Mr Big: Let me get this straight. Your picture is going to be on a bus.
Carrie: That's right.
Mr. Big: A crosstown bus or a downtown bus?
Carrie: The M2. It goes right down Fifth.
Mr. Big (nodding seriously): That's a good line.

*

   My relationship with women has always been a constant in my life. I am from a large family (four boys, three girls) but the women have always ruled. I suppose that this is true of all families; women are usually the ones who quietly arrange, organize and then dominate all family proceedings. In my own family the boys seemed to play the least important roles – we just watched them. Father figures came and went so I shouldn’t be surprised. However in my house they just didn’t seem like normal women. These girls were divas. They fought, loved, shopped, played, argued and challenged one another. They either had babies or they did not. They seemed to depend on one another. They seemed connected.

When I moved to New York City in 1998 I roomed with another of the women in my life, my friend Megan. She came to the city to be an actress and I came along for the ride. This was also the year that Sex and The City debuted on HBO; from episode one on we were both hooked. Sunday nights at 8pm we would be settled down with our wildly expensive takeout from Mama Mexico (guacamole $9) eager to consume the bite-sized bon mots served up by Darren Star and four feisty NY singles wittily exposing the female dilemma with humor and profanity. No topic here was new to me (or her for sure) but there was something truly novel in the series approach. It neither intellectualized nor pandered to the audience, it was funny, and it was good looking. Need I say that it also glamorized our not so glam New York experience? I thought it was the greatest thing on television. I tried to turn some friends on to it but people had odd responses. One of my friends found it déclassé. Straight men hated it. I thought it was the most enjoyable thing going in pop culture but I was learning that it really only appealed to women and gay men. Perhaps it was this staunchly pro-female upbringing that brought me to the show; I could certainly relate to women saying what they think. What made Sex and The City more and more interesting as the series progressed were the layers and layers the show explored in the female experience. No one type was repressed or vilified. Each of the main characters expressed insecurities within their persona (from slutty to virginal). There were shades of gray in each woman, and in their relationship to one another. It wasn't static. I think this was unusual then and it would be unusual now. This was basically Clare Boothe Luce' “The Women” without the need for farce. And it was refreshing.

Time has passed and those giddy New York years are over. Two movies have come and gone (one passable, the other unnecessary). I still live in NYC but I am more settled. Is Sex passe? There is a definite backlash against the themes and styles that made the show so popular - but I am suspicious. The luxury female is still thriving as an image (perhaps more than ever) and New york still sells that $20 burger (except that it is now $30) . Perhaps the SATC women have maxed out our good will like Carrie did her credit cards but nowadays glamour feels dumbed down. Thankfully the show is still with us in reruns on tv: expurgated, cleaned up versions that chronicle Samatha, Carrie, Charrlotte and redheaded Miranda’s (my favorite character) foibles in a rapid Monday through Friday succession. The whole series can start and finish in two months. I know all of the arcs, all of the problems, all of the catfights and all of the (mostly bad) puns by heart, and I watch it every night. Should I be embarrassed? Maybe. I should be embarrassed as a man that I watch it at all I guess. But I cannot help it. I love the complexity of the stories. I love how much and how well you can write for women (when they do write for women). There are just so many scenarios and possibilities to explore. As the series has now unspooled in front of my eyes maybe a hundred times this is what keeps me comforted and still amused. Womens’ stories are fascinating; their personas are mutable, they shift between roles constantly, they have more emotions available to them and are permitted to express them. It is good drama. We once seemed to know this (as evidenced in the films of the 30s and 40s) but in general I think we have forgotten. Why else would the novel “Eat Pray Love” be so successful?  We are obviously starving ourselves.

Not that those characters ever did (they ate and ate on the show and mysteriously never gained an ounce). Until they come up with something better I guess I will watch those tired old episodes and make my apologies later. What can I say?  I am from a family of big bossy women, and they weren’t afraid to talk about their periods. It comforts me.  Every time I see Sarah Jessica Parker’s tutu get splashed by that bus on 5th avenue I am transported to a shinier, more wistful time, a time where I would be eating duck stuffed tacos with a good friend and imagining a future with no reruns. It was always a blissful 30 minutes with the ladies. Yes images of the luxury female are just as pervasive as ever.  But does she have a brain?
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Waiters 08/06/2010
 

...featuring Bunny, Timmy, Marsha, Megan, Shannon, Wayne, Summer, Naomi and many others too numerous to mention.


   Working in a restaurant is one of life’s most ignominious and overlooked endeavors: whether you are cooking, sweeping, bussing or waiting on tables it becomes a family affair. This is the closest respectable people ever come to a life of crime – isn’t there something disreputable about taking tips and calling it pay? It is here you will also meet many people on the way (midway actually) toward their careers in the wider world, or slowly developing as alcoholics (you will never meet more drunks than in a restaurant); you will also never laugh harder nor work harder anywhere indoors. When you are in the food biz human nature becomes your subject for study no matter where you are ultimately headed. I doubt I ever learned more anywhere.

“86 shrimp cocktail!”  Translation: you are out of this for the evening. “Need a set-up – thank you set-up.”  Translation: I need it fast and then it is handed off by a line cook.  “Marsha is seeing colors at table ten.”  Translation: someone is losing their grip on reality.  Every movement in a restaurant is coded so a server can get out onto the floor and play a complicated performance of give and receive. Serving is theater: there is always a backstage (the waiters area and kitchen) and there is always onstage (the floor). Will I ever be able to tally how many large trays delicately arranged with heaping plates I negotiated between these two arenas? I certainly remember that slight tingle of energy to the skin as one prepares to go “on”. A starched shirt and a knotted tie (along with your sunniest smile) and you push yourself out there amongst the “English” (as Kelly McGillis’ Amish father called the big city slickers in the movie Witness). This is showtime.

There are many different styles of waiting on a table and your style depends on your type. People wait tables for many different reasons but they are all in need of cash. There are your druggies and alchies – they are working for more. There are your students – they work summers and on breaks for tuition or snacks during the semester (depending on household income). There are your lifers – people pushing 40 and beyond who have settled into the lifestyle. Then there are the flunkies. The flunkie was my group: homos, partiers, weirdos, depressives, abuse victims, writers, poets, artists, dropouts, bums. You never met a wittier, better read, or funnier group of outcasts. We were all there in our 20s and 30s when the muscles and stamina are still good and you have the youthful glow of delayed adolescence. When we weren’t running the streets we were fiercely running our sections and laughing all the way. Waiting is not like high school; it is the reverse. The flunkies ruled. They lived to riff on every average soul that wandered into the killing fields. Everyone was fair game: recent divorcees, the just out of high school, the single mom, anyone trying to make an honest living was put under a microscope and toyed with. With our group cruelty wasn’t the goal; we were sponges for all the variety that life had to offer. Initiation was usually a week or two and mostly painless for the newbie. We really just wanted to take them in and see if we could peg their story. With the usual problems and heart aches you would always come across some surprises, because life is surprising; you would meet wonderful souls on a similar journey and soon they were flunkies too. If not they spiced up the small time they worked with you and provided gossip.

And oh the gossip – everyone was either sleeping with everyone else or close. If they weren’t doing it they wanted to. There is a painful coming-of-ageness in a restaurant; if you aren’t ready to pop out of your prospective closet you are in for an ordeal. For some reason it just pushes you to the edge and sexuality is usually where it lands. It happened to me at 22, flirting with girls and sleeping with boys and ending up in a whole world of trouble which I do not regret. I think these events led to my first adult moments, if being an adult means taking responsibility for your actions because your actions mean something to you. It meant being called names, lied about, railroaded, snubbed and sat down for a talk about mental rehabilitation for me. And in that moment (with you GP, one of the owners of a seafood house) I stood up for myself. I didn’t see myself as mentally ill. In fact, I saw myself as completely sane for once. After our charming chat I politely put on my apron and went back out there to make a few more dollars.

For you, those kind patrons who never came of age in the food industry, now is the time for some myth busting. Yes, waiters do interfere with your food if they hate you; I have seen food stepped on and served. I have seen bar mat cocktails (whatever is left from previous drinks is drained into a new one), stale bread, crusty bottom of the urn soup revived with hot water, cold food reheated and served, bugs, glass, plastic and you-name-it discovered in the dish du jour. And no, not one of us really cared for long. We were busy having fun and making cash for the drinks later on at the disco. I have also seen how childish most people are in public, how demanding and ruthless, rude and picky patrons are. Dinner is not a pretty light to sit in. It is usually the place where in most normal people choose to act out. All the small tragedies in a restaurant usually add up to no more than a natural justice system; it always seemed to me that the worst customers had the mishap. The good news is that for the most part the food was hot and fresh and your waiter was trying to keep his section in order so that he did not go crazy. I think your odds are at 95% for having a delightful time if the place is busy and the food is known to be good.

Perhaps the next time you go in and the lights are down and the joint is bustling you will take a look around you. Who are the flunkies?  Who is really running the place?  If the performance is studied and the specials come out with a stutter you are not working with quality. If your waiter is a little brusque, however, not so approachable and with a poised and sardonic look, then ask him or her what you should skip. They will steer you in the right direction. Never fear. You are dealing with class.

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The Rookie 07/16/2010
 
I can see it with perfect clarity – two tiny chubby hands around a giant glass of milk. I am coming in for a landing, right down onto the edge of my plate. I let go. I watch the glass tumble forward and see the milk puddle first on the table (all of my brothers lift their plates automatically) and then down my front. I wait for the voice - Mark! - it always comes. My oldest sister runs to the kitchen for clean up.

I have always been a beginner. The art making process is one where you start from scratch, at home plate, new ball every time. I have never been the old hand, never a natural athlete, never a natural anything. Every effort has been a leap into space. My most intense admiration has always been for those who seem to naturally know what to do. In school they not only knew when to take the test but what was on it when they did. For those who could hit the ball and for whom the cheers came naturally. For those who could make a friend easily, walk without tripping, buy the right clothes and wear them gracefully. Is it part of an artist’s outlook to be a fumbling, bumbling fool? It certainly seems to be part of mine.

Thwaack! A knife sails past my head and into the wall. It is vibrating back and forth from the force of the throw. I look over at my mother, standing in the kitchen in a long nightgown. Her face is furious. A woman has obviously been scorned. I jump aboard our scratchy 60’s couch to peek outside the window – it is a rainy, foggy morning. Through the mist I see red bullets glow off and on from long finned tail lights as someone pumps the breaks. That someone is my father and he is leaving. I watch the car pull out and drive away. I am four years old. He is not coming back.

I wake up. I am in second grade: blackboard up front, oldish female teacher, 30 odd students lined up in five neat rows. I don’t have the slightest idea what is going on. All of my classmates are hunkered down to take a test. What test? I begin to frantically beg one classmate after another for instruction: which subject, how long, what to do? I am eight.

Next I am sitting in class in my favorite plaid pants and in my favorite special period – art class. We all go to a cordoned off section of the room near the back wall and each pull out a large sheet of khaki colored “manila” paper from the stack, find our child’s seat at a big round table and indulge in the luscious mixed tempura colors in front of us. It is hard to resist just going at the paint (no drawing first) – it lies on the spongy paper coolly and opaquely in thick solid bands of color. I am in heaven. I turn to someone to make a joke and when I turn back I realize I have toppled a full plastic container of sunshine yellow paint down my right leg. I am riveted to this moment. My favorite pants are ruined but I love yellow. I am ten.


There is an interruption of our 6th grade class; an office monitor has come into the room. Oh God who could it be? The class is tense with expectation. Mrs. Smith calls me to her desk at the front. I march anxiously up from a side seat (what have I done?) running through a list of possibilities. I have never been called to the office before. I am escorted to that glass door with closed venetian blinds and the door shuts behind me. I have been chosen as the best poet in our school to create a tribute to our teacher who is retiring at the end of the year. I work on it at night for a week – my longest poem ever. As I approach the podium to address the assembly I am paralyzed with fear, nausea and grief. My knees shake and I have no voice. I stare down at the microphone and do it anyway, quivers and all. I am twelve.

My childhood was this snapshot kind of life: brief punches of reality that made up my developmental moments. When the narrative is cut out and you have to wing it who could expect a normal soul to emerge? I think it is possible that all of my idols growing up (“the naturals”) had stories beyond their young lives to pull from. The ones with bag lunches, carefully packed sandwiches with the crust cut off, the ones with snack pudding. It is possible that they had fewer rivals for love and attention (I had 5, then 6, brothers and sisters). Maybe this gives you grace, poise, surety. Maybe they were just more certain of where they were going; I’ll never know. What I do know is that I was dropped willy nilly into a crazy quilt family and I will always have to piece things together. I am starting to believe that at some point we all do. The things in my life I have taken for granted I will never fully know, just as I will never know the grace of the sportsman, an easy gait among a group, or a flawlessly turned out style. I will have to take my lot – nervous and anxious and always looking outside of myself. This is why I pick up a pen to write or to draw or to dream a dream – to probe the world and possibly discover the things I’ve missed along the way. Who knows what you know and when or why. I do know this: uncertainty has been in part my family inheritance, my good fortune, and my deepest memory.

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Cocktail Hour 07/06/2010
 

Miss Claudia Caswell: Oh, waiter! 
Addison DeWitt: That is not a waiter, my dear, that is a butler. 
Miss Claudia Caswell: Well, I can't yell "Oh butler!" can I? Maybe somebody's name is Butler. 
Addison DeWitt: You have a point. An idiotic one, but a point. 
Miss Claudia Caswell: I don't want to make trouble. All I want is a drink.

From All About Eve (1950)


   May I share with you the small thrill I received at the ripe age of 9, escorted into the AAA club in Savannah at three on a weekday afternoon with my Uncle Joe, the inky black inside of the bar making me look blind as a raccoon at midnight, eyes adjusting, the glow of the jukebox at the end of the room my only light source?  All of the adult men (no gals) are lined up at the bar hunched over a cold Pabst Blue Ribbon, talking here and there but mostly quiet. I am thrilled. An illicit world!  Heartbreak!  Jokes!  I feel right at home.  I think I know exactly what they are getting up to. I feel no judgment or fear as Joe gets me my usual cherry coke and I hang loose with my brother Andrew (it is summer and we have just been released from The Boys Club which I am also too young to be a member of).  As I suavely peruse the selections from the jukebox – most of the yellowed cardboard selections with typewritten song titles are from some other foreign era - I note that it is cool as a cave in here.  I tinkle the cubes in my Roy Rogers cocktail thoughtfully.  Time seems flexible so who knows how long we are in this dark paradise.  But something is forming inside of me.  I know that everyone here is letting their inner child loose.   I know this even as a child.

Part of growing up was waiting to be indoctrinated into this great secret club.   In my college years I had my share of over dosage, confusion, weepiness and shame yet I was fortunate in that I always had a limit (four drinks....six on very special and regretted occasions), never blacked out, and never got caught driving drunk.  (Do not tsk tsk me...we have all done it.)  Alas I never quite made it into Uncle Joe's world, the one that so enchanted me back then.  Was it even possible?  I was a Gen X'er trying to be arch and suave and my mates were just as confused as I was.  I suppose the great gay bars of my 20s provided something similar, add a dance floor and the delicious possibilities of sex.   But it wasn't quite a “club”.  We didn't have that same mutual 9 to 5 to come down from.  It lacked that blue collar bonhomie.  And it certainly lacked that style – deeply Southern, secret, decidedly grown up.

Now that I am in my 40s I think I am finally drinking like an adult. I look forward to the magic time of day (5pm on the weekends with my partner) when I am ready to “melt down”, ease those cares, and relax into myself.   These days I am besotted with the shaker.  I love the alchemy of raw ingredients to potion.  Mosey into the kitchen, grab some vodka, a splash of cranberry, a jigger of triple sec and half a lime and you have The Cosmopolitan, my favorite cocktail.  I am not unaware that there are some folks who do not even consider vodka a proper spirit but I have nothing to prove.   This drink (if mixed properly) is a symphony of balance.  So what if those damn Sex and The City girls overexposed and ghettoized it as a luxury lady drink?  I am unabashed – I love it.

A man (or woman) is judged by his drink of choice (I love good beer - ok, all beer – what does this say about me?).  As I am new to the wine game I mostly brave bottles in the 10 to 15 dollar range. Spanish reds are my current favorite (Garancha is delicious).   Scotch and Bourbon have a narcotic effect on me. I can only assume that these are for the tightly wound.  Gin I associate with drunks; it also makes me feel mean after drink two so that is out (maybe juniper is poison).  Cordials I can never finish but I prefer Drambuie – very nutty.  Rum: only in the tropics.   So this leaves me (excepting a Sidecar here or there) with Vodka and Tequila.  Vodka, I love thee: Vodka Cran with a lime (you have to have a lime) is my drink of choice.  People insist vodka is flavorless but I can taste it plenty: Smirnoff and Absolut are dreadful.  They remind me of rubbing alcohol.  Kettle One is my top choice; it is so smooth that it is nearly flavorless.  The new Scandinavian vodkas on the market are cheap and delicious (try Fris). Tequilas I find heavenly.   What is better on a hot day than a margarita?  Nothing!  It is one of my favorite 5pm drinks.  The sugars and the spirit are so magically paired I believe it is the smoothest buzz there is.  If you are making one at home pour in that liquor!  Tequila I never stint on. 

Drink is also the highlight of any party, and there is a ceremonial quality to arranging your materials. If I am hosting a soiree I take the time to neatly line up all of the glasses like little soldiers, have the ice bucket full, fruit cut, spoons placed, and the different liquors and mixers at the ready.  This sets up the anticipation for the little kisses and hugs at the door, the taking of the drink order, and watching for the mysterious direction the conversation will take during the evening.  Once the first drink goes down and your guests have decided what the tone will be (recent troubles? political outrage? bad movie? celebrity sex scandal? perhaps the holy grail – someone else's straying husband?) everyone begins to politely levitate and then come back down in a much more relaxed, human way.  Talk goes around person to person.  Sometimes you contribute, sometimes you drift back into your own thoughts, sometimes you watch them chat and you just enjoy your buzz.   It has usually been a long week, frustratingly sober as we are most of us required to be, and this is as nice a landing as one could hope for. 

Have I made it into Joe's world?   Those days have probably gone the way of the Cadillac.   But I do like that I finally feel “of age” and that cocktails (the old and superior term) have their place.  If you are in the neighborhood by all means drop by for a drink.  I will run to the freezer,  pull out two martini glasses frosted to a hard chill, and make us a couple of Cosmos.  If my attention drifts I just may be remembering myself as a child, pulling a maraschino cherry out of my coke with two clumsy fingers, and doing a slow twist to the jukebox music.  But I will snap out of it.  We will have a chat.  Whether things get serious or we just relax into our drinks not to worry: there is always next weekend, and we can do it all over again. 
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Bookish 06/29/2010
 

   I was not born an egghead. As a child my favorite activities were daydreaming, hanging around in the kitchen (the lady gossip was excellent), watching TV on my belly, or pretending to be those characters when I played outside. I was mostly a watchful person. Somewhere around ten I snagged a copy of “Charlotte’s Web”.  I had always loved reading in school simply because I could; it was magical. However Charlotte, Wilbur and Fern led me into another world, quieter than the kitchen, less abrasive than fighting with siblings over a channel, and wonderfully solitary.  I was alone but with wonderful company on E.B. White’s animal farm.  There I was introduced to pathos, irony, satire, tragedy and sweet sadness, all presented in a perfect square package, one I could ponder over and look away from when I chose but had me completely under its spell.  When I reached the final chapter (spoiler – it ain’t good) I ran into the living room to share the horrible climax of the novel, tears streaming down my face, drama in high gear.  “ Sha-Sha-Charlotte....is...dead!” I sobbed.   Everyone got a kick out of my new dramatics but something had occurred that could not be ridiculed away.  I had just read my first good book.

Once I got a taste of quality, a new man was born.  Greatness rubs off and I wanted more.  At age twelve I received a brand new pale gray ten speed bike and trips to the library became one of my normal routines.  I would go in and relish the cool air-conditioned spaces, pockets jangling with all the nickels I would need to Xerox anything xeroxable, and hit the biography sections.  I wasn’t after fiction to begin with (who knew where to look) so I dove into books about movies and sleazy Hollywood biographies (“Marilyn Monroe – Confidential”, a juicy tell-all written by her maid, really delivered).  I slowly began to develop a new sense that what you read became you.   I could develop myself: become smarter, sophisticated, and elite.  I could even educate myself, an amazing concept that had never occurred to me before.  Sooner or later (perhaps in high school) I found my way to better and better books. I chewed my nails as Atlanta burned in “Gone With The Wind”, vicariously became a Jew in Leon Uris' “QB VII”, an alien in Robert A. Heinlein’s “Stranger In A Strange Land”, a Japanese warrior in Clavell’s “Shogun”, a six year old girl in Harper Lee’s “To Kill A Mockingbird”, and a true Southern decadent reading Faulkner’s “The Sound and The Fury” for 12th grade AP English.  This one might have sealed my fate, a book at once so literary and so cinematic in its effects that I can remember the chair I was sitting in reading it, riveted with quality.  This was a book, and I was changed by it.

The better the books I read the less I was able to indulge in the ordinary.  Anything mechanical bored me: this ruined detective stories and lurid thrillers because the plots were based on formulas, clues and contrivances.  Once I began to read authors with a point of view I wanted ever more esoteric and artistic experiences through them.  This stage included the wonderful Eudora Welty (“Delta Wedding”), Joseph Conrad (“Heart Of Darkness”), Robert Nathan (a forgotten writer of gentle, poetic satires most famous for the movie versions of “The Portrait of Jennie” and “The Bishop’s Wife”).   All of the writers during this period shared a quality I look for today: a careful, spare and poetic style. In my 20s this led me toward wonderful artists as well as writers, spanning past fiction toward art: Cocteau, Oscar Wilde, Tennessee William’s short prose, Flannery O’Connor, Paul Bowles, the even nuttier Jane Bowles, Capote, Willa Cather, Katherine Anne Porter, Cheever, Fitzgerald, the exquisite E.M.Forster, the bizarre and Gothic Midwesterner James Purdy and on and on, each identifiable as a unique voice and a careful stylist. I believe that the best writers slave over highly selective prose so that we don’t have to.  Reading the hard diamond sparkle of Flannery O’Connor’s work is as wickedly delicious as any written work could be; so good it reads for you.   You may come out of it a sadomasochistic Lutheran with a rank world view but hey it is art.

Now that I feel like my persona has been developed (and I am not so bent on posing as an genius or aesthete) my reading choices are ever more select.  Perhaps most of the groundwork has been laid so I am no longer ravenous to improve myself.  I read four or five novels a year, usually very good ones, and savor them slowly.   As I read less I worship print more.  I love the qualities of books as objects: hard bound or soft I want good creamy paper in a heavy stock, a nicely chosen font (not too small) and a nice new bookmark.  I love the smell of a new book (and even an old one); I love the thrill that a tightly bound and unread book gives off.  I open the volume right in the middle and put my nose in; they always smell wonderful and feel wonderful.   I love owning them too.  Of course I still have my library card but books are such a wonderful indulgence: the graphic design is always carefully executed to pull in just the exact segment of the populace they are targeted for.  Books make a home warmer by being on the shelves.  Amazon may be evil but a book cheaply purchased at the touch of a button – who could resist?  I am sorry the small bookstore is dying but I cannot resist ordering them instead. (There is also an irony in that I often order gorgeous out of print things that arrive with their library card pockets glued in the back, safely in their mylar sleeves. I love them. I feel like a criminal!)

We live in a digital age. If you are reading this now you are reading it online and may even be enjoying it regardless of this detail.  I, too, used to buy the New York Times religiously Monday through Friday and preached the benefits of a paper document to scan – what could match it? – and here I am reading it online every day (on the day before it is actually published) and I am fully embracing it.  If the writing is good who cares if I am immersed?  I do not fear for the printed word.  Books will always be with us because they are real and they are intimate. Is it possible the internet will sort the wheat from the chaff?  Maybe only the best books will merit print in a future world. 

My wish is that if you do not have a collection you begin one immediately and start cultivating that style.  Stop bitching about ebooks and invest in your own library!  Let your bookshelves be your calling card; let them tell your guests secrets about you.   Let them tell secrets to you.  Once you start collecting your tastes will be dramatic and obvious (I may be a book snob but if someone has the nerve to collect Barbara Cartland romances I am impressed).   Of all pointless habits (let's be honest - we rarely reread them and I never lend them) this must be one of the most delightful, cultivated, and civilized.  You may not come out of it as the model of a perverse Southern aristocrat but you do your own magic.  I have already made my choices. 

*

For Diane - as bookish as they come.
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I Hate Bling 06/22/2010
 

   Traveling the streets of New York City can be a disorienting experience. It is not so much the hordes of commuters, Ivy League bankers, shopkeepers or tourists that get me down (well, for the most part). It is the ever presence of shiny, attention seeking Americans flashing their latest look that I cannot stand. Growing up on old movies taught me that sparkle is definitely an evening wear choice. Well, no more in 21st century America!  Feel free to sparkle all of the time!  Lately none of us seem able to distinguish ourselves without a big, loud designer something on. Must sandals now have long suede ankle wraps attached to them (and 20 buckles)?  Does every young girl have to look like an 18 year old hooker recently let loose unchaperoned at Barney’s?  It’s not just the girls either. Grown men cannot seem to ride the subway without wearing full wraparound beige to white Gucci sunglasses on. I know fluorescents provide an unflattering light but there are limits. So what has happened to style?  Why does fashion only mean risk taking anymore?  I need a break. My eyes hurt.

What disturbs me about the prevalence of a ‘bling’ attitude is the pose it suggests – that of a very insecure, well-off teenager.  Adolescence was never my favorite phase to begin with. I remember walking around like I was untouchable but truthfully I could not have felt more insecure or fag-bashed. Burgeoning sexuality is not a pleasant sensation, especially when you are trying to find a social niche. This is just what I see on the streets nowadays, this same stance: can’t touch this / I don’t know who I am (add  an expendable income). Is this the new America?  I’m not gonna lie - I am afraid.

I do not believe this is the slightest representation of America or the American character. It is however pervasive. Everyone on the street seems to want to be perceived as a slumming pop star. It is a look but don’t touch world. But I don’t think it is style. Style is cultivated - this is bought and boy does it show. Isn’t leisure wear supposed to be leisurely? I am all for a little color coordination and some high end sunglasses but we the USA have fallen into a rabbit hole and everyone on the other side looks bizarre on purpose. Here are some of the apparel I would place in the 'no, please' category: strappy sandals with rhinestones, anything with rhinestones, loud European sunglasses, high heeled shoes at noon, excessive layering, “pocket pants” (jeans with a crotch pouch for men), super high sheen lip gloss, tiny tees, skin tight jeans, oxford shoes without socks, peg leg pants for men, Capri pants for men, summer fedoras for anybody, gaudy handbags held out for display, omnipresent smart phones, “guns” (giant headsets), sleeves (arms full of tattoos), print tees, and labels, labels, labels.

What happened to a distinctive American style?  A casual, modest kind of look designed for walking around during the day?  I love fashion, I love glitter, but I love my sanity more.  Looking at old family photos from the 60s I once asked my mother how she kept us all looking so immaculate on a budget. “Oh I bought everything at Penneys (JCPenney)” she said. “Clothes were not high like they are now”.  I’ll say. Clothes are high! I am not saying that we should all run around in 40s fashions (where every man owned a good suit and a woman wore gloves) but I am not saying I would mind either. How about a touch of modesty in our attire?  Must our clothes sneer at one another?  Extreme presentation is a very isolating experience for the wearer and the viewer. It also defies a classic American ethos of folksiness, even friendliness. If we are all starring in our own show how are we going to get along?  I feel as if we are all running around like Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange – and look what happened to him!  So here is what I say: viva chinos, hello khakis, wear a belt, shoes to match, buy a couple of things and wear them over and over again. If you are working on your look don’t make the public suffer – casual elegance is time honored and worth achieving. This way if someone strikes up a conversation with you it won’t be about where you got your jeans.  Not that you would bother responding. You will just blankly, glamorously stare into space. 
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   When I was a freshman at The University Of Georgia the library had a video center on the 8th floor (it was a haven). You could choose a vintage (or new) VHS, a television of your own, and with earphones (the big kind) entertain yourself. It was here that I first saw the Cary Grant/Mynra Loy comedy Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948) and was introduced to the novel predicament of the New Yorker. What starts as the dream of anonymity and possibility with the big city at some point is turned on it's ear and one is dreaming of escape: the country. In the movie Cary, his wife and two teen girls brush their teeth over one another and squeeze around their tiny Manhattan apartment until they have had it.   As all roads point to a beautiful new suburban home in Connecticut, hilarity ensues (if not quite at screwball speed), and calm is restored.  Now that I am grown up and have paced the 1919 wood floor of a studio in Queens myself for 10 years I too now find myself in Connecticut with my partner on the weekends. Some thoughts.

4:30 am

Racket. It all starts out so beautifully. I usually go to bed by 10 or 11pm on a Saturday night if we don't have plans. The condo bedroom faces dark green woods. Population here is sparse. In Spring and Summer a cool breath emanates from the trees. It is very very dark. The smallest noise makes an impression, yet invariably this will be a twig drifting to the ground. It is Mr. Blandings' dream : deafening silence and calm. I unwind from the honk honk siren salsa salsa cha cha cha of nighttime in Queens. I begin to settle in for a long 10 hour rest – hey, I average 7 in NY now. I drift away. And then it happens. I am awakened by the din of flocks and multitudes of undetermined species of birds twittering, squawking and socializing like maniacs. This is a meet and greet from hell. I don't think I have heard more noise at Tea Dance in Provincetown on Fridays at 6pm (look it up). It is the Colonial version of noise pollution. I now know how Betsy Ross felt and why Thoreau died young. I find myself wanting to scream shut up but it is pointless. The birds are having one hell of a good party. I know they are not working; I know that what they are doing is gossiping. Isn't this why I left the city? I roll over and try to find my sleep rhythm but I am robbed of at least an hour of good rest. Please Lord make it stop. There was less sonic boom in the Dolby theater version of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. I am in hell. Somehow I drift back off and poof by morning all is normal. 

11:00 am

Ramble. My boyfriend is a hiking enthusiast and so I join the birds once again. There are (I am learning) hundreds of parks with trails to hike in Connecticut. We started doing this together five years ago and it is a nice workout. If we go to a famous one called Steep Rock the hike is up. The terrain is rocky and full of pines and gnarled roots underfoot. There are some beautiful things to see and experience here: amber light in the pine forest, soft needles underfoot, a small hush, and a deep earthy smell. Down below is a river with a rapid current and white spray. When I am hiking I find myself uncoiling from a city attitude. Instead of being present and watching the sidewalks for spaces to rush ahead of the rushing crowd I let my mind wander and eventually become completely thoughtless. I am only panting up a hill and quietly slipping over the rocks and roots. I am clumsy so I stumble from time to time but this becomes part of a greater rhythm. What happens is another kind of anonymity, a new kind of possibility. I just go blank for a little while and forget about myself. I have the benefit of the boyfriend ahead, sussing out the blue hash-marked trees to follow our trail (two hashes mean abrupt turn) and I just go with it. It is a peaceful thing.  At the top we sit on a boulder that overlooks a wide vista and eat our sandwiches.  All is quiet.

People tell me I have the best of both worlds and the truth is that I do. I have thought of abandoning NY for the country just like Cary did but the oddest thing happens when I pull into Grand Central on Monday mornings: I breathe a sigh of relief. Connecticut's woods aren't the only wilderness. There is another freedom in the city. It has it's own rapids but I know how to navigate them, and I don't think at this point I could choose. I just switch mental gears, grab my bag and head into the gorgeous human traffic. I bob, I weave, I look at the faces as they blur by and then stop for a freeze frame. I am anonymous here as I travel on foot. As my mind amps up and my spirit relaxes I accept that there are more ways than one to be yourself and I need them all.

But one day those birds are gonna get it.
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The Middle Ages 05/27/2010
 


   The middle ages (I am 45) are not unlike the Dark Ages they suggest.  Between 35 and 45 many mysterious changes have taken place in my life. I have found my art and lost my art.  I have  been unemployed (and perhaps unemployable). I have found that "real job"...the kind the sucks the soul but makes everything level. I have let an obsession with thinness blossom and become a runner (fat kid).  And in the middle of the middle I have found love...the real kind, with someone you respect and learn from and laugh with. With love came pancakes. Margaritas. Chips and dip. Fabulous pastas with rich sauces. Restaurants. Vacations with more restaurants. Cocktail hour. Cocktail parties. 

And so I have begun to eat (and eat) in earnest.  Om.

This is not to say that I haven't always loved me some food; I had a bag-a-day candy habit from as early as I could see over the counter and finance it. I would romance large bags of Funyons or Doritos on the long walk home from the store, or better yet carry them gently so that I could crawl under the house and not have to share them with 6 brothers and sisters who would beat you for them. Yes I love food. I wasn't ever an obese child or person but I have always carried that endomorph body type: fatter around the middle. As the straight-haired wants curly my 13 year old self would always look at the thin boys in their baggy chinos with intense admiration. My huskies never quite draped. Well let's face it nothing draped. So I became bookish and enjoyed my food and stayed plump but never really fat. And I was happy. Ish.  Om.

Then I met hormones. I met my stranger self. Sex entered the room.  I wanted thinness passionately.  Bone thinness. In high school I began to cut back on lunch. I watched myself eat. I will never know whether it was nature or nurture but by senior year I was a rail. Although I flirted with denial-like anorexia I could never quite go there. So I was thin, and still my body was never right. That shape was still there....just odd around the middle. I always had to try my clothes on so carefully to even out the disparities: small head, thin neck, small shoulders and the trunk of a Russian wrestler. I will never be sure how I got baby making hips but I did. OK I may be exaggerating. But the drape, that Roman body, remained elusive.

So I have yo-yo'd with this 10 or 15 extra pounds my whole life, and middle age has recently gifted me with 5 more. I am happy and not so body conscious but the cholesterol is high and I am 20 pounds (officially that is) overweight.  Now I want to lose 10, accept where I am at, and not run my knees into surgery to do so. How?  How Lord how?  And the answer came to me as Yoga. I tried it years ago and sprained something and never went back. I could dig the mystic part of it but never the group part of it. I hate groups. I hate the association with any group. It is like a religion, this distaste. But I knew in my heart that I could not have the figure or the dream of the figure of a teenage boy anymore. Plus my life is busy and I need the breathing.  I need a new obsession.  

The local YMCA offers a class and I have been going for a couple of months now. Let me tell you the old me was easier - even the running, punishing me. Yoga is hard!   There are no parameters, there is no ruler by which to measure, there is of all God awful things no ego increasing reward. It is slow. It is variable. I have usually always played to my strengths; if I could not complete a task I could always at least tell a joke. Not here. All is quiet. It is just quiet, 13 year old fat me and a mirror at the front of the room and lithe women and men who know all of the poses. I tremble. I sweat. I am terrible at it. Right hand left knee toes curl thread your arm open your chest on the inhale: I am lost. Which one is the right hand? And we are on to the next move.

But I really like this practice and I am hoping to improve. Every now and again the instructor comes quietly behind me and pushes my pose further or corrects my stance. No one ever talks (nice). The music is quasi-eastern ambient: I like. The lights are low. I have my own mat. And perhaps this is the time in my life for a little patience. Perhaps I have been running from one accomplishment to the next with too little meditation. I recently began again the artwork that I lost somewhere between my 30s and 40s and this too is no easily defined undertaking. Before I would feed nervously on the novelty of a new drawing, a new approach, or just on the ego of producing something. This second phase for me is not unlike my Yoga class: I am nervous and dissatisfied with every move. Is it an old move?  I tremble and try the next position, the next drawing, the next medium with no teacher to help push me into place. I am learning that I need a little patience here too.  Middle age is difficult just like the practice of Yoga: novelty is out and steadiness is in. It takes practice and maybe a little compassion for yourself. No reward for that. My obsession with food has finally – oh who are we kidding? I am positive that if they put a bag of Lay's Classic potato chips just out of arm's reach I would master Yoga in 48 hours. It ain't a perfect world people. But I am giving it a shot.

Om. 
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   How many years has it been since you walked down the street and heard the faint, ghostly sounds of a speeding car passing by playing the songs from Thriller? It is summer in New York City 2009 (and what must be the wettest on record).  July is looking up: as I walk down 6th avenue it is humid but clear, girls stroll languidly in flip flops and pretty summer dresses, moms and their kids all lick ice creams from the soft serve trucks that pepper mid-town every third block, and those all too familiar sounds waft past my ears, Billie Jean, Beat It, PYT, Lady In My Life, but most especially Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’, which I guess crept up on us over the years as some kind of representation of Michael Jackson, maybe a distillation of what everyone really loved and feared about him. Not too hokey, not too overplayed, a bit of a B-side, and a little on the creepy side, this is the song that seems to haunt us most the year that he has died. It has surprised us all how much he was missed, this ubiquitous presence, these sweet delectable songs, and it is shocking they had actually gone off of the air. But they had. What was left was gossip, scandal, and his image. But the image wasn’t really him anymore.

I logged onto the New York Post’s website at 6:22 pm that Thursday of June 25th. The news of his death had posted at 6:20. I was, of course, stunned towards amazement, and told my coworkers, who laughed and called me a liar until it set in that it was true. My sister called almost immediately, my best friend right after; and I cannot imagine another pop star with that much commonality in my life. We were all floored. Everyone began talking at once: the face, the songs, how far back we went with the music, the pedophilia, the abuse, the masculine, the feminine. The range of discussion was startling, and it was all personal. Everyone seemed to have a relationship with Michael, or at least related to him so personally as to make it so. The disbelief bubbled up among us as at any real family death, the kind of surprise that always comes before the real crash that sorrow will bring. And that too came the next day, and it came so quickly. Someone was lost to us. Someone we shared.

I was in 9th grade when Off The Wall came out, and I loved listening to radio. Before I bought the album I would stand by whole afternoons for them to play “Rock With You”, my absolute favorite song ever, which they would once every hour. It would send me into orbit, and I would do the “rock” to it, the only appropriate dance response. (You swing your hands and knees back and forth in the same direction, you “rock”.) It was a blissful song for me, complete and total immersion, those first rat-a-tat drum beats, synthetic flutes, candied strings, and Michael - that lovely boy/girl voice, that ultimate come on, and a completely unforgettable melody. I really felt it was completely mine. I knew that other pop songs belonged to everyone; this is part of the pleasure, you’re in, you’re now, you are one of your peers when you listen to Top 40. But Michael felt personal. I never thought of his songs as popular. I just experienced it with him. I wish I could remember buying the album but I can’t quite place it. I used to steal 45s from Sears around the same time (Stevie Wonder’s “Send One Your Love” and Nick Lowe’s “Cruel To Be Kind”) but I am sure I ponied up that babysitting cash for Off The Wall. I do remember staring at the cover for long hours, fetishizing the glowing socks and pondering the child’s scrawl of the title. I loved that he looked superimposed, and that the bricks looked fake. I loved that it was all made up. I always started with Side 2 of the record (this had all of the short songs) and begrudgingly finished up with Side 1, with the more adult and discofied tunes (Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough and Working Day and Night). By this time “Rock With You” was so in my psyche it hardly mattered where it was on the record.

Thriller went down during 12th grade. I bought it as soon as it came out. These were hard years for me: gay and deep in a strange closet of my own device, I was a colder creature than the one that exalted in the shimmering beauty of Off The Wall, and it was clear that Michael had changed too. I bought the album with none of the same excitement; I bought it out of curiosity. Perhaps I identified with the old Michael, as a child does an imaginary friend, but in high school I was a stranger to myself, cautiously watching the social games and teen hierarchies playing out around me. Of course the album was a joy, to be played at least twice a day and entering into my system as in intravenous drug would. But around the edges of the songs I sensed a new parallel to my own isolation: a lonely and detached pop star. “Wanna Be” wasn’t lost on me as paranoid, “Thriller” as occult, “Beat It” and “Billie Jean” as somewhat freaked out. It made the songs exciting and unusual but unsettling. As beautiful as the music was the seeds for what was to come were planted, and the emergence of the image of Michael Jackson became just as profound as the music. In fact to a teenager they were inseparable. I was in front of the television for Motown 25 and eagerly discussed it in homeroom with everyone…we knew what had happened. But looking back on it the magic was gone. It had been replaced by excitement, which has very different properties. The excitement had greed attached to it.

It was in the next couple of years while I was at college that Michael began the great physical transformations that would change him so much. And perhaps here is where I diverged from everyone else: I loved it. I loved the makeup, the broaches, and his willingness to stand out. He began to do female drag, and as no one seemed to know how to classify it no one did. His hair grew long, the lipstick became redder, and (my favorite) he started to wear big baggy sweaters. Right before the leather costume in Bad and the sparkly drum majorette costume I swear he was running around in women’s clothes. And he looked so beautiful to me. He looked just right. In 1984 Michael appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone in black and a lot of makeup. I was rooming with a couple of beer swilling rednecks at my dorm and the mix was awful. They sensed that I was gay and in the closet and wanted me gone (I was taunted so many times that eventually I was forced to find a new place). One of the guys was named Dart, a game he excelled at. I am sure he was an alcoholic…he only ever seemed sober in the morning. He had a subscription to Rolling Stone, and I saw the magazine with the MJ cover and asked if I could read it. In a rare moment of sobriety he looked me straight in the eye and said “Sure you can - no problem”, walked over to his side of the room, ripped the cover off, and handed it to me. I could not have been more shocked. “Why did you do that?” I asked him. He took a beat before he put his face really close to mine as I lay on my lower bunk. “Because I know you want to look at it” he hissed.

Dart may not have been a genius but he had me on that one: I did want to look at it. I wanted to study it. I wanted to watch Michael become a womanly man. I wanted to study his style, his composure, and I wanted to see how he occupied a space he alone had fashioned for himself. I never wanted to become a woman myself but I intuitively knew that this is where the revolution for homosexuals begins: in girlyness, in the identification of gays with girls. While I never defined what Michael was doing as specifically gay I knew he was creating the same space gay men do by being something in between a man and a woman and demanding respect. He was startin’ somethin’, or finishing it. He wasn’t alone, of course: the 80s was an androgyny party. But he had so much soul and talent that my old identification with him made his transformation more than fashion. I think he meant it for real. I actually think he meant all of it. There is a helpless quality to the endless face surgeries he indulged in later but I am sure he was really searching for some place for himself, like I was that first year of college sharing a room with couple of homophobes. The place Michael started for me (as I am sure for us all) was on the radio, sweet, safe and seductive. The place he had ended up was as an image in my mind, a rather forlorn outsider, always hiding behind reflective shades. I am glad for his death only in that I now remember the excitement he generated for me, a fuller picture that finally contains the music, the transgressive poses, and that sweet, sweet smile.














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