Forever 2021

On the way uptown today some vintage music was wafting out of a restaurant storefront, serenading the couples gathering at sidewalk tables... 'This magic moment...' I heard, and thought,.. who is listening to this now in late-pandemic 2021?  It just seemed so incongruous with the masked people looking at their phones, texting their cocktail orders... 'so different and so new... will last forever....' the song said.  

I wondered if any of these couples was having any sort of 'magic moment'-- not sure with online dating and hook-ups whether they have these 'pregnant' moments... whether they even heard the Drifters singing 'till the end of time'.  It didn't seem so.  Me-- I remembered hearing this one on the car radio on the way to primary school-- the way old rock and roll seemed like a world I could not quite penetrate.  

Years later I hung out with Doc Pomus the composer at the old Lone Star... a girthy man in a wheelchair,  he always seems in memory to be wearing the printed shirt he has on in that famous shot with Bob Dylan.  He laughed a good deal... just didn't look the part of the lonely romantic songwriter.  Obviously he did not last forever; he passed away at 65... I will remember him most for the line...'my room it has two windows and still no light shines through' or some variation of it... the heart of a bluesman who knew failure as his most constant lover.

Around the time the Drifters were on the charts, a neighbor-boy gifted me a pile of comic books-- Archie, Superman... it was kind of a romantic thing for a 2nd grader... and while the strips bored me, I was utterly fascinated by the advertisements on the back cover. Realizing some of the items might have caused a parental fit, I ordered a safe pack of 1000 postage stamps for a single dollar.  

They arrived in a plastic-windowed envelope-- fell out everywhere like tiny treasures.  I was elated.  Faces, portraits... maps, creatures... landscapes.  They were from countries I'd never heard of-- in strange languages... each one a little world.  I became something of a collector-- typically seeking out the most picturesque.. or the ones from museums and libraries... famous authors, paintings... not for value but for looking.  One of our neighbors moved to Egypt and sent letters with amazing stamps; sometimes she visited African countries and slipped in extras.  I began to find pen pals... in Mexico, France, Italy... just to greet the stamp when the post arrived; letters were secondary.

My father gave me a stitch-counter-- a kind of magnifier with a light and this opened up the little world even further; the engraving was so fine and delicate-- the coloring-- the paper they were printed on. Of course there were the new editions-- I'd go to the Post Office with my mother and pick out our Christmas and Easter stamps-- it was my job to lick and stick them on holiday cards along with a festive seal. But US stamps never had the appeal of the ones from overseas that were suffused with a kind of exotic presence.  And they'd come so far... on ships, on airplanes... from leather sacks carried by men and women who spoke strange languages.  

Once a week I'd take my little wagon to the local library-- load and unload my weekly 'read' which was impressive in those days when any escape from domestic claustrophobia was welcome.  I discovered I was eligible to borrow the enormous Scott Catalogues-- well-fingered huge volumes covered in plastic with thousands of ultra-thin pages of identifying images.  I lay on the floor and pored through these, looking for stories and details.  I fell asleep with them.  

My son inherited many boxes and books of stamps-- some in glassine envelopes, alphabetized by country-name, some of which no longer exist... we briefly had a 'moment' when he was maybe 12... until sports and girls replaced hobbies.  Some nights I take one out, and mentally roam the world a bit-- the Doc Pomus world of the Drifters... when these tiny squares and rectangles gave me global headroom... or when Doc and his peers sweated out inky lyrics on rumpled paper in smoky rooms on the Upper West Side.

It's sadly rare these days that I send actual letters; the quick appeal of my laptop is just too compelling, my handwriting is creaky and unreliable.  I visit the post office occasionally to send out books... and while there are all kinds of stamps-- with rockstars, astronauts, poets-- they are pre-glued and digitally printed; there is no magic here, no nostalgia or vintage connection.  These are coded money-units-- not for saving in scrapbooks but for currency.  Most of the first class stamps, to accommodate the quick obsolescence of postage, are now ironically marked 'forever'... not the Doc Pomus/Drifters forever-till-the-end-of-time forever but the cheap internet/ guaranteed money-back kind. 

It's also rare in 2021 that I find anything in the mailbox with a true stamp-- occasionally from France or Sweden.  In March I sent an old photograph to one of my childhood friends.  I pasted on a forever stamp I'd had since December (Christmas forever) and included a poem.  It never arrived.  So much for forever... lost in dead letter purgatory?  Who knows?  But tonight I wanted Doc Pomus to know I honor him every damn time I post a letter.

Trash and Vaudeville

At any given moment, assume one of your friends is depressed, one is having a nervous breakdown or terminal writer’s block or suddenly can’t get it up to have stage fright; one has a broken limb or appendicitis, or crippling tinnitus. Some weeks these crises align and your phone rings off the hook at 4 AM, those of you who are pathetic enough to still have one.

So I have a new diagnosis for virtually everything, including cancer and anxiety: Lethal Procrastination. Another expression for Life-as-we-know-it. Just having a diagnosis, for the hypochondriacs and drama queens among my callers--- is a little relief.

My Super has a Hummer. I am dumping coins onto my bureau, looking for the larger ones so I can make my monthly maintenance payment without a penalty, and my super who can barely speak any kind of language commonly understood in New York City has a free apartment on a posh street, a pretty great looking wife, an iPhone and a Hummer.

Nevermind that the main itinerary of this car is from side to side of our street to avoid city parking penalties, and maybe an occasional run to Home Depot. He no longer ‘does’ garbage or plumbing or cleans or much of anything but move the Hummer around and make calls on his coop-sponsored iPhone to union plumbers and maintenance men whose bills have caused my monthly maintenance to exceed my monthly income. Oh, he also opens envelopes at Christmas.

Speaking of trash... he has an aversion to this. But for me, Tuesday and Thursday nights on the sanitary Upper East Side are like archaeological documentaries. I, like my mentor Andy, am secretly fascinated by the ironic dichotomy of what some people need and others discard. By the way people eat sandwiches-- -what they leave, what they cut off, what they take home for their dogs, what they spill out, what they pick up. Their wives and girlfriends. The oreo cream-lickers, the potato-skin peelers, the bone suckers, the slurpers, plate-cleaners, cigarette stubbers. The confusion. The fact that my neighbors spent 6 million on re-finishing their perfect apartment and then hired an art consultant who spent another 6 million buying a celebrity artist’s ‘ready-made’ which is essentially something the guy found in the trash and glued onto something else he found. Points for the artist. Zero points for the people on the 2nd floor who paid $150,000 for some uninspired Grafitti from a Phillips’ auction when they could for $50 have hired our own doorman who has style and spends his nights tagging city landmarks and is quite famous in his ‘hood.

As often happens in middle age, I’ve lost my fashion footing. Besides being able to distinguish leather from vinyl, I can scarcely tell Forever 21 from Balenciaga. Well. Okay... not Balenciaga. But is it the case that some high-fashion does take inspiration from strippers and prostitutes? Plastic surgeons do. Jeff Koons and Richard Prince do. Editorial make-up and hair do, occasionally. Underwear. So if trash is on the mannequins, does it not follow that the real deal is in the trash? Old wood, art deco stoves, hand-made glass door handles. Books. Vinyl. Wagner boxsets. These things are on the sidewalk in the new regulation clear-plastic bags. Everyone loves a bargain; especially we New Yorkers, where on any given block you might see 10-30 'sale' signs, from groceries to services to clothing. But on Tuesday and Thursday nights curbside, your plastic and money are no good. These deals are unsullied by commerce, lucre, mark-ups and markdowns. They all bear the celestial pricetag. Free.

Of course the homeless and the professional bottle-collectors are well-aware of my neighbors’ failure to distinguish value, and they are hard at work on Tuesday and Thursday nights. There are even trucks to collect the furniture for resale and refinishing ---the stuff may even end up tarted up or further distressed at Urban Archaeology or one of those cavernous crammed trendy shops on Houston Street where a young couple or a design-star contestant will re-purchase some ‘vintage’ and spend a great sum to have it white-glove-delivered to some Manhattan loft.

Remember in Warhol’s movie, the shoes Holly Woodlawn got from the garbage? The ones that slickly dressed yuppie-guy tried to procure from her? In my senility I get them confused with the ones Beyonce was wearing on her last red-carpet appearance.

The Bi- and Tri-Cycle of Life. Stuff. Junk. New garbage. Crumpled cash. Trash. Vintage. Trash. Crash. I miss Andy. I could have gifted him my newly-chiseled Jenny-Holzeresque future-vintage recycled grave marker. He might not have perished so prematurely of Lethal Procrastination. Perhaps the fermented will indeed inherit the earth.