Love in the Time of Coronavirus

A quarantine is not an opportune time for a break-up.  While we hear news reports (and occasional courtyard noise) that warn of spikes in domestic violence, the operative word of shelter-in-place would be 'shelter'.  For some couples, even a honeymoon is claustrophobic... but we have ventured beyond even a long holiday confinement into what feels for some like a prison sentence.

By the Harlem Meer today, I met a young man with a suitcase, desperately phoning everyone he knew. His girlfriend, he told me, kicked him out.  That is cruel punishment at this time when it is not charitable but dangerous to offer your sofa to a stranger.  What did you do, I asked him... and he muttered, through his mask... You mean what DIDN'T I do?  Which I understood to mean not his transgressions but the simple boyish failure to meet his partner's standards.

It's harder to deceive in the unstaged world of home confinement.  We are each other's mirrors; we can't hide behind excuses of 'I'm working' or 'at the gym' when we're having a drink at a bar, flirting a little too long at the office... hanging out... having a cigarette--- enjoying a little personal solitude.  Personally I cringed when one of my guests posted a Thanksgiving dinner photo; my home is my private domain?  But this month alone I have received so many home-broadcast videos, films, demos... if I looked at them all I'd be screen-blind.

At first it was a little novel seeing the usual TV newscasters sitting at their desk... their bookshelves revealing years of research and reading choices.  Most all of them, I've noticed, have the Robert Caro biographies-- the Winston Churchill World War II set (often unread-- mint condition).  I have a place in my heart for the dog-eared spine of Judy Woodruff's Oxford History of the American People; it looks just like mine-- a well-used souvenir of student days.

But the jokes have worn thin... the celebrity cameos seem callow and annoying.  Happy people in their well-stocked places with clean children-- housekeepers, toys, amusement, music-studios, ping-pong tables... showing how homespun they are-- mixing facials out of refrigerator ingredients, trying on costumes... looking 'casual', showing just enough of their personal environment to seem privileged.  Many of them are not aware of how this fuels domestic discontent for viewers.

A few blocks north of me is a woman with 9 large children... and a small 2-bedroom apartment.  Her husband is out of work but trying to drive a rented Uber car to make ends meet.  I have seen her in the grocery store where she stretches out her enormous shopping task into an afternoon activity for the kids who are literally bouncing off walls and turning over carts.  At least there are distractions-- label-reading opportunities.  She has aged five years since the pandemic began.  They have no wifi, she told me-- the kids received BOE tablets but they are useless unless they are 'somewhere'.  The youngest one was sitting in the front of the cart with a box of Confetti Cupcake Poptarts showing me how she knew her colors (well... a couple of them).  At any given moment, at least one child was crying, one stomping his foot.  Her tab was impressive; food stamp allowance for eleven people edges well into 4-figures.  Eating is the narcotic of the poor and under-stimulated.  Her boys have hoop-dreamy eyes and seem to grow by the hour.  She gives me a look-- shakes her head.

I would like to take one or two off her hands... to shelter that poor boy on the bench by the Meer... to even reach out and host a friend.  But we cannot.  I remember a time when I broke up with someone-- and you just wanted the world to end-- you wanted that person to have no life and no friends and no future without you.  We are not supposed to complain in the face of the litany of names listed every day of the pandemic victims... we are supposed to wait on lines and gladly pay twice the value for second-choice staples we need to survive.  Today I waited 35 minutes  just to find the price of chicken was more than I could manage.

But I am alone; I am old.  My son, I know, has violated the quarantine-- has 'dated' against social distancing recommendations.  I really can't blame him... I remember the early days of the AIDS epidemic, standing in a crowded bar weighing disease against passion-- and the latter always won.  There's a risk, yes... but I can't imagine being so young and independent-- having worked hard to make himself a home--  to watch his future being wrung out like wet laundry.  He is restless and ambitious.  I cannot answer his questions.

Personally I have no regular means of support... but I do recognize that I have a place to live in which I have collected things of importance to me-- books, instruments-- things that offer me a window in this solitude.  My rich neighbors with the renovated new space-- they have nothing... I hear their children, too-- trying to learn an instrument, being scolded, in the end sitting in their large bookless rooms with phones and tablets like social pacifiers.  They order food deliveries-- that is an event, an adventure.  Yes, occasionally I see the restaurant bags and sigh. They have no idea.

On the street outside the tent hospital Ubers line up at 9 PM to transport the medical staff home.  We applaud the workers every night, and they seem a little happier these days... less stressed.  At least they are not confined to a hostile apartment. The shiny black Billy Graham truck announces they are 'Sharing in the name of Jesus Christ.'  I'm not sure about that...  I don't like to speak for Him.

Shout out today to the white egret at the Meer today who almost let me touch him...to the fruit-vendor who stuffed a finger of fresh ginger in my bag and would not take my money... to the market that sold me a giant honeydew melon for $3 that is the best thing I've had in weeks...  And to all those who have met disappointment in love-- better sooner than later, I suppose.  The pandemic at its best will be like a sieve that filters truth from illusion.  And may that boy find a mother or grandmother who will take him in... the night is cold and bench-sleeping is not for the weak of heart.

Goodnight, Moon

The last moments of the year always seem rushed.  They should feel weighted, as though the cumulative burden of 364 days compresses in an inverted hill on some temporal grave.  We are given the post-Christmas week like a winter denouement in which to inventory or regret-- to grieve and mourn or steel ourselves for the coming challenge.  In my image-bank-- probably an illustration from some childhood advent calendar or storybook-- I imagine these days as a chain of painted skaters-- hand in hand, colored hats and scarves flying backward in a joyful procession... waving goodbye eternally as their silvery blades speed them into another chapter.

It seems someone always dies on Christmas-- or just before.  It's a kind of superstitious dread probably left over from early childhood when the death of some relative precluded a family vacation-- death in those days meaning little but a nuisance-- having to forego some pleasure to attend some service and having to whisper around my stern father.  No one bothered to explain anything like it, and except for Bambi, I had little sense of loss-- only obedience and absence.

My son happened to have been born on the brink of a decade, so for him the 2020 demarcation has a certain synchronicitous resonance.  For me, it falls oddly between two strangely marked personal years-- one a prime number which seems wrong, after all this accumulation.  Doesn't anything rhyme with my age anymore?

Nothing, I remember discovering, composing a grade-school poem, actually rhymes with Christmas.  I do remember once trying to write a limerick which began 'You can take the 'Christ' out of Christmas...' but nothing ever seemed complementary enough.  It felt like one of those songs Ezra Pound wrote at some point, and the philosophical and semantic implications were more than I wanted to take on.

I always hated holiday vacations, actually... I longed to be in my room, to linger over my gifts and inventory my toys and closets-- get ready for the coming year in which I would presumably grow and progress.  On trips there was no solitude... and I worried about pets and things which remained at home.  I remember once asking my mother on arrival at some mountain: 'How did the moon know we were here?' And she assured me that it would follow me till the end of time.  It would be there, as she would never leave me.

But she did leave me, my mother... and although I still have my wonderful son to think about, there was no one like my mom for receiving gifts.  She'd sit in an armchair by the fireplace wearing one of her succession of elegant bathrobes (they have all blurred in a vintage fashion-fantasy) and pretend to be completely delighted by whatever awkward article I'd create or buy and wrap up in elaborate boxery to prolong the moments of the opening.  It was as though I'd bestowed some royal honor on her-- she couldn't thank me enough or love it more.  It was everything.

My son just ended a relationship-- at least I think so, and despite the fact I splurged on some fashion faux-pas he craved, I could see there was no joy in his face.  It's fine, he always stoically insists-- or the ubiquitous 'no worries'-- the millennial motto.  I wanted to ask him-- Have you ever missed someone so much you sit and watch the traffic-channel for hours, on the off chance you might see their car or taxi pass in front of one of the street cameras?

But I didn't... and they have their Instagram and GPS...  their thousands of daily messages and I have only my memories and images... a few old letters and photos-- not nearly enough from the days which seem to have grown in importance.  Looking at the calendar, 2020 seems so wide-eyed and innocent... but I am no longer sure that I'll last this one out.  2021 is already winking at me and I have yet to discover its meaning... it now seems unfathomable that twenty years have passed since the millennial timestamp.

This end-of-year interlude of rain has given the moon a chance to rest behind the cover, here.  She has not aged a day since we first met-- her solo act is still the main celestial attraction for me despite what I have learned about the infinite galactic spectaculars.  I've surely tipped the balance of what remains from what has been.  And I've been lucky;  certainly there will be not so many new years ahead.  Most of what I read has been written by dead people, as my teenaged son used to remark; much of what I listen to has been recorded by dead people, and grace to technology, we can still 'see' some version of those we miss the most.

There is a book I used to keep in which I recorded my Christmas lists; besides family, a great number of the names are unfamiliar now-- the fickle trajectory of our life-acquaintances.  I no longer need to list; I am piling up those things I want to 'gift' the world under some imagined tree... it seems unbearable and inevitable that I will leave behind more than I will befriend this year... but the moon has yet to complain... and I will, in her image and the sense of rain, God-willing, walk bravely into the next year with all the rest of you.  Amen.

The Branding of Leonardo

Post-Thanksgiving for me is a calm time-- no more pre-Christmas frenzy in my current state of financial deprivation; my son and I managed to snag the very last tree of the Whole Foods Black Friday Event; it was deemed unsaleable because of a trunk defect-- tall and skinny, it was the one for me, and as it turned out, harbinger I hope it is, the ugly duckling Frasier swanned into utter holiday perfection.  A work of nature's art.

Anyway, with the scent of the forest, I was dared by an old friend to take an entire night 'off' and binge on reality television.  To parallel the US 'marketplace', the Housewives have morphed into a brand rather than the ridiculous parody of what happens when you mix the ingredients of mediocrity, extreme cosmetic prosthetics and Twitter with absolutely no content but scenery-- real estate-- restaurants, bad behavior, etc.  Their share of the store-bought network pie, from the jewelry, cars, homes-- is now huge.  The Kardashians have become a dynasty-- it's like the Partridge family with 21st-century values and portfolios.  Everything is scaled to enormity... and the words 'real' 'reality'.. 'real-real'... are everywhere, reminding us that we are being not just scammed but duped and insulted.  At least the cooking shows have some entertainment value although it baffles me that an audience is so hooked on an experience which depends primarily on the two senses missing from television.  Would we watch a Dylan concert with no audio? Doubtful.

It's been many years that we've overused the term 'really'; as a teenager I doubled it for emphasis... because like so many things, we need these words to prop up and convince.  Authentic-- another one.  Art these days often comes with a certificate, a pedigree or document.  Why?  Because its authenticity, in this sea of mysterious Monopoly money, is uber-questionable.  There used to be a chain of command... things were traceable and there were stamps and marks for ownership.  Things were commissioned-- things were kept in institutions or palaces-- churches.  Yes, things were stolen, occasionally.  But talent was unique and copyists were copyists.  Scholars kept logs of these things, which became catalogue raisonnés.  I studied Art History... connoisseurship and restoration.  It was a responsibility.  We looked and compared, had many hours in museum basements looking at forgeries, copies... comparing to masterpieces.  We discussed and often failed to conclude.

Then money entered the equation.  Art is one of the least regulated businesses.  It is mysterious and incomprehensible for many.  Collectors rely on 'experts' for advice and education.  Besides an important jewel, it is one of the few instances where one man can own something rare and unique.  Priceless, they say.   There is one Mona Lisa.  But we read about scandals-- even catalogue raisonnés where the authors received fees for certificates and inclusion.  The question of authenticity becomes dubious... which only seems to fuel the market further.  Cut to the Leonardo da Vinci sale... the star of the Post-War and Contemporary auction-- does this not, in itself, speak to us?  Okay-- since the $110 million Basquiat, all bets are off.  Wall Street loses and gains many billions each day.  This is the way money moves in a world where the managers make the market and profit either way.  A million dollars has become cheap in Manhattan culture.  Money has grown geometrically for the rich.  The housewives might have begun in apartments, but now they have jets... mansions; the Countess looks poor compared to her friends with the diet margarita-mixes and personal enterprises.  Their twitter audience is massive.  They rub shoulders with the celebrity culture and now our President himself is the greatest American reality show.  His brand and personal wealth will be many multiples of its pre-election worth.  Stupidity reigns and Greed is its Prime Minister.

But seriously... the Salvator Mundi-- it just doesn't look right.  There is a reason this painting was shelved and sold for a mere 45 pounds in my own lifetime.  No one claimed it.  The experts who taught me, way back, are gone. I doubt they would have been fooled. The restorer, from the IFA-- my alma mater, although I dropped out of the program because the ethics of restoration began to worry me.  This is big business now... and piles of crooked money are laundered through the art market-- masses of fakes are certified and authenticated and carry this like a vintage sheepskin.  I owned a Jean Michel Basquiat and a couple of things Andy gave me.  Did they have certificates?  No, they did not need paperwork because they were actually real.  At the time, of course, they were inexpensive.  Unmarketed art is affordable and sometimes very, very good.  There are artists quietly suffering and painting small masterpieces.  For the ultra-rich, this is not sexy.  Hedge funds do not buy a man selling home-goods on the street; they are invested in the geometrics of money.

Art, like religion, is suffused with belief.  The art market exists because collectors believe in the value of what is really a few dollars' worth of linen and paint.  It is a symbol, the way this da Vinci has become a symbol, to me, of the way anything can be marketed and deified-- not unlike those TV evangelists.  I hated this painting... found it uber-ironic that the number 45 was still in the figure-- with an additional string of zeroes.  The Christ figure crosses his benediction fingers... he reminds me a little of the king on the new BBC Versailles series-- the handsome and indulgent sovereign who is beginning to get a little fat and just corrupt enough to try to use religion to consolidate power.  Glam piety.

How many scrappy start-ups have gone public and raised a billion dollars overnight-- the market pushes up share prices and investors sell for profit?  Another kind of 'belief'.  Not to mention this is the way they can afford these paintings.  Monopoly money buys hotels, golf courses, mansions and art.  It's a whole network, an incestuous web of artifice and fantastic wealth.  Look at our president.  The Midas asshole of quackery.  The man-who-would-be King, if he could only....

At 3 AM, we watched a back-to-back of My 600-pound Life.  More dubious reality? You can't really make up this kind of thing.  What struck me is these people who consume food all day until they are literally paralyzed--  they are all poor.  They are mostly suffering from some childhood abuse issue... and they are not alone.  They have a partner who loves them-- enables, yes-- that, too.  But they have some kind of love the housewives lack?  The scale of obesity-- well, it maybe parallels the obscene scale of wealth on the other shows... this is a different kind of greed, though... it is some kind of inverted need that becomes desperate and personally destructive.  And they all have TVs.  Large ones.  They are victims of this culture, trying to make their way and failing on a massive scale.

I took a break and went up to Harlem to see what I could buy for $1.  I got 5 pounds of slightly defective but decent tomatoes.  A haul.  On the street I stopped to pick up a penny.  What you want that for, a man asked me as he smoked a butt in the mild night air?  Because it's real, I said.  I know it's real.  And it's free.  And I can trade it in anywhere.  Unlike the Salvator Mundi-- a very large title for a painting that enriched those involved in the deal... but saved no one. Certainly not the world.  My bad, Jesus might say.

Biblical Sense

When I was in graduate school a girlfriend of mine convinced me to audition with her for a topless dancing job.  Just come and watch, she urged.  It was somewhere on 42nd Street; some nights I imagine it was the very stage where I have played bass guitar so many times.  I was maybe 22 and she was even younger-- still had baby fat, she did… but she was sophisticated and read Proust and Kafka, like I did, and she was very sure of herself.  Besides-- I was taking home $92 a week working 40 hours… and she assured me I could make that in one night.  No one would ever recognize me; it was not the kind of place our Dads-- Madison Ave. businessmen-- would prowl.  We went down on a sunny Tuesday afternoon-- but there was like a night curtain in the bar, the way Atlantic City casinos keep you time-blind.  We both liked to dance-- the music was decent… we were bold and bohemian and our boyfriends were bandmates; it seemed safe, in a way… like a sister-thing.  She was less shy than I was; afterward, while the manager was laying out the rules, I covered myself and she didn't.  But it wasn't about the dancing-- it was about getting guys to buy you an overpriced drink, which would actually be ginger ale or seven-up or water… and there was just something so sleazy about the cheap little scam of it… I turned it down.  She, on the other hand, took the gig.  Years later-- maybe 25 years later-- my guitar player went to a strip club in San Francisco, and there she was-- a little matronly but still working it.  No judgment-- I admire her, in a way, and if she writes the novel we both talked about when we were young-- well, hers will undoubtedly sell better than mine.  She friended me recently on Facebook.

On my first trip to Amsterdam, I went with the boys to the Red Light district.  I was fascinated: the working girls were in these little shadow box environments-- they reminded me of those doll-suitcases they made in the 1950's… where you'd open a mini-trunk and there would be this unclothed doll with her wardrobe and little accessories in a compact cardboard closet.  I selected an angelic looking blonde in aqua lace for them-- but the guys went for the slutty ones in red and orange.  I waited in a coffeehouse-- envying the girls, in a way.  No one looked worried or sad or lonely.  It was like a tiny stage-- and they were both the play and the actor.

Backtrack to my junior year in college.  I lived off-campus and our little flat was famous for welcoming transient rock musicians, writers, travelers… one of our regular guests was a prostitute from Manhattan who was hands-down the most fascinating woman I'd met up to that point-- built like a model, the face of a madonna--with style and taste, a razor sharp tongue and an exotic vocabulary of 4-letter euphemisms.  She smoked like a chimney, borrowed money from everyone--  perched herself on our living room sofa for days at a time, generally on an amphetamine-fueled binge-- preferred the company of my gay roommates.  One night a drunk psychotic ex-boyfriend threatened me with a gun, and she stood up and decked him.  It was incredible.  Then she called campus police.  Fearless.  Dignified.  Plus she had carte blanche at Max's and treated me to a few nights at the Chelsea when it was memorable.

I noticed last week's New York Magazine chose the subject of prostitution for their cover article.  Not sex trafficking, but the voluntary kind.  Seems kind of tired and overdone-- especially with lines of sexuality culturally blurring and the constant parade in New York City of old men with fat wallets and their much-younger well-heeled dates.  It's a bit of a yawn, the whole issue.  I was surprised recently to hear a friend of mine acting horrified that someone at our table was on his way to a late-night massage in what is effectively a brothel… I mean-- how many dates, dinners, boring conversations has he paid for-- anticipating… okay, so romanticism is not dead.

But really, what is unromantic about paying for sex?  It doesn't seem bad to me.  In a culture where every other storefront is a spa or hair salon or a specialty food merchant --a photography studio or gym or cosmetic boutique--- acupuncture, facials, massage-- colonics and manicures-- it seems a tiny leap to seek some essential physical pleasure or relief.. or variety.

When my son was a baby-- I struggled and occasionally took a few odd jobs-- painting or learning how to prep and tile bathrooms… the money was decent and I kept nursery school hours.  One day my 'boss' asked me to paint his dick.  I laughed-- but then I realized he was serious.  So I did it.  He gave me a $50 and I felt some kind of power.  Okay… it progressed.. no details… but I felt no shame and no  guilt.  I bought things for my son.  Clothes.  Nikes.  The guy was obsessed with me and brought me breakfast and overpaid me for my work.  It was a little fun-- we listened to music.  He had a wife.  I felt 'professional'.  Then after a while it began to feel a little desperate and needy and I was turned off.  Years later he tried to 'hire' me-- I thought about it--  but it turned me off.

Now I'm old.  The idea that someone would pay me for sex is absurd.  But the idea that anyone is paid for sex seems not only reasonable but obvious.  Plenty of women get the on-the-job harassment anyway-- why not put it on the table and get your end-of-year bonus in advance?

It's Easter.  There's a well-believed myth that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute.  I think the Bible nowhere states this; she was a sort of fallen woman, or maybe suffered from nerves or mental illness.  The image of a woman washing Christ's feet is compelling and pious and loving.  Maybe erotic in a chaste way.  Whatever-- in Saramago's version of the Gospel, they slept together.  Sometimes we love someone and the only gift we can really give is ourselves.  Sometimes they want this.  Sometimes they want to pay for it-- guilt, or gratuity.  The act of love is sometimes just sex… maybe the next best thing-- why not make it available… is it not a need?  Are these Craigslist posts and desperate online dating shoppers not looking for some kind of pleasure if they can't find true love and many of us never have this?  We have arrangements-- marriages, affairs, relationships.. a consensual contract and exchange of money seems to distribute the power equally.  And as any divorced man will testify, at least you get what you pay for… in some version… as opposed to giving away what you bought and didn't have.

Anyway, less judgment, more acceptance-- we're human; the lesson of Jesus is forgiveness and mercy.  We do what we do to survive and we are all accustomed to paying for food and shelter… if we could just as easily order take-out physical intimacy, there might be a lot less aggression and anger.  I'm sure Jesus wouldn't mind that.  And I'm not looking forward to debate or discussion-- just airing a bit of slightly dirty intimate laundry...