You Can Leave Your Socks On

Late-Mondays Times Square underground platforms are a kind of reality stage for a cross-section of New York City not everyone gets to sample.  Recently there is a sprinkling of track workers because
there is always post-midnight repair activity and endless delays... so you have more time to settle into the drama. By 2 AM there is little musical entertainment, but plenty of hustlers and salesmen of a variety of wares-- stolen cheap watches, re-wrapped candy, articles of clothing and discarded earbuds...  talkers, lonely displaced people with nowhere else to spend the night... shuffling old women often close to your own age...dragging their shopping bags, hunched over and unwashed... the squishy stenchy hardcore car-sleepers... rats taking their time doing a sluggish diagonal dance on the tracks because train traffic is sparse; there is a kind of rare silence.

Last week a nice-looking guy with sideburns sat down on one of the wooden seats and took off his boot.... he had clean white sport-socks on, and he started in scratching.  Minutes later he'd scratched so hard the ground was littered with dancing clumps of white fuzz from the cotton... and still he went at it; I tried not to look.  After a time, a sick yellow-green ooze started to penetrate his socks; my stomach turned over...  he stopped-- as though the liquid seepage was the antidote to the itch.  He shook out his boot, stuck his foot in and walked to the north staircase of the uptown 1/2.  Just like that.

Not even a minute later, a drunk young couple sat down where he'd been working his foot... I tried to warn them, but they were too busy groping each other.  I'm no germaphobe but I felt a little tense in my seat on the train;  I started to reconsider trying on shoes in thrift stores.  In every car, the late-shift was working the crowd--- asking for handouts-- food, old gloves, a smile...  the same girl I've seen nearly every week gets on looking for enough money to buy a room for the night.   Her eyes are glazed, her feet are filthy and bare, her skin is pocked with needle-marks and infected sites.  It's more than sad.  You squirm and don't give her money to get high... but you feel ashamed of the C-note in your pocket even though you can barely come up with your month's expenses, even with the care packages from the kitchen at your gig.  A man gets on and sits across from you-- bloodshot eyes, a wedding ring-- he looks guilty and somehow sated.

All the stories in New York City-- the lit and unlit windows, the drawn shades, the silhouettes.  My friend's boyfriend has been seeing another woman; I know this and don't say anything.  It's not my role to hurt her, to bust him... I'm caught.  Another woman just ended her marriage when she found her husband hopelessly addicted to porn and heroin.  She must have been the last to know, or the last to want to know until it was in and on her face.

My best friend in the world is an ex-- one of those men who comes in and out of your life between disastrous relationships and marriages. You figure one day you'll marry him, but you're not quite ready to surrender to yesterday's clothes that have lost their style and no longer really fit.  Still, he's there.... or is he?  You walk by his place one random night; he always comes to yours-- his is essentially a mattress on the floor, some piles of books, dingy walls and permanently shut blinds.  You buzz up... and a woman answers... it seems he no longer lives there... has he forgotten to mention to you that he's moved?  Who are you, you text.  You get home late-late and he's been calling..  and the tales begin to unravel like a committee of scriptwriters batting around a scene.  On the third night your lawyer friend looks up his court records and it seems he's secretly married.  He's living with some Asian waitress--- sublet his place and moved to Queens.  You are stunned... not exactly hurt, because it's not like that-- but stunned.  Like your security blanket has been ripped away... like a betrayal.  He cries... how could he have lied to you?  Every day-- every FaceTime, every call, every joke-- because he sees you nearly every day-- tells you everything... except this.  Day 4, he claims he's miserable, he hates his life-- he hates the lies, he's always loved you-- well, sort of, because it never really worked out between you...  but he has been your health-care proxy, your emergency contact.  Who is this man?  The Asian woman is a bitch and is showing her age-- not a nice comment, because she is like twenty years younger than you are.  I guess this happens once the green card is inked.  The double life thing...

When I was a teenager I saw my best friend's father making out with a young woman in a restaurant.  It wasn't him, my Mom assured me... but it was.  Or it wasn't 'him' but it was my friend's father.  Itch.  The oozy, itchy leaking feet underneath those clean white socks.  Like a metaphor.  Who are these people?  I remember when we were young kids--- underneath our clothes we were beautiful and innocent... still honest enough in our free-love practice not to really hurt anyone... clean, even when we were bad.... but life goes on-- our scars and wounds and complications besiege us with small disappointments and failures... and we escape-- some of us have music and art-- fantasy... but others confuse their life opportunities with an emotional vacation... they create these webs of deceit and they knot themselves up so there is no way out without ripping off an arm or leg.

I don't love the guy.  No, but I expected loyalty-- honesty?  Some version of this... after all, what did he have to lose?  Me?  If you watch someone scratch long enough you start to itch.  I don't want to see what's underneath most people anymore.... we use our imagination.  This is why people love their pets-- their babies...  with humans it's complicated.  Needs... secrets-- stuff we hide that festers into addictions and lethal diseases... syndromes and mental illness.  So what now?  Amputate the guy?  You would never have known-- what were you missing?  Not  much?  You didn't need so much from him-- just trust, faith-- the phone calls and facetimes-- the seat next to you at your Mom's funeral.... It's a quandary.  The truth is more complicated than it should be.  It's a dirty fork in your road, here.

At the end of the 2 train ride, you get out.. you've got a couple of bucks to buy vegetables at the fruit stand; the same panhandler always there to greet you at 3 AM.  Hey, Baby, he says, like a question.  You wind up with 17 cents.  You tell him... 17 cents.  That's it.  That's not it, he says-- that's a fucking blessing.  He thumbs-up you as you drop the coins into his cup and he looks happy.  Clean.  Simple.  The truth.  He's a damned angel, this guy.  Somehow you feel better.

Sisters.net

Last night some featury not-quite-coherent bit of news surfaced on my radar, alleging staggering statistics of on-campus rapes among Columbia freshman.   So I read a little further, with my own prejudices and skepticism, and learned the alleged perps are not predatory intruders but matriculating Columbia athletes and students.

As a mother, I know freshmen don't have the best judgment.  They are prone to the excessive drinking and partying that is part of the 'independence' declaration of college life.  Suddenly kids are forced to  set curfews and boundaries and I remember occasionally wishing I could blame my mother when I lacked the courage to say no to one thing or another.  Sex?  Pretty much a passionate 2-thumbs up, but another generational can of worms back then.  It wasn't until I was a young adult, pursuing a career, that I really encountered tough boundary issues and power ploys.

My son at the age of 19 was accused on Facebook of being a 'deadbeat dad'.  This by another sophomore who had skipped a day or 2 of the pill and wanted him to pay for her over-the-counter pregnancy test.  She used to call my house at least once a week in a coke-induced panic-- her apartment was on fire, someone was trying to break in-- -anything to require his presence at 3 AM, and to spend the night.  It was like gender-reversed rape when he'd arrive, exhausted and emotionally bullied by her threats and schemes.

In no way would I ever suggest that any of these Columbia women had not been assaulted; what does confuse me, in most of the cases I read--- is where is their head, their thinking, their 'sisterhood'?  I grew   up in an era where pervy uncles and drunk friends of our parents would cross lines and make suggestions.  Pediatricians touched us inappropriately and told us 'the boys are going to love this' when you get a little older.  Our bosses and mentors in our first jobs pressed their suited groins against us and groped us under the desk.  Did we tell our mothers?  Our teachers?  We did not.  But we told each other.  Our friends, our cousins--- whomever-- we told each other-- we confided, we confessed, we exchanged  humiliations and nightmares.  And we grew collectively stronger.  Once we shared our fears, we could look at them and decide what we could do.  We developed a collective jury of our intimate female peers.

We all knew who liked rough sex, we all knew who kissed and told and who disrespected our preferences.  And we knew what to do about it.  Of course there was always a girl among us who was attacked or assaulted without warning.  But we backed her.  We went to the police if we had to; we held each other's hands for abortions, we raised money and protected each other.  We navigated the free-love era with our hearts and brains and one another.  We learned to give love and take love, to try things and not fear them, and to trust our instincts.  I'm not sure, in this Kardashian age, where my son and his girlfriends had seen the Paris Hilton tape a year or two after Bambi,  that there is the sense of a 'net' among women.

Mothers in 21st-century New York City are pretty protective.  We interview and interrogate and hover.  No one is going to touch our baby with impropriety.  Doctors are required to have a female PA present during exams.  We have discussed sex so much our kids don't want to know what we knew.  They want to do it and have it and they want to act like rappers and ho's when they feel like it.  For all the soft porn and T & A & P everywhere we look, sex and love seem just a little cheap.  Girls are desperate and often date the B list.  Women my age are lonely and court guys they wouldn't have given a light at a bar in 1985.   Most guys who take advantage of women do so because no one stops them.  No one confronts them.  Not a tribune of Columbia administrators, but the girl they dissed and her girlfriends.  In my day, that guy wouldn't have lived to tell the tale without a beating from someone…and he wouldn't have dared repeat his offense.  Not in the same geographic hub.  For all the face booking and internet gossip and instagram posting,  how the f--  is the sisterhood failing women?

I am about to do a 'women-in-rock' fundraiser for anti-violence and domestic abuse.  We conscious warriors who have often waded through catcalls and ass-pinching to play our music with pride. We swam upstream to survive the sexist prejudices in a male-dominated musical world.  We support each other, we share, we talk, we rock and we are loud.  My message to the Columbia freshman-- stop blaming the administration for failing you, and start showing up for each other.  Use your brain and instincts and avoid men who are assholes.  An ounce of prevention, etc… protect your assets and stop spreading yourselves so thin.  You are not victims-- you are smart enough to manage your life.  You have a goddam voice and you can arm yourself with a few lessons in self defense.  Be generous with your sisters and see where you are and get out while you are safe.  And don't be afraid to love the ones who love and deserve your righteous body.  That is our legacy and our just dessert.  Amen.