When I see small kids crying nowadays over what I recognize as very reasonable, longish haircuts, I have to laugh. Because Leo would give a kid reason to cry – it was like joining the army. It was that radical a departure from what you had previously seen in the mirror, just a total sheep-shearing experience that would leave most kids either wet-eyed or blubbering. The apologetic, post-haircut sucker was poor solace in that situation. You could have given me a complete set of Phillies baseball cards, and I still would have felt like shit afterwards.
This didn’t end at childhood – it went on well into my teen years, although I was relieved when Leo retired and left the business to his son, who always gave much more reasonable haircuts. And after that, I started going to a woman in my neighborhood with a chair in her basement who always gave great haircuts, which went on well through college.
New York City has always been a weird mix of barbers for me, sticking with Manhattan when I first moved here as barbers in the Bronx were geared to black and latin hair. The longest I stayed with was a Russian guy with his sons down by the gym I went to on Saturdays at 23rd and 8th. He and his sons were pretty good, but the price kept inching closer to $20 a cut, which is just too much for me.
Eventually, when I moved to Astoria, I settled on another Saturday barber on my way to the gym in the neighborhood, just walked in by chance, an old Russian guy and his son, and have stayed with him ever since. As time went on, his son stopped showing up, and the old man always seems to have a different barber working with him on Saturdays. Once, he had what was clearly a family relation, probably a nephew, and the kid made the mistake of giving me a haircut without buzzing the sides and back (which I like short … they grow in faster than the top). I should have sat there and made him do this at the end, but the kid also seemed a bit emotional, like he would be offended if I asked, and would do a bad job, so I just went to another local barber that Sunday and had him polish up the longish job the kid did on me.
Still, that wasn’t a really bad haircut. Too long, sure, but too long can be corrected. Yesterday, day before Easter, I walked in mid-afternoon, and the place was dead. The old man was sleeping. I’d have much preferred if he had snapped awake, cried out, “Hello, alt friend” and got me in his chair, because he knows my head by now and what I like. But he had a new Saturday helper, a younger guy with one of those “balding guy/closely-cropped hair” cuts who seemed real eager to cut my hair. I’m assuming he was bored out of his skull if business was so slow that the old man had been dozing.
This guy’s Russian, too, asks me what I want, I tell him #2 on the back and sides, but leave a little more on top, I like it longer on top. Da. He starts in on the sides, and man, he’s shearing me, which is good. I’m perfectly fine with the back and sides being short as I know they’ll grow in so fast, and the biggest mistake most barbers make with me is leaving them too long.
Before I know it, and without telling me, this prick runs the electric clippers over the top of my head, knocking off a huge plume of full hair.
“Hold on, buddy, hold on,” I yelled out, “I said leave it long on top.”
“But I thought you said #4 on top.”
Number 4 must be a buzz cut. I didn’t say #4 on top!
But right there, I asked myself, what does it matter now? This guy just took an alarming chunk of hair off the top of my head … it’s not like he can pick it up off the floor and glue it back on. The old man sees all this going on and cries out, “Oh, vat are you doink to my alt friend, he no like it that short!” But, again … what the fuck can you do when the guy has just made an uncorrectable error?
So, at this point, I resign myself to the fact that I’m about to get a buzz cut that would have old Leo beaming down from his cloud in heaven. There is no choice now. The guy runs the electric clippers over the top of my head … and I’m now left with the shortest haircut I’ve had since the early 70s, shorter than the one referenced above, I mean down to the nub all around, which I really don’t like, it’s just too fucking short for comfort, accents the shape of my skull, and I just don’t have one of those skull shapes that’s good for this kind of closely-cropped hair.
After he made that initial cut, the guy kept saying, “You don’t look happy.” No shit! I should have picked up on that assholish vibe the guy put out when I first walked in, that sort of brash cockiness I’ve come to associate with people who really don’t know what they’re doing, but think they can cover it up with an attitude. I’m assuming this guy must have spent some time in a barber school, getting his license and should know what he’s doing, in theory. But, as I find so much in my life, most people just don’t know how to listen. Not so much just don’t know how, they choose not to acknowledge what people tell them. Which normally doesn’t matter, but when you’re giving someone instructions on how to cut your hair …
So I’m resigned to the fact that I’m going to look like a mental patient for the next two or three weeks. Am steeling myself for going to work tomorrow, when coworkers take one look at me and ask what the hell happened. Worst of all, just feeling out of sorts and off kilter every time I look in the mirror. That's one place you should be able to look and like what you see. So I'll be avoiding mirrors for the next few weeks - really won't have any need as my hair is now so short I can't even comb it.
I’ll go back there again, probably late June or early July before I need it cut again, but that son of a bitch is never touching my head again. Hopefully he’ll be one in a series of Saturday barbers the old man has been employing, although I’m getting kind of tired of the quality of these guys coming and going. He had an Asian guy in there for a long time who was pretty good, but haven’t seen him the past two times. All I know is if I walk in, that guy is there, and the old man is there cutting someone else’s hair, I’m getting my hair cut elsewhere that rotation and trying him again in two months. I want to give this guy my business because I like him, but if his hired hands remain this incompetent and indifferent to customers, I just can’t do it. Something tells me I’m not the only one looking in the mirror after this guy got done with them and asking what the hell happened.
Allow me to preface this by saying I’m no stranger to bad haircuts. God bless Leo the barber – he was a kind old man. But when Mom used to drag me into his barbershop in Ashland, it was always a bad trip. She was in the habit of letting my hair get long as a kid – not hippie long, but definitely shaggy. And Leo specialized in one thing and one thing only: crew cuts. You could sit there and give him five minutes of detailed instructions. Didn’t matter. You’d always end up with the same box-headed crew cut. He cut hair like The Ramones made music – two minutes, electricity buzzing, and you were gone. The only difference was Leo didn't count off, "One - Two - Three - Faw" before dive-bombing in with his clippers.
His son who worked with him was a bit better, but it was always a gamble which chair would come open first. When I see small kids crying nowadays over what I recognize as very reasonable, longish haircuts, I have to laugh. Because Leo would give a kid reason to cry – it was like joining the army. It was that radical a departure from what you had previously seen in the mirror, just a total sheep-shearing experience that would leave most kids either wet-eyed or blubbering. The apologetic, post-haircut sucker was poor solace in that situation. You could have given me a complete set of Phillies baseball cards, and I still would have felt like shit afterwards.
This didn’t end at childhood – it went on well into my teen years, although I was relieved when Leo retired and left the business to his son, who always gave much more reasonable haircuts. And after that, I started going to a woman in my neighborhood with a chair in her basement who always gave great haircuts, which went on well through college.
New York City has always been a weird mix of barbers for me, sticking with Manhattan when I first moved here as barbers in the Bronx were geared to black and latin hair. The longest I stayed with was a Russian guy with his sons down by the gym I went to on Saturdays at 23rd and 8th. He and his sons were pretty good, but the price kept inching closer to $20 a cut, which is just too much for me.
Eventually, when I moved to Astoria, I settled on another Saturday barber on my way to the gym in the neighborhood, just walked in by chance, an old Russian guy and his son, and have stayed with him ever since. As time went on, his son stopped showing up, and the old man always seems to have a different barber working with him on Saturdays. Once, he had what was clearly a family relation, probably a nephew, and the kid made the mistake of giving me a haircut without buzzing the sides and back (which I like short … they grow in faster than the top). I should have sat there and made him do this at the end, but the kid also seemed a bit emotional, like he would be offended if I asked, and would do a bad job, so I just went to another local barber that Sunday and had him polish up the longish job the kid did on me.
Still, that wasn’t a really bad haircut. Too long, sure, but too long can be corrected. Yesterday, day before Easter, I walked in mid-afternoon, and the place was dead. The old man was sleeping. I’d have much preferred if he had snapped awake, cried out, “Hello, alt friend” and got me in his chair, because he knows my head by now and what I like. But he had a new Saturday helper, a younger guy with one of those “balding guy/closely-cropped hair” cuts who seemed real eager to cut my hair. I’m assuming he was bored out of his skull if business was so slow that the old man had been dozing.
This guy’s Russian, too, asks me what I want, I tell him #2 on the back and sides, but leave a little more on top, I like it longer on top. Da. He starts in on the sides, and man, he’s shearing me, which is good. I’m perfectly fine with the back and sides being short as I know they’ll grow in so fast, and the biggest mistake most barbers make with me is leaving them too long.
Before I know it, and without telling me, this prick runs the electric clippers over the top of my head, knocking off a huge plume of full hair.
“Hold on, buddy, hold on,” I yelled out, “I said leave it long on top.”
“But I thought you said #4 on top.”
Number 4 must be a buzz cut. I didn’t say #4 on top!
But right there, I asked myself, what does it matter now? This guy just took an alarming chunk of hair off the top of my head … it’s not like he can pick it up off the floor and glue it back on. The old man sees all this going on and cries out, “Oh, vat are you doink to my alt friend, he no like it that short!” But, again … what the fuck can you do when the guy has just made an uncorrectable error?
So, at this point, I resign myself to the fact that I’m about to get a buzz cut that would have old Leo beaming down from his cloud in heaven. There is no choice now. The guy runs the electric clippers over the top of my head … and I’m now left with the shortest haircut I’ve had since the early 70s, shorter than the one referenced above, I mean down to the nub all around, which I really don’t like, it’s just too fucking short for comfort, accents the shape of my skull, and I just don’t have one of those skull shapes that’s good for this kind of closely-cropped hair.
After he made that initial cut, the guy kept saying, “You don’t look happy.” No shit! I should have picked up on that assholish vibe the guy put out when I first walked in, that sort of brash cockiness I’ve come to associate with people who really don’t know what they’re doing, but think they can cover it up with an attitude. I’m assuming this guy must have spent some time in a barber school, getting his license and should know what he’s doing, in theory. But, as I find so much in my life, most people just don’t know how to listen. Not so much just don’t know how, they choose not to acknowledge what people tell them. Which normally doesn’t matter, but when you’re giving someone instructions on how to cut your hair …
So I’m resigned to the fact that I’m going to look like a mental patient for the next two or three weeks. Am steeling myself for going to work tomorrow, when coworkers take one look at me and ask what the hell happened. Worst of all, just feeling out of sorts and off kilter every time I look in the mirror. That's one place you should be able to look and like what you see. So I'll be avoiding mirrors for the next few weeks - really won't have any need as my hair is now so short I can't even comb it.
I’ll go back there again, probably late June or early July before I need it cut again, but that son of a bitch is never touching my head again. Hopefully he’ll be one in a series of Saturday barbers the old man has been employing, although I’m getting kind of tired of the quality of these guys coming and going. He had an Asian guy in there for a long time who was pretty good, but haven’t seen him the past two times. All I know is if I walk in, that guy is there, and the old man is there cutting someone else’s hair, I’m getting my hair cut elsewhere that rotation and trying him again in two months. I want to give this guy my business because I like him, but if his hired hands remain this incompetent and indifferent to customers, I just can’t do it. Something tells me I’m not the only one looking in the mirror after this guy got done with them and asking what the hell happened.
Sunday, April 10, 2011
Two Kinds of People
In that aborted novel of my late 20s (thinly-veiled fiction related to my life … which made me feel a bit sleazy), the older brother of the main character had a habit, as older brothers often do, of wrestling the kid to the ground in the living room and farting on his head. Much like used to happen to me! But when he did, unlike reality, the older brother always had a snappy one-liner before emitting his gas blast: “There are two kinds of people in the world – me and everybody else.” Pffffttttt.
In reality, that was my line. A great way to acknowledge one’s individuality while employing that “two kinds of people” cliché people use so often. Generally to designate whatever problem they’re having at the moment, with the “two kinds of people” coming down solely to people who relate to their problem, or those who cause it or don’t give a damn. Even within the limited context of the analogy, they’re usually wrong, leaving spaces for dozens of other kinds of people in that given scenario.
But lately, I’ve been thinking: there really are only two kind of people in the world. It’s those who can acknowledge the existence of other people and those who can’t. I’m not even getting into some hokey concept of “those who can love and respect other people.” It has nothing to do with love or respect. I’m talking the simple ability to recognize the existence of other people. You don’t have to love them. You don’t have to respect them (although it helps). You just have to acknowledge that there are other people in the world, many people, and you’re just one of them, trying to get by and make sense of it all.
As opposed to people who don’t give a shit about anyone else. I’m talking sociopaths, and not in that Manson/Dahmer sort of extreme. I work with sociopaths. I live around them. Run into them on sidewalks and subway trains all the time. They’re pretty much everywhere you go, New York or not. That previous post where I noted some creep parking a stolen shopping chart filled with discarded clothes on the landlord’s sidewalk and walking away? That’s probably a sociopath: someone who takes zero responsibility for his actions and doesn’t care at all what sort of effect his lack of respect for himself and others will cause. A sociopath doesn’t have to be a mass murderer; he may never even commit a felony crime. This website offers a great thumbnail description of sociopathic tendencies.
Do you know how many sociopaths I’ve worked with in New York? More than I care to admit. I’m not saying that in a “ha ha funny” way. If you read the main criteria for sociopathic behavior on that website, these are all qualities that are well suited to office work, a place where glibness and superficiality routinely are valued as common currency. If you want to know why corporations and institutions are so needlessly heartless and cruel at times … they’re often run by sociopaths who aren’t worried about the morality of their actions or repercussions. Sometimes it comes back to bite them on the ass (think Enron), but most times not (think Wall Street). I’d also put forth that a vast majority of politicians are sociopaths, regardless of the goodwill façade they present to the public. But I don’t really want to think too long about this, because it’s too disturbing.
I like what that above-noted passage on sociopaths points out: “ultimate goal is the creation of a willing victim.” I must be like Dr. Van Helsing, the vampire hunter, when it comes to dealing with sociopaths. I know what they are. They know I know what they are. Obviously, they don’t care: they’re sociopaths. I try to leave them to their own devices as much as possible, and when I can’t, just discourage and avoid situations where they can indulge themselves.
But sometimes women in an office around a sociopaths? It’s high drama. They make the mistake of investing their emotions with people like this. They get “involved,” somehow. They must “save him.” They must find reason in this person’s inexplicably bad behavior, mixed in with the charm and moments of clarity. Remember the vampire hunter. There is no cure for vampires, only wooden stakes. There is no slow turning of thought and emotion for the person to “see the light” and start behaving like a normal, caring individual. It just doesn’t happen. I’ll never understand how people get pulled into this other clearly troubled person’s self absorption. Your average sociopath is an emotional vampire, sucking the life and energy from everyone around him. These people don’t present mysteries and enigmas to me. Shit, they’re like wallpaper in New York!
Obviously, not every driven, Type A person is a sociopath. But I think we all deal with sociopaths far more often than we’d care to acknowledge. It sometimes feels like the American way, this way we have of gauging success by financial worth, is geared towards creating sociopaths, or at the very least deeply selfish, uncaring people. I’m hardly blowing the lid off a deep dark secret here, but it pains me to acknowledge that what we consider normal is far from it. We’ve all had that feeling of being at work, or just walking the streets, and being presented with a situation or person that is just so radically wrong, we’re left breathless, thinking, “Doesn’t this person know how wrong this is?” And the answer is, no, he doesn’t. In his eyes, he’s right and everyone else is wrong. Doesn’t matter if we’re talking some creep sending text mails on a smart phone on a crowded subway staircase during rush hour, or a division head laying off everyone who does real work in a department and promoting all the wrong workers.
Happens all the time. If we’re feeling sensitive, we stop to ponder how crazy the world has grown, and it only seems to be getting worse. But it’s always been this way. Hell, may have been worse in the past when you consider all the wars, bad politics and power coups throughout history. I usually cringe when people advance that line of thought, because they personally witness some type of bad behavior, that the world in general must be “going bad” in some sense. Compare a negative experience on the street or at work with, I don’t know, say that of someone in Japan right now who survived an earthquake only to watch his house get swept out to sea by a tsunami, can’t find his wife and may be receiving daily doses of radiation that will shave years off the end of his life.
There are bad days and bad people we deal with, but then again, there are some truly horrific situations that people go through daily, sometimes to the point of death. I try to remember that when I’m carrying on about garden-variety sociopaths and bad manners. It is a sort of petty whining on my part, but then again, what I’m noting has some truth to it, too. It’s surely better to focus on the good. If you are one of those people who can acknowledge the existence of other people, keep that thought in mind, walk it as you talk it, don’t let yourself slip into not carrying around that sense of recognition.
And I don’t mean to paint this purely in terms of good/evil. If anything, I recognize sociopaths really have little control over how they act and do not intend to be “bad people” in some sense. Thus, I’ll feel a mild sense of pity for a person with this issue, much more than contempt. I’ve noticed that sort of strange unhappiness in the upper reaches of the corporate world. Granted, a lot of that is massive pressure, mind-bending levels of stress I tend to avoid on purpose. But I gather some of it is just that general unhappiness with life, and no amount of money will change that. You spend all your time in power plays, aggressive behavior towards real and imagined enemies, forever functioning with your back to the wall, distrustful of everyone you meet, it surely takes a deep psychic toll. Sometimes I’m amazed when I meet seemingly happy, well-adjusted executives, because everything else about their lives (despite the money) seems like constant, massive trouble. I guess we all decide how much shit we’re willing to take, how much money we’re willing to make, forgive me for sounding like a Billy Joel song.
What I’ll never understand is these men thinking their ways of life are the ultimate expression of manhood. True, there are men out there using their backs for a living, or engaged in some manly sport, who exude manhood like a musk that everyone notices. How much money do they make?
That’s where these guys gauge their manhood. But you look at what goes on sometimes … and it’s like being cast back to the schoolyard. Remember how you used to fight as a kid with your siblings or neighborhood friends? Those knock-down/drag-out fiascos that would find both of you wailing on each other, mentally or physically, in ways that were meant to leave permanent scars? Those deep blasts of psychic rage you weren’t mature enough to contain or see past because you were a kid and didn’t know any better? Each of you looking for ways to embarrass and dominate your opponent by exposing every possible weakness and secret place?
Take all those ugly, bratty blasts of irrational selfishness and anger, put them in a guy wearing a suit and tie, and this is not all that unusual in an office. It’s virtually no different from those brawls between eight year olds … the same levels of understanding, compassion and empathy. It’s not manhood – it’s the worst of childhood. With monetary value attached.
Where most people go wrong is trying to find reason to justify this. There is no reason. We’re better off focusing on what makes people “good” in some sense and moving towards that. And understanding that most of the good we do, others will not see. Sure, the people in our lives will, those who know us for who we are, but most people won’t have a clue as to what good we’ve done in life and what legacy we’ve left behind. That was a strong feeling I got at Dad’s funeral, that he was essentially a good person who quietly went through life doing whatever it took to keep his family going. And the only people who really knew that were us, the few dozen of us gathered on that frigid, cloudless day in December to lay him to rest.
I bring up Dad because it pleased him no end that I was living in New York, not working in a factory, and in his mind, making more money than he did. (Maybe I have, but I’m still lower end of the totem pole, by far and by choice.) I never quite understood how he never fully grasped that he had a pretty good life – at least the factory he worked in treated and served him pretty well over the course of decades. Does so to this day with a healthy pension for Mom after his passing. But he seemed to think having more money magically made your life better.
Then again, on some level, he knew, as I recall him passing up a few promotions over the years that would have moved him out of the area or put him on the road – two things he had no urge to do after traveling the world on the tail end of World War II and the Korean War. He drew a line, as most of us do. I guess all I’m saying is watch out for people who don’t draw lines. I used to think that sort of wild ambition was a wondrous thing, but now that I’ve lived around it in various guises for the past two decades, I’m not so sure about that.
In reality, that was my line. A great way to acknowledge one’s individuality while employing that “two kinds of people” cliché people use so often. Generally to designate whatever problem they’re having at the moment, with the “two kinds of people” coming down solely to people who relate to their problem, or those who cause it or don’t give a damn. Even within the limited context of the analogy, they’re usually wrong, leaving spaces for dozens of other kinds of people in that given scenario.
But lately, I’ve been thinking: there really are only two kind of people in the world. It’s those who can acknowledge the existence of other people and those who can’t. I’m not even getting into some hokey concept of “those who can love and respect other people.” It has nothing to do with love or respect. I’m talking the simple ability to recognize the existence of other people. You don’t have to love them. You don’t have to respect them (although it helps). You just have to acknowledge that there are other people in the world, many people, and you’re just one of them, trying to get by and make sense of it all.
As opposed to people who don’t give a shit about anyone else. I’m talking sociopaths, and not in that Manson/Dahmer sort of extreme. I work with sociopaths. I live around them. Run into them on sidewalks and subway trains all the time. They’re pretty much everywhere you go, New York or not. That previous post where I noted some creep parking a stolen shopping chart filled with discarded clothes on the landlord’s sidewalk and walking away? That’s probably a sociopath: someone who takes zero responsibility for his actions and doesn’t care at all what sort of effect his lack of respect for himself and others will cause. A sociopath doesn’t have to be a mass murderer; he may never even commit a felony crime. This website offers a great thumbnail description of sociopathic tendencies.
Do you know how many sociopaths I’ve worked with in New York? More than I care to admit. I’m not saying that in a “ha ha funny” way. If you read the main criteria for sociopathic behavior on that website, these are all qualities that are well suited to office work, a place where glibness and superficiality routinely are valued as common currency. If you want to know why corporations and institutions are so needlessly heartless and cruel at times … they’re often run by sociopaths who aren’t worried about the morality of their actions or repercussions. Sometimes it comes back to bite them on the ass (think Enron), but most times not (think Wall Street). I’d also put forth that a vast majority of politicians are sociopaths, regardless of the goodwill façade they present to the public. But I don’t really want to think too long about this, because it’s too disturbing.
I like what that above-noted passage on sociopaths points out: “ultimate goal is the creation of a willing victim.” I must be like Dr. Van Helsing, the vampire hunter, when it comes to dealing with sociopaths. I know what they are. They know I know what they are. Obviously, they don’t care: they’re sociopaths. I try to leave them to their own devices as much as possible, and when I can’t, just discourage and avoid situations where they can indulge themselves.
But sometimes women in an office around a sociopaths? It’s high drama. They make the mistake of investing their emotions with people like this. They get “involved,” somehow. They must “save him.” They must find reason in this person’s inexplicably bad behavior, mixed in with the charm and moments of clarity. Remember the vampire hunter. There is no cure for vampires, only wooden stakes. There is no slow turning of thought and emotion for the person to “see the light” and start behaving like a normal, caring individual. It just doesn’t happen. I’ll never understand how people get pulled into this other clearly troubled person’s self absorption. Your average sociopath is an emotional vampire, sucking the life and energy from everyone around him. These people don’t present mysteries and enigmas to me. Shit, they’re like wallpaper in New York!
Obviously, not every driven, Type A person is a sociopath. But I think we all deal with sociopaths far more often than we’d care to acknowledge. It sometimes feels like the American way, this way we have of gauging success by financial worth, is geared towards creating sociopaths, or at the very least deeply selfish, uncaring people. I’m hardly blowing the lid off a deep dark secret here, but it pains me to acknowledge that what we consider normal is far from it. We’ve all had that feeling of being at work, or just walking the streets, and being presented with a situation or person that is just so radically wrong, we’re left breathless, thinking, “Doesn’t this person know how wrong this is?” And the answer is, no, he doesn’t. In his eyes, he’s right and everyone else is wrong. Doesn’t matter if we’re talking some creep sending text mails on a smart phone on a crowded subway staircase during rush hour, or a division head laying off everyone who does real work in a department and promoting all the wrong workers.
Happens all the time. If we’re feeling sensitive, we stop to ponder how crazy the world has grown, and it only seems to be getting worse. But it’s always been this way. Hell, may have been worse in the past when you consider all the wars, bad politics and power coups throughout history. I usually cringe when people advance that line of thought, because they personally witness some type of bad behavior, that the world in general must be “going bad” in some sense. Compare a negative experience on the street or at work with, I don’t know, say that of someone in Japan right now who survived an earthquake only to watch his house get swept out to sea by a tsunami, can’t find his wife and may be receiving daily doses of radiation that will shave years off the end of his life.
There are bad days and bad people we deal with, but then again, there are some truly horrific situations that people go through daily, sometimes to the point of death. I try to remember that when I’m carrying on about garden-variety sociopaths and bad manners. It is a sort of petty whining on my part, but then again, what I’m noting has some truth to it, too. It’s surely better to focus on the good. If you are one of those people who can acknowledge the existence of other people, keep that thought in mind, walk it as you talk it, don’t let yourself slip into not carrying around that sense of recognition.
And I don’t mean to paint this purely in terms of good/evil. If anything, I recognize sociopaths really have little control over how they act and do not intend to be “bad people” in some sense. Thus, I’ll feel a mild sense of pity for a person with this issue, much more than contempt. I’ve noticed that sort of strange unhappiness in the upper reaches of the corporate world. Granted, a lot of that is massive pressure, mind-bending levels of stress I tend to avoid on purpose. But I gather some of it is just that general unhappiness with life, and no amount of money will change that. You spend all your time in power plays, aggressive behavior towards real and imagined enemies, forever functioning with your back to the wall, distrustful of everyone you meet, it surely takes a deep psychic toll. Sometimes I’m amazed when I meet seemingly happy, well-adjusted executives, because everything else about their lives (despite the money) seems like constant, massive trouble. I guess we all decide how much shit we’re willing to take, how much money we’re willing to make, forgive me for sounding like a Billy Joel song.
What I’ll never understand is these men thinking their ways of life are the ultimate expression of manhood. True, there are men out there using their backs for a living, or engaged in some manly sport, who exude manhood like a musk that everyone notices. How much money do they make?
That’s where these guys gauge their manhood. But you look at what goes on sometimes … and it’s like being cast back to the schoolyard. Remember how you used to fight as a kid with your siblings or neighborhood friends? Those knock-down/drag-out fiascos that would find both of you wailing on each other, mentally or physically, in ways that were meant to leave permanent scars? Those deep blasts of psychic rage you weren’t mature enough to contain or see past because you were a kid and didn’t know any better? Each of you looking for ways to embarrass and dominate your opponent by exposing every possible weakness and secret place?
Take all those ugly, bratty blasts of irrational selfishness and anger, put them in a guy wearing a suit and tie, and this is not all that unusual in an office. It’s virtually no different from those brawls between eight year olds … the same levels of understanding, compassion and empathy. It’s not manhood – it’s the worst of childhood. With monetary value attached.
Where most people go wrong is trying to find reason to justify this. There is no reason. We’re better off focusing on what makes people “good” in some sense and moving towards that. And understanding that most of the good we do, others will not see. Sure, the people in our lives will, those who know us for who we are, but most people won’t have a clue as to what good we’ve done in life and what legacy we’ve left behind. That was a strong feeling I got at Dad’s funeral, that he was essentially a good person who quietly went through life doing whatever it took to keep his family going. And the only people who really knew that were us, the few dozen of us gathered on that frigid, cloudless day in December to lay him to rest.
I bring up Dad because it pleased him no end that I was living in New York, not working in a factory, and in his mind, making more money than he did. (Maybe I have, but I’m still lower end of the totem pole, by far and by choice.) I never quite understood how he never fully grasped that he had a pretty good life – at least the factory he worked in treated and served him pretty well over the course of decades. Does so to this day with a healthy pension for Mom after his passing. But he seemed to think having more money magically made your life better.
Then again, on some level, he knew, as I recall him passing up a few promotions over the years that would have moved him out of the area or put him on the road – two things he had no urge to do after traveling the world on the tail end of World War II and the Korean War. He drew a line, as most of us do. I guess all I’m saying is watch out for people who don’t draw lines. I used to think that sort of wild ambition was a wondrous thing, but now that I’ve lived around it in various guises for the past two decades, I’m not so sure about that.
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Eternal Spring Quest for Cotton Windbreaker
It happens every spring. Most years, I don’t really need one. This year, the black cotton windbreaker I have has started showing its age of five years or so. The cuffs are starting to fray. Polo by Ralph Lauren, paid way too much for it at the time, but that’s how it is with good cotton windbreakers. When you see one, you buy it on sight, because you may not see another one for awhile. Still have a tan Nautica windbreaker from a few years before then, but it makes me look like a UPS delivery man.
You would not believe how hard it is to find a good cotton windbreaker these days. Go ahead and try – I dare you. All I could find was an over-priced new Ralph Lauren model at Macys that had a weird design I didn’t like (as opposed to just a straight cut, short-waited, cotton jacket). A jacket on Eddie Bauer’s website that could be good, but cost $80.00, which I won’t spend without trying it on first. There are unlimited numbers of micro-fiber and weather-proof windbreakers, which I don’t like. The fabric doesn’t breath – whether it’s 45 or 65 degrees, sooner or later, I start sweating in those micro-fiber things.
I’ve been wearing these jackets all my life, and buying a cheap cotton one used to be about the easiest thing you could do every spring. They were everywhere, and never more than $20 or $30. James Dean didn’t start the trend, but he surely capitalized on it and made it cool. It’s a basic, no-frills look, and if you haven’t already gathered, I’m very comfortable with these sort of no-nonsense relationships in life, whether we’re talking people, clothes, music, etc.
I can’t recall when the massive switchover occurred to polyester blends and micro-fibers. These sort of windbreakers often don’t look bad – the design is right – but, again, I’ve had the experience of buying these, wearing them around, and there’s just something smothering about the fabric. So it keeps the rain off. I don’t live in England or Seattle; when it rains, I use an umbrella. I like cotton. It’s a great fabric: light, breathable, feels good on your skin.
So why is it, that every fucking spring, when I start spelunking around the web or department stores, be they high or low end, it’s like pulling teeth to find a cotton windbreaker, good or bad quality? The LaCoste section at Macy’s actually had one featured this year … for $150! Adding insult to injury, when I tried on the XXL size, it didn’t even fit, about a size too small. I always hated that LaCoste alligator symbol, mainly because all the unimaginative kids at college in the mid-80s would wear LaCoste sport shirts, collar turned up, with Vuarnet sunglasses on a rope. I never got over that sickly association with dudes grooving to Tears for Fears songs in these things. But such is my desperation for a cotton windbreaker, that I would have bought that LaCoste windbreaker at Macy’s for $150 had it fit.
I can’t stand being made to feel like a yuppie on a spree when all I want is a basic, no-frills, black cotton windbreaker. The Polo Ralph Lauren one I own, I periodically black-out the little horse/polo player on the left breast with a marker so it doesn’t stand out. (I think it was originally white.) And I don’t want to knock the company too hard. I love the cut and feel of the jacket, suits me fine. But I’m just not one of those people who loves showing off labels (unless it’s Woolrich or Champion).
I’m not sure what grates on me more – that sense of not being able to find what was once such a basic staple of American life, or the realization that time has passed me by. Not like I’m a vinyl record guy living in a digital world – more like an eight-track tape guy, because there are still plenty of places you can buy vinyl records and have it deemed cool by people of all ages. Try finding a place that sells eight-tracks, and when you do, I can guarantee you it will be a kiosk in a forlorn mall in southeast Arkansas run by an aging hippie.
But it’s been that kind of spring. Having a ragged time at the office, doing tons of work to little or no fanfare and feeling about as appreciated and valued as … well, a cotton windbreaker. Been making a lot of lasagna lately, as it helps me to make these things a few times in a row when I first learn the recipe, but I’m also learning that eating heavy cheese dishes a few nights a week is a bloating experience, like I should start looking for hay in my bowel movements every morning. Weather has been much colder than usual, with a last winter blast expected for April Fool’s Day, although we’re going to get lucky here and only have freezing rain and high wind.
Some prince left a shopping cart filled with discarded clothes sitting against the lamp post on my landlord’s sidewalk tonight. A real sore point with me as she went through a very bad spell for a long, long time with Queens douche bags littering her sidewalk with construction debris, garbage bags filled with bathroom tile or dozens of pounds of empty liquor bottles, broken beer bottles, once even a toilet. (Oddly enough, the bathroom tile and toilet magically appearing a week after her next-door neighbor had those items in front of his house after stripping down an apartment in the building …) So when I see something so clearly out of place sitting on her sidewalk, knowing full well she’s going to be fined $100 or more for “littering” because some jackass parked it on her sidewalk, I don’t think, “Oh, must be some poor homeless person nearby searching for bottles” … because I know, in Queens, it’s just some senseless creep dumping nonsense in a public place and walking away.
I just wheeled the cart down around the corner to the public playground and left it there in the drizzly rain, knowing full well that someone will come along and take that shopping cart for his own personal use and probably dump the clothes there, where the parks cleaners who come by every other day will deposit that stuff in a trash bag and dispose of it. (For every time this happens, there are five or six times I’ll just silently stuff whatever's out there on the sidewalk into the landlord’s outdoor trash bin and dispose of it myself … nothing like cleaning up after anonymous bums!) If I had been in a better mood, I’d have bagged the clothes and took them to the Salvation Army bin a few blocks away at the supermarket. But it’s been a ragged week, so I left it at that. As predicted, there was no enraged homeless person appearing moments later bawling, “Who took my shopping cart?!” I sometimes wish my landlord would get a camera installed on her property so I could see the type of people who routinely do this sort of thing around the neighborhood.
So, as you can imagine, the concept of walking into a store, finding a basic black cotton windbreaker for a reasonable price, really looks good to me on a number of levels right now, personal comfort and a sense of connection to a simpler past chief among them. I don’t ask for much, but, man, a good cotton windbreaker would really hit the spot right now. Every spring, I tell you, it's the same damn thing.
You would not believe how hard it is to find a good cotton windbreaker these days. Go ahead and try – I dare you. All I could find was an over-priced new Ralph Lauren model at Macys that had a weird design I didn’t like (as opposed to just a straight cut, short-waited, cotton jacket). A jacket on Eddie Bauer’s website that could be good, but cost $80.00, which I won’t spend without trying it on first. There are unlimited numbers of micro-fiber and weather-proof windbreakers, which I don’t like. The fabric doesn’t breath – whether it’s 45 or 65 degrees, sooner or later, I start sweating in those micro-fiber things.
I’ve been wearing these jackets all my life, and buying a cheap cotton one used to be about the easiest thing you could do every spring. They were everywhere, and never more than $20 or $30. James Dean didn’t start the trend, but he surely capitalized on it and made it cool. It’s a basic, no-frills look, and if you haven’t already gathered, I’m very comfortable with these sort of no-nonsense relationships in life, whether we’re talking people, clothes, music, etc.
I can’t recall when the massive switchover occurred to polyester blends and micro-fibers. These sort of windbreakers often don’t look bad – the design is right – but, again, I’ve had the experience of buying these, wearing them around, and there’s just something smothering about the fabric. So it keeps the rain off. I don’t live in England or Seattle; when it rains, I use an umbrella. I like cotton. It’s a great fabric: light, breathable, feels good on your skin.
So why is it, that every fucking spring, when I start spelunking around the web or department stores, be they high or low end, it’s like pulling teeth to find a cotton windbreaker, good or bad quality? The LaCoste section at Macy’s actually had one featured this year … for $150! Adding insult to injury, when I tried on the XXL size, it didn’t even fit, about a size too small. I always hated that LaCoste alligator symbol, mainly because all the unimaginative kids at college in the mid-80s would wear LaCoste sport shirts, collar turned up, with Vuarnet sunglasses on a rope. I never got over that sickly association with dudes grooving to Tears for Fears songs in these things. But such is my desperation for a cotton windbreaker, that I would have bought that LaCoste windbreaker at Macy’s for $150 had it fit.
I can’t stand being made to feel like a yuppie on a spree when all I want is a basic, no-frills, black cotton windbreaker. The Polo Ralph Lauren one I own, I periodically black-out the little horse/polo player on the left breast with a marker so it doesn’t stand out. (I think it was originally white.) And I don’t want to knock the company too hard. I love the cut and feel of the jacket, suits me fine. But I’m just not one of those people who loves showing off labels (unless it’s Woolrich or Champion).
I’m not sure what grates on me more – that sense of not being able to find what was once such a basic staple of American life, or the realization that time has passed me by. Not like I’m a vinyl record guy living in a digital world – more like an eight-track tape guy, because there are still plenty of places you can buy vinyl records and have it deemed cool by people of all ages. Try finding a place that sells eight-tracks, and when you do, I can guarantee you it will be a kiosk in a forlorn mall in southeast Arkansas run by an aging hippie.
But it’s been that kind of spring. Having a ragged time at the office, doing tons of work to little or no fanfare and feeling about as appreciated and valued as … well, a cotton windbreaker. Been making a lot of lasagna lately, as it helps me to make these things a few times in a row when I first learn the recipe, but I’m also learning that eating heavy cheese dishes a few nights a week is a bloating experience, like I should start looking for hay in my bowel movements every morning. Weather has been much colder than usual, with a last winter blast expected for April Fool’s Day, although we’re going to get lucky here and only have freezing rain and high wind.
Some prince left a shopping cart filled with discarded clothes sitting against the lamp post on my landlord’s sidewalk tonight. A real sore point with me as she went through a very bad spell for a long, long time with Queens douche bags littering her sidewalk with construction debris, garbage bags filled with bathroom tile or dozens of pounds of empty liquor bottles, broken beer bottles, once even a toilet. (Oddly enough, the bathroom tile and toilet magically appearing a week after her next-door neighbor had those items in front of his house after stripping down an apartment in the building …) So when I see something so clearly out of place sitting on her sidewalk, knowing full well she’s going to be fined $100 or more for “littering” because some jackass parked it on her sidewalk, I don’t think, “Oh, must be some poor homeless person nearby searching for bottles” … because I know, in Queens, it’s just some senseless creep dumping nonsense in a public place and walking away.
I just wheeled the cart down around the corner to the public playground and left it there in the drizzly rain, knowing full well that someone will come along and take that shopping cart for his own personal use and probably dump the clothes there, where the parks cleaners who come by every other day will deposit that stuff in a trash bag and dispose of it. (For every time this happens, there are five or six times I’ll just silently stuff whatever's out there on the sidewalk into the landlord’s outdoor trash bin and dispose of it myself … nothing like cleaning up after anonymous bums!) If I had been in a better mood, I’d have bagged the clothes and took them to the Salvation Army bin a few blocks away at the supermarket. But it’s been a ragged week, so I left it at that. As predicted, there was no enraged homeless person appearing moments later bawling, “Who took my shopping cart?!” I sometimes wish my landlord would get a camera installed on her property so I could see the type of people who routinely do this sort of thing around the neighborhood.
So, as you can imagine, the concept of walking into a store, finding a basic black cotton windbreaker for a reasonable price, really looks good to me on a number of levels right now, personal comfort and a sense of connection to a simpler past chief among them. I don’t ask for much, but, man, a good cotton windbreaker would really hit the spot right now. Every spring, I tell you, it's the same damn thing.
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Days of Screw-Top Wine and Wild Irish Roses
Oh, for the days of screw-top wine and Wild Irish Roses. A short time in my 20s that ended as quickly as it began. I don’t know if kids still drink screw-top wine. Someone is, because I see it every time I’m in a liquor store or supermarket. (My local in Queens favors Boone’s Farm.) The local bodegas don’t have any, but they’re still carrying cans of Four Loko, which was recently outlawed in the state. No one seems to be sweating it. I’m sure those guys are charging kids a fortune to drink that swill. Not sure how that stuff is anymore lethal then Red Bull and Vodka, which people have been pounding down since that energy drink came on the market a few years ago.
College made me a little full of myself, at least in terms of tastes in alcohol. I was a college student, branching out in the world, refining my tastes. No longer could I drink simple beer. I needed wine, because this is what intelligent people drank. Having the occasional drink with a college professor? All these guys drank wine. This was clearly the way to go.
One slight problem with that: college and redneck bars were in no way geared to cater to wine drinkers. I found out fast that ordering wine in these places was an eye-rolling endeavor for the bartender, not a discussion on the merits of red vs. white, or “that was a fine year,” etc. It was a pain in the ass for them to pull out the one gallon-jug bottle of red or white that they had stowed behind the bar, next to the baseball bat, and listlessly pour it out.
I was never quite sure why this was such a negative experience for them. It wasn’t a mixed drink. They’d generally charge a dollar or two more than they would for a pint of beer. But it was always a chore for them. The worst came in a bar back in rural PA, when I pulled my “glass of wine, please” stunt, and the bartender barked, “If SHE wants anything special, all we got is this jug bottle of Gallo.” The assumption was a man would never order a glass of wine. Luckily, I never took a shine to wine coolers, and was never quite sure why these sickly carbonated beverages weren’t placed on the same taste level as screw-top wine.
They wore me down. I’d say there are after-effects to all this. I’m not a big wine drinker. I keep a BOX of red wine in the refrigerator after reading of the heath benefits of drinking a glass of it daily in terms of circulation. That’s really the only reason I have wine around. I would never go to a wine bar, more so because of the crowd who would. But I did branch off into imported beers later in my 20s, having had my first good taste of Guinness, and branching out from there, more recently having the great experience of hitting the Belgian Beer Café in Manhattan and going to town on their heavenly, over-priced ales.
I have become a sort of beer snob and couldn’t tell you if Bud or Miller or Pabst suck because I haven’t had the stuff in years. Put in a situation where the choice is one of these or soda, I’ll go with soda. I don’t drink to get falling-down drunk. I drink to get a nice buzz and leave it at that. So if I’m going to do that, it never hurts to spend a few dollars more and drink quality beer, which you can find just about anywhere these days (not so in the 80s …). Even that will raise a snigger from the blue-collar, Bud/Miller/Coors contingent. If they want to spend the rest of their days drinking shitty beer, that’s their business. (I do make an exception for Yuengling beer, as it’s my home county beer, but I am alarmed these days by how widespread this beer is growing, not to mention the import prices people in NYC pay to drink it, with me full well knowing the same thing is going for $1.50 a pint back in the Coal Region.)
But that screw-top wine phase. I can see it now as my recognition of the somewhat “faggy” aspect of ordering wine in a redneck bar, getting out of college, recognizing I was being guided away from my working-class roots in many ways I found suspect, and trying to pull my tastes down as a half-assed tribute to those roots. And there’s a novelty of otherwise sane, healthy guys in their 20s drinking rot-gut wine generally consumed by winos and bums who couldn’t afford anything else.
It started in that loose time after college was over and my move to NYC about a year and a half later. Brother J got into it, too. We were forever reading novels and short stories by Beat writers that featured characters drinking cheap wine. Rock stars would pontificate on it in interviews – still remember Peter Wolf from The J. Geils Band recalling how much he loved buying Thunderbird Wine because the bottles would come with a bonus Bic multi-colored pen taped to the side. (I guess to write out one’s will later that night?) Thunderbird had that great rhyme: “What’s the word/Thunderbird/What’s the price/A dollar twice.”
The state stores back in Pennsylvania were all well-stocked with Mad Dog 20/20. I think “20/20” is just the company name, although it sounds like something you’d associate with a rifle. The official name is MD 20/20, and I’ve gather MD really stands for Mogen David. But what a great nickname for an alcoholic beverage: an angry, crazy dog. Grape and orange were the main flavors on the shelf. I also get the impression these cheap wines are very high in alcohol content, much higher than beer, so that only added to their allure.
And I hate to say it, but in a Cheez Whiz sort of way … these things tasted good! You knew you were drinking shit, but it was flavorful shit that was strangely easy to put down. That was the goal in any Mad Dog session, put the whole bottle down. Puking would be a vodka/orange juice affair: doing so would turn you off that flavor for a long, long time. But you’d also get over it.
I don’t need to say that aside from Brother J and I, very few people took the same ride on the Night Train with us. It was purely a novelty act that lasted for a year or two. I’m not sure what the state-store clerks thought who sold us the stuff. Probably the truth: “A bunch of college kids drinking shitty wine on a lark.” We surely weren’t the only ones in the history of mankind, but I would have been curious to hang out at the state store to see who else was drinking Mad Dog.
The most m
emorable Mad Dog binge came at a party in Frackville, PA. It was summer, I recall, and I had just graduated, was truly at loose ends back home, not working. This also coincided with my regrettable bib overall phase. As you can see, this was all a put-on. Everything I did at that point in my life was done with ironic intent. It was just that age: hard to be serious about anything when you’re 23, just spent all your life in school, and now have no idea what you’re supposed to be doing. I wouldn’t classify it as free-falling. I’d call it being dumbfounded and directionless at a time in life when everyone expects you to take off like a rocket.
One of my sister’s friends was holding a big Fourth of July party to which everyone was invited. Good and bad news. This particular friend was a fairly flighty/wealthy girl who just ran with a different crowd, the few moneyed people we knew, that paper-thin layer of people in any small town who come from wealth and keep it to themselves. At that point in our lives, the money issue wasn’t big at all. Probably still isn’t, but as you get older, you see that some people have five or six-digit figures routinely shuffled their way through familial connections, while the rest of us work for a lot less. It surely affects how all of us see the world! Having spent my adult life around people in New York making much more money than any of us, it sort of shoots the whole concept out of the water. But I still recall that gulf and can still feel it sometimes back there.
Well, this was at the height of our Mad Dog obsession. So we each brought a bottle of grape to this thing, in bib overalls. We liked to romanticize that our hometown was a little crazy, but honestly, you’ll find drunks with their shaggy-dog stories in any town back there. The good thing about bib overalls is that flap on the front has a pocket in it that’s a perfect fit for a bottle of Mad Dog. So the gist was to take a few swigs, unbutton that pocket, screw the top back on, put the bottle in, then either wipe your face or hold it in your hands depending on how far you’d gotten into the bottle.
We sat there all night, pissed off that nobody knew who The Replacements were, in our bib overalls, pulling a one bottle per Mad Dog session while, I don’t know, Howard Jones and Bruce Hornsby cassettes played in the background. We thought we were impervious. Everyone does at that age. I wouldn’t dream of downing a whole bottle of Mad Dog now in one sitting. The worst I ever got was here in NYC, the time old pal John visited from Delaware, and we went to O’Hanlon’s under the N Train, who had a “buy three get one free” drink special. We worked our way through that cycle for four free pints of Guinness, meaning we drank 16 pints all together, two gallons of stout. We didn’t puke, but the next day, it felt like we had our heads in vices, and there was a constant buzzing sound in our ears. I remember John gazing out the window for minutes on end with a pained look on his face and then barking. We felt a lot less impervious.
That Mad Dog session, all along, people kept sauntering up and treating us like cool rednecks, which was the exact effect we were shooting for. We weren’t cool, and we weren’t rednecks. But we were drunk off our asses and daring enough to dress like hayseeds in the time of La Coste sport shirts with turned-up collars. I think it was more Tom Hanks in Bachelor Party than Matt Dillon in Drugstore Cowboy.
Everybody got profoundly drunk that night, falling down drunk. I had to drive home (about four miles). That was the night where we got just outside of Frackville in the yellow hornet station wagon. I pulled over the side of the road. Held up my finger to denote that I had to do something. Opened up the door, daintily leaned over, and puked for about thirty seconds solid. Wiped my mouth off. Gingerly shut the door again. Then drove home. Fell asleep on the lawn because the grass felt so cool on my face. Neighbors must have had a good laugh seeing me splayed out on the lawn at 6:00 am in bib overalls, at least not piss, shit or puke stained.
You can only get away with that shit so many times. I never pushed it like that again. Probably drove drunk more times than I’d care to admit back then – we all did, before driving with a few beers in you became crime of the century. But I haven’t driven drunk in decades, mostly because I no longer drink when I go back there. Too many friends who wandered down the DUI path and paid a heavy price for it. The county’s had multiple DUI check points set up weekend night for the past decade, and there’s something a little too gestapo-like about all this to routinely chance having a few beers (by which I men three or less) and driving home. And the bars just seem to get more seedy as time goes on back there, or maybe I just have a thing about multiple facial piercings, tribal armband tattoos and NASCAR regalia.
Maybe I’ll pick up a bottle of Mad Dog next time I see one, for old time’s sake, although I’m hardly nostalgic for it. It would sit nicely against the bottle of moonshine in the fridge I never touch.
College made me a little full of myself, at least in terms of tastes in alcohol. I was a college student, branching out in the world, refining my tastes. No longer could I drink simple beer. I needed wine, because this is what intelligent people drank. Having the occasional drink with a college professor? All these guys drank wine. This was clearly the way to go.
One slight problem with that: college and redneck bars were in no way geared to cater to wine drinkers. I found out fast that ordering wine in these places was an eye-rolling endeavor for the bartender, not a discussion on the merits of red vs. white, or “that was a fine year,” etc. It was a pain in the ass for them to pull out the one gallon-jug bottle of red or white that they had stowed behind the bar, next to the baseball bat, and listlessly pour it out.
I was never quite sure why this was such a negative experience for them. It wasn’t a mixed drink. They’d generally charge a dollar or two more than they would for a pint of beer. But it was always a chore for them. The worst came in a bar back in rural PA, when I pulled my “glass of wine, please” stunt, and the bartender barked, “If SHE wants anything special, all we got is this jug bottle of Gallo.” The assumption was a man would never order a glass of wine. Luckily, I never took a shine to wine coolers, and was never quite sure why these sickly carbonated beverages weren’t placed on the same taste level as screw-top wine.
They wore me down. I’d say there are after-effects to all this. I’m not a big wine drinker. I keep a BOX of red wine in the refrigerator after reading of the heath benefits of drinking a glass of it daily in terms of circulation. That’s really the only reason I have wine around. I would never go to a wine bar, more so because of the crowd who would. But I did branch off into imported beers later in my 20s, having had my first good taste of Guinness, and branching out from there, more recently having the great experience of hitting the Belgian Beer Café in Manhattan and going to town on their heavenly, over-priced ales.
I have become a sort of beer snob and couldn’t tell you if Bud or Miller or Pabst suck because I haven’t had the stuff in years. Put in a situation where the choice is one of these or soda, I’ll go with soda. I don’t drink to get falling-down drunk. I drink to get a nice buzz and leave it at that. So if I’m going to do that, it never hurts to spend a few dollars more and drink quality beer, which you can find just about anywhere these days (not so in the 80s …). Even that will raise a snigger from the blue-collar, Bud/Miller/Coors contingent. If they want to spend the rest of their days drinking shitty beer, that’s their business. (I do make an exception for Yuengling beer, as it’s my home county beer, but I am alarmed these days by how widespread this beer is growing, not to mention the import prices people in NYC pay to drink it, with me full well knowing the same thing is going for $1.50 a pint back in the Coal Region.)
But that screw-top wine phase. I can see it now as my recognition of the somewhat “faggy” aspect of ordering wine in a redneck bar, getting out of college, recognizing I was being guided away from my working-class roots in many ways I found suspect, and trying to pull my tastes down as a half-assed tribute to those roots. And there’s a novelty of otherwise sane, healthy guys in their 20s drinking rot-gut wine generally consumed by winos and bums who couldn’t afford anything else.
It started in that loose time after college was over and my move to NYC about a year and a half later. Brother J got into it, too. We were forever reading novels and short stories by Beat writers that featured characters drinking cheap wine. Rock stars would pontificate on it in interviews – still remember Peter Wolf from The J. Geils Band recalling how much he loved buying Thunderbird Wine because the bottles would come with a bonus Bic multi-colored pen taped to the side. (I guess to write out one’s will later that night?) Thunderbird had that great rhyme: “What’s the word/Thunderbird/What’s the price/A dollar twice.”
The state stores back in Pennsylvania were all well-stocked with Mad Dog 20/20. I think “20/20” is just the company name, although it sounds like something you’d associate with a rifle. The official name is MD 20/20, and I’ve gather MD really stands for Mogen David. But what a great nickname for an alcoholic beverage: an angry, crazy dog. Grape and orange were the main flavors on the shelf. I also get the impression these cheap wines are very high in alcohol content, much higher than beer, so that only added to their allure.
And I hate to say it, but in a Cheez Whiz sort of way … these things tasted good! You knew you were drinking shit, but it was flavorful shit that was strangely easy to put down. That was the goal in any Mad Dog session, put the whole bottle down. Puking would be a vodka/orange juice affair: doing so would turn you off that flavor for a long, long time. But you’d also get over it.
I don’t need to say that aside from Brother J and I, very few people took the same ride on the Night Train with us. It was purely a novelty act that lasted for a year or two. I’m not sure what the state-store clerks thought who sold us the stuff. Probably the truth: “A bunch of college kids drinking shitty wine on a lark.” We surely weren’t the only ones in the history of mankind, but I would have been curious to hang out at the state store to see who else was drinking Mad Dog.
The most m
emorable Mad Dog binge came at a party in Frackville, PA. It was summer, I recall, and I had just graduated, was truly at loose ends back home, not working. This also coincided with my regrettable bib overall phase. As you can see, this was all a put-on. Everything I did at that point in my life was done with ironic intent. It was just that age: hard to be serious about anything when you’re 23, just spent all your life in school, and now have no idea what you’re supposed to be doing. I wouldn’t classify it as free-falling. I’d call it being dumbfounded and directionless at a time in life when everyone expects you to take off like a rocket.One of my sister’s friends was holding a big Fourth of July party to which everyone was invited. Good and bad news. This particular friend was a fairly flighty/wealthy girl who just ran with a different crowd, the few moneyed people we knew, that paper-thin layer of people in any small town who come from wealth and keep it to themselves. At that point in our lives, the money issue wasn’t big at all. Probably still isn’t, but as you get older, you see that some people have five or six-digit figures routinely shuffled their way through familial connections, while the rest of us work for a lot less. It surely affects how all of us see the world! Having spent my adult life around people in New York making much more money than any of us, it sort of shoots the whole concept out of the water. But I still recall that gulf and can still feel it sometimes back there.
Well, this was at the height of our Mad Dog obsession. So we each brought a bottle of grape to this thing, in bib overalls. We liked to romanticize that our hometown was a little crazy, but honestly, you’ll find drunks with their shaggy-dog stories in any town back there. The good thing about bib overalls is that flap on the front has a pocket in it that’s a perfect fit for a bottle of Mad Dog. So the gist was to take a few swigs, unbutton that pocket, screw the top back on, put the bottle in, then either wipe your face or hold it in your hands depending on how far you’d gotten into the bottle.
We sat there all night, pissed off that nobody knew who The Replacements were, in our bib overalls, pulling a one bottle per Mad Dog session while, I don’t know, Howard Jones and Bruce Hornsby cassettes played in the background. We thought we were impervious. Everyone does at that age. I wouldn’t dream of downing a whole bottle of Mad Dog now in one sitting. The worst I ever got was here in NYC, the time old pal John visited from Delaware, and we went to O’Hanlon’s under the N Train, who had a “buy three get one free” drink special. We worked our way through that cycle for four free pints of Guinness, meaning we drank 16 pints all together, two gallons of stout. We didn’t puke, but the next day, it felt like we had our heads in vices, and there was a constant buzzing sound in our ears. I remember John gazing out the window for minutes on end with a pained look on his face and then barking. We felt a lot less impervious.
That Mad Dog session, all along, people kept sauntering up and treating us like cool rednecks, which was the exact effect we were shooting for. We weren’t cool, and we weren’t rednecks. But we were drunk off our asses and daring enough to dress like hayseeds in the time of La Coste sport shirts with turned-up collars. I think it was more Tom Hanks in Bachelor Party than Matt Dillon in Drugstore Cowboy.
Everybody got profoundly drunk that night, falling down drunk. I had to drive home (about four miles). That was the night where we got just outside of Frackville in the yellow hornet station wagon. I pulled over the side of the road. Held up my finger to denote that I had to do something. Opened up the door, daintily leaned over, and puked for about thirty seconds solid. Wiped my mouth off. Gingerly shut the door again. Then drove home. Fell asleep on the lawn because the grass felt so cool on my face. Neighbors must have had a good laugh seeing me splayed out on the lawn at 6:00 am in bib overalls, at least not piss, shit or puke stained.
You can only get away with that shit so many times. I never pushed it like that again. Probably drove drunk more times than I’d care to admit back then – we all did, before driving with a few beers in you became crime of the century. But I haven’t driven drunk in decades, mostly because I no longer drink when I go back there. Too many friends who wandered down the DUI path and paid a heavy price for it. The county’s had multiple DUI check points set up weekend night for the past decade, and there’s something a little too gestapo-like about all this to routinely chance having a few beers (by which I men three or less) and driving home. And the bars just seem to get more seedy as time goes on back there, or maybe I just have a thing about multiple facial piercings, tribal armband tattoos and NASCAR regalia.
Maybe I’ll pick up a bottle of Mad Dog next time I see one, for old time’s sake, although I’m hardly nostalgic for it. It would sit nicely against the bottle of moonshine in the fridge I never touch.
Monday, February 21, 2011
A Madame Sousatzka Moment
The other night coming home from boxing, I got a seat on the subway train when it pulled into Times Square, and the usual tourist riff-raff and people who just didn't look like they rode my train got off. (You ride the same train long enough, you can spot people who are going to get off in Manhattan before the train hits the neighborhood. And the people who are going to get off on the first stop in Queens to grab the 7 train connection.)
Of course, this concept has been turned on its head in the past few years. People I had once pegged as tourists turn out to be moneyed nudges who now live in my neighborhood, and still carry themselves like tourists.
I'm not going to get into a prolonged bashing of the type, much as I love to. It's always college-educated white folks in their 20s who carry themselves with a seemingly unintended arrogance, despite the glaring fact that there's little physically striking or notable about them. And the insult "tourist" doesn't do justice -- it's more like tourists on safari. Like driving around in an armored jeep taking pictures of animals in the bush makes you one with the land. Meanwhile, the guides can tell what kind of animals are moving around a few hundred yards away in pitch darkness just by the sound of their paws on the grass.
Anyway, I’m sitting next to a hipster couple who, for years, I would have assumed were going to get off at 57th Street to go back to their hotel. At the latest, 59th and Lex, as people like this, once upon a time, would have turned into pumpkins on a subway train exiting Manhattan. But, endless articles get pumped out in magazines and newspapers, rents and real-estate prices sky-rocket over the course of years, and wouldn’t you know it, that air of exclusivity you can only get from paying too much for too little draws in nowhere nudges like this. People who base their lives on magazine articles. A different breed from those of us who moved here because it once was an affordable place to live. We moved here it because it was unhip … now the Converse Hi-Top is on the other foot.
The woman next to me was nothing special. I wouldn’t call her a dog, because that would be unkind, and even if she was technically a dog, she thought she was hot stuff. Just that sort of mousy, sandy-haired, glasses, designer bag, featureless girl who moves here from (insert mid-sized city from Midwest) and now thinks she has the world by the tail because she’s in New York. Again, I feel no need to call her a “dog.” Just an average-looking woman riding the train, nothing wrong with that.
What was deeply annoying about her, aside from her boyfriend whom I’ll describe shortly, was that giggly “sideways glance/whisper into boyfriend’s ear” affectation she had. You just don’t pull that shit on a subway train. Sooner or later, the person next to you is going to be a Cro Magnon who takes umbrage at the frilliness and drops a well-deserved elbow into a rib cage. How many dozens of times have I sat next to assholes like this on a subway train? I used to think, “Is she laughing at me?” when I was a lot less secure. Now, I just see life more clearly: “Asshole.” Not just an asshole – an asshole who will not be part of my life in 15 minutes, so just let it roll. Dozens of times, at least. Although, for the record, it’s usually teenage girls who pull shit like this, not women who appear to be mid-20s.
The boyfriend had a purple/orange mohawk. And white-framed Vuarnet sunglasses. The End.
Honestly, he didn’t seem like a horrible guy. A typical guy whose “hipness” meter has been set to the numbingly low standard of his home suburb, where guys like this are “wild” because of “that hair” and “the attitude” … but in NYC, dicks like this are a dime a dozen. They come here to “belong” … when they don’t seem to realize they’ll always have a spiritual home anywhere with that guy who put a lampshade on his head at a party. Or endlessly quotes lines from movies for “comic” effect. To me, a mohawk seems like a punk version of a comb-over. You’re trying to hide just how ordinary you are with a hair affectation.
He wasn’t throwing off angry or negative vibes – just the same annoying “above it all” vibe as his mousy girlfriend. I’m not sure how you’re above it all with a purple orange mohawk. Riding a subway train. To a neighborhood you never knew existed as little as two years ago. Where you now live on your parents’ dime. Because it’s too damn expensive to afford on your own. And you can’t get any real work. Because it’s so damn hard to find real work with a purple orange mohawk. Why does the world have to be so cruel, man?
But even if you strip away all my disdain and snap judgments… these people annoyed the shit out of me. Would have been the same had they been dressed in corporate garb, or as rednecks, or hiphoppers, or whatever. I can live with the hipster vibe. That same guy, sitting next to me, quietly reading a book, or acting like a normal human being, I got zero issue with him. That’s how subways work. If people act like normal, reasonably-caring human beings, they can be whatever they want, and no one is going to take issue with them.
It was the cute couple vibe that grated on me. Always does. Being in love is not synonymous with being a shithead. Granted, they often appear to be one in the same, but they are not. I’ve been there. When you’re with someone, you feel like you’re traveling around in your own little world. And, in effect, you are – like a rock star with his or her one-person entourage. You have this bubble that the rest of the world will not understand, and defends you from their slings and arrows.
Which is nice when you’re a kid, but sooner or later? You realize, as we all do, the world is not spinning around you. That would be the one thing I’d impart to these two knuckleheads if provoked. Not just to them, but to anyone walking around with a false sense of privilege, which seems like a national past time these days. The world is not spinning around you.
Was I ever like this? Not as a rule or way of life. But I do recall minor incidents of displaying this same kind of arrogance. The one that sticks in my mind was hanging out with college friend Eileen and her roommate Joyce, who had gone to the same college as us, but I did not know her then. They had both moved to the city a few years after I had and got an apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. Those were the days of drunken 2:00 am subway rides home on a work night. We had yet to be beaten down by the realization that going to work the next day hungover and on three hours of sleep was a very bad idea. I wish I could sit back now and say it was all worth it, but it wasn’t. Nothing magical happened those nights. Just people getting drunk. As they have done for centuries and will do forever. It was part of our images to live it out, until it slowly dawned on us that walking around like a zombie the next day was a drag.
We were at the infamous east-side bar, P.J. Clark’s. The kind of bar I wouldn’t be caught dead in now. Because people hang out there for the name of the bar – it’s not a local for many people. I guess every night is a different mix of characters, but there’s no character to the place. The people running it will surely tell you otherwise, but it’s no different from a generic concept like Hogs and Heffers, which may be a thousand times more obvious and canned, but just as touristy in its own way. Most Manhattan bars suffer from this in one way or another. I’ve found the only way to make them work is to hit happy hour early and get out when it starts getting SRO.
I was flirting around with Joyce, although that didn’t end up going anywhere. And how I got away with this … the bar was so packed that we were wedged in tightly, so I took the liberty of rubbing her lower back and keeping my hand there as we got progressively more drunk. She didn’t seem to mind. I recall working that number a few times back then, which just strikes me as being sleazy and manipulative now, but I guess made a lot more sense with a semi-erection, a belly full of beer and little to no shame.
But that one night, there was a middle-aged woman there by herself. Probably no older than I am now, but one of those people who went to a bar alone to wander around and see what developed. I could never do that – still can’t today. I’m OK with meeting a friend or two at a bar (not a ton of people – as noted, I find myself offended when groups of people try to take over a bar), but drinking alone has just never suited me. Some people love doing that – rolling the dice to see what happens.
Right around that time, Shirley Maclaine was starring in a movie called Madame Sousatzka, in which she played a middle-aged Russian immigrant piano teacher in London who served as a zesty and “wise in the ways of the world” guide to a young Indian boy under her tutelage. Maclaine really did it up: the clipped English accent, the imperious glances, the shawls, the sense of deep culture her students will never fully grasp. (I haven’t seen this movie in years and am not even sure if it made it to DVD.)
Anyway, this woman at the bar, I don’t know if she was drunk or just plain weird, but she spent most of the night walking through the crowded bar, eye ablaze with mascara, clutching a brandy glass she never seemed to drink from, making eye contact with everyone she came across, not saying anything, but either smiling warmly or tossing her head aside, I’d imagine when she came across a face she found undesirable. It was strange. She was done up in shawls, like Stevie Nicks, and was a bit round, not enormous, but heavy. I wouldn’t say people were afraid to talk to her so much as she put out the vibe that one wouldn’t know what to say to her, unless it was to ask her to read a palm or break out the Tarot cards.
As you could imagine, a 24-year-old guy, drunk, with his hand just about on the ass of a beautiful girl … we spent the whole night calling her Madame Sousatzka and giggling under our breath whenever she passed. I recall thinking how pathetic this woman was, wandering around alone in a bar, making eyes at strangers. I don’t know if she heard us, but she had to know we were goofing on her.
And I can see now, this was just a woman feeling lonely, wanting to go out in the night and be around people, but made the mistake of going to the bar that was filled mostly with people half her age. We probably weren’t the only ones making fun of her. But I put it in the context now of my own life and feel bad about that night. Because I can look at how I was then and know I was sincerely full of shit, really had nothing better going on than that woman, no better grasp of life, save I thought I did because I was younger. And I know now being younger means nothing, is no excuse for anything, no reason to feel superior, save physically, which is where so many of us make the mistake of extending that false belief to every aspect of our being.
I couldn’t help but thinking, sitting next to these giggly douchebag hipsters, that they somehow must have been having a Madame Sousatzka moment with me. Who knows. The girl may have been saying, “Doesn’t that guy look like my father?” But I got more the vibe that these two were sharing some secret joke on the world, may not even have involved me, but if I had wanted to be really rude, could have taken off my headphones and got into her face with a “what the fuck is your problem” moment that would have escalated to these two having a moment they’d never forget. I was doing nothing unusual. Looked no different than I do any night of the week, heading home after work or working out, not drawing attention to myself, if anything, as usual, striving to be left alone while I relaxed after another day of running around.
The difference, of course, is back then I was just a guy in a bar, dressed in a relatively normal fashion, whereas this more recent experience, the young guy may as well have been dressed as a giant penis in terms of drawing attention to himself. It was my attitude back then that I didn’t have to draw attention to myself. I was a reasonably good looking guy at the peak of my youth and knew I didn’t have to do anything to make people look at me.
And it never would have occurred to me to carry around that same arrogance on a subway train. Which would have got me killed or severely beaten at the time as one of the few white people in the train, and drawing any more attention to myself, particularly in a way that insinuated making fun of the locals, would have been a bad idea.
I guess I should put it all in context. That same subway train in Queens, heading out of the neighborhood around 3:15 in the afternoon will be packed with gangs of ghetto kids heading back to their grubby neighborhoods from the local Catholic school, many of them carrying on like mental patients and exuding an arrogance that makes anything mohawk boy could come up with seem mild. Would I feel any more reflective tolerating a bunch of jackasses like that? Probably not, and that’s a post you wouldn’t want to read!
Of course, this concept has been turned on its head in the past few years. People I had once pegged as tourists turn out to be moneyed nudges who now live in my neighborhood, and still carry themselves like tourists.
I'm not going to get into a prolonged bashing of the type, much as I love to. It's always college-educated white folks in their 20s who carry themselves with a seemingly unintended arrogance, despite the glaring fact that there's little physically striking or notable about them. And the insult "tourist" doesn't do justice -- it's more like tourists on safari. Like driving around in an armored jeep taking pictures of animals in the bush makes you one with the land. Meanwhile, the guides can tell what kind of animals are moving around a few hundred yards away in pitch darkness just by the sound of their paws on the grass.
Anyway, I’m sitting next to a hipster couple who, for years, I would have assumed were going to get off at 57th Street to go back to their hotel. At the latest, 59th and Lex, as people like this, once upon a time, would have turned into pumpkins on a subway train exiting Manhattan. But, endless articles get pumped out in magazines and newspapers, rents and real-estate prices sky-rocket over the course of years, and wouldn’t you know it, that air of exclusivity you can only get from paying too much for too little draws in nowhere nudges like this. People who base their lives on magazine articles. A different breed from those of us who moved here because it once was an affordable place to live. We moved here it because it was unhip … now the Converse Hi-Top is on the other foot.
The woman next to me was nothing special. I wouldn’t call her a dog, because that would be unkind, and even if she was technically a dog, she thought she was hot stuff. Just that sort of mousy, sandy-haired, glasses, designer bag, featureless girl who moves here from (insert mid-sized city from Midwest) and now thinks she has the world by the tail because she’s in New York. Again, I feel no need to call her a “dog.” Just an average-looking woman riding the train, nothing wrong with that.
What was deeply annoying about her, aside from her boyfriend whom I’ll describe shortly, was that giggly “sideways glance/whisper into boyfriend’s ear” affectation she had. You just don’t pull that shit on a subway train. Sooner or later, the person next to you is going to be a Cro Magnon who takes umbrage at the frilliness and drops a well-deserved elbow into a rib cage. How many dozens of times have I sat next to assholes like this on a subway train? I used to think, “Is she laughing at me?” when I was a lot less secure. Now, I just see life more clearly: “Asshole.” Not just an asshole – an asshole who will not be part of my life in 15 minutes, so just let it roll. Dozens of times, at least. Although, for the record, it’s usually teenage girls who pull shit like this, not women who appear to be mid-20s.
The boyfriend had a purple/orange mohawk. And white-framed Vuarnet sunglasses. The End.
Honestly, he didn’t seem like a horrible guy. A typical guy whose “hipness” meter has been set to the numbingly low standard of his home suburb, where guys like this are “wild” because of “that hair” and “the attitude” … but in NYC, dicks like this are a dime a dozen. They come here to “belong” … when they don’t seem to realize they’ll always have a spiritual home anywhere with that guy who put a lampshade on his head at a party. Or endlessly quotes lines from movies for “comic” effect. To me, a mohawk seems like a punk version of a comb-over. You’re trying to hide just how ordinary you are with a hair affectation.
He wasn’t throwing off angry or negative vibes – just the same annoying “above it all” vibe as his mousy girlfriend. I’m not sure how you’re above it all with a purple orange mohawk. Riding a subway train. To a neighborhood you never knew existed as little as two years ago. Where you now live on your parents’ dime. Because it’s too damn expensive to afford on your own. And you can’t get any real work. Because it’s so damn hard to find real work with a purple orange mohawk. Why does the world have to be so cruel, man?
But even if you strip away all my disdain and snap judgments… these people annoyed the shit out of me. Would have been the same had they been dressed in corporate garb, or as rednecks, or hiphoppers, or whatever. I can live with the hipster vibe. That same guy, sitting next to me, quietly reading a book, or acting like a normal human being, I got zero issue with him. That’s how subways work. If people act like normal, reasonably-caring human beings, they can be whatever they want, and no one is going to take issue with them.
It was the cute couple vibe that grated on me. Always does. Being in love is not synonymous with being a shithead. Granted, they often appear to be one in the same, but they are not. I’ve been there. When you’re with someone, you feel like you’re traveling around in your own little world. And, in effect, you are – like a rock star with his or her one-person entourage. You have this bubble that the rest of the world will not understand, and defends you from their slings and arrows.
Which is nice when you’re a kid, but sooner or later? You realize, as we all do, the world is not spinning around you. That would be the one thing I’d impart to these two knuckleheads if provoked. Not just to them, but to anyone walking around with a false sense of privilege, which seems like a national past time these days. The world is not spinning around you.
Was I ever like this? Not as a rule or way of life. But I do recall minor incidents of displaying this same kind of arrogance. The one that sticks in my mind was hanging out with college friend Eileen and her roommate Joyce, who had gone to the same college as us, but I did not know her then. They had both moved to the city a few years after I had and got an apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. Those were the days of drunken 2:00 am subway rides home on a work night. We had yet to be beaten down by the realization that going to work the next day hungover and on three hours of sleep was a very bad idea. I wish I could sit back now and say it was all worth it, but it wasn’t. Nothing magical happened those nights. Just people getting drunk. As they have done for centuries and will do forever. It was part of our images to live it out, until it slowly dawned on us that walking around like a zombie the next day was a drag.
We were at the infamous east-side bar, P.J. Clark’s. The kind of bar I wouldn’t be caught dead in now. Because people hang out there for the name of the bar – it’s not a local for many people. I guess every night is a different mix of characters, but there’s no character to the place. The people running it will surely tell you otherwise, but it’s no different from a generic concept like Hogs and Heffers, which may be a thousand times more obvious and canned, but just as touristy in its own way. Most Manhattan bars suffer from this in one way or another. I’ve found the only way to make them work is to hit happy hour early and get out when it starts getting SRO.
I was flirting around with Joyce, although that didn’t end up going anywhere. And how I got away with this … the bar was so packed that we were wedged in tightly, so I took the liberty of rubbing her lower back and keeping my hand there as we got progressively more drunk. She didn’t seem to mind. I recall working that number a few times back then, which just strikes me as being sleazy and manipulative now, but I guess made a lot more sense with a semi-erection, a belly full of beer and little to no shame.
But that one night, there was a middle-aged woman there by herself. Probably no older than I am now, but one of those people who went to a bar alone to wander around and see what developed. I could never do that – still can’t today. I’m OK with meeting a friend or two at a bar (not a ton of people – as noted, I find myself offended when groups of people try to take over a bar), but drinking alone has just never suited me. Some people love doing that – rolling the dice to see what happens.
Right around that time, Shirley Maclaine was starring in a movie called Madame Sousatzka, in which she played a middle-aged Russian immigrant piano teacher in London who served as a zesty and “wise in the ways of the world” guide to a young Indian boy under her tutelage. Maclaine really did it up: the clipped English accent, the imperious glances, the shawls, the sense of deep culture her students will never fully grasp. (I haven’t seen this movie in years and am not even sure if it made it to DVD.)
Anyway, this woman at the bar, I don’t know if she was drunk or just plain weird, but she spent most of the night walking through the crowded bar, eye ablaze with mascara, clutching a brandy glass she never seemed to drink from, making eye contact with everyone she came across, not saying anything, but either smiling warmly or tossing her head aside, I’d imagine when she came across a face she found undesirable. It was strange. She was done up in shawls, like Stevie Nicks, and was a bit round, not enormous, but heavy. I wouldn’t say people were afraid to talk to her so much as she put out the vibe that one wouldn’t know what to say to her, unless it was to ask her to read a palm or break out the Tarot cards.
As you could imagine, a 24-year-old guy, drunk, with his hand just about on the ass of a beautiful girl … we spent the whole night calling her Madame Sousatzka and giggling under our breath whenever she passed. I recall thinking how pathetic this woman was, wandering around alone in a bar, making eyes at strangers. I don’t know if she heard us, but she had to know we were goofing on her.
And I can see now, this was just a woman feeling lonely, wanting to go out in the night and be around people, but made the mistake of going to the bar that was filled mostly with people half her age. We probably weren’t the only ones making fun of her. But I put it in the context now of my own life and feel bad about that night. Because I can look at how I was then and know I was sincerely full of shit, really had nothing better going on than that woman, no better grasp of life, save I thought I did because I was younger. And I know now being younger means nothing, is no excuse for anything, no reason to feel superior, save physically, which is where so many of us make the mistake of extending that false belief to every aspect of our being.
I couldn’t help but thinking, sitting next to these giggly douchebag hipsters, that they somehow must have been having a Madame Sousatzka moment with me. Who knows. The girl may have been saying, “Doesn’t that guy look like my father?” But I got more the vibe that these two were sharing some secret joke on the world, may not even have involved me, but if I had wanted to be really rude, could have taken off my headphones and got into her face with a “what the fuck is your problem” moment that would have escalated to these two having a moment they’d never forget. I was doing nothing unusual. Looked no different than I do any night of the week, heading home after work or working out, not drawing attention to myself, if anything, as usual, striving to be left alone while I relaxed after another day of running around.
The difference, of course, is back then I was just a guy in a bar, dressed in a relatively normal fashion, whereas this more recent experience, the young guy may as well have been dressed as a giant penis in terms of drawing attention to himself. It was my attitude back then that I didn’t have to draw attention to myself. I was a reasonably good looking guy at the peak of my youth and knew I didn’t have to do anything to make people look at me.
And it never would have occurred to me to carry around that same arrogance on a subway train. Which would have got me killed or severely beaten at the time as one of the few white people in the train, and drawing any more attention to myself, particularly in a way that insinuated making fun of the locals, would have been a bad idea.
I guess I should put it all in context. That same subway train in Queens, heading out of the neighborhood around 3:15 in the afternoon will be packed with gangs of ghetto kids heading back to their grubby neighborhoods from the local Catholic school, many of them carrying on like mental patients and exuding an arrogance that makes anything mohawk boy could come up with seem mild. Would I feel any more reflective tolerating a bunch of jackasses like that? Probably not, and that’s a post you wouldn’t want to read!
Sunday, February 13, 2011
The Holy Grail
It’s shameful to admit that most of my knowledge of the holy grail myth comes from repeated childhood viewings of Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Excalibur. Both movies, aside from being a comedy classic and featuring Helen Mirren in her prime (respectively), do a nice job of imparting the myth: King Arthur setting himself and his knights on individual quests to find the holy grail in hopes of recapturing the glory of his kingdom. The grail, of course, is the golden chalice that Christ used during the last supper, thus the mystical connection to a higher power.
What does one do when he finds the grail? In the Monty Python version, while storming the castle that held the grail, King Arthur got arrested by modern-day English bobbies for earlier lancing a TV documentarian who had crossed into the time-space vacuum created by good comedy. The gist is you find the grail and sail off into a golden eternity of permanent grace … sort of like suicide bombers getting X number of virgins in paradise. (I’m not sure why having sex with virgins is considered paradise … reality would be a lot of crying, belly-aching teenage girls asking is it over yet? in pained tones and then cat-fighting while you set about relentlessly jack-hammering the rest. 80 porn stars, I understand. Not 80 virgins.)
I’ve since come to understand that most people are living their lives by the holy grail method. Instead of a golden bowl that held Christ’s blood, they’re thinking wealth and fame more than anything else. Find these things, and you’ll be happy forever. Or someone to marry. Kids. Big house. Not much else fits the bill. Usually a small handful of archetypes that make people feel secure in their lives.
Well, funny things happen on the way to the grail. And even funnier things happen when you get the grail. Sooner or later, it dawns on you that the grail is made of plastic with “Made in China” stenciled on the bottom. Christ’s blood is Cherry Kool-Aid. The myth of the grail fades to the reality of your life, whether you’re fruitlessly chasing it the rest of your days, or have found “it” ten-fold. If you’re married and have kids, it all just sort of fades into who you are. Ditto, fame and fortune. You can surely enjoy the fruits of these labors, but you’re still whoever you are, whoever you were before you set out on this mythical quest.
I’ve never understood the concept of transformation in our lives which, in essence, is the Holy Grail myth. You will be transformed from something lesser to something greater by obtaining this magical thing. Unhappy girlfriends carry on about “personal growth” when all they really want is boyfriends getting new hobbies that cater more to their interests. A vice president strives to become senior vice president so he can move into a more expensive house in a more expensive neighborhood that ratchets up the pressure from coal-shoveling in a boiler room to tightrope-walking level. An actor works his ass off to become famous, only to realize this way of life prevents him from ever walking down the street unaccosted and finds people with cameras chasing him his every waking hour.
I seem to get into these themes of ambition on here regularly – probably because I’m in my 40s and find myself, especially living in New York, puzzled over why people do the things they do. I’m trying to understand the roots of this blind ambition I see in so many people here – and wondering whether I should recognize it as an enlightened state of being or a character flaw. I don’t believe either extreme is entirely true, but having spent enough time around people who have “made it” in some sense, I believe their lives are no better than anyone else’s, save it would pain them to acknowledge that. Way too much time, money and hard work has been spent to ever ponder that.
Value seem to be what all this comes down to. What do you value in your life, and what are you willing to do to obtain what you value? I’ve learned that I value sanity, physical health, reasonable financial security and minor creature comforts. Earlier in life, I thought I would want or need a big house with property to live on. I wouldn’t mind getting a house, but not for the obscene price tag you’ll find in the immediate NYC vicinity. In the back of my head is that concept of a nice house with property – sure, I’d like to have that – but it’s not a burning priority. I’m shocked that I can live in a small apartment, but I’ve learned that having a ton of physical space to roam around in isn’t a necessity. I would value that sense of privacy – I feel like I’m missing that in my life – but I can make-do with what I have. Living anywhere in an urban area, save for the highest-end real estate, you will have to put up with other people’s bullshit.
Which, I’ve learned, in and of itself, is not a bad thing. I’d prefer not dealing with pricks on a routine basis, but doing so gives you more worthwhile experience on how to get by in life. Of course, live here long enough, and it’s hard not to try on the “prick” hat occasionally and find it fits very nicely. It’s impossible to spend decades here and walk around in that sanctified state where you forgive every transgression and have eternal patience in every situation. I was that way for about five minutes in 1987.
I don’t’ know exactly how or when I stopped worrying over all those things I once desired – to be famous, married, tastefully wealthy, benevolent lord of the manor. I wouldn’t say no to any of these things, but again, I’m noticing how life works more than what I desire. Living in New York tends to make people strip down their lives to core essentials. How much money do I need to live. How much time and space to stay sane. How many people to feel loved. The answer tends to be “not a lot” to most questions. But in having that reductionist way of seeing the world, that sense of closing ranks also sinks in emotionally.
I think when we’re younger, we sense all these possibilities swirling around us and feel like we have to spread our arms out wide to pull them all in, whether or not we ever pursue them. As times goes on, our arms are occupied only with what we can carry. And carrying things is harder than thinking about things you want to carry. As with so many other things, if you think you’re failing or doing something wrong, the simple ability to stop and question yourself means you’re doing better than you think you are. But we’ve been trained to think anyone who doesn’t make himself highly visible as an archetype of power and success must have failed in some sense.
The quest for the grail! I don’t know where it goes for some people … the quest for the morning can of Old Milwaukee, and anything good that happens after that, icing on the cake. I sometimes think all of the things I noted above are just rationalizations and bullshit I tell myself to get by. But even if that is the case, that’s how life goes, you go along, things happen or don’t happen, and you learn from each turn in the road. When I write things like this, I sometimes think, “Christ, this sounds stupid, like it should be written in crayon, it’s so easy to understand.” But it’s not that easy to understand and often takes years of getting it wrong before getting it right – and I mean living it, not writing it down and thinking that makes it real.
For me, it feels like a sort of muted epiphany, the slow transition from possibility to reality. Our childhood and teenage lives are all about imaging possibilities for ourselves, but the rest is dealing with reality, and finding out what we desired may not have been what it appeared to be. Maybe it was exactly what it appeared to be, and passing time made us see it differently. As a kid who wanted to be a writer and loved rock and roll, so much of life back then was lived inside my head. I distinctly remember doing this constantly – imaging myself as the rock star creating the music I was listening to. I did this for years and listened to a lot of music this way. Again, I can’t pinpoint when I moved away from that fantasy. But now I just listen to music and get as much pleasure from it. Maybe not that lightning bolt of recognition I felt as a teenager, but growth and understanding like I never new at that time.
I think Dad passing along a few years back wiped out that fantasy world. Even before that, 9/11. I can’t explain it, but before that I enjoyed reading, and writing, fiction. Afterward, some aspect of my nature just closed down on fiction. I had no urge to read or write it. To this day, I’ll rarely read a work of fiction, or write any. I guess when you feel your life directly threatened in some sense, it makes the mind shift gears into survival mode, for me at least. And when Dad passed on, that sense of no longer being a kid really sank in. Even at the time it happened, on the cusp of turning 40, I still felt that fantastical sense of being child inside. I came away with much more of a sense of fending for myself in the world, which is exactly what happens when you lose a parent. I wouldn’t even call it losing Dad as a guide – just the reality of one of the few people in the world I knew I could absolutely count on in any situation, no matter what, no longer being there. God bless you if you’re cracked the code and feel that sense of security with a lot of people, because I surely haven’t.
Would Dad be proud of me now?Hell , yeah. He’d be annoyed that I wasn’t making more money and didn’t have a wife and kids. But he’d roll with it. I suspect he always thought “the writing thing” was a load of BS and was over-joyed when I started making more money in NYC offices than he did as a factory worker … in his mind, that was why he sent me to college. Of course, I’ve never been all that happy with this turn of events, but not miserable either, and able to live my life with certain levels of self respect and security that surely made no sense to me through my 20s. Obviously, I think I should incorporate professional writing more into my life, but if you take a good look around the writing world over the past decade, paid writing positions have been disappearing like the rain forest. So I'm not holding my breath on that one.
I think the grail for me was simply being able to write, like this, however I wanted. If you went back to the garden of Gethsemane, chances are Christ wasn’t passing around a golden chalice to the apostles. It was probably a grubby wooden bowl. These guys were on the run, outlaws, about to get the hammer dropped on them by the Romans, not working in any traditional sense, wandering around in dirty robes, just trying to survive the crazy path they had set themselves on against all sanity and reason. I relate to that more than I do golden chalices, and blood, and kings and knights wandering the land, thinking having that thing is going to make everything hunky dory. I always had the grail. Something tells me you always had it, too, in whatever sense the world felt right to you. The trick is not to lose it.
What does one do when he finds the grail? In the Monty Python version, while storming the castle that held the grail, King Arthur got arrested by modern-day English bobbies for earlier lancing a TV documentarian who had crossed into the time-space vacuum created by good comedy. The gist is you find the grail and sail off into a golden eternity of permanent grace … sort of like suicide bombers getting X number of virgins in paradise. (I’m not sure why having sex with virgins is considered paradise … reality would be a lot of crying, belly-aching teenage girls asking is it over yet? in pained tones and then cat-fighting while you set about relentlessly jack-hammering the rest. 80 porn stars, I understand. Not 80 virgins.)
I’ve since come to understand that most people are living their lives by the holy grail method. Instead of a golden bowl that held Christ’s blood, they’re thinking wealth and fame more than anything else. Find these things, and you’ll be happy forever. Or someone to marry. Kids. Big house. Not much else fits the bill. Usually a small handful of archetypes that make people feel secure in their lives.
Well, funny things happen on the way to the grail. And even funnier things happen when you get the grail. Sooner or later, it dawns on you that the grail is made of plastic with “Made in China” stenciled on the bottom. Christ’s blood is Cherry Kool-Aid. The myth of the grail fades to the reality of your life, whether you’re fruitlessly chasing it the rest of your days, or have found “it” ten-fold. If you’re married and have kids, it all just sort of fades into who you are. Ditto, fame and fortune. You can surely enjoy the fruits of these labors, but you’re still whoever you are, whoever you were before you set out on this mythical quest.
I’ve never understood the concept of transformation in our lives which, in essence, is the Holy Grail myth. You will be transformed from something lesser to something greater by obtaining this magical thing. Unhappy girlfriends carry on about “personal growth” when all they really want is boyfriends getting new hobbies that cater more to their interests. A vice president strives to become senior vice president so he can move into a more expensive house in a more expensive neighborhood that ratchets up the pressure from coal-shoveling in a boiler room to tightrope-walking level. An actor works his ass off to become famous, only to realize this way of life prevents him from ever walking down the street unaccosted and finds people with cameras chasing him his every waking hour.
I seem to get into these themes of ambition on here regularly – probably because I’m in my 40s and find myself, especially living in New York, puzzled over why people do the things they do. I’m trying to understand the roots of this blind ambition I see in so many people here – and wondering whether I should recognize it as an enlightened state of being or a character flaw. I don’t believe either extreme is entirely true, but having spent enough time around people who have “made it” in some sense, I believe their lives are no better than anyone else’s, save it would pain them to acknowledge that. Way too much time, money and hard work has been spent to ever ponder that.
Value seem to be what all this comes down to. What do you value in your life, and what are you willing to do to obtain what you value? I’ve learned that I value sanity, physical health, reasonable financial security and minor creature comforts. Earlier in life, I thought I would want or need a big house with property to live on. I wouldn’t mind getting a house, but not for the obscene price tag you’ll find in the immediate NYC vicinity. In the back of my head is that concept of a nice house with property – sure, I’d like to have that – but it’s not a burning priority. I’m shocked that I can live in a small apartment, but I’ve learned that having a ton of physical space to roam around in isn’t a necessity. I would value that sense of privacy – I feel like I’m missing that in my life – but I can make-do with what I have. Living anywhere in an urban area, save for the highest-end real estate, you will have to put up with other people’s bullshit.
Which, I’ve learned, in and of itself, is not a bad thing. I’d prefer not dealing with pricks on a routine basis, but doing so gives you more worthwhile experience on how to get by in life. Of course, live here long enough, and it’s hard not to try on the “prick” hat occasionally and find it fits very nicely. It’s impossible to spend decades here and walk around in that sanctified state where you forgive every transgression and have eternal patience in every situation. I was that way for about five minutes in 1987.
I don’t’ know exactly how or when I stopped worrying over all those things I once desired – to be famous, married, tastefully wealthy, benevolent lord of the manor. I wouldn’t say no to any of these things, but again, I’m noticing how life works more than what I desire. Living in New York tends to make people strip down their lives to core essentials. How much money do I need to live. How much time and space to stay sane. How many people to feel loved. The answer tends to be “not a lot” to most questions. But in having that reductionist way of seeing the world, that sense of closing ranks also sinks in emotionally.
I think when we’re younger, we sense all these possibilities swirling around us and feel like we have to spread our arms out wide to pull them all in, whether or not we ever pursue them. As times goes on, our arms are occupied only with what we can carry. And carrying things is harder than thinking about things you want to carry. As with so many other things, if you think you’re failing or doing something wrong, the simple ability to stop and question yourself means you’re doing better than you think you are. But we’ve been trained to think anyone who doesn’t make himself highly visible as an archetype of power and success must have failed in some sense.
The quest for the grail! I don’t know where it goes for some people … the quest for the morning can of Old Milwaukee, and anything good that happens after that, icing on the cake. I sometimes think all of the things I noted above are just rationalizations and bullshit I tell myself to get by. But even if that is the case, that’s how life goes, you go along, things happen or don’t happen, and you learn from each turn in the road. When I write things like this, I sometimes think, “Christ, this sounds stupid, like it should be written in crayon, it’s so easy to understand.” But it’s not that easy to understand and often takes years of getting it wrong before getting it right – and I mean living it, not writing it down and thinking that makes it real.
For me, it feels like a sort of muted epiphany, the slow transition from possibility to reality. Our childhood and teenage lives are all about imaging possibilities for ourselves, but the rest is dealing with reality, and finding out what we desired may not have been what it appeared to be. Maybe it was exactly what it appeared to be, and passing time made us see it differently. As a kid who wanted to be a writer and loved rock and roll, so much of life back then was lived inside my head. I distinctly remember doing this constantly – imaging myself as the rock star creating the music I was listening to. I did this for years and listened to a lot of music this way. Again, I can’t pinpoint when I moved away from that fantasy. But now I just listen to music and get as much pleasure from it. Maybe not that lightning bolt of recognition I felt as a teenager, but growth and understanding like I never new at that time.
I think Dad passing along a few years back wiped out that fantasy world. Even before that, 9/11. I can’t explain it, but before that I enjoyed reading, and writing, fiction. Afterward, some aspect of my nature just closed down on fiction. I had no urge to read or write it. To this day, I’ll rarely read a work of fiction, or write any. I guess when you feel your life directly threatened in some sense, it makes the mind shift gears into survival mode, for me at least. And when Dad passed on, that sense of no longer being a kid really sank in. Even at the time it happened, on the cusp of turning 40, I still felt that fantastical sense of being child inside. I came away with much more of a sense of fending for myself in the world, which is exactly what happens when you lose a parent. I wouldn’t even call it losing Dad as a guide – just the reality of one of the few people in the world I knew I could absolutely count on in any situation, no matter what, no longer being there. God bless you if you’re cracked the code and feel that sense of security with a lot of people, because I surely haven’t.
Would Dad be proud of me now?Hell , yeah. He’d be annoyed that I wasn’t making more money and didn’t have a wife and kids. But he’d roll with it. I suspect he always thought “the writing thing” was a load of BS and was over-joyed when I started making more money in NYC offices than he did as a factory worker … in his mind, that was why he sent me to college. Of course, I’ve never been all that happy with this turn of events, but not miserable either, and able to live my life with certain levels of self respect and security that surely made no sense to me through my 20s. Obviously, I think I should incorporate professional writing more into my life, but if you take a good look around the writing world over the past decade, paid writing positions have been disappearing like the rain forest. So I'm not holding my breath on that one.
I think the grail for me was simply being able to write, like this, however I wanted. If you went back to the garden of Gethsemane, chances are Christ wasn’t passing around a golden chalice to the apostles. It was probably a grubby wooden bowl. These guys were on the run, outlaws, about to get the hammer dropped on them by the Romans, not working in any traditional sense, wandering around in dirty robes, just trying to survive the crazy path they had set themselves on against all sanity and reason. I relate to that more than I do golden chalices, and blood, and kings and knights wandering the land, thinking having that thing is going to make everything hunky dory. I always had the grail. Something tells me you always had it, too, in whatever sense the world felt right to you. The trick is not to lose it.
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Riding the Storm Out
Man, what a winter. Right now, New York has around a 56-inch total for snow, with the record being 72 inches from that awful winter of 1995/96. At that time, I was living in the Bronx and recall the first blow, that huge, three-foot blizzard we had that January. It sticks in my mind mostly because I watched Elvis Presley movies all day on AMC while the city ground to a halt. When I got to work the next day, the powers-that-be asked where I’d been the previous day, as one of my lunatic coworkers actually made it into work from Brooklyn, a four-hour trip that normally took 30 minutes.
“I stayed at home because the mayor was on the TV telling all non-essential workers to not go to work. There was a blizzard? My train wasn’t running until 4:00 in the afternoon, and then only sporadically? Did I miss something? Were you here?”
“Well, Eugene made it in from Brooklyn yesterday.”
“Anybody else?”
“Well, no.”
“So, why are you asking me why I wasn’t here, which was obvious, when only one person came in, and I’m guessing he spent all day doing nothing?”
I didn’t last much longer at that place. I’ve always wondered what goes through an employer’s mind with a little head game like that, asking a very dumb question, the sole purpose of which seems to be to humiliate what in this case was a very good worker. I didn’t make it into work because I was sane and realized I’d be taking my life in my hands to try to get to an empty office. The real question should have been mine: “Why did no one in a position of authority contact each of us and let us know not to risk our lives trying to get to work?” (I’ve since seen that “just play dead” management technique used many times on questionable snow days. Each time by managers who never showed up for work themselves.)
I didn’t have to worry about snow cleanup at that time as my landlord, Eddie, had it under control, and only had a small swath of sidewalk in front of the house to worry about. Unlike the 60 or so feet of sidewalk I clear out now for my landlord in Queens, which took three hours with this last winter blast, 18 inches of wet, heavy snow that I had to pile on drifts of over a foot frozen over from previous storms. It’s getting to the point where I think six inches of snow is a blow-off.
The worst came two Fridays ago when I badly twisted my knee on the ice … on my landlord’s sidewalk, adding insult to injury. Friday night, just after dark, walking home after picking up some Thai food. Sometimes the mounds I shovel, on a sunny day followed by a freezing night, will melt and leave ice patches that are hard to see on the black macadam leading up the sidewalk.
Well, it got me this
time. My left knee slid straight out from under me, bent outwards at an awkward angle, and I sensed I should lean back into the snow bank to avoid an even worse bend, not going down hard, but knowing my knee had just twisted at a horribly bad angle. I sat there in the snow, feeling like a dick. Some people across the street had seen what happened and asked if I was OK. “Yeah, I’m fine. Only embarrassed.” They laughed. I felt like an old man, like I should have had one of those fur hats with a feather in it, a pipe full of Borkum Riff, big Woolrich coat, pair of horn rims, a schooner of Cutty Sark waiting for me by the fire, a Mitch Miller album on the hi-fi.
I told myself I was OK, but I wasn’t. The knee felt a little stiff that night, but not debilitating. The next morning, I could barely move it, as with all serious injuries that never feel that bad before a long rest period. Lo, two weeks later, I finally feel back to normal, but have lost my boxing chops in the mean time and feel even more pudgy than usual. A bad feeling for January, but by the same token, if you’re going to miss time in a gym, there is no better time than now, with all its temporary “resolution” members who won’t be there come late February.
And I keep seeing this mental patient walking the streets. I’m not going to snap his picture, lest I draw his attention to me, and he turns out to be a serial killer. I’ve seen this guy at least half a dozen time the past month, each time I was shoveling out from a storm, and once on the coldest day of the year, with the temperature around 15 degrees that morning. He must live in the newer apartment complex at the end of the block. This cheap block of apartments sprung up on the other side of the playground a few years back, and I get the distinct vibe it’s a bit of a post-college playground, drawing in those “first apartment” kind of people who seem hopeful and stupid in ways that can be either endearing or revolting. A few times I’ve walked by Saturday morning to find the sidewalk littered with cigarette butts and empty drug baggies, meaning a late-night party, just the kind of thing you should do when you have neighbors above, below and on each side of you. The people I see walking up the block from those apartments skew hard to either party bozo or earth mother in training.
But that morning, it was 15 degrees, agonizingly cold and as warm as it would get all day, and up the block comes this white guy, appears to be mid-20s, good-sized guy, clean cut, wire-frame glasses, short hair, could have been a linebacker in high school. Did I mention all he’s wearing is a white t-shirt, blue gym shorts and a pair of sandals? No socks – socks would be uncool. The first time I saw him dressed like this, after shoveling out from that 12/26/10 blizzard, he was carrying a hard drive. At first I thought, oh, this guy’s just walking a hard drive over to his friend’s apartment. I saw him minutes later on the train with the hard drive … in his shorts and t-shirt after he had walked the same 8-9 blocks like I did in knee-high snow.
But the coldest day of the year, this guy comes up the block in the same outfit. Only this time, it’s during the school load-in next door, dozens of kids being dropped off by their parents to get into the local PS, appears to be grades 6 to 8, or so, kids around 10-13 years old. I figure, this guy’s going to hook around the block to avoid walking through the milling bunch of kids just up the block. Most people do as the kids are giddy and full of themselves first thing in the morning, goofing on each other and looking to be brats before they walk into school. No … this guy heads straight through the kids. And they all start pointing at him and laughing. It was like an episode of The Little Rascals, the type of braying laughter that would accompany Alfalfa running down the aisle with firecrackers going off in his pants pockets.
And this guy was totally oblivious. Just let a path clear for him, which it surely did, while all these little brats laughed their asses off. I couldn’t help laughing myself. This guy was nuts. And I’ve seen him during every storm since, which has been a weekly occurrence, walking nonchalantly through the dead of a brutal winter in only shorts, t-shirt and sandals. He appears to be going to work. I’ve seen him on the train. Where he works that requires that sort of outfit, I don’t know. I fully expect to see him walking around in the summer with a parka and a pair of snowshoes. I must admit, he’s constructed a wonderful urban defense mechanism – everyone he meets must surely think he’s crazy and not to be messed with – but at what cost?
I’ll treat his presence as a good, albeit insane, omen. You need to get a little crazy to deal with a winter like this, because to deal with it head-on is to encounter a floating sense of depression that will spread out for weeks, each passing storm serving as a reminder that it aint over yet, and we still have a ways to go. I have to believe February isn’t going to be as bad a month … but who knows? We could conceivably stick with this “storm a week” pattern through the rest of winter and have mounds of snow with us well into March. Shit, I hope not. But at some point you have to entertain the possibility and ask yourself how you’re going to cope with that reality. And while I wouldn’t say walking around in a pair of shorts and t-shirt is the answer, it at least points in the right direction, of making yourself oblivious to your physical environment and walking your own path, however warped it may be.
Forecast is for more snow/rain/sleet weirdness this Tuesday and Wednesday. At this point, a depressingly familiar weekly occurrence. Gone through six bags of calcium chloride from the local hardware store – went through three all of last winter. Here’s hoping the gods smile on us, and we don’t beat that shitty 72-inch record. This winter has been a matter of degrees, seeing just how far you can go before you snap, and realizing you most likely will not snap, but spend a lot of time, shaking your head and muttering, what the fuck over this Book of Job type weather. Got the long winter vibe way ahead of schedule this year.
“I stayed at home because the mayor was on the TV telling all non-essential workers to not go to work. There was a blizzard? My train wasn’t running until 4:00 in the afternoon, and then only sporadically? Did I miss something? Were you here?”
“Well, Eugene made it in from Brooklyn yesterday.”
“Anybody else?”
“Well, no.”
“So, why are you asking me why I wasn’t here, which was obvious, when only one person came in, and I’m guessing he spent all day doing nothing?”
I didn’t last much longer at that place. I’ve always wondered what goes through an employer’s mind with a little head game like that, asking a very dumb question, the sole purpose of which seems to be to humiliate what in this case was a very good worker. I didn’t make it into work because I was sane and realized I’d be taking my life in my hands to try to get to an empty office. The real question should have been mine: “Why did no one in a position of authority contact each of us and let us know not to risk our lives trying to get to work?” (I’ve since seen that “just play dead” management technique used many times on questionable snow days. Each time by managers who never showed up for work themselves.)
I didn’t have to worry about snow cleanup at that time as my landlord, Eddie, had it under control, and only had a small swath of sidewalk in front of the house to worry about. Unlike the 60 or so feet of sidewalk I clear out now for my landlord in Queens, which took three hours with this last winter blast, 18 inches of wet, heavy snow that I had to pile on drifts of over a foot frozen over from previous storms. It’s getting to the point where I think six inches of snow is a blow-off.
The worst came two Fridays ago when I badly twisted my knee on the ice … on my landlord’s sidewalk, adding insult to injury. Friday night, just after dark, walking home after picking up some Thai food. Sometimes the mounds I shovel, on a sunny day followed by a freezing night, will melt and leave ice patches that are hard to see on the black macadam leading up the sidewalk.
Well, it got me this
time. My left knee slid straight out from under me, bent outwards at an awkward angle, and I sensed I should lean back into the snow bank to avoid an even worse bend, not going down hard, but knowing my knee had just twisted at a horribly bad angle. I sat there in the snow, feeling like a dick. Some people across the street had seen what happened and asked if I was OK. “Yeah, I’m fine. Only embarrassed.” They laughed. I felt like an old man, like I should have had one of those fur hats with a feather in it, a pipe full of Borkum Riff, big Woolrich coat, pair of horn rims, a schooner of Cutty Sark waiting for me by the fire, a Mitch Miller album on the hi-fi.I told myself I was OK, but I wasn’t. The knee felt a little stiff that night, but not debilitating. The next morning, I could barely move it, as with all serious injuries that never feel that bad before a long rest period. Lo, two weeks later, I finally feel back to normal, but have lost my boxing chops in the mean time and feel even more pudgy than usual. A bad feeling for January, but by the same token, if you’re going to miss time in a gym, there is no better time than now, with all its temporary “resolution” members who won’t be there come late February.
And I keep seeing this mental patient walking the streets. I’m not going to snap his picture, lest I draw his attention to me, and he turns out to be a serial killer. I’ve seen this guy at least half a dozen time the past month, each time I was shoveling out from a storm, and once on the coldest day of the year, with the temperature around 15 degrees that morning. He must live in the newer apartment complex at the end of the block. This cheap block of apartments sprung up on the other side of the playground a few years back, and I get the distinct vibe it’s a bit of a post-college playground, drawing in those “first apartment” kind of people who seem hopeful and stupid in ways that can be either endearing or revolting. A few times I’ve walked by Saturday morning to find the sidewalk littered with cigarette butts and empty drug baggies, meaning a late-night party, just the kind of thing you should do when you have neighbors above, below and on each side of you. The people I see walking up the block from those apartments skew hard to either party bozo or earth mother in training.
But that morning, it was 15 degrees, agonizingly cold and as warm as it would get all day, and up the block comes this white guy, appears to be mid-20s, good-sized guy, clean cut, wire-frame glasses, short hair, could have been a linebacker in high school. Did I mention all he’s wearing is a white t-shirt, blue gym shorts and a pair of sandals? No socks – socks would be uncool. The first time I saw him dressed like this, after shoveling out from that 12/26/10 blizzard, he was carrying a hard drive. At first I thought, oh, this guy’s just walking a hard drive over to his friend’s apartment. I saw him minutes later on the train with the hard drive … in his shorts and t-shirt after he had walked the same 8-9 blocks like I did in knee-high snow.
But the coldest day of the year, this guy comes up the block in the same outfit. Only this time, it’s during the school load-in next door, dozens of kids being dropped off by their parents to get into the local PS, appears to be grades 6 to 8, or so, kids around 10-13 years old. I figure, this guy’s going to hook around the block to avoid walking through the milling bunch of kids just up the block. Most people do as the kids are giddy and full of themselves first thing in the morning, goofing on each other and looking to be brats before they walk into school. No … this guy heads straight through the kids. And they all start pointing at him and laughing. It was like an episode of The Little Rascals, the type of braying laughter that would accompany Alfalfa running down the aisle with firecrackers going off in his pants pockets.
And this guy was totally oblivious. Just let a path clear for him, which it surely did, while all these little brats laughed their asses off. I couldn’t help laughing myself. This guy was nuts. And I’ve seen him during every storm since, which has been a weekly occurrence, walking nonchalantly through the dead of a brutal winter in only shorts, t-shirt and sandals. He appears to be going to work. I’ve seen him on the train. Where he works that requires that sort of outfit, I don’t know. I fully expect to see him walking around in the summer with a parka and a pair of snowshoes. I must admit, he’s constructed a wonderful urban defense mechanism – everyone he meets must surely think he’s crazy and not to be messed with – but at what cost?
I’ll treat his presence as a good, albeit insane, omen. You need to get a little crazy to deal with a winter like this, because to deal with it head-on is to encounter a floating sense of depression that will spread out for weeks, each passing storm serving as a reminder that it aint over yet, and we still have a ways to go. I have to believe February isn’t going to be as bad a month … but who knows? We could conceivably stick with this “storm a week” pattern through the rest of winter and have mounds of snow with us well into March. Shit, I hope not. But at some point you have to entertain the possibility and ask yourself how you’re going to cope with that reality. And while I wouldn’t say walking around in a pair of shorts and t-shirt is the answer, it at least points in the right direction, of making yourself oblivious to your physical environment and walking your own path, however warped it may be.
Forecast is for more snow/rain/sleet weirdness this Tuesday and Wednesday. At this point, a depressingly familiar weekly occurrence. Gone through six bags of calcium chloride from the local hardware store – went through three all of last winter. Here’s hoping the gods smile on us, and we don’t beat that shitty 72-inch record. This winter has been a matter of degrees, seeing just how far you can go before you snap, and realizing you most likely will not snap, but spend a lot of time, shaking your head and muttering, what the fuck over this Book of Job type weather. Got the long winter vibe way ahead of schedule this year.
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