North Randolph in the Rain

I look out onto the rainy street beyond the porch railing.  It is silent.  The Saturday morning ballet of nattering neighbors and carousing kids is delayed by the soft rain pattering to the pavement.  The air is a wet wool blanket clinging to my shoulders.  I sit, shift restlessly, fight the impulse to tread barefoot in the morning drizzle.

 I watch Doug step out his door, quiet as a cat burglar.  He reaches out, palm up, feeling for the exact cadence of the raindrops.  He frowns, mustache drooping like a dejected blonde caterpillar.  There will be no golf this morning.  He tiptoes back in.

The windchime is tangled.  I lean cautiously over the railing, stretching to unsnarl the delicate strands.  Meanwhile, giant drops of water divebomb from the gutter’s edge and plunk me on the head.  I persist, and soon the chime peals gratefully at me, a lullabye sound. 

The motion has made ancient injuries smart.  Both heels are sore, and my hamstring is cranky.  Humidity seeps into crevices and corners of my muscles like a spelunker. I smile, remembering the double plays and the Brooklyn-Queens championships that left me the legacy of a complaining physique.  The weather won’t let me forget.   

Water is running in rivers beside the curb.  It flows around clumps of cottonwood pods with artistic agility, feigning left, going right, and finally continuing its descent to the storm drains at the foot of Hooker Avenue.  The motion moves the air.  The sweet locust scent and the chalky essence of asphalt ride the breeze. 

I consider the swamp maples, the stalwart old ladies of the hill.  Sturdy and mossy, they soar over the houses reaching toward the sky.  Their branches lay open, welcoming the gentle shower from above. 

Birds flit from branch to branch, too busy to notice the rain.  They study the mulberries, like rabbinical students poring over Talmud. They converse in another tongue, chattering insistently, but still I understand. 

I am a foreigner among the native life.  Nature maintains its rhythms when I cannot manage mine.  I wrestle with doubts that descend on my life like sudden downpours.  I question and fret and wonder and despair as if tomorrow will never come. 

            The leaves don’t know how much growing they should do until the rain tells them.   I sit back, and listen harder.

Cugine

[Names have been changed to respect the privacy of the respected parties whose lives are detailed here.]           

 
      I find it somehow disturbing that I cannot find his name on the Internet.  It seems his obituary should at least be there.  It doesn’t seem right, or fair, or reasonable.  I guess what my girlfriend says is true.  People’s lives are like pebbles dropping one by one into a tranquil pond.  The water ripples in ever-widening circles, until there is no motion left, and the surface becomes still again.  The pond looks unchanged, but it isn’t, really.
            “What?  You what?” I struggled to untangle myself from the serpentine sheets that threatened to swallow me.  

“I didn’t mean to call you so early, ya know, “ Louie’s staccato voice was full of apologies.  “But I just found out and I wanted to let you know as soon as I knew that I’m HIV positive.”

         I met Louie in the dank recesses of a neighborhood dive named Rhythms.  He was nineteen years old.  A Foreign Language major at LIU, Louie was a brash, frenetic Bensonhurst boy with a ready smile and an infectious laugh. 
         I had met a lot of gay men during my furtive trips to Rhythms.  He was the only gay guido I had ever met.  He had an Italian temper and a sense of humor to match. 

Louie and I fell in with a small, cohesive crowd of gay club hoppers that trekked from borough to borough in search of a good time.  At the hub of that circle was Louie, chain-smoking Parliaments and dancing himself into a Sufi-like trance under the dazzling swirl of dance-floor lights.  People would often step aside to give him more room and watch him dance.  He loved the attention. 

Contrasted with this club kid identity was the side of Louie that made him a riveting Language teacher: “my intellectual snob side”, he called it.  His porn flicks shared the video cabinet with National Geographic films about the plight of Sumatran tigers   His bookshelves spilled over with books whose titles I couldn’t translate: Essais – Montaigne, Catalogo Dei Premi Letterari Italiani, Mein Kampf.  He taught himself Afrikaans in his spare time.  Once he got sick, his only ambition was to go on safari in Africa, so he could get close to the giraffes. 

My vowel-laden surname and Catholic school history, combined with the fact that I was absolutely no sexual threat, made me a natural choice for Louie’s “fake girlfriend”.  Louie didn’t come out to anyone but his mother until his early twenties, so family functions before that point always demanded a surrogate date.  I always obliged.

I learned early on that Louie’s mother was the center of his world.  His relationship with his father was never more than perfunctory.  Louie often said he was tired of trying.  That he would never be like his brother, Charles – the older, athletic, macho golden boy – and thus would never win the approval of his stoic, taciturn father.

Their relationship was painful to watch.  Louie could have set himself on fire and run through the living room, and still his father would ignore him.  I never saw them hug or kiss or exchange kind words.  According to Louie, when he needed money, his father took him to his Washington Heights wholesale grocery and put him to work in the packing room to earn what he needed.  When Charles needed money, his father took out the checkbook and asked how much. 

Louie summed up his relationship with his father in four succinct words, “He’s a fuckin’ jerk.”

Louie may have had a hard time with his family, and his family may have had a hard time with his sexuality.  But Louie certainly didn’t.  He loved men.  Wildly, obsessively, unapologetically.  He was like a Venus flytrap in the bars, always with several cute but unsuspecting flies buzzing around him, buying him drinks, laughing at his nonstop jokes, lighting his cigarettes.  He never went home alone.  Often, I dropped him off at Shore Road, the local gay cruise strip, so he could flit from vehicle to bike path to park bench, orgiastically worshipping the bodies of anonymous men he encountered.  It was his element.

          As our twenties faded, the bar scene and party-hearty habits we’d developed fell away like the discarded skin of a snake.  Louie held on the longest.  He did not handle aging – he got hairplugs, and he always talked about wanting liposuction.  He did not handle change - his greatest lament was the demise of disco music.  He considered 1981 the best year of his life, from which the best music and his best memories were gleaned.   I still cannot hear Jimmy Bo Horne’s “Spank” without thinking of Louie.

By the time I got the call that Louie was HIV positive, our lives had diverged in the way lives usually do.  Louie was teaching at a public high school in Brooklyn, not far from the neighborhood in which he grew up.  He was in a tumultuous relationship with Hernan, a personable Bajan guy.  His mother had passed, and his father had remarried almost immediately, then moved to Florida, leaving Charles with the house.  Every time we spoke, Louie talked about the old days, and I spent the whole conversation laughing.

Eventually, Louie’s health failed.  He had CNS Toxoplasmosis and came close to dying.  The bout left him blind in one eye.  He retired on disability from teaching and moved to Florida.  He couldn’t handle winters in the Northeast anymore.  Hernan, drained from previous months of being a caregiver, decided he could not stand Louie’s jealous behavior and fits of temper any longer, and moved to Savannah to be near his family.  

Louie had no driver’s license due to his visual impairment.  He drove anyway.  He tried only half-heartedly to quit smoking.  He enjoyed the sun, and took a job landscaping.  The job, he informed me, was making him buff.  The Internet opened up a whole new cruising venue for him.  He took full advantage.

He liked Florida because of all the barely-dressed guys.  He hated it because it wasn’t Brooklyn. 

I had fallen into the across-the-miles routine of emailing Louie frequently and telephoning every few months.  Not hearing from him for an extended stretch was no reason to panic.  Sometimes, he would forget to pay his phone bill, and would be without AOL and long distance for a month or two.  Then an Instant Message would pop up on my computer, or a rambling message would be waiting in my voicemail, and there he was. 

When a childhood friend of mine – the sister of Louie’s best friend – emailed and said, “I’m sorry to have to tell you – Louie passed away”, it was a few months after the fact.  I felt a rush of guilt and anger and sorrow about losing him.  But, for Louie, I felt relief.

I believe that Louie had already lived the happiest years of his life and some part of him knew that.  Having AIDS never panicked or depressed him.  Perhaps that’s why.  He never felt particularly comfortable or happy with the inevitable weight of maturity.  Like the stars in Orion’s belt blazing into the night sky, Louie recalled his previous luminosity and could not persevere without it.  Sometimes, I understand how he felt.

I still expect the phone to ring, and Louie to be on the other end, ready to regale me with some tale of sexual daring, or a complaint about the HMO establishment.  Part of me knows that will never happen.  Another part of me refuses to accept that.  Because of Louie, the surface of my pond will never be still. 

Transparency, or Early Notice

 
I have been watching the brutal Danse Macabre of your relationship for some time now.  This is a locked-in pose, the players are frozen in a death throe that is contorted and blatantly obvious to everyone except you, my friend, who believes that strangulation begets willing submission and suffocation begets bliss.

The woman you love is dying.  As surely as the seasons turn, this vibrant woman is withering to dust.  You have embarked on myriad maneuvers to cut off all routes of egress.  Either by feigned helplessness or lies or threat of violence or inflicting chaos on her loved ones, you have assured her compliance.  You have cut her off from her comfort, bereft her of safety and companionship, constructed a bubble that encapsulates her completely.  And you feel safe, unchallenged, untouchable.

Meanwhile, your captive is gradually disappearing.  The lively dreams she once had glimmer faintly in the distance.  She speaks of her life in the past tense.  She has become a reactionary, cannot move independently without fear of inflicted paralysis, cannot think freely without fear of complete dissolution. 

But there is a bell tolling, my friend.  It peals loudly.  Can you hear?  It heralds the exposure of your one fatal mistake.  Your plan, your web, this prison you have constructed – it is transparent.  We can see through it, to its multitude of flaws, the chinks in its protection.  No matter how long it takes, we intend to dismantle it piece by piece, lie by lie, manipulation by manipulation, until all that’s left are pieces of you scattered to all the winds.

Better run.  We see through you, too.

An Open Letter to the Father That Never Was

I have been watching you silently for years now, teaching by example that there are men who deposit children into the world simply to convince themselves that they are men, then spend their entire lives proving to their children that they are not worth the bodily fluid that made them. 

I have said nothing because you are the twins’ father, and I would no sooner hurt them frivolously than cut off an arm.  But you have gone far enough.  You left your twenty-one-year-old son standing by himself for nearly two hours in a place he has never been before, after he traveled three hours by public transit specifically to see you.  You are a villain.

Without thinking, I can recall myriad occasions when you dashed these boys to the rocks in favor of some selfish pursuit.  If I could assemble your lies side by side, they would encircle this city.  You engage in hype, in endless rhetoric, then fail to deliver.  Always.  You have bought one twin a birthday gift, but not the other.  You have let Christmases pass with nothing.  You have refused to house them when we were in need, then moved in with your new woman and her ungrateful children.  You have ducked child support but told them to come see your new boat.  Then you have called them, angry because they didn’t call you for Father’s Day.

Well, “father”, let me tell you about your sons.  Their entire lives are a reaction to what you have done to them. 

One shut down for years, angry and frustrated and hurt and sad that the world seemed to have left him behind.  That other people “have it like that”, and he doesn’t.   He had to crawl out of that pit without help or acknowledgement from you.  He speaks to you because he has to, because he loves his mother and doesn’t want her to think ill of him.  But he has no use for you.  You are a non-entity to him.

The other exhausts himself chasing the attention and affection of people who constantly hurt and disappoint him.  He is the sweetest boy in the world with the most self-loathing I have ever seen exist in one person.  He is a simple mind and holds out a useless hope that you will turn out to be something more than the walking, talking piece of human detritus that you are.

Did you know that these boys do for each other what you do not do for them?

Twin One is the father figure – he makes patient explanations and calms his brother when he is agitated.  His brother comes to him for advice and consolation.  We count on him to understand Two as only a man can and we cannot, because there is no other man in his life.

Twin Two is the provider – when One has been unable to work, it is Justin that has provided.  He rarely gets things for himself without getting one for Adam.  He has paid both their bills when it is necessary.  He gets goofy when One needs a laugh.  He always wants to know where One is and what he is doing, endlessly seeking out One’s  company and his attention.

So, at the end of this rant, it becomes very clear that they really don’t need you, “Dad”, which is just as well, because they have never really had you in first place.  But that’s OK.  They have their mother, and they have me.   As long as they have us, nothing you can ever do will have any lasting effect on their lives. 

And that’s the best thing about having you for a father.

Of Chickens and Nylons

My friend Diana and I engaged in this exchange in email some time ago.  Personally, I think there's something wrong with both of us...

Diana:  Now, on to another important question.  How do you pick out nylons?  I mean, I'm hearing about garter belts, control top (what are you controlling exactly?), color options (if it's nude color what's the point?), ones above the knees, ones below the knees, something about coming in an egg though I thought nylons were man made?  Do I have to find a chicken to get a pair of nylons?

Me:
In the matter of your other (sic) burning question: the nylons.  They were the bane of my existence during my time in corporate hell, so I am a recovering wearer.  In terms of picking them out, I may as well have hurled a dart into the display rack at Macy's and chosen that way.  Whatever the method, for me they had all the comfort of the Judas Cradle at a medieval execution dock.  I know I am in the minority here, but I own my biases - my wounds are still fresh.

Those free-thinking hosiers have concocted a method of sizing that relates to the measurement of nothing else in the known universe.  Other clothing manufacturers must have patented the idea of numeric sizes, because this intrepid group chose letter sizes as their domain.  And single letters were not enough.  No, not for these pioneers.  You must choose a letter range.  A-B for the habitually anorexic. C-D for the "I'm-on-Atkins" crowd, and E-F for most others.

Not to mount a soapbox here, but you'll notice there are no letters for larger-than-average hosiery.  That's because this group of Neanderthals (men, no doubt) have decided to grace us with the epithet "Queen Size", which I could abide only if they would guarantee I would be treated like one upon wearing the garments.

Some tips for safe use:  You cannot be too moist after a shower, because they will grind to a halt halfway up your legs, your knees will bind together, you may need to have the Jaws of Life applied in order to be extricated from them.  If have skin that is too rough, they will shred like Christmas tissue paper and run so badly that your legs will look striped.  If you fail to pull them up far enough, the crotch will sag, you will experience fatal chafing, and your ankles will look like those of an African elephant roaming the savannah. 

Control top hose are intended to conceal extra pounds by compression.  Since it is physically impossible to cram ten pounds of sand into a five pound bag, the excess pounds merely struggle for freedom above the waistband and spend their time trying to roll the waistband toward the thighs, freeing the rest of their captive brethren.  Hence, control top hose only succeed in controlling your inconvenient urge to take a full breath.

Color should not be a problem in the least.  As long as you can distinguish fluently between ecru, eggshell, taupe, off-white, beige, crème, fawn, mushroom, and light brown, it should be quite simple.  Likewise black, night, midnight, ebony, ink, let, onyx, raven, and sable.

The nude thing stumps me completely.  I have never in my linguistic travels (and I am an English teacher) heard the misbegotten phrase "semi-nude" uttered anywhere else.  Nude is a word that should join the ranks of words of the the "you-are-or-you-aren't" distinction: I.e., dead, alive, pregnant.

And where nylons begat of eggs are concerned, you must rely on your highly-developed sense of reason.
Ponder this conundrum: is a chicken stupid enough to wear nylons?

Color My Childhood Green (for my father)

     Green is the overriding color of my childhood. Every memory I have has some element of green in it, despite the obvious lack of harmony green has with having grown up in a city dominated by concrete and asphalt. The Brooklyn of my childhood was definitely green.
     My favorite sneakers were kelly green Pro-Keds. I remember wearing them until the rubber soles separated from the canvas body of the shoes.
     I remember seeing the green in my eyes when I looked in the mirror. They are olive green, a color I have never seen in anyone else’s eyes. Everyone mistake them for green – even the DMV – but I know better.
      One of my earliest memories is walking along the street with my mother. She was wheeling my cousin in a baby carriage, and we were walking next to a pile of rubble that used to be a building. I was wearing a lime green sleeveless polyester pullover (everything was polyester in the 60’s), matching shorts with seams down each thigh, and a coordinating headband.
      Our kitchen was small and neat. It was dominated by a huge, avocado-green refrigerator. The single best feature was that the fridge on top and the freezer on the bottom. The metal cabinets were painted the same avocado color.
      My mother is fond of saying she has a “brown thumb”. That she can’t for the life of her make plants grow. But I remember flowing spider plants and descending philodendron spilling from window pots and planters and into my world. 
     We used to strip leaves off the long, flexible branches of a particular type of weedy bright green perennial found in untended gardens, and call the remaining stalk a “whip”. These whips became a pirate sword, a teacher’s pointer and a weapon to flog an unsuspecting little brother.
      Every spring, like clockwork, the big oak tree in front of my house rained thousands of seed pods down on the sidewalk. My friends and I called the pods “spinners”, and gathered great handfuls of them – the green ones were best. We sat and split them open at took out the seed. The remaining v-shaped pod fit beautifully over the bridge of a kid’s nose. A bit of sticky moisture left by the seed acted like glue and held it there. We spent hours laughing at how we looked, and flicking seeds at each other to try to knock the pod off.
      Green is the color of so many other things I remember, like the blue-green of the pool in my yard, or the iridescent green of the traffic signal at the corner in front of Aldo’s Pizzeria, or the lush-looking green of the hillside in the colorized scenes from the Wizard of Oz.
      But the most dominant green of my life is the leafy green of the infield grass. I spent the better part of ten softball seasons six steps behind the grass, four strides off the first base line, studying the batter in the chalk-lined box beyond. The earth of this verdant field rooted my relationship with my father, who knew everything about softball, and, by extension, everything about everything else, too. The endless series of Saturday afternoons created my hero. I am a ballplayer, like him, and am a teacher, like him. And if I can ever be half the person he is, I will be grateful.

To My Kearney Girls

I waxed a little nostalgic a moment ago, so sorry if this note sounds a bit lame -

I just saw my friend's daughter's prom photos. She's BK class of 2010. The photos were very sweet - Mom, Dad, grandparents, little brother and sister, etc.

And then came her pics with her BK sisters. Their eyes are full of the delight that comes with being seventeen, and the joy that being part of that community can bring.

Can I name that joy? Can I list the attributes and nuances of the experience that coalesce to form the Kearney experience? Not at all. But the experience lives vibrantly in my memory.

My wish for this lovely 2010 grad is that she retain the kinship and fondness I have for all of you because we shared that time together. And I want to thank you.

People think Kearney girls are stuck up. But what we really are is stuck together in a way that the graduates of most other schools will never quite understand.

(Feel free to forward, in case I missed anyone...)