Greatest Gym in the World

Last night I started a free one-week trial membership at Chelsea Piers, the gym a few blocks down my street. It's the gym people join because they might see Ethan Hawke. I don't give a shit about Ethan Hawke, except that I consider his first novel one of the guiltiest mild pleasures of my life. But this gym is something else, and if I stay in New York, I'll have to find a way to afford the $160/month dues.

Converted from a gigantic warehouse on the Hudson River, it's got every amusement one could imagine, from huge rock-climbing wall to batting cages. You've got things like bins of mouthwash and Q-tips in the bathroom. Tonight the fame-obsessed were pleased as punch because the L.A. crowd was in the house at an independent film award ceremony. I asked someone who I was looking at and received a fusillade of actors' names I didn't recognize.

Last night I did a jumprope course with an Olympic boxing aspirant named Gary. Gary kicked my ass. I had visions of them wheeling me out of there on a stretcher. I don't know how he concocted this shit, but it involved lots of jumping rope, barbells, pushups and holding one's body in impossible contortions. Today I can't properly raise my arms, which wreaked havoc on my basketball game.

I played with a gang of Italian thugs, and I'll have to do the accent for you when we meet in person, but you see it on TV every day, as no cultures seem to mesmerize Americans like snobby Brits (everyone loves their old rulers) and Italian mobsters:

"Vito, why you holdin' your back? Don't mess wit your spine. D'you hurt it in that last game?"

"Nah, I hurt it grindin' wit dat crazy chick on the dancefloor the other night." He tried to demonstrate but it hurt his back too much.

I couldn't admit it to the Italians, but before the game I did an hour and a half of an advanced yoga class with a guy whose yoga accent I could not believe. I've heard many yoga teachers affect a fake Indian accent on the words "inhell" and "exhell," but this guy drew the word "inhale" out for about five seconds: "eeeeeenhelllllll AND exhell." Some of the positions were so impossible that I laughed, until he came over and said "I'm going to open you up" and filled me with fear. He tried to take my leg and put it over my shoulder and I said a bit too loud, "No no, that's okay."

Well it's too bad I only get another week in this apartment on West 20th Street. It has to be one of the nicest little walks in New York, this Chelsea historic district that was developed by the guy who wrote, "Twas the Night Before Christmas." It's a quiet street with some old churches and three-story apartments set back with steps. On the way home from the gym only two cars passed me. I ate two slices of pizza sitting out on my stoop. I thought I'd strike it up with the locals, but the only one who passed was a tiny Asian female cop. I had an urge to jump off my stoop and tackle her to see what she would do.

My Big Fat Greek Thanksgiving

Well I spent most of my Thanksforgivingusyourland this year in airports and airplanes working my way back from Wichita, but when I arrived in New York I wound up in the home of a fat Greek and his family on East 57th Street.

A friend had wangled the invitation from the Greek, whom we'll call Jimmy (his real name) and who gets his back adjusted at the chiropractor's office where she works. We knew the party would be good because Jimmy the Greek runs a business that supplies restaurants around Manhattan with food.

Jimmy greeted us in the hallway and hugged us, pressing his sweaty face against our faces.

Now damn that's a spread, I said when I walked in. Food everywhere. Hanging on the walls, dripping from the ceiling. Shrimp, guacamole, bakhlava, pies, the usual turkey stuffing cranberry, wines, on and on as far as the eye could see.

There were so many old Greeks sitting around this little apartment that at first there were no chairs for us, and we just stood there in the center of the room with 20 pairs of eyes checking us out. But soon everyone introduced themselves and welcomed us and even toasted us. It was the warmest family feeling I've seen in a long time. People speaking Greek and English with Greek accents, laughing, teasing each other. A crazy old uncle doing card tricks for a wide-eyed little girl. When he ran out of card tricks, he started walking around with zombie glasses and making animals out of the cloth napkins.

The matriarch, Christine, was 87, one eye open one eye closed. She was a sweeter version of my grandmother, with the same New York accent but higher-pitched than I expected and none of my Nana's bitterness.

She asked for red wine and they tried to trick her with cranberry juice. "This isn't wine!" shouted the little hunched-over figure. "I asked for wine!"

"Come on Ma, it's fruit wine," said Jimmy.

"Ah baloney!" Then she leaned in to me and added, "Or like we used to say: bullshit!"

I couldn't stop laughing at this one.

Jimmy the Greek kept trying to force his mother to eat. "Ma,
eat. It's important, you gotta eat!"

She turned to me: "You ever heard of Hitler or Mussolini?"

Christine started dancing with her brother, 86, though both could hardly walk. It was a traditional Greek dance in which both partners hold the same cloth napkin and twirl around. Somebody had made a huge poster of the two as children, around 3 and 4 years old. They were adorable and you could see the facial resemblance, the little bit of overhanging upper lip each still had.

I don't know where Jimmy bought his belt, but it must have been 100 inches long. His girth was matched only by his hospitality, and he was constantly bringing around food and making sure we were happy. There was a Russian and a Chinese and other people who had no family in the area, and Jimmy had welcomed them all.

Wow, it was unbelievable. My only regret was drinking a bit too much red wine, so that I went into a bit of a trance state and when I finally stood up I flopped a slice of cake onto the table while trying to serve it to someone across the table.

Jimmy's aunt taught me some Greek that's too complicated for me to remember now. They passed around an old picture of Jimmy as a young trim college stud with shaggy locks, and the aunt kept shaking her head, saying, "It's a shame." Apparently he started gaining weight after his father died. At 50 now, his family must know he doesn't have much longer to live if he stays that fat. But for one night, that sweaty man was the greatest host I've known, mixing his dearest family with complete strangers who had nowhere else to go for the holiday.

Dear Ma

Dear Ma,

I am living in Chelsea, NY's gay neighborhood, until Dec. 7. My roommate, Marc, is gay, very nice, and a scholar of Caribbean literature. Last night he tried to get me to watch Brokeback Mountain.

The spaces in Manhattan are so tiny, it's like living on a boat. I'm banging my body on things all the time. I do not fit into this borough.

The guy whose room I'm staying in gave me the place on a handshake. I paid him later with $500 on Paypal for the 3-week sublet. He's a Texan world traveler. We swapped trekking stories and he showed me pictures from Kilimanjaro. He seemed totally straight, using words like "man" and perhaps "dude," I can't remember. I just came across some large leopard-skin pumps on his bookshelf.

People ask me why I find New York so distracting. I was just on my way to my office (the New York Public Library), head down, focused on my work, when a laughing sound caught my attention. It was an African named Jerry wearing posterboards advertising eyebrow threading. He was running up to people and playing air guitar and singing and laughing and looked as if he'd won life's lottery. He reminded me of my friend Drissa in Burkina Faso who said he would walk to America and if he ever made it he would take any kind of work, even washing cadavers.

One block later was a blind man being led across the street. His jacket said Blind Bowlers of America. I couldn't get this out of my head, how it works. Suddenly any ideas for work that I had that did not involve making a documentary about this blind bowlers' league seemed inconsequential.

There's a woman in Colorado being made to take down her peace-shaped wreath because other residents in the housing association feel it's an anti-war statement and others suspect it's a satanic symbol. It's the kind of stories Europeans will recount for years in cafes because it makes them feel more civilized than we are, as if they needed confirmation.

Are people excited or nervous about the Dec. 3 election in Venezuela? I had a psychic dream last night in which I was telling you of my travels, but you had no time. I couldn't believe I was still in my tiny childhood room with the red and blue crosshatch rug. You did ask me if the room I was staying in on my travels was lit by a single light bulb. I said yes. Just now I saw a story about a room lit by a single light bulb. It was in a neighborhood in Caracas in which there were 38 murders during a stretch of 24 hours.

Peace,
Sonny

Coffeyville

Don't let them tell you there's nothing to see in Kansas. There's Coffeyville after all. Tucked into the southeast corner of this great state, Coffeyville is home not only to Amanda the Wichita concierge who refuses to be interviewed for my project but to Walter Johnson, the greatest pitcher ever according to some.

It was Osage Indian country until the whities started camping out here in the 1860s. In the Drum Creek Treaty of 1870, the settlers pushed the Osage south to present-day Oklahoma.

But the town is best known for five other invaders who pulled up on their horses one day in 1892. The Dalton gang. They robbed two banks, but before they could make off with the $25,000, townsfolk opened fire on them, killing four and losing four of their own. The graves of most of these dead are in the cemetery. You can still see the holes in the walls from the shootout. Just as you can see the holes in the walls in Northfield, Minn., where the Jessie James gang had a shootout. I saw those holes on a visit to Carleton College in 1984.

The surviving robber had 23 slugs pulled out of his body, served 15 years in prison and was pardoned before becoming a real-estate salesman in California.

But I have to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, what had the biggest impact on me in Coffeyville was a concrete container sitting on a downtown corner with this sign on it: "This capsule to be opened in 2061 contains items placed herein by the Coffeyville Historical Society in 1961."

"Yes!" I said. I must come back here for the grand opening, to see what's in the capsule. A typewriter, perhaps, a small farm implement. We don't know, because the members of the historical society are dead.

But then I did some math, standing in a parking lot. I saw that I would no longer be alive in 2061. It started as a frustrating sense of not being able to make an appointment then moved quickly into the strange feeling of the world going on without you, as difficult to grasp as conceiving of the time before you existed.

What great foresight they had, these historical society members, the imagination to think ahead and not just behind. Could they have imagined their capsule would have such an impact on a man in 2006, not even halfway to opening day? That the man would stand frozen in a parking lot, drawing concerned stares of passersby.

The smoke mounts in great strides over the refinery. The sky is blue today, at four o'clock. A bird dives. In a flash of flight there is both happiness and sadness. The bird gives the man company. His is not the only transience.

Toto, we're still in Kansas

I realize I'm supposed to be doing ethnography of Kansas, so why am I drawn to the foreigners working in the hotels and restaurants?

This morning, 10:30, in Coffeyville (note the spelling: there is no real coffee in this town), Kansas, I went to the all-you-can-eat 3.99 buffet at the Great Wall Chinese restaurant. The manager chose the name Steve when he came here from Fujian province. He drew me a picture of a boat going up a river through the mountains of his homeland. Coffeyville is like any other town in this country, one main strip with signs leaning in on you from every angle. The landmarks are signs. ("Where's the public library?" "Behind the Long John Silver's.") I asked Steve if he missed Fujian, but he didn't get the word "missed" and I couldn't define it in simple terms.

In the Wu Yi mountains of Fujian there is a tea that sells at auction for over $2,000 a pound. There are only six trees that grow the leaves. Each tree is insured for $20 million. The trees are 500 years old. Only kings used to enjoy the tea, Steve said.

Yesterday in Lawrence, I stopped at the public library and saw a sign offering French lessons. I called the number to practice my French. The woman was so sweet; she sounded like she wanted to be lifelong friends. She got stuck in Lawrence because her son's going to law school at Kansas University. She fumed about how ugly and empty the town was. "All the streets are completely straight! There is nothing here. Nothing!"

Looking around, it's hard to argue with her. The locals say it's a shame I wasn't here for tornado season, because then there would have been something to see.

This is not to say there aren't interesting Kansans. Wait till you meet Lisa.

Kansas City Here I Come

On the Thrifty Rent-a-Car map, it looks like you can spit from Wichita to Kansas City, but it's really about 190 miles.

The car had Sirius satellite radio with twelve stations of oldies, so I thought for sure I'd be able to find "Going to Kansas City." No dice. I did find "Carry On My Wayward Son," the Kansas song that my friend Danny used to wake up to every morning thanks to his neighbor in Takoma Park, Md.

They call it a car but it's more like a little tank, this 2007 Dodge Caliber that's a mini-SUV with such thick bracing that I couldn't see much around me. Any lane change was pretty much a guess. When I took driver's ed they made us learn the two or three blind spots, but this vehicle would shift the curriculum toward vision spots.

Off to the right, a 100-car train bending like a rattler across the yellow prairie. A sign made of old plywood planks nailed together: "Osage: Center of Recreation and Industrial Opportunities." But the plank holding most of the last word had blown away.

Another sign: "Accept Jesus Christ and you will be saved." A pleasant enough offer of a carrot to a wayward son. But the sign-maker just couldn't resist wielding the stick. In smaller slanted print at the bottom: "Or regret it forever!" Love is never good enough for Christians, and fear just too tempting.

I stopped to see the National Teachers Hall of Fame, but it had closed down. Through the window I could see big alphabet blocks.

In "What's the Matter with Kansas?", Kansas native Thomas Frank discusses how the corporatocracy (not his word) has crushed the state, and how voters have been brainwashed into supporting the very party that robs them. In the 1890s, the state was known for supporting populist movements concerned with the average worker and farmer.

I couldn't remember what the guy sings; is it "Kansas City here I come, they got some crazy little women and I'm uh gonna get me one," or is it "pretty little women"? Either way, all I found was another American ghost town, a downtown so empty at night that you can't find anyone to ask for a good restaurant. The only people who will talk to me are the hotel concierges.

A Russian concierge pointed me to an Ethiopian restaurant, where I feasted on succulents and learned from the Ethiopian owner that Eritrea fought for independence for 30 years because the Arabs wanting control of the Red Sea convinced them independence was what they needed. As soon as they declared independence, they aligned themselves with Israel, betraying the Arabs. Ethiopia and Eritrea are run by cousins, dictators who were appeared in Parade magazine's ranking of the world's top 20 dictators.

My waitress gave me some names of people I could interview for my project, but they live in Lawrence, half an hour to the west on I-70.

In Lawrence I found hope. That's right, here in the plains, after listening to 100 satellite stations of junk, I heard one of the best live rock shows ever. It was a private 30th birthday party for a guy named Steve. There was free beer and cake and curry, but the best was this band, whose name we'll never know. Music too good to ever make it on the radio, musicians too good to ever be rewarded enough by the marketplace to continue being musicians, grooves and licks and surprising turns too juicy to ever be heard again, just a moment in time in these young lives, kids who probably went to Kansas University together. I walked out with a smile on my face. Art is being made here in the middle of nowhere.

Wichita Nights

I asked everyone I met in Wichita for something to do, and everyone gave me the same blank look.

"Just one thing. Is there one thing Wichita is known for, or one thing I should do while I'm here?" I asked the concierge at my hotel.

"No," she said. Behind her was a shelf with things I could borrow, including "The Wizard of Oz" videotape and a book called "The Word of God." She thought some more. She looked like my ex-girlfriend Amanda, with long dark hair, porcelin skin and these fruity red lips. "Do you like bars?"

I had read that Kansas ranks dead-last among the 50 states as a tourist destination. The top tourist spot in the state is a sporting goods store outside of Kansas City.

I asked the concierge if she'd like to be interviewed for a project I was working on, and she said no because she can't focus on things for very long.

"Do you have ADD?" I asked.

"No, I don't believe that really exists."

"Oh really?" said a second concierge, who had popped up like a prairie dog from behind a partition. "I'm obsessive-compulsive. Are you going to tell me that OCD doesn't exist either?"

"No, that's a real thing, I believe," said Concierge Number One.

"How does your OCD manifest itself?" I asked. She was a heavyset bleach-blond, with stuck-on eyelashes about a centimeter long. She came around the front desk to talk more intimately.

"It mostly has to do with cleanliness," she said. "I can't stand it if anything is contaminated or out-of-order."

"If you’re in a public restroom and you wash your hands, how do you get out without touching the handle?" I asked.

"I get a paper towel and use that to open the door," she said. "You know where I think I got it? From working in the hotel business."

"Did you hear about that study on hotel bedspreads?" I asked.

"Yeah, the one where they found blood, feces, urine, semen, everything? I think I saw it on 20-20. It was disgusting."

"I thought they just found like 100 different men’s semen on one bedspread or something. I didn't hear about the feces." I crinkled my nose.

"Yeah, it’s because they never wash them. I'm not saying anything bad about your Comfort Inns or hotels like that, but they only wash their bedspreads twice a year. Hotels like this, the extended-stay ones, we wash ours twice a week."

Perhaps everyone out there can understand The Concierge Dilemma, or maybe it's just me: you want to be talking to the cute one and you get stuck with the other one.

I tried to bring things back around to Amanda: "So what movie would you recommend? How's 'Beaches'?"

"Uh, do you like girlie movies?"

I guess I wasn't coming across as a manly man of the Plains. "I like some girlie movies, but probably not the--"

"It's a girlie movie. A crier."

"Did you cry?"

"I did."

We pretty much dried up on that note, so I picked up a six-page "Old Town Gazette" and went around to the dining room. It was 5:30 and the free meatball dinner would be served soon. The Gazette was a free monthly guide to entertainment in Wichita, and the first sentence I read was: "Yes, fellow Wichitans, it’s that wonderful time of year when shops are busy, cookies are baking, and Cabaret Oldtown puts on its Christmas show."

I kept thinking of reasons to bother Amanda. I went back to the front desk: "Excuse me, do you know what time the Best Buy closes?"

Over my meatballs, I tried to tune out the TV and read the Wichita Eagle. The front page featured a chart explaining what a Playstation 3 is, along with a picture of a young woman camping out for one at the Best Buy. I'd thought this was a pathetic local story, until I read in the national press that a Connecticut man had been shot while in line to buy one, and somewhere else a 19-year-old man on his way to buy one had run full-speed into a pole.

Beside the Eagle story about Playstations was a story about how four Wichita middle schools are being forced to offer parents transfers because so many failed state exams.

I wish I’d actually read the story so I knew what the hell a Playstation 3 did before going to the Best Buy and asking one of the campers. I approached a group of four young guys, three American Indians and one white. With his blackened teeth the shape of the limestone mountains of Guilin, and a metal stud through the bridge of his nose, the white guy did the talking. He rattled off the attributes that set it apart from Playstation II, and I stared back at him as stunned as a Wichita middle schooler looking at a textbook. "I’ve been thinking about this for six months," he said. They'd been waiting two days to buy Playstations for $500.

Inside the Best Buy, I cracked the following mildly unsuccessful joke for the clerks: "What's a Playstation? I'm still on Atari."

Since the top tourism site in the state is a sporting goods store, I thought I'd check one out. Gander Mountain offers about two football fields of hunting and fishing gear. Hanging from the ceiling were about 50 stuffed ducks posed in mid-flight. There was a black bear pouncing on a 14-point buck, and a bobcat lunging at a goose. There were tee-shirts ("Kiss My Bass") and scores of rifles, including a Winchester Model 21 for $28,000. I picked up an automatic submachine gun and sprayed the other customers but got no reaction.

Scorpions

Stuart was a carpenter, come to give me an estimate for redoing a section of the basement. It was the section of the basement, the workroom, where I had spent some time as a youth. It was the dilapidated counter covered in a three-inch layer of tools and screws, with the little red vice where my dad taught me to saw. The kids’ saw was really an adult saw, efficient if you were strong enough but flappy if you were a kid. What I made with those scraps of sawed wood didn’t amount to much, some abstract sculptures, the hint of a ship.
Here he came, whistling down the stairs, this Stuart, chipper guy in his 20s with a lightness I must have once known too. He was improvising his own lyrics to the hit of the day, Alanis Morissette’s “One Hand in my Pocket,” singing, “I got one hand in my pocket, the other holding a soc-ket wre-eench.”

In a corner of the workroom was the door to our old clubhouse. It was once someone’s idea for a bathroom, though no plumbing was ever installed. My sister had either set up some benches made of plywood balanced on cinder blocks or gotten our dad to do it. One day she bequeathed the clubhouse to me and the club of which I was self-appointed president, the Scorpions. No longer did we have to meet under the stairs after sliding through a crawl space.

The new clubhouse was creepy and murky and damp and would flood with a foot of water in heavy downpours. Potato bugs would curl themselves into the Scorpions’ official notebooks, which contained minutes of meetings, lists of activities and records of votes on what activities to do. Blind man’s bluff or explore the woods.

When Ted Groupenhoff moved to town, something had to be done. Wherever he came from, this Aryan was a man among boys. Muscles on his blond-haired arms and a chipped front tooth, he seemed destined to take over the Scorpions and make subjects of us all. We had to come up with something. We passed a new law that in order to become a member, you had to beat me in the sport of your choice. You could choose from the standard American list of soccer, basketball, baseball or football. All games were one-on-one, full-court or –field. I didn’t know what I’d do if Ted chose football. It would be like tackling Larry Csonka. But he chose soccer, and I beat him handily.
One day after school in his basement bedroom, he said, “Watch this,” and put on a football helmet and drove his head through the wall. By the time his mom came downstairs, he had put a poster over the hole.

He was a bully even by school standards, not just in neighborhood standards. These were two different worlds for me; the neighborhood was like home and the school a couple miles’ bus ride away was a planet of aliens. Something about school distanced me from myself, slowed me down and silenced me, as if my blood and limbs couldn’t move at their regular pace through the fluid of its atmosphere. I, for example, could have beaten up the majority of Scorpions but would not stand a chance against any of the chief figures at school. Ted did. He not only stood a chance; he challenged everyone at school to fights. The first day of 5th grade, after Ted moved to town, he walked into the classroom and said, “I can beat anyone here in arm-wrestling.”

One Eric Zuelke, himself a recent transplant from Seattle, didn’t take kindly to Ted’s bravado and the two fought their first of a series of brawls. This one ended up with both roughed up, a draw, with Ted sitting on a file cabinet licking the blood off his fat lower lip. The young reporters were asking him, “Are you going to fight him again?” and he kept saying, “As soon as my lip gets better.”

Two different worlds. I was pathologically shy at school, had skipped first grade, was usually about the third smallest kid in the class. I never uttered a peep at school but was a babysitter’s nightmare. I never tried out for school football teams but was a terror in the schoolyard across the street, which was called Rock Creek Forest. Fathers complained that I tackled too hard.

I felt pretty dominant in any sport in Rock Creek on most days. But sometimes the two worlds would blend. Waves of immigrants would roll through our neighborhood, kids like Ted who had moved from who knows where, California maybe. Ted was so goofy at baseball that he would swirl around after missing, and once he actually hit the ball by accident on his second rotation. He didn’t have great hands in football, and I had long before banned handoffs, but if you could get him to catch a short pass, no one was going to take his Teutonic ass down. I only remember one time he went down fast, and that was the sheer luck of a chubby kid with breasts named Hobie sticking out his arm, so that Ted’s neck ran right into it for a picture-perfect clothesline tackle.

Some guys and I had finished a game one afternoon, and we were just lying back in the grass tossing the ball into the sky. It was a gorgeous spring day and the schoolyard which usually was empty but for 80-year-old Mr. Turner doing laps, today had that alien feeling of being packed with kids we didn’t recognize, some of them little ones playing four-square on the blacktop. Ted strolled across the field toward us with two older kids, teenagers perhaps. He pointed to me and Dave Chen and said, “I can beat him up, and I can beat him up.” I was still trying to figure out how this aggression had sprung from such a beatific spring day, when the elders chose Dave Chen. Dave was a half-Chinese guy from the other side of the tracks who got in fights a lot, once in the hallway on the first day of Leland Junior High, and he immediately started punching back when Ted charged him. It was a tie. Dave showed up at my apartment on his motorcycle 20 years later when I was in grad school in San Diego. He was a pharmacist in a black leather jacket and had brought his girlfriend with him from Houston. She was the first person I ever heard say, “Well, I was young, dumb and full of come.”

I don’t think Ted’s candidacy for membership in the Scorpions really ended with the one-on-one soccer game. I think it ended one day after school when we were hanging out in my bedroom. On some level I was probably still scrambling for a policy on how to deal with Ted’s colossal power. I don’t remember what the little issue was that erupted on my floor into an imminent threat, but I remember whacking him in the shin with my baseball bat, the alarming hardness and sound of his bone. He cried and went home. It felt a bit weak to have to use a bat, but at least the threat was over.

Now that I think about it, he also cried on the lip of the schoolyard near the pine tree when Michael McDonald, who was just as big as Ted, hit him with his patrol belt. It made me feel better about having used a bat on Ted to see big Mike McDonald use his patrol belt. I was never a patrol, but my understanding is that a patrol belt is just an orange strip of plastic that you wear so you can tell kids on the bus to keep their toes out of the aisle. I don’t think there’s any metal on it, except for the aluminum shield, and that must have been what caught Ted in the face for the way he screamed so loud. I couldn’t believe I was watching mighty Ted walked home in that slow-motion crying walk where your torso’s at a 45-degree angle to the ground. It’s kind of weird, that Ted cried twice like this in the private neighborhood world, when he never cried on the big stage, at school. He fought, he won, he got cut, licked his wounds, but he never cried.

Ted never made it to our high school. He burned his house down before that and had to move away. Now he leads environmentalist kayak tours in Hawaii.

At some point when Stuart the carpenter was singing away between his truck and the basement, and I was wandering around the house that would soon no longer be my home and sometimes staring at corners like the clubhouse that still had its red metallic “Keep Out” sign stuck to it, Stuart asked if I had a job. I didn’t know how to tell him that this was my job, that giving up one’s childhood home is no easy task, and that walking around trying to remember things is one of the hardest and most beautiful jobs I ever had.

Starbucks belch

Upper East Side

I let fly a belch in Starbucks today,
forgetting I wasn't alone.
I was lost in the NYT,
and it seemed I was alone.
So long since I've been a part of something,
it didn't occur to me I might not be alone.

To my left was a job interview,
two women in business suits
over on the couches,
falling silent after the belch.

To my right one seat over,
a Chinese man I couldn't stop staring at
once the belch had called him to my attention.
His head seemed the longest,
narrowest rectangle I'd ever beheld.

He looked happy to have on a suit
and to be flipping through his appointment book,
making plans,
the way as a child I used to imagine I'd do one day.
I even carried a briefcase
with lists and schedules.
Charts of the distances I kicked
a ball in the backyard, the colors
of the cars passing on Colston Drive,
number and location of animals seen.

Boom, boom, going down the list,
another cell phone appointment,
this man living my fantasy of adulthood,
with the energy of a child.

Arnold Palmer is a Buddhist

Dream.

Arnold Palmer lines up for a two-foot putt. It's for all the marbles. The tourney is riding on this shot. It's only two feet, and he is the golf legend Arnold Palmer, but the grass is thick in this section of the hotel lobby, so it's a tough shot.

Somehow I am the only spectator standing so close. He hits the ball, kind of pushes it out of the thick grass, which I didn't know was legal. The ball goes in and out of the cup, the crowd goes up then down, the inverse of the ball. The ball then rolls backward, almost reversing into the cup. I think about nudging it in with my foot or blowing or stamping on the ground, but I'm not sure if I can get away with it or how the crime would be prosecuted. Just to be sure I'm getting my story right, I measure the distance of the missed putt with my feet. Yup, less than two. It was still a great shot from that thick grass, though.

"Well," he told me, "usually it comes back. This time it didn't." Then he made a distorted face and stuck out his tongue and made a noise impossible to transliterate, something like this: "Wenhh!" This was to show he didn't care. I found this incredible. He wasn't OCD. How could you be so accomplished and not obsess about your failures? But he was: Take it as it comes. A Buddhist. The moment had passed.

"But Arnie," I said, trying to bond with him. "It did come back, a couple inches, almost went in." But he was putting his putter away. It was clear he had already moved on. I, and the crowd, and any link to what had just happened, were all invisible to him.

Boisseau Monkey

Boisseau Monkey

There was this guy, Jon Boisseau, who knocked on our door once and asked for my sister. After she’d lost the big glasses and gone to lenses. He didn’t stand a chance, not bad-looking but kind of scrawny and pimple-faced and a generally unappealing and not so smart aura about him, but I was amazed at the confident way he looked at me, only three years younger than he after all, and said, “Is your sister here?” They actually did go on one chaperoned movie date, because my sister couldn’t say no, but that was it.
I came to think of guys like Boisseau, with whom, as it turns out, I watched my first porno in a basement whose wall-to-wall carpeting I couldn’t stop rubbing my bare feet through because it was the first I’d ever touched, as monkeys. They just didn’t think about rejection. It didn’t cross their minds. When a girl said no, it made no difference to him. That’s why he was so fearless coming up to our door. He probably didn’t think twice about it. He probably had his mind half on California or wherever it was he came from before moving to our neighborhood. Maybe he was even just walking home from the deli and thought of it while crossing through the schoolyard. Monkeys. Where is the gut-wrenching, soul-clasping, hair-tearing agony that I always suffered, before that first phone call, my talking points scribbled in front of me: “Hey, Camilla, did you know there are people down in Georgia who eat dirt?”
And, much later, those first kisses. The endless countdowns from ten before I swooped in for the first kiss with a given rejectress. “Okay, now,” I’d say to myself. “Ten, nine, eight...” and the count would reload itself at zero: “Dammit, okay, now.” At Prince’s Purple Rain concert at the Capital Centre in 11th grade I stood there rubbing the shoulders of Virginia Rojo in front of me for a very long time before I summoned the nerve. Reilly had already fooled around with her, and I had to be higher up on the food chain than Reilly, who had failed three grades, right? Prince was singing my favorite song of his, one where he starts slow and goes crazy toward the end, and I vowed to swoop down for the smooch before he hit the crazy part. That way it could be the best kiss ever, even if I didn’t know the first thing about this Virginia Rojo, other than she had big knockers that Reilly touched one night on a hill in the playground near his house. I did about a dozen countdowns from ten, and finally just after the point where Prince goes crazy, singing, “Do you want him, or do you want me, cuz I want you, baby baby baby...” I tried to duck around to her face to kiss her, but it was a tough angle, because she was standing directly in front of me, and so I never even got close. She saw me closing in like a jetliner, and she lurched back and said, “I don’t even know you!” I went back to rubbing her shoulders, as if the last two seconds hadn’t happened, and the rest of the song became a wash of humiliation. At some point I just stopped rubbing her shoulders and stood straight as a board while the rest of the Capital Centre swayed.
There was something about the transformation from friends to lovers, from two-people-talking to two-people-doing-this-weird-thing-with-our-mouths, that, in that moment of truth, seemed utterly insuperable. I was so sure of rejection that in the very act of leaning in I could feel my lower jaw transform into a wrong-way magnet, so that her face would move away at exactly the pace and distance mine approached.
Often I would lose my nerve, but in the cases when I didn’t, girls reacted with shock that I would do such a thing as swoop down. I thought of going to the “can I kiss you?” but once on a school bus I heard a girl mocking that approach. “I’m like, damn, just do it,” she said. “Don’t ask me first.” So that ruled that out.
Oh, there were the charity cases, pimple-backed Catherine George, the racist rich girl from that Catholic school. Somehow I got drunk enough to—yes, that’s it, I could only do this swooping when I was drunk. That numbed me to the bizarreness of the act. Sober, forget it. Physically impossible.
Finally, after years of flagellating myself for my idiocy and wasted opportunities (still, I think of the five or so who got away as among the biggest tragedies of my life—I can name one who will never read this, Heidi Hendrix, and I can’t another on the off chance she and her family do), I learned. I traveled the world, I learned a bit about the absurdity of life and the way other people see these courtship games, and I learned about Asia and Africa and laughter. Like Boisseau who had his head half in California or whatever beach place had him listening to the Cars and dancing in his Jams, I had my head half elsewhere. The world was larger now. Rejection started to lose its impact. I came to embrace it even, to feel better after I had tried and failed than when I hadn’t tried at all. I read about other cultures and human evolution and apes and mating behavior. Rejection was a job well-done. After all this training, I became a kind of higher-tech seducer, or a busier one, but, by all measures, a better one. Instead of 0 out of 10 I was about 2 out of 10, which is pretty good I think.
I would still get a little nervous before doing it, but there was a little laugh I took with me in my swooping down, and this would take care of me in the event of rejection, and would even manifest itself in a shrug and smile or chuckle if we backed away from each other.
I realize now that the Boisseaus are not monkeys after all but maybe they—we, now--simply take life a little bit more lightly than the young brooder I was. And maybe monkey is a good metaphor for what we are, when you watch how smoothly they glide among branches, how they seem to glide right through life, lightly, laughingly, bright-eyed, optimistically. Was Boisseau laughing with life even then? Where did he come from and where was he off to? I remember the Hawaiian shirts, the laid-backedness, the way we drove to the beach once listening to Let the Good Times Roll, the way he bobbed his head. It seemed as if we were on our way to the endless party that was life. There was something west coast about him, surrounded by the uptight easterners like the rest of us.
Like everyone, I harbored a life-long crush on Cara Deckelmann down the street. In around 5th grade I had a vivid dream about the bare bottom on her sleeping figure. There was no movement or activity in the dream. Just her bare sleeping butt. The three or four smiles she threw my way over the course of 12 years branded themselves into my consciousness. But I would never have contemplated going to her house and knocking on her door. No, wait, I did once, but I was standing next to Reilly, who was delivering his crush note to her.
One afternoon after school, maybe fourth grade, Cara knocked on my door. Amazing that those fleet Diana feet ever crossed my lawn, stepped on my sidewalk. She was the fastest white girl in our school by far. We all tried to throw the ball her way during that game that used to be called “Smear the queer,” so we could tackle her. There she was, right where Boisseau would stand years later, smiling at me with that supercharged smile. “Is Rick here?” she asked. What? What did she want with my friend Rick?
Gitte, my dying Danish aunt, I think all the time about what you told me in the assisted-living facility. You said if you meet God when you die, you’re going to ask him only one question: Why did you teach me everything I needed to know when it was too late? It sounded rich at the time, and I tried to imagine what it meant to you, was it about the way you lost your big love, do you wish you’d forgiven him or done something else to not lose him, but I didn’t really get it. Until now. Now it brings tears to my eyes. Now, I’ve been to my 20th high school reunion, and Cara wasn’t there, but 303 other people were there, and I could see that nothing mattered anymore. Swooping in to kiss someone would not have amounted to much at all, and it didn’t. I swooped in on the cutest woman there, and she kissed me back, and it was utterly empty. Our lives had been too long already. Our minds were on other things. We just looked at each other, devoid of feeling, and went our ways.
Kissing Cara would probably have been no different. But I see, Gitte, what it means, I see it in the blur of Cara’s running fourth-grade stride, in the indescribable light of her girlhood smile, in the young fire of those brown eyes, those dimples that crushed all the junior-high boys, with those of us who’d been to elementary with her somehow feeling betrayed by these new attentions, in what is still almost impossible for me to contemplate: leaning in to kiss her.
Could it be that the only true magic comes before the world expands. Before you have your mind half on someplace else. When the local place is the only place. When a humiliation makes you think of suicide, and a victory makes you king. But that’s just it. With so much at stake I was petrified to take a chance. I never fought. I never made moves. I carried no global laughter with me. If I had known this secret, could I have used it? Or is it a secret that, once you have it, reduces everything? Is there a way to carry a balance inside, just a touch of the global laughter. Boisseau monkey. I could have laughingly reinvented myself as the swashbuckler who whisked her away, I could have made crazy moves, in all kinds of ways, I could have gotten into fights, raised my hand to speak in class, cracked jokes. I could have seen those hazel eyes beaming up at me, the dimples right up close, the knock on the door for me.

The 4.99 Haircut

With no money in your pocket you have to be selective about your haircut. Most of Manhattan wanted $50 for a haircut. I went to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to some joint in an old warehouse, where everyone inside had that manicured messy look, and they wanted $65 so I could pretend I didn’t care how my hair looked. Walking through Chelsea, I spotted a sign for a $4.99 haircut. My kind of place.
You sign a list, go to a booth and pay your five bucks. You stand around and wait, but there were about five others waiting, so there was no space for me and my backpack and the bag of clothes I was carrying around. I had no home and was between couches.
A five-foot white guy with a buzzcut came in the door.
“What kind of haircut you want?” he asked me.
“A regular.”
“Okay, I’ll take you over here.”

He led me to a chair. He spoke slowly and reminded me of my childhood friend Reilly, who was slow because he was born without a thyroid. The barber’s name was Yuri. He was came here from Moscow when he was ten and a half. He spoke with a New York accent that was unchanged from my father’s day growing up in New York in the 30s.
“So you guys are students?” I asked. This was my first professional haircut in seven months. Usually I just found a friend to cut it. It was shaggy, disheveled. I looked more homeless than I wanted to let on.
Yuri nodded slowly. He replied to most of my questions with a nod or shake of his head and the same facial gesture you see in mob movies, a crinkled brow with puckered lips to the side.
“They pay you anything?”
Same face, shaking his head no.
“How much does it cost to go here?”
“Two thousand.”
“How long’s the class?”
“Two months.”
He didn’t look happy about anything.
“The fuck,” he said, dropping a comb.

“What do you think of the people you work with?” I asked.
There was a Latino with blond streaks in his wavy hair sneezing onto the head of a customer to our left. On our right was a black barber with a one-centimeter wide manicured beard strap spraying something onto the bald head of a customer, and I took a breath before the cloud engulfed me.
“Where do you want to work when you graduate?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t want to cut.” He crinkled up his face to show disdain for cutting. “I want to have my own business, get other people to cut for me. You want it short, right?” This was the third time he had asked me that.
“Yeah, that’s fine.”
He kept surveying the implements arrayed before him, trying to decide what to use. There were three razors, a beat-up toothbrush, a comb and scissors. When he had finished razoring the sides and back of my head, he scrunched up his face and said, “I liked it better before.”
“You mean before the haircut?”
He nodded slowly. “It looked better when you came in.”
He hadn’t gotten to the top yet, so I was sitting there with a mop on top of my head and nothing on the sides. An 80s Cure cut.
“This stuff has to go,” he said, touching the top.
“Unless I want a mohawk,” I said.
He shook his head no.

He doused the mop on top and combed it back. “You want it like this? You look like a mobster.”
“I’ll get arrested walking out of here.”
He shook his head no again.
It occurred to me that cutting hair on the edge of Chelsea, New York’s gay capital, must have been the gayest job one could have. Maybe that’s why he talked like a mobster. Yet there was a tenderness in the way he touched my hair, and the faintest Mona Lisa smile, that made me wonder about him. He had already been cutting my hair for 45 minutes. Sometimes he would clutch a tiny cluster of about 20 hairs between his fingers and trim a millimeter off. He was awkward and unsure, but gentle. “Am I hurting you?” he asked once with the razor. He apologized another time for hitting my ear with it.
“Is your girlfriend or wife going to recognize you?” Yuri asked. “It’s so different.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “What’s the hardest head you’ve ever done?”
“Long-haired guy. Pony tail. Probably homeless.”
“Where’d he get 5 bucks for a haircut?”
“Panhandling.

"...Yeah, I used to run an MRI machine. It’s what my mom wanted. I listened to her. I was getting headaches every week. Weekends I was fine, around Wednesday my head would start to hurt. I had to get out of there.”
He spent another hour trying to get the top of my head right. He started like all barbers with a pinch of hair between his first two fingers, but he didn’t know whether to go over or under the pinch point. Even I knew you’re supposed to go over. He would hesitate each time, then go under. I wondered what they had taught during the first few weeks of barber school.
The teacher was a Nigerian named David who paced through once to bark out commands. “Check the line in the mirror,” he said of the apparently crooked back of my head.
“I know, I know, I’m not done yet,” said Yuri.
There was a little cowlick on the front right of my head that he couldn’t figure out.
“I can’t cut it anymore,” he said. “It’ll give you problems.” He drowned the cowlick with so much water that it began dripping onto my nose.
Finally Yuri announced he was done. There wasn’t much hair left on my head, except for the cowlick.
“Whew, I feel like I cut five heads,” Yuri said. “Almost nobody gets a regular cut. Straight hair. You gotta practice with the scissors.”
I tipped him two dollar coins. A forty percent tip. “Hey, I appreciate it,” he said.

Out front I found David, the teacher, going through a pile of trash. He found an electric heater.
“Does that work?” I asked.
“I’m going to find out,” he said, wheeling it toward the barber shop. He said he got into the cutting business two years ago when he came here from Lagos. We discussed my travels in West Africa. I said I never went to Lagos after I heard the stories. One woman lost an earlobe to a machete because she wore a fancy earring. He said people say Lagos is dangerous but in 40 years he never got attacked. He loves to travel and in another year or two will hit the road again.

the record pants

While we're on the subject of records, I would like to
alert you all to the personal record Sisko has set.
More monumental even than last April, when he went 30
days without seminal release, and grander even than
breaking the world record for standing on one foot
with eyes closed, which Rick captured on videotape in
Chicago.

That's right, I've gone 45 days wearing the same pair
of pants.

To answer some commonly asked questions about The
Streak (no puns please):

1. Yes, I wash the pants from time to time.

2. They are a pair of khaki slacks, several sizes too
large. I bought them for $3 in New York. They are held
up with a piece of white string I found somewhere.

3. Four ladies have had a chance to complain during the pants-removal process but have not.

4. I have worn them from France to the 3-week family
reunion in Denmark, back to France, to Vermont and New
York and the business trip to Atlanta. No complaints
from the public yet.

Now The Streak is in danger of being broken. The
washing machine in the apartment where I'm staying is
dead, and I found a pair of jeans in my car that I'm
considering wearing. But I wanted to give you guys a
chance to lobby for The Streak, and if the public
demands it I will continue.

new york public library

Here in my current office, the stately reading room of the New York Public Library, the one at 5th Ave at 42nd that is one of the largest libraries in the world, with columns and sculptures and huge murals of the sky on the ornate ceiling fifty feet overhead, the man on the computer next to me is using his cell phone to take pictures of scantily clad chicks on the
internet. This one’s a blond on a beach. “Say che-eese!” his cell phone says before it clicks. They're not even naked! I prefer the aesthetic of the guy in front of me, staring at real porn in full view of about 20 people.

On the ground floor is an exhibit of centuries-old Japanese prints. One of them shows three women hiding behind a screen masturbating while peering out at a prince gazing at the moon. One can barely make out the contours of the arms and hands under the folds of fabric, although the hand of one is clear.

On the third floor, across the hall from where I sit, is an exhibit on the history of fashion and costume. Here in the reading room a fancily dressed European woman kicks a homeless man off a computer at the appointed time. He asks her for more time and she points to the clock.

I go into the bathroom and there's this young brother with cornrows and no shirt washing his face in the
sink. Really scrubbing. He's got a tube of honey and oatmeal facial scrub beside him. "Is that stuff good?"
I ask.

"It's good for me," he says.

"What does it do?" I ask.

"Well, I got bad skin," he says, his face white with
foam.

"It doesn't look so bad to me," I say. I'm cringing at this one, and waiting for the gay-bashing to begin.

"You see, this part up here (forehead) is dark, and this part down here (nose, central) is light. Now, I
don't give a fuck about the dark part, because I'm black. But I just want it to all be the same color."