Chelsea Peers

I spent the week looking at art.  There was the New Now sale at Phillips featuring several Afro-American contemporary superstars, complete with a pop-up basketball court--then Swann-- gallery viewings, photography in East Harlem,  and a small Chelsea space which auctions dusty and vintage treasures which smell of old New York. I travel alone.  Masked and mingling, anonymous-- my itinerary included no destination which required a fee or the presentation of mandated documents.  But somehow visuals seem acceptable with a mask. Crowd activities just don't feel right; it's as though everyone is partying and pretending to be 'back' but it's a kind of forced celebration.  I don't trust it.  Actually I don't trust myself these days. I'm liable to speak my post-pandemic mind and one thing that has emerged from the grief and the anger and the Black Lives Matter movement is a kind of naked honesty.   

Most of all I loved the dusty space with the stacks of estate canvases and once-discovered objects whose owners had passed away or been replaced by descendants who value space over things.  I lingered until they were sick of me.  Walking east from 11th Ave. an SIR truck passed.  I waved like an idiot, remembering all those fantastic rehearsals and evenings in studios which felt as though I'd 'arrived' as a musician.  One night there was a private performance of a reinvented Blondie with a tiny audience.  I was privileged.  

From the Highline the profusion of new architectural structures gives 'concrete jungle' a new meaning.  It's kind of fantastically overwhelming and feels nothing like the perpendiculars of tradition. The paths were packed with tourists photographing, taking selfies, shooting video.  Glass windows reveal fishbowl lives of the apparently rich occupants of these new buildings which require plenty of income.  No one seems to care that they are observed; it's a culture of posting and Instagram-- everything is up for public 'grabs' so why bother with curtains or shades? But it's also a visual carnival of shapes and profiles.

In between the new are the remnants-- the stalwarts of old buildings where long-time renters hang on to their little corner of a city which has grown like weeds around the stumps of their abodes.  Thousands of apartments tower over their modest 4-story existence, rob them of sun, expose them to the hordes of walkers trying to wrap their insatiable tourist heads around the spirit of New York.  

For me the greatest 'jolt' is the Hudson Yards... it's absolutely a transplanted vision grafted onto the hips of the Manhattan profile.  It was disorienting and although I've viewed it many times from the river, walking through its plazas and amusements was like being in another state.  I'm not the only person who found the Vessel an architectural failure, but its current status as a sort of empty morgue is more than ironic.  Who knew it would become a living blingy monument to death?  

In the 70's we'd sometimes climb a fence and explore the Yards.  I remember the SVA students had their annual exhibitions there-- warehouses and space-- accommodated performances and films.  One came often to my gigs... invited me shyly to see his work there, among the old tracks and the pitted earth.  It was  a sort of journey into a cavernous house with electric music and crowd-echo-- plastic cups of wine and hundreds of aspiring artists in their Doc Martens and plaid...  I felt 'old'; I was something over 30... and I searched out my painter, in a small dark corner where his work was a heart-stopping revelation... studies in white, like contemporary Vermeers, that took my breath away.  I was speechless.  He was drunk-- kind of a cliché for painters at their own openings... but I tried to convey my utter admiration for his work.  He was young, midwestern-- played drums in an indie band... had this sort of James Dean tormented innocence aura.

A few nights later he rang my doorbell.  People did that in those days.  He brought a bottle of cheap wine, and the painting, wrapped in a rag.  It was so beautiful.  Yes, we listened to Luna I think it was... his friends... and yes, we slept together.  He was passionate and intuitive the way painters were, in those days... I felt I'd been initiated into one of his works.  I felt painted, from the inside.  It was a one-night thing for me-- or maybe one week.  I waved at him across the subway tracks at Columbus Circle years later.  I think he designed windows for Tiffany and that sort of thing.  He was no longer a boy.  I still had my bass.. he threw me a salute and a midwestern kiss with his talented hand with which he now only rarely painted.

Walking through the Yards in late September sunset, Year-of-the-Pandemic + 1, I remembered this... the smell of the train tracks, and the faint aura of turpentine on his skin.  These things do not happen anymore-- meetings in the privacy of dark crowds and old underused warehouses where unknown history has unfolded, and few things were photographed.  The walls and the ceilings and floors have been removed like old debris... moneyed people occupy the piled homes with stainless steel kitchens and marble saunas... with gyms and theaters and adult play spaces.  

There are few urban fairy tales like this now, things that happen only in utter privacy and the dark.  Certainly not in this ironically masked culture when everything else is laid out in online platforms and Instagram posts.  And the painting--- someone stole it from my home one night; I gave a party-- I think I mentioned the tragic story in another blog.  One of my guests... put it under their coat, slipped it out the open door... I hope it is loved, wherever it is.  Occasionally I imagine I will see it at an auction, in a thrift shop or gallery... but in the context of this culture, it is a small thing.  It would surely be overlooked.  And as old as I have become these days... as poor and as unacknowledged, I felt kind of young walking through the sad newness of this architectural Disneyworld-- the plazas and the courts-- the arenas and playgrounds...  I am initiated... I am masked... but I am seeing.  I am experienced, I answer the Hendrix question.  Here we are now; entertain us.

Lady and the Tramp

I maintain my own private version of 'New Yorker of the Week' awards.  The designees get no public accolade or acknowledgment... just a silent heads-up from me...  some spare change occasionally, because most of my heroes are either under- or unpaid for their courage and humanity... but since I am a member of the economic underprivileged, I hesitate to insult them with my pathetic donations and instead offer a kind of prayer on their behalf... or literary-underground immortality in one of the poems I scatter like autumn leaves find their way to obscurity-- or maybe to some school-child's fall art-project where they will be briefly loved.  I can't help myself.

Last week's winner was a homeless man, sleeping temporarily on the steps of a church on Varick Street.  I would not have noticed him; it was late, it was beginning to rain…and the staggering numbers of men spending nights on the streets in the last few years has inured us all to the sidewalk population.  They seem to have food; their daily panhandling income, they tell me, averages somewhere between $50 and $150-- more than most real musicians I know earn for a gig.  They stay out of the shelters where their egos are filed and shaved down to a brand of humility that is more lethal than an overdose.  These places are dirty and dangerous.  Despite the rules and regulations,  possessions are not protected and sleepers are subject to violent attacks from other occupants who refuse to take their meds and experience psychotic and hostile episodes.

My man had risen around midnight-- relative calm on the streets-- to relieve himself… because as we all know, there are no public restrooms in the city after dark.  The homeless visit and even bathe in Grand Central, Port Authority, the various library branches, MacDonald's, those Starbucks stores which are kind enough to share their restroom combinations.  But at night-- well, even the parks are curfewed.  We have well-enforced dog-waste laws, but my son tells me in Soho and Tribeca there is so much human shit on the streets these days that business owners have had community meetings about this.  One store recently built an outdoor boxlike structure for advertisements and artistic displays.  Every day they had to shovel out the excrement and hose the receptacle down with disinfectant until they just gave up on the whole campaign.  Coming home at 2 and 3 AM, I have many times seen men defecating at either end of the subway platforms.

So my man squatted quietly at the edge of the steps,  and with his head bowed, stood carefully to clean himself with the pages of an old paperback novel.  I resisted the urge to see the title… but some passing young couples who witnessed his naked butt in the lamplight shadow-- well, they gasped and sniggered and pointed.  The thing was-- he was tall-- like a basketball player… and his sinewy legs and butt were so perfect and beautiful, and the grace of his rising, and even the way he pulled up his layered pants and fixed his clothing-- well, it took my breath away.  The sheer aesthetic reality of this man, trying to avoid falling into the cracks of the shelter treadmill, the humiliation and the consideration with which he waited until dark, until the traffic was moving, how he tried to avoid spectators… how his little pile of possessions was so neatly wrapped.  He was not that far from being a boy; I could imagine his mother, who loved him, or maybe failed to love him and care for him… the women he could have had, in another version of the story… an athlete-- a star… it broke my heart.

I got on the train, feeling helpless and almost guilty because I have a place to go back to-- a place to sleep and take a hot shower, where my books and my instruments, God-willing, are relatively safe and sheltered enough so I can leave them and go about my work.  Another disgraceful story on the discarded tabloids on the subway floor, with our orange-skinned Lego-President spouting more of his anti-humanitarian rhetoric.  He in his gilded rooms on Fifth Avenue, security alone costing more than the annual food budget of a small country… with his umpteen bathrooms and his tanning beds and hair-magicians… he couldn't survive a week in the wilderness.

Why is it we all pick up after our dogs-- we pamper and love them.. and have little compassion to adopt stray people… are disgusted and uncomfortable about their natural needs? Hunger is a force here… disparity is baffling, and for these fallen souls-- getting back onto the track is near-impossible in a city where so many of us are barely holding onto our homes, finding ourselves with a lower standard of living than we could ever have imagined.  I think of all those legends and fairy tales where the kings traded places with the paupers-- how it changed their worldview… what happened to this?  We are all counting our money here… me, and some of these homeless--- counting the change in our pockets to see if we can buy a slice or a coffee… and the Wall Streeters assessing the daily fluctuations in their portfolios-- pushing a button and making more money in a single trade than most of us will see in a lifetime… and they are happy to lend you credit, your friendly banker who pays you no interest-- for a mere 25-30%.  They bet on your failure to repay and they win big.

It makes no sense.  My version of this week's fairy tale has the winning Mega Millions ticket belonging to my man of Varick Street… although things don't work this way.  I do know the affliction of extreme poverty and homelessness is epidemic and chronic.  It leaves scars and residual symptoms for even those lucky few who manage some kind of recovery.  But most don't.  No sociologist or journalist or researcher into the phenomenon quite understands what it is like to be homeless and needy in a city like this, where you are chased from doorways and sidewalks of buildings filled with tenants paying $10,000  month for a few rooms… Lady, a local man begged me-- Can you let me in the gate?  He wanted to sleep in our trash alley where he will be locked safely against attack and theft.  I was reprimanded by my Coop Board for this nominal act of compassion in a neighborhood where a bakery now charges $10 for a doughnut and coffee.  Personally, I haven't bought myself a cup for years now.  Things are tight.  There but for fortune…. but that's another tale.

Today I remembered how my Mom once dressed me up as a 'tramp' on Halloween… at the time I had no clue what that meant, but I wore an old beat-up suit jacket and a bent hat and she smeared my face with coal like dirt.  I had a scarf-sack on a stick over my shoulder.  Everyone laughed and filled my sack with candy.  A man on the block told me about 'hobo' life; it seemed romantic.  I dreamed of runaway trains, of wandering, of campfires and hitchhiking…

Today I dream of a lottery for the poor-- where the billion dollar ticket gets divided among the homeless deprived angels of the street-- What was that old TV show… the Millionaire? The 21st century New York City update… that would be a reality show worth watching…  (to be continued…)

Bewitched

All Hallow's Eve-eve back in the early 1960's was always known as Mischief Night.  While you slept, your house or parents' car might be egged, tagged, covered with toilet paper and goop, smashed pumpkin meat or worse.  You hoped for the best.  When we were teenagers, we went out and witnessed the terror, sometimes participated in a little naughtiness-- no serious damage but some spray paint and mess.  There was a woman on the block behind us who was reputed to be a witch.  She came home at 7 AM after God-knows-what with a black kerchief tied around her head, and her shades were drawn all day while presumably she slept along with the vampires and goblins of our neighborhood.  A broom was frequently leaning against the front door-- most likely for sweeping her stoop, but allegedly among us kids this was her night transportation.  I looked inside her mailbox many times-- mostly the same catalogues we all got in those days; her name was Eunice B. Harrison.  We addressed her this way when we made prank phone calls during the day… we spied on her and left dead bugs and cut fingernails and animal fur in shoeboxes on her windowsill.

Years later my Mom told me Mrs. Harrison was a nurse and she worked nights.  That's what you think, I told her.  I'd never seen her face-- didn't know if she was black or white… but she was our only local flesh-and-blood designated ghoul and we nourished her mythology with tales and conjecture.  Ironically, a few short years later we'd all be obsessing over Edgar Allen Poe, dying our hair and dressing up to hang out at Rocky Horror showings.  So much for the withered legend of Eunice B.

I sometimes wonder whether my neighbors' daughters perceive me as a kind of witch.  I dress in black, leave my apartment late at night wearing a hat and carrying a strange looking case; often returning at dawn, my blinds drawn against the sun so I can get some daytime sleep. Then again, they  have a multitude of horror apps at their fingertips, all-Vampire TV, the Twilight series in HD 24/7, etc.  We had to invent our own entertainment in those days; the Wizard of Oz was shown once a year and it was an event.  In New York City, every night is Mischief Night… and in most neighborhoods, watchful parents accompany their kids while they trick-or-treat; we were on our own.  Fear was personal.

Anyone who has kept watch over a sick child or relative knows that night-workers have a different mindset.  I spent a week in an intensive care ward when my son was six and had a dangerous pneumonia.  His roommate was a young woman who had lived her whole life on a respirator; she was virtually non-responsive, but her Mom chose to keep her alive this way.  Days were peaceful; the shift nurses chatted and ate sandwiches, watched TV and socialized with staff.  But the overnight nurse sat quietly in semi-dark.  She read to the girl-- sang to her at times.  There were 2 emergencies that week-- panicky alarming episodes which required huge x-ray machines to be moved in and used.  These both happened at night, when patients who are not sleeping are maybe anxious and frightened… when death feels a little nearer and the human mind is that much more vulnerable.

Coming home late nights on the subway, I am surrounded by day-sleepers, by this culture of people who are all a little pale, a little subdued, who are used to walking the streets with black shadows, who brush shoulders with the hunted and haunted who either do not or cannot sleep during these hours-- who plot and plan, create, think, suffer, drink, take drugs… stalk, worry, grieve, search and avoid.   We understand one another, we feel a certain kinship.  Most of us are on our way home; there are few destinations at these hours-- there is a sense of denouement, we are without rush, we rely on the unreliable timetables of night trains which travel with delays and issues; very few of us protest and fret. We are tired and insulated, surrounded by our own thoughts and fears-- some of us have had a nightcap or two and know that little will be resolved before tomorrow.  There is a small sense of relief.  We often share jokes and smiles.  There is entertainment and there are beggars, but most of these have given up by 4 AM.  We eat, we dream, we nap a little.  I read and think; we grumble less at the frequent disruptions and detours.  We feel relatively safe in this state of transition.  We are going home.

When I was a sophomore in college I had some small health issue that required a few days in the hospital while they analyzed some organ or other.  It was nothing serious, and I was so young I had to stay in the pediatric ward.  They treated me like a princess.  One night I woke up to find a really handsome young resident sitting by my bed reading volume 2 of Remembrance of Things Past which I had to finish for European Lit.  I pretended to be asleep-- was so surprised and charmed by this; and can remember so well the passage he read:  about love and instability and the fact that happiness neutralizes the suffering necessary to sustaining the instability which is at the core of passion-- something like this, in the Proustian universe.  I remember these pastel-colored paperback books which I loved and cherished and carried for a year, and still, despite the fact I have 4 versions of this novel-- I keep these, to remind me of where I have been and whom I have touched while I read, and how this world-view changed my life and taught me to dissect and observe and feel these tiny moments.

I think this doctor had a kind of crush on me; I was lovely then and so young I couldn't reciprocate any kind of mature emotion.  But I remember well feeling so embraced by the night-- even in a hospital-- this sense of being watched and understood and cared for… the opposite of fear.

Tonight I had to take my friend to an emergency room.  Medicine for her is state-provided and uncaring  and callous.  She is in the excruciating indescribable pain of late-stage cancer and the hopelessness of her case only seems to provoke hostility in staff because they are reminded of their ineffectuality.
She begged me to take her back home; anywhere but there, at night.  There are no handsome interns to watch over her and read her Proust.  There is no one.  I am helpless and annoying because anyone who is suffering less reminds her that she is quite alone.  She wants to die and yet I feel she holds some tiny thread of hope that this is all a nightmare, and she will wake up calm and pain-free.  I realize tonight that she, like all those about to die, must first bury their own dreams and that is tough.  I walked home across town in this pre-Halloween unsettled weather and thought about the souls which supposedly fly around freely for this one night.  They outnumber the living by myriads-- they and their memories, and their parents and children and lovers… and for my friend-- her dreams of being a great actress have dissipated into medicated dreams of swimming and floating and nightmarish twinges.

I am sure this October 31 that my Eunice B. Harrison is among these souls and rather than spending her nights making wicked mischief on a broomstick, she sat by the bedsides of tired patients and gave her life for their comfort and solace, and never defended her honor to a bunch of clueless, mean teenagers.   So in my modern Gothic lexicon, she is the ultimate Halloween saint; I salute her and wear her black cape of goodness as my costume and only pray she will in some version watch over my friend and weave a spell of sleep and carry her through to some better moment.

Sisterhood of the Praying Hands Tattoo

My local homeless man asked me this morning if I'd been to 72nd Street and Broadway recently.  I have, I said… and yes, I'd noticed that a sort of shantytown is beginning to take shape on certain nights… and yes, there is a definite proliferation of the homeless.  They come in all varieties-- the ones who seem absolutely hopeless victims of circumstances-- then the poor planners, the drug addicts and alcoholics who would trade any kind of security for a fix… the beggars, the wounded and afflicted, the vegan dog-lovers who squat on corners and feed their pets boutique food, who ask for practical things like flashlights, batteries, toothbrushes and water packets.  They are safe there--- it's almost a little festive in the balmy summer nights… a kind of reality show of their own-- some of them swearing to me that they wouldn't trade their freedom for the oppressive landlord-tenant system, for a 9-5 existence working in fast food or retail just to put cornflakes in the breakfast bowls of a tableful of kids whining for $200 Nikes and an iPhone 7.

Sister, one calls me as I get off the 2 train at 3 AM… because I am susceptible to that nomenclature, since my own sibling is mean and heartless, wealthy and estranged.  He can almost feel my knees buckle imperceptibly as I reach into near-empty pockets and dole out whatever is left… 42 cents last night… yes, I travel light, when I am carrying my instrument.  Yes, he needs all 42… and I am painfully sympathetic to the less fortunate, despite the fact that a small thing like shoe repair is beyond my budget these days.  No, I cannot imagine not having a dry place to write on rainy nights, clean sheets and a warm bath for my babies, in past days… a door behind which I can lock my guitar and know that it will be there, unstolen, when I return, God willing.

I have thought long and hard lately about this will of God, as I check up on a neighbor who is in final stages of a wasting and wicked cancer-- a woman who just 3 years ago was living the careless and happy life of a bartender/actor with marginal financial success but with a devil-may-care attitude and a spirit of independence witnessed by her wild red hair.  She is now terrified, this new friend of mine-- of the unknown, of the pain, of the power of the disease to outwit any treatment or diet or prediction.  Fear is contagious.  I approach her with steeled nerves-- with love, because I know how callow people shun the sick at times…and with great admiration because she is living with a kind of grace and dignity that I don't think I could muster.  She thanks me for my kindness-- when I have not earned that attribute.  I can scarcely afford to buy her a Gatorade while her electrolytes are haywire and she is unable to manage much of anything by mouth at this point.  She apologizes for the occasional outburst or protest at the medical staff who calmly stick and stab her, wound her and send her home, because she is still, most of the time, categorized as 'ambulatory'.  So she goes upstairs and thanks God for her remote so she can distract herself with television, go online on her ancient computer where she can share side effects and symptoms with other patients, most of whom are desperately seeking affirmation or answers which do not exist.

God?  I ask myself, knowing full well He has never been the sort of miracle worker on a throne with a magic staff.  I imagine He, too, is as baffled by cancer as He is by the internet and robotics and Uber vs. Didi; by an artificially tanned presidential candidate, and by the bitterness of the lower half of the one percent.   No, there have not been many wealthy saints-- no matter how philanthropic this fractional minority with the economic majority may be, they still have way too much.  I, on the other hand, am in the lower half of the 99%… somewhere above the homeless, I suppose, but struggling to pay for intermittent phone service and lousy TV, afflicted with leaky pipes, insufficient heat, mice and various mechanical Catch-22s which make reasonable repairs impossible.

Still, I am alive… I am detached from some of my most cherished lovers, my children are independent but good humans…. my possessions have become things that are deeply poignant and meaningful… as though people have receded and the souvenirs have taken their place.  Try as I do, I cannot impart to my son the importance of this or that book, this pile of old handkerchiefs, these letters-- these hand-painted envelopes and this shirt from 1968… this beat-up guitar case.   To him, they are all things for the future post-mortem bonfire, the enormous thrift-shop pickup which will punctuate my departure.  For me, this seems unbearable now.

I am going out of town for a gig-- I asked my ill friend if I could do anything.  'A postcard,' she said.  'I would like a postcard mailed to me with an exotic stamp.'  And how that touched me--- how I hope I'll find something which will not let her down because that has become my mission.  I wonder if she will notice if I send her something from one of my collections-- because I fear I won't be able to find something worthy in a souvenir shop-- or even in a museum-- in this disappointing digital culture of ours, so I think I am going to cheat and take along something I cherish.

On the uptown C train today, there was a young girl with a 10-month-old baby in a stroller.  He was her 5th, she told me, with her tired eyes and her wifebeater and shorts.  I wonder how many were with her when she got that incredible tattoo of the praying hands on her chest… or the cursive-written ink names on her breasts.  She was shaking her head to music from her iPod as her youngest boy nodded off and his little hand let itself down to his side the way children do in their sleep-- with a slow grace that eludes even the most accomplished ballerinas.
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There is God in this gesture, I thought, although his mother was in the world of Hip hop.  This is how He would bless us, if He did… how He will lower us, we pray, from living to some kind of rest… with a sense of compassion and control… from tears and the hot sweaty crowded subway car of life to some eternal dream of peace... where there are no more bandages or treatments or malignancies or Medicaid, no more bills and hateful sisters… no more homelessness and fearful sleeping in damp ominous doorways under mercury streetlights but the safe breeze of a starry summer night.  Amen.

The Dog in the Room

Anyone who lives in the city is aware of the dog culture.  More than ever, dogs have become part and parcel of not just personal fashion statements, but a symbol of something…. kindness, unselfishness, an identification with canine values--- like loyalty, integrity, unconditional love… whatever.  At night, my neighbors emerge and socialize on the street while their dogs sniff around and enjoy their brief outdoor recreation.  Some of these people would never speak, have nothing in common-- but somehow they bond via their breeds, their veterinary preferences, dietary recommendations, etc.  Like nannies, their  dog-walkers and sitters are frequent visitors to Manhattan buildings.

I love dogs as much as anyone; I grew up with them, I often adopted a stray in my college dorm-- it grounded me, gave me a sort of domestic vibe that took the edge off the academic competition and relief from the exhausting chatter of my fellow roommates.   But here in the city, and I have kept adopted strays and loved and cared for them, there is a dog-luxury-culture that turns me off.  One of my neighbors wheels her poodle around in a baby stroller.  I mean, if you're childless and lonely, this is a solution.  The dog seems only slightly ashamed.  But recently a sort of storefront canine day-spa has opened where a tek-serve-type place closed.. .and I've been spying on the patrons.  Mostly there are several dogs running around on a linoleum floor with few toys or distractions.  I guess they get some exercise, like prisoners doing yard-laps.  But they seem agitated and embarrassed--- like a cat in a huge fishbowl.  I mean, what's so bad about staying home?  Watching a little TV.  Looking out the window.  Waiting.  

My stray dog Rags was a wiry foxy hybrid of the Harlem/Bronx 1980's variety-- before Pit Bulls infiltrated the mutt population.  He was the one that escaped a Soho bar and came more than 100 blocks uptown to find me.  But he also seemed to have little regard for the boundary of my home, and ran away every chance he got.  He did often return, but not after giving me some sleepless nights and reminding me that he was an animal, not a human member of the household, and he intended to go back into his habitat when it suited him.  I had to respect that.  He wasn't particularly social and besides feeding and walking him, I left the grooming to a bi-annual bath which was miserable for both of us.  

I have one neighbor who somehow lost his show-quality Golden Retriever and immediately bought this Great Pyrenees as a distraction.  It weighs as much as a small bear.  They are rarely home and 2 or 3 people come in and out daily to walk it.  It's alone.  Waiting.  I wonder if city dogs have shorter lives; plenty of them seem to get cancer-- tumors, diseases, allergies.  There is a pit bull near my friend's gallery in Chelsea.  Occasionally when I'm there it walks by… it's a little terrifying and tough… but for some reason, it loves me.  Its owners warn people not to touch him;  but he seems to recognize me from another life.  I remind him of someone.  When they pass the gallery, sometimes the dog just sits and refuses to move.  Waiting.  I love that dog, but I ask it, silently, how it feels to be on a rope and have to repress all instincts and sit politely in some strange non-earthy environment all day waiting to be fed, waiting for company, waiting?  No wonder dogs in packs have another mentality.  

So I have this dog-repression empathy now.  A few of my friends-- well, their lives revolve around their dogs.  The ones that are home all day-- well, that's okay.  But a couple of them buy these high-maintenance breeds that require 24-hour air conditioning and special diets.  They hate the heat, and they look beautiful, but also a little psychotic.  Ugly childless couples who would have nerdy funky kids with short legs and frizzy hair and big ears.  They get these Siberian huskies to stand in for the graceful blonde/blue-eyed Nordic leggy kids they will never have.  And the dogs do crazy things.  They bite people and they puke in the house, and their expression is like a cry for help.  Ah Wilderness, their icy eyes say.   I'm a Jack London novel shelved with Sex in the City.  I'm hot and I want to dig a hole in the snow and sleep.  I want to kill me some pigeons and squirrels.  Help.  They live short lives and die of bizarre things like vitamin overdoses or intestinal parasites from eating mice.  They crave mice.  

My Swedish ex-boyfriend once told me he fell in love with me because I looked like his German Shepherd.  Maybe I am the dog.  I feel like I can read their minds.  The bulldogs with their long lists of ailments and weaknesses whose eyes bleed fluid.  The skinny little chihuahua mixes who shiver and beg you not to touch them.  The puppies who are joyful and pampered and haven't yet figured out that their life is going to change,  that they are very soon not going to be as pettable and cuddly and will be  relegated to an empty dark apartment where they will spend long bored hours sleeping and waiting by the door to have their basic needs met.  I pity them.  I want to set them all free somewhere.  

It seems unfair that anyone can adopt one-- whether they intend to mistreat and torture it, or whether they unknowingly condemn it to a life of boredom and enforced waiting.  So many of them are 'whims' to satisfy the kids, or a selfish indulgence that gets stale and begins to annoy, once the novelty has worn off and the weather has grown cold and rainy and you want to have a drink after work with that sexy woman who gave you 'the look' in the office, and your dog is at home, waiting in his apartment prison.  And some of these people come home resentful.  Some of them become abusive-- or give the dog up, let it go, pretend it ran away.  Facebook pages are devoted to these poor animals stuck in public and private shelters, wondering how they got there, and maybe thinking their crummy apartment was better than the cage and the fluorescent lights they must endure now.   Thousands and thousands of them, the victims of human neglect-- and not like kids who are conceived and born into families-- these dogs were deliberately adopted or bought or acquired.  

Who has not commented on the anagrammatic significance of the dog-word?  Maybe this explains our connection.   But they are everywhere in the urban streets… the sleek and beautiful and the mutty and ratty, the long and short legged, the spotted and spiky and furry-- the pug nosed and snouty-- more variety, it seems, than humans… on a rhinestone-studded leash, running in the park, tied outside Starbucks, peeking out of a handbag on the subway-- the cared-for, the uncared-for, the cheerful and the depressed.  Somehow they all break my heart, like foster children.  They don't want to be photographed-- they can't see the the stupid selfies, they can't see themselves in mirrors, they have no idea how ridiculous they look in their little rain boots, or why their owner will never have a date or a bedmate, besides them.  They dream of mountains and forests and snow.  Of other dogs.  They are lonely… they sleep, they pace out their apartments. Waiting.  My dog-owning friends, and these are many-- will hate me for this one.  But I don't want a dog.  I don't want to own anyone or anything living that doesn't follow me of its own accord.  I don't want to subjugate an animal or pull it or humiliate it.  It feels wrong.  

For all the Manhattan parents who cannot control their children because they will all say embarrassing things, get acne, be rude to teachers, wear hideous clothing… their dog will look exactly as the breed dictates.  It will stay photo-perfect on a leash and will have a little preventive muzzle if it bites.  You will force it to behave, and if it doesn't, it will rarely come outside.  It will make you feel normal.  Man's best friend, like a kept woman who never speaks up.  At worst it will bark.   But a dog's best friend will always be a dog.  A-dog.  

Tearful Earful

At the age of 2 you spend a significant amount of time crying.  Not infant need-based crying, but the kind with some budding emotional content. Of course I don’t accurately remember my own early childhood, and my own children were a little stoic; I think they sensed their mother suffered from melancholia and felt safe.  But from the ones I've observed, there seem to be 3 phases.

The first phase--- the trigger-- is frustration.  You simply don’t get what you want, or you want to get what you can’t have until you’re older--- your own proprietary extra-large ice cream cone, a ride on the roller coaster, a few minutes of independence on the sidewalk.  These things are no-negotiation impossible.  So it progresses into crying for its own sake, because let’s face it--- tears don’t really have punctuation.  Adults cry until someone tells us a joke or has to use the bathroom in which we have locked ourselves, or we are so congested that we have to blow our nose which startles us into a self-awareness-based mood shift.  So kids cry through the point at which they forget all about the dropped ice cream or whatever it was--- and pretty soon there just seems no dignified way out.  At a certain point, if they have cool educated parents, they begin to realize that their mother not only has no sympathy but she’s not even annoyed enough to whack them or scold… and like a future ex-boyfriend on one of the first bad dates, she is just turning off.  Then the crying revs into third gear because there is some vague awareness that they are actually causing the very emotional abandonment which is the archetypal root of crying in the first place… and the exact opposite of the desired result.  Phase 3 is unadulterated toddler misery. Wailing.    

From my son's recent relationships I notice the Drama queens can go through a parallel kind of process; first the precipitated crying, then the momentum- hysterics, then the horrific realization that their boyfriend or whoever has shut down and is looking at his phone.  So you can either cut your losses, or just draw it out because it is the end.  Maybe not tonight, but he is already considering the girl who gave him her number on line at Starbucks yesterday.  Whether it will be lunch or dinner, what he will wear.  What she will wear.  Drama queens also know serious hysteria burns calories.  So there is a silver lining, if they really want to go the distance.  But catharsis? Only if you are alone, and seriously guide your crying through a treacherous and fuel-guzzling psychological-emotional journey. 

 

Big Girls Don’t Cry… the song.. .I remember it so well… over and over, I played my sister’s 45.  Was it the lyrics? The heartbreaking harmonies? The cool rainbow on the label?  The title?

I already knew that.  Babies cry.  Little sisters can’t.  You get enormous contempt.  But all of my early record-purchases from Sam Goody were about crying.  ‘Rhythm of the Rain’ by the Cascades, ‘Go Now’, Skeeter Davis’ ‘End of the World’, Marianne Faithfull…”As Tears Go By’… Everyone was crying.  Elvis.  Buddy Holly.  The Beatles, the Stones, the Mamas and the Papas; Smoky Robinson, Otis.

So today I look at these 2 year olds without impatience or annoyance. ‘Knock yourself out’ I want to say,  'it gets you nowhere.' In about 10 minutes you will begin to fear that your mother will never again respect you or look at you in that way she used to.  You will regret this.  I watch them convulsing, moving from phase 1 into 2^nd gear, shuddering, a little drama…

Can you remember the first time you sabotaged a relationship?  When everything was perfect—the way he looked at you, the things you said… and then something dark wafted in--- a glimmer of jealousy, discontent--- whatever… and you let yourself down from the pedestal for just a minute… and you knew you’d blown it.. .and now what?  Walk out? Manipulate him by leaving first as though you’d planned it? Or hang in and bash the walls in--- ? Let him see your very worst, worst, nastiest side...? Cry?

Men don’t like crying.  Certainly that racist drunk asshole on the plane was not impressed.  Okay, he had issues.  But generally men don’t like crying babies or crying women and they certainly don’t tolerate other crying men well.  I can remember hearing 'Tears on my Pillow' blasting on the car-radio of the college student that drove us back and forth to nursery school.  It blew my 3-year old mind.  It had that minor key thing and I felt really, really bad for the singer.  He was a man.  

Onions, my Mom used to tell me on those nights I'd catch her alone at the kitchen table, my father shut in his den with the newspapers and the Scotch.  She was a Big Girl.  If I'd only peeled back that onion,  stood my ground, interrogated...it might not have taken 50 years for me to feel something for her.  She was singularly non-comforting when I was falling apart.  I got my teenage spiny solace from Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath.  Tears are just superficial.  There were deeper, darker, bloodier places to explore.  Sadness was something to dissect-- a dare, maybe.  

When I moved to England, I remember some Broadcast Psychologist urging the Brits to grieve after a massive tragic accident.  I found that ironic, until I realized my own husband, who was a bit of a crybaby,  only pretended to sympathize when I righteously and tearfully accused him of an affair with the fashion editor at his newspaper.  His denial was cold and complete.  She had water-proof mascara, and still looked perfect when she came weeping to me after he dumped her weeks later.  

'Save your tears; this is anybody's call' is an 'auto'- lyric from one of my songs.  I am, of course, speaking to myself, and it had little effect when I tried it out on the screaming 2-year old on the subway this morning.  His mother was brilliantly ignoring both of us and several trapped passengers who were  holding their ears.  Some were even laughing.  But most, I realized, including the child's mother, had their earbuds in and were listening to Rihanna or will.i.am with full frontal empathy.

West Side Story (read over Azealia Banks 212 soundtrack)

I went to hear some jazz tonight--- intelligent, subtle white unamplified tiny supper-club jazz. I liked it. I even loved it. I went with a couple of research doctors and a guy celebrating the publication of his 5th novel the mediocrity of which is so predictable that it's hard to find anything but irony to celebrate. Still, rather than having to write about Rush Limbaugh or the goddam MTA again, I went, I congratulated with zero bitterness. I am just in retrospect so happy I never slept with the guy when he was young and hot, or had to hide his cryptic ink dedication because all his gifted volumes are long ago donated to Housing Works and maybe keeping some homeless guy warm in a trashcan fire. I excused myself, complimented the musicians, kissed the writer, said I had a late session... it was good to walk up Sixth Ave. and smell the pizza and Halal food and marijuana, see the street cats combing their hair in the parked car mirrors.

Maybe the change started at the West 4th Street station. One of the doctors insisted on walking me. Trains so messed up these nights, it's like an extra subsidy for subway performers. You can almost get a whole set in before the next uptown or downtown. Platforms are packed. A guy with a whole trap kit tonight-- electronic drums, synth tracks synched up, sampled vocals, whacking it out-- and after every tune getting off the kit, and walking it off to real applause, not the polite jazz kind. Catcalls and whoops and 2-fingered whistles. Jacked up, he is--pumped and wired...and the music kind of funky trip-hoppy but solid grooving...louder, now...me with just enough free merlot in my veins to shake it a little... and 'Isn't New York wonderful', my scientist asks, slightly embarrassed. Not so many white people waiting on the A platform at 2 AM.... people are taking their coats off and showing what they got, kids break-dancing old-style, guys with the Azealia Banks Mickey Mouse hoodie... now I am letting go a little... a young black couple next to me is egging me on. My date is clearly talking to himself, trying to force a smile, looking at his phone, trying to offer a cab instead...nothin' doing for me. I am coming off of my intellectual jazz high, grooving with my old self.

I switch to the uptown 4....alone now, with the young couples, the older couples, the packs and wilders, the rich and poor and the tired. A cute nerdy pair next 2 me, entwined, talking about their courses, she lovely and disheveled, he grungy and smelly, going home to have collegiate sex on their mattress. A trendy gay couple---he with skinny orange pants, he with a leather cap and mascara, face to face, centimeters apart, talking, hardly moving their lips. A late-40's couple, she wearing too much make-up, russet hair heavy, sleeping on his shoulder, ringless; he with a ring, looking vague and drawn and burdened. Not talking. By the door, a tall blonde--- the Frederic Fekkai hair my son's girlfriends used to have--- black Prada glasses-- the real kind-- to set off her pale skin; a tiny Chanel purse, tight jeans. Uggs, one foot bent like a young horse, leaning up against a light-skinned guy from the hood--- a gang alumni--- my doorman taught me how to identify these guys... he with his fitted hat backward and just so, his sideburns sculpted to a point-- clean, his jeans and Tims.. you can feel his muscles. She's carrying her I Love Pink bag--the one with the letters in pink leopard-- a present from him, no doubt. He's got her with his strong thick fingers just barely touching, in case the train swerves, he is there. Holding her arms in the middle-- just there, the way he does when he has her up against his door, from the inside, because they can't wait. She turns and I maybe recognize her, from the UES. My niece likes these guys, too, she likes to party in the 'hood, give her parents a little heart attack.
So I am waiting for them to get off at 86th, 96th--- where she will take him to her Park Avenue pink bedroom-- her parents at their weekend house. But no, they stay on. She is going all the way to the Bronx. I like this girl now. She will soon know there is nothing like the tenderness of a gangsta thug, when they want it that way. Nothing. It is all about the protection her Daddy's cash will never give her. He shifts as people get out, moves her slightly, and his left hand grazes her butt. Her face is up close to his chin, breathing his scent. So clean, these guys are. They have their own soundtrack. She craves the music. It taught her how. They share this. The drugs, maybe. He will teach her other things....show her, because he is strong and hardly speaks. Purrs like a lion king when they do it. With him she doesn't ever feel fat or not good enough. She is a goddess. He will handle her that way, and she will be wrecked. His hands frame her, measure her, without touching. She is the train rocking, aching for him, staring at their silhouette in the train glass. It doesn't get better. Ever. His eyes empty, lids heavy with his passion, purple-grey circles underneath. He will have had 2 or 3 kids before he's 21, tattoos and scars. He needs her. He will not let her fall. It will be like this-- -for weeks, maybe months. Then he will get sick of watching the Kardashians and her silliness. She will begin to smell like his cigarettes. One day he will be tough with her--- just a little. It will frighten her, she will love him more. He will feel trapped. He wants to go out on his own one Saturday. She will whine and argue, threaten. She may even leave and he may even care, for a minute. She will text and text but he is tough. He will not answer. Her parents scold, take her to the shrink, give her antidepressants. None of this will help. Time, maybe... a little. But she is ruined. Once you go Bronx, it's hard to come back down.

I have to get out. He refuses to look at me, with his hooded eyes, as I get off, remembering how good it was for me, in my time-- 2 of us always alone, on a T-shirt on the sand, in a car, on a filthy wood floor-- the cigarettes, the sacrifice, the silent cool. I know now he had no interest in who I was--- only what I was, the symbol of my body and my shoes and my clothes and my hair, and the inside of me that obsessed him like a mad dog. He died, my thug... the only acceptable ending there is, because there is no ending that is happy. Souvenir this night, I want to say, but knowing she won't, she will have to keep returning and returning until her heart is an unidentifiable charred mess and she will quietly long for this train ride with all she becomes. She will feel for his chain around her neck long after she has thrown it at him while he stands stone-like, and she will quietly resent her future husband for his niceness and his manners and the way he holds the door for her instead of pressing her up against it.

Summer Memories

Okay... for anyone who’s noticed the hiatus--- my computer’s been behaving like an adult child who’s just discovered she’s adopted. Rebellious, uncooperative... turning a digital finger... and I have this increasing feeling of being the only person at the wedding who’s about to burst into tears, or to tell the bride you’d slept with the groom years before, or refused to, and had to nearly take out a restraining order... but of course all that is spilled milk or poured champagne at this point. And you don’t. You simply kiss the happy couple and stroll out to the verandah and stare off until you’ve killed enough time to leave politely.

I can’t help this inherent cynicism at festive occasions... and can’t imagine any intelligent human isn’t clever enough to do a credit check on any sort of gift horse these days—even the ones with a horn on their forehead.

It’s not what you get, it’s what you do with it--- I mean, if you get a wrapped giftbox, some of us must care more about what we will put inside it than what we will remove. Some of us will use it as a template—will paint the sides, wrap it up and pass it on, lick it, leave it out in the rain until it is soft enough to re-shape into –well, a space shuttle?

The end of the space program is a huge mistake. Not the money thing—it’s all a total waste of cash... a mammoth black hole like almost every single national program which only functions in theory. To me it’s sort of a sign that we are shutting down – that we are becoming a literal and less imaginative nation. No more visions and spacemen—let’s get with the social networking and money culture. Things we can brainstorm and then remove actual cash from, even though there are only theoretical profits. Like Bernie Madoff. Like the art market. Like the whole stinking banking system which reputedly has issued 300 trillion dollars in loans to one another and collected the interest and awarded it to its new financial astronauts in the form of astronomical bonuses. The national deficit is in their pockets-- their Ferraris and inflated art collections, their wives' colossal diamonds, their properties and investments.
Don’t get me started. Beyonce, you could feed every starving child in Africa with your income. Not to mention your wardrobe. My heart bled for you when you cried in your pathetic PR documentary. It makes me enjoy the music only slightly less.

Yesterday on the train, a tiny girl sat next to me and showed me her new dress. It had butterflies on it. It deja-vued me into a dress I had at the age of 4— a summer butterfly dress that I loved so much I slept with it. Couldn’t believe its beauty, and that it was actually mine. It had these straps that tied at the shoulders and on the family cookout occasion on which I debuted it, I couldn’t stop looking at my lap...purple and blue butterflies--- turquoise and pink. After dinner that night my pervert uncle-by-marriage managed to maneuver me into a screened-off room where he asked me the usual set of inappropriate questions secret-abusers ask children. I kept on looking down at my amazing dress, and thinking something about my eyelashes and the way my Mom said butterflies kiss.

So he never quite did anything to me, but the threat of it was there, the filthy cloud of contact-sickness with which people like him contaminate innocence. And in those innocent years, you didn’t tell your mother...and even if you shared it with a sibling, they would assure you that no one would believe it, and you kept it to yourself. Abused dogs and little Caylee Anthony even if she lived would probably never testify against their mothers. But I never wore the dress again, and I hope my tiny subway friend will wear hers in good health and innocence until it is outgrown.

And on the cusp of whatever age I am now, at the moment when what you forget equals what you remember.. .and then it begins to outweigh, and then you forget what you’ve forgotten and there are these selected memories you keep running into… I see how one can replace memories with fiction, evil with memories. And it’s not our fault if we love the rapist, and how we can’t delete and re-record that glitch in our psyche—it is now part of the pattern, that wild out-of-time drumbeat which will repeat and become familiar--- maybe even comfortable— but it will never again be even.

And maybe that is a good thing. Like my laptop which feels in a way more like a Ouija than a keyboard.

March Madness

The Japanese disaster has silenced dark voices and made any kind of whining not just politically incorrect but morally intolerable. We gasp and cry. Those of us who have been there, played to their welcoming audiences, feel maybe a bit worse. This is not a culture of drama queens. They need expertise. They need steamshovels and airlifts. They need essentials. They need everything.

Apparently we were somehow more sympathetic to the Haitians. After all, Japan is a rich country. We in NYC are used to masses of well-dressed NYU students, Tokyo fashionistas, club kids, Mitsubishis, Murakami, Manga. Of course we now need to consider lovely people who could not afford to live elsewhere than in the shadow of a nuclear plant on earthquake-prone terrain. Like most humans, we worry enough to buy insurance, but cannot really comprehend the future. We live for today. The Japanese, for the second time in history, have become martyrs for nuclear containment. Lightning unfairly strikes twice.

We here go on with our lives; we watch CNN and speak of this. On the subway home, I found myself in the midst of some loud ghetto gang coming out of the midnight showing of Battle: Los Angeles. The other nighttime riders were intimidated. These guys were blingy and high, rowdy and rough. Earthquakes dispel this kind of fear for me. I asked one about the film. They all began chiming in about how much they hated it and if they hadn’t conned their way in through the side door, they would have demanded a refund. Apparently they hardly saw any aliens, and really, I suggested--- LA is like another planet to us New Yorkers and its destruction seems some kind of fantasy anyway. Now Japan—CNN—the tsunami damage, the nuclear reactor crisis— this is terror--- real terror in realtime. But they hadn’t heard even a word about this. Nada.

Tonight Obama did his brackets on ESPN. Okay.. .so is he supposed to be tearing his clothes and weeping? Life goes on... life goes on everyday. People die---we are devastated—and then we walk out into the sunshine and order our Starbucks. Those of us who cut ourselves and refuse to eat? Does it help? It does not. Money helps. A little, although I don’t trust texted $10 contributions in a world where American banks managed to repay several trillion dollars of debt in a very short time. People are facebooking like crazy, arranging benefit gigs where they get to have a slightly larger audience than maybe last month, in the name of a good cause. Maybe U2, Muse, Kanye can make a dent. I want to help but getting on a stage with competing loud guitars and raising maybe a few hundred dollars at best seems to do little besides medicating troubled egos.

Today I picked up a random book of poetry and began to read. It was okay. Nothing earthshaking. Bad word. But after 30 pages or so, I came upon my own scribblings--- maybe a few years old. I’d read this before-- -didn’t even remember. Not a familiar line until my own scrawl. So does this mean that the poems were not memorable? More like I’ve read so many less-than-spectacular at this point that they’ve lost significance. Like a pretty girl in a crowd. Is it just the nature of life that as the days and moments mount, everything loses significance? Experience is diluted? Of course a needle stab is a needle stab. Over and over. But the rest? How many times were we absolutely knocked out by a song or a painting or some book when we were teenagers? Do kids still get these epiphanies? Some do, I guess. First loves are still painful, no matter how unromantic facebook and texting and multitasked relationships seem. But the whole muck of information and websites and twitters--- what has this done to dilute the soup of human thought? Is there even a floating particle of carrot or potato anywhere? The information on these disasters--- are we numb? Why is it that the yen has reached a new high against the dollar?

Maybe the 2012 thing is real. Maybe the Biblical deluge is overdue. We’ll have to get someone like Harold Bloom or the Nobel Prize committee to help us weed out the ark-worthy. And what if one of the penguins turns out to be gay? Doesn’t want to mate? Then it’s really the end-end.

My Mom has some form of Alzheimer’s. To me she just seems happier. I can’t help thinking she was sick of all the stuff in her head and just let go. She was sick of my father whining about dinner and sick of getting her nails done and her hair cut. She went out in a homemade rowboat, in the midst of some sea, and just let the oars go. It’s kind of peaceful. All she has to do is float. Other people take care of her. Occasionally she calls me and alerts me that her 92-year-old husband is having an affair. But usually she seems peaceful and happy. I wonder if she has registered the earthquake. She seems safe.

The crosstown bus came, like always. In this Obama era I know if a driver looks at me with contempt it’s not a racial thing; he just hates me. When you’re middle aged, it’s easier to be hateable. Like dead flowers or just someone they have to brake for. But this guy talks to me, he’s glad to see me. We’re both glad that there are no fallen buildings and that we both have been working and we will have a meal and hot water. Life is good here. We have to worry about the Japanese people and do our best, but we are also allowed to watch the Sweet Sixteen and have cake. The kid who died on the basketball court--- his team finished the game.

Today I read a piece somewhere alleging that Obama is not equipped to handle multiple crises. Well who is? God? Maybe Kobe can dribble 2 balls and dunk 3, but if 4 passes come at his head he’s going to get a concussion. Earthquakes.... things that Can’t Happen Here. They happen. I don’t know if anyone else saw this footage-- from a horrific tsunami-ravaged landscape-- a dog, barking at the cameraman...and when he followed, filming, he was led back to another dog, lying on its side, wounded. The barking dog was distraught... but as the cameraman backed away, the dog sat down again with his friend. Something so unbearable about that shot.

Obama and I both bet on Kansas.

Oh Say Can You Sing

I’ve just been to the gym and concluded there are 2 kinds of people in the world: those that come upon a disabled piece of exercise equipment and move calmly on, and those that whine and complain and feel somehow not just deprived but personally attacked because of the small snag in their daily routine. I generally wonder if these people have children, these self-absorbed, micro-universed ego-damaged creatures, or whether there is a higher concentration of them in Manhattan.

Actually there is maybe a sub-group, here: those that try to fix the broken pulley—not for themselves, but for someone else whose life seems somehow ruined by this equipment failure, whose entire routine and night has been irreparably altered and skewed and derailed. We guiltier-than-thou would-be samaritans who empty our pockets of small bills and change at the slightest sidewalk appeal, when our own kids have found only half-stuffed stockings on the homemade Christmas hearth.

I went up to the Bronx today on the subway--- spring in the air and I found the population laid back and kind; stores happy to see you, none of the competitive shopping bags once you get past Grand Concourse. Teenage mothers with oversized strollers everywhere, young hip-hop couples sharing ipod earphones, 3 and 4 toddlers in tow, parents looking barely legal. Don't these people have jobs? Go to school? They seemed carefree, festive.

At 125th Street on the way back a West Indian drummer--- singing and playing traps which must have been a haul getting the kit downstairs and set up--- but with this golden voice—smooth and authoritatively ‘professional’—talking to the MTA workmen who were grooving away to this guy... not missing a beat, better than any performer at this year’s sad Grammy show which I nominate for a Writerless Much Ado About Nothing Award. Two young dancers doing that robotic thing but in this subtle, graceful incredibly original way —it was breathtaking —amazing... an edgy minimal 22nd century break-dance thing, kissing the filthy floor, defying gravity and their own joints...I was literally mesmerized. The best $1 show I’ve seen in years. And that voice. Where are Jay Zee and Clive Davis? Not on subway platforms. And these guys were free. They didn’t care. They ruled their stage.

So did anyone else notice the unprecedented number of Grammy performers who sang off-key? I mean, we’re all flawed, but with the ear-sets and personal monitors... okay, granted they may have had audio issues, but what happened to ‘singing’? Personally I was disappointed in Katy Perry, felt Otis rolling in his grave during Bruno Mars’ appalling performance, and yes, I used to like Arcade Fire, but they came off like a pretentious bunch of over-enthusiastic high-school geeks in 30-something bodies. Okay...Eminem and Rihanna got a thumbs-up-- that song's been in my head for 6 months. Aretha stayed home. Besides, her footage at the beginning--- the cameo soundbytes---put them all to shame. God, make her well. I hope she didn't watch too much of the show.

I missed Pink. I missed Prince. I liked the Lady Gaga egg better than the performance. I miss James Brown and Michael Jackson. I guess Bob Dylan has poetic license but I wasn't sure if I was supposed to laugh. Mick, you were the only bright spot. Barbara--- nice to see you in that Scarlett O'Hara used-to-be-a-stage-curtain dress thing, but I would have preferred to just imagine your voice. And I'll defend Christina. She's just this year's Britney Spears. Britney has class compared to most of the MTV girls now...and she had talent.

So maybe I’m a cranky old woman now but I don’t want to see Spiderman and humans in silly costumes flying around in a theatre. Wasn’t the film enough for these people? Don’t they get enough cinematographic pyrotechnics with Disney and those crazy warrior movies? What happened to 'the play', acting? Or maybe the possibility of witnessing a fatal accident attracts the New York audience? Can't they buy tickets to the circus? Superman masqueraded as a human. It was amusing. He kissed an actual woman in a reverse-superhero feat. Humans don’t do well trying to play superheroes. We don’t have these talents and all those wires and computers can’t really bring it on. I miss Peter Pan, with the visible wires on Mary Martin. It was conceptual. Broadway is all mixed up--- plays about rock bands, Cirques doing Beatlemania, musicals about music, movies about ballet, musicals about movies....

Give me the singing drummer in the subway— grassroots multitasking. You can get right up there and hear him sing on key without a monitor or a microphone. Sweet and smooth and rhythmic and melodic. Making it up as he went along. And he was nice. Took requests. Asked me if I wanted change when I put my bill in.

I do want change. Or maybe I don’t. I’m still trying to peel off pieces of 2010 that are stuck to me like old wallpaper. 2011 could be the year of democracy. It is also the year of the rabbit, the year of Oprah. All bets are off.

A black suede glove was lying on the north end of the platform like a dying animal. My son asked for North Face gloves for Christmas. He didn’t get them--- he loses a pair a week. But here... one left one... I flipped it over with my foot to see the logo. If you wait long enough, you do get what you wish for... maybe if I picked it up, the mate will be waiting on some sidewalk somewhere, underneath the melted snow, in April when gloves are useless. But as I flipped it over, it seemed to gesture—‘Help’. Gave me the chills. ‘Help’. I watched it now from the wall a few steps away... it was clearly asking me to put some money in it. I watched as one of the hiphop dancers picked it up and turned it into a kind of puppet. Wished I had the other one to put in the red ‘A’s’ cap as he passed it around.

I Want the Angel

A gap here.

Complaining about the economy has become lucrative for some. Personally I couldn’t accept money for whining. Maybe that’s what happened to Jim Carroll at the end…when all he had were bitter words inside, his advance had run out, and he was ashamed to admit he was too worn and fuddled by the clouds hovering by his desk, by ghosts of himself, by phantom pain of an amputated past that he could no longer translate onto paper.

Some of us wake with what we think is poetry on our tongues and no ink. I heard a not-yet-failed poet last week swearing by longhand. Personally I can scarcely read my own handwriting, especially when it comes with that other voice— the one that frightens me. I have a computer and am glad for any help I get, especially the silent kind. I am glad to use my fingers to ask questions and for that matter, any opportunity not to humiliate myself with a telephone call.

Other things I am thankful for these days:
The absence of excruciating pain, food for the week, sparse but consistent gigs, my bass fingers, books.
Ditto the safe distance of tropical storms, massive brushfires and earthquakes from Manhattan, the depleted coffer of my building preventing crippling renovations; coats draped over rails, the living monotony of day after day.

Things that terrify me:
The ever-hovering possibility of excruciating pain, my postponed terminal diagnosis, the inevitability of losing my words, the shrinking muscle of my former brain, the possibility that a tall man with a slaughterhouse mind will thwack a meat cleaver into my head from behind and I will recall the unbearable brutality of murder. We all fear death-- I mean the killing.

Last week on the C train a man with 2 voices was singing. He couldn’t quite get them to harmonize, but there were two distinct singers inside of him, dragging him through the cars, compelling him to humiliate himself by holding a Mets hat out to riders. I wanted to engage one of them, to see which one had his eyes, but he was not going to look. We gave our dollar, each of us, to the man with two voices. More would have been too much.

For the Morgan Stanley guy, though… with the $1.5 million salary and the $2.3 million bonus— that wasn’t enough. He was hungry. Lewis is getting $98 million and that’s just a bonus. Maybe he is rationalizing to himself, saying ‘the man with two voices still gets a dollar even though the people on the subway have no job.’

I don’t know about all of you, but I was rooting for the balloon boy. When I was young there was Pascal and The Red Balloon. It was terrifying and it was real— in the movies— not a cartoon. I had the book of still photographs and it was proof to me of my inherent stubborn belief in the humanity of objects. Things spoke and felt, things rescued you from the pathetic box of childhood. Things had wings.

That father and his squirmy children, the camera-readiness of their portrait arrangement on the sofa. It was sickening. And yet the police fell for it… they ran and flew for what? The reward money? The fame? Rescuing a child? People flock to the spectacle of child-saving. The metaphoric weight is immense— the personal resonance. What about the typhoon boys and girls in Southeast Asia, the African cleaved and raped? This boy— Falcon— was canonized. As though they’d planned this when they named him. Sickening.

Maybe it's easier to project our own worries onto the ones we invest in our children. Like a mother, I still can’t get the image of Jim Carroll out of my head-- sick and alone with the humiliation of having slightly outlived his own restlessness. The idea that the black balloon comes for us when we are not at our best, and the youtube voyeurs and glommers will stand outside with their cellphone cameras and then watch over and over this sort of killing. For all you control freaks and ultra-theatrics out there… those few Wall Street guys who were firm enough to jump— suicide is maybe the only safe option.

Either way, as JC said...Gravity— just sick for revenge.

Number 23

New York City summer. Hot enough for you? This is the topic of choice. Everyone in the city complains, whines. Always something. The Second Avenue subway, taxes. Wall Street is shaky. I vacillate between wanting the glassy towers of hedge-fund driven wealth to topple and knowing it’s us poor bastards that pay for it all in the end.

On my way downtown last night, one of these welfare mothers napping on the train. 5 kids all under the age of 6…two strollers, 3 huddled on the metal bench in cheap polyester basketball jerseys and shorts, chilling in the subway AC. Boys, all of them. Mother not more than 21—like a girl, pulling a hoodie over her chest. Maybe another life starting under the thickness of her over-stretched T-shirt. The middle-child of the huddle—the boy, maybe 4, his thumb in his mouth, stroking his other hand up and down on the back of his brother who serves as his pillow. The little miniature Michael Jordan, wanting a little affection—the sensitive one, needing the touch.

I caught some footage the other day of that orphaned hippo who’d chosen a 130 year-old tortoise for his mother…The whole world is moved by this…that giant amphibious toddler caressing an old shell with a shapeless heavy head, licking the rough hideous turtle-face with that massive baby-tongue in the dry Kenyan turf. Another one—needing the touch.

On the late-afternoon Upper East Side streets, an endless parade of nannies between air-conditioned spaces-- picking up toddlers from playgroup. Corporate types who never missed a well-dressed beat for pregnancy and the mess of childbirth-- coming home to their Chinese-born youngsters in designer toddler-wear—so far from home. What will happen to these privileged children with the perfect haircuts and SAT scores? We’ve not yet seen the adopted American-Asian population in rehab, collecting DUIs and ex-boyfriends and prescriptions. So far they wear their Spence and Chapin uniforms well, do not struggle with their weight. They excel at drawing, play their ½-sized violins with finesse. Their parents wear this well.

At work I keep thinking of the boy in the huddle—the one with the soft heart—the one that maybe cries more, gives his young mother a harder time, the one with the enormous thirst who pulled a short damaged straw. His little shaved head…his shiny brown-black little arm soft and smooth and needy in the little knot of brown limbs and red polyester. Maybe after a few years of unfulfilled hunger he’ll start to act out, look for the wrong kind of attention. Maybe he’ll be a rapper, be adored by millions; maybe he’ll put his passion into ball-playing. Maybe he’ll confuse his needs and become obese. Or maybe he’ll be a sex-addict. Maybe he’ll have to sell himself for the touch, fill his hole with a needle-ful.

Oh God, I am thinking—give this little boy a guitar-- something. All these people on the stage with me here.. using volume as their art…the Lost Boys of rock and roll. Up here—with the audience, the women, the affection… doing Summertime Blues for the Budweiser-saturated.. .. You Can’t Always Get What You Want ..and they forgot what it was they wanted in the first place. All dressed up, all wired…and nothing to say.

So as I ignore all the hustlers on the way home—all the hard-luck stories…the exhausted sweaty subway-guitarist who’s played ‘Landslide’ more times than Stevie Nicks… I keep my little Michael in my pocket. My prayer of the day—please God, or Oprah...let someone feed this child, let him weep…give him an ear, an extra pat on the head, a copy of Harold and The Purple Crayon.

Jesus. I think the heat’s getting to me.

Safe

Monday night on the train this young girl asks me how to get to 103rd Street. So I tell her. She is well dressed and attractive, and it is 3 AM and I am feeling a little protective, so I put out that maternal vibe, and she hooks right in. Tells me she is from New Orleans, how her parents’ house was in one of the better neighborhoods (her accessories are expensive), how she is here looking for a job, 22 years old, etc. But starts the ‘wind-up’. Other tourists in the subway car, heading up to their family-style hotels and hostels on the Upper West, hear the buzzwords—New Orleans, Katrina, FEMA…start to listen…

And the girl is not just winding up but smoking now—standing in car-center, using her hands and arms… suddenly her parents are devastated. I am exhausted from five sets of music, but I could swear she’d assured me her house was spared, that some strange hurricane phenomenon occurs whereby one house is untouched, the next one is flattened. And so on. And the accent—that lovely warm southern thing—has suddenly been cast aside—and a little bit of Long Island is creeping in. Now it is maybe New Jersey I am hearing, because she is on ten and eleven and these tourists- French-Canadians—are giving her questions, and she is answering with this quasi-hysteria vibe now, on fire--her face grimacing and frowning and eyebrows wild. She is preaching, losing her track now—all kinds of mis-information coming out of her mouth. The shady characters who ride the train late-nights-- the ones who ignore straight people-- are starting to take interest. Even the meth-girl who walks up and down asking for donations through gritted teeth.. she decides to pass on our car, realizes center stage is occupied.

We are generally a tough crowd, we late-night passengers. We have seen it all. Some of us have done it, too. Vaccinated by scrapes and near misses, by knowledge of things we wish we hadn’t seen, we have acquired a certain immunity. We are maybe the true New Yorkers, the ones whose apartments were NOT smashed up by Carl Lidle’s plane, who have been scammed and mugged in a non-newsworthy way, the ones who will not ever win more than $1 with a Lotto ticket, who maybe had a brief and painful bout with cancer or depression or hepatitis but are still here, on our way back from work, hanging in, courtesy of fading rent-control, the unlimited 30-day Metrocard which allows us our money’s worth, KeyFood discounts.

We are grateful for the air-conditioned cars because some of us have to return home to steamy apartments, to the permanent ghost of garbage smell which permeates our inside-air all summer, no matter what we do. We are grateful for the all-night service, no matter how infrequent. We mind our own business, sometimes enjoy a sandwich on the way home, read our newspapers, nap.

For the most part, this city feels safe to the rank-and-file. If you don’t fuck with it, it doesn’t fuck with you. If you have not much to lose and you don’t wave it around, chances are they’ll let you alone. Am I nostalgic for the good old days? When New York felt just a little edgy and haunted? When racism was closer to the surface, violence and unemployment were not as medicated and whitewashed? I was young and cute, once. Guys used to follow me home, write suicide notes. But I was one of the lucky ones. What’s the worst thing that ever happened to me? I was mugged by two women on the street who pretended to have fallen down. My place was robbed by some junkies who took not only my grandmother’s bracelets but my underwear, sheets, vitamins, old photos, shoes and sewing machine. They needed it, I finally decided as I installed iron bars on my window. One night while I played at a club called 8BC, a punk rocker yelled out “I WANT TO FUCK YOU” and drove a nail through his palm into the stagefloor. I was covered with spurting blood. In in a way I was flattered. He was a fan.

But I am older now. I am someone’s mother. Fewer fans, just audience. My enemies are in the ether-network. Silent terrorism. Our government which manipulates and cooks our books to convince us we are better off just going about our business and leaving world affairs up to them. Because we haven’t a clue what they are doing behind closed doors. The simple criminals in jails are puppies. These guys are in packs. These guys have power. Another column.

I get out and look upward to the latest series of mostly-glass Disney buildings going up in poor neighborhoods. Rich schmucks will be duped into paying millions for apartments that do not even exist—they are just marketed air-space. Billionaires forced to live right next to poor schmucks like me, because all of the best space is taken. And how did the new builders get this kind of money? Doing Enron-math? It all seems impossible when I am sorting through my crumpled bills which add up to exactly the $100 I earned playing music for 6 hours. I worked for this money. I actually enjoyed the work.

I notice my Katrina survivor-girl didn’t take my directions seriously. She followed the tourists out at 72nd Street. I can’t afford to worry about these things, even though I do.
I worry about all the kids out there, all the poor old folks who maybe couldn’t make it to the corner today to get their loaf of bread. I still talk to people. And I still, in that edgy New York City way, feel safe. I am proud to be of the dwindling rank and file, we the heroes who know the bus drivers by name, who sleep through the night or the day with all the traffic noise, without doctor’s prescriptions, without an overpriced nightcap, without a million-dollar view. We who return to our little piece of real estate which smells of our neighbors’ dinners and the perpetual New York Soup outside, and are glad that our little TV works, glad to be home, glad to be somewhat invisible. I missed the 4 AM news recap but am just in time for Sports. Baseball season again. I'm washing the sinkful of dishes my teenagers left, and I turn off the water just in time to hear the announcer yell out: 'SAFE!'

Yeah.