Eclipse

A word of advice for the next lunar eclipse. If you’re a straight man, steer clear of Fort Tryon park as a viewing station. The gay men there have no interest in astronomy.

But if you do find yourself in these North Manhattan cliffs for the eclipse of 2010, don’t approach all the men standing around with, “Hey! You guys here for the lunar eclipse?”

Better to ignore them.

As soon as I entered the park, a man was moving toward me in slow motion, his gaze into my eyes unblinking, though it was 20 degrees. I stared back at him, of course, assuming I had a friend in astronomy.

“Did you hear about the moon?” I asked, smiling.

“What?” he said. His eyes had moistened at the contact, his body softening like butter.

I pointed at the full moon over the brick high-rises.

“Oh jes,” he said. “Ees very niice.” He gave it a cursory glance before looking back into my eyes.

I kept on up the path. There weren’t many lights. Branches grazed my forehead like fingers. Every 30 steps another gay, standing sentinel.

When I stopped to stare at the moon through a gap in the trees, two of them would post up on either side of me, separated by some 50 yards, so that I wondered if they were in cahoots.

I tried to lose myself in what our ancestors a million years ago must have thought when their moon disappeared, but it was impossible. Instead I thought: Are there signals? Is my right knee leaning on this cold stone wall a signal? Nothing against homosexuals—all my best friends are black Jewish gays—and fine for them to have signals, but what if one of them posted on the Internet the signal we pointy-headed straighters can give to let them know they’re wasting their time and harassing our imagination? Say, dancing from foot to foot like baboons.

One of them perched himself three steps away, waiting for a signal. Is this how women feel? I took off down the hill. Back on my block, I found a woman standing between two cars gazing at the sky.

“How bout it?” I said.

“Yes, I am crazy about the moon,” she said. “I watched the last one three years ago in the park.”

Her name was Nuria (“sounds like nudie, no clothes,” she said). I had lived there two days; she, 40 years, back when it was Jews and “what you call it, them with the clover leaf?”

“Irish.”

“Yeah, them, the Irish. The Jews thought we was too loud so they took off. The Irish left. Now it’s just us and the Mexicans.” By us she meant Dominicans. “Look at all the trash on the street. Used to be none of that.”

The earth’s shadow had taken a bite of half the moon now. “Oh my god, I’m calling Santo Domingo.” She went to the concrete ledge of her garden apartment and picked up her portable. “Nine cents a minute,” she said.

She said into the phone in Spanish, “I’m standing here with my friend, an American. The whole neighborhood is out watching it. Yeah, an American.”

But really it was only about five or ten people, led by a man who must have been the mayor. He knew everyone. He was shouting to old women and hugging gangsta-looking dudes in 8-ball jackets. Probably no one except Nuria would have known there was an eclipse had the mayor not stopped every passerby, in car or on foot, and pointed to the sky.

The moon was down to a thin wedge. The mayor, who must have been pushing 60, started howling like a wolf.

“Oh my god, it’s about to go!” he called.

“It looks like a banana!” yelled Nuria.

The mayor screamed, “Money, money, give me lots of money!”

“You’re supposed to make a wish,” Nuria explained to me.

“What’s your wish?” I asked.

“Good health. I mean, what’s a million dollars if you don’t have your health?”

“The world’s going to end!” the mayor screamed. “This is when the Indians were going crazy and the cavemen were like (he did a crazy dance and yelled hoo hoo hoo), painting on the fucking walls and shit.”

The mayor was standing in the street near us working his cell phone.

“Are you calling the moon?” I asked.

He cackled that deep guttoral laugh of the islands. “I’m calling Jesus Christ.” A passing boy of 12 heard that and smiled.

The mayor closed his phone and screamed to the sky, “Give us poor people something. Get me outta heeyaaaa!”

He ran 20 steps up the street to a group of three young guys in puffy jackets, the kind of kids who look like thugs till you talk to them.

Nuria lived alone with her 10-year-old grandson, who smiled at me through the window.

“I want him to see it,” she said. “He’ll have to answer questions tomorrow in school. This’ll be on the front page. Let me get a picture.” She took a picture with her cell phone, but the moon was too far away.

“Why doesn’t he come out to see it?” I asked.

“He watchin through the kitchen window.”

Nuria called out to one of the mayor’s posse, a fat guy in a huge puffy blue jacket. “Is that Raymond? No.” She couldn’t see because of the hood. “Oh my god, Raymond?”

He came down to greet her. She did this with several kids throughout the eclipse, as if she hadn’t seen them since they were children growing up with her own. “They used to spend the night at our place,” she told me later.

“Raymond, I heard you got pneumonia. When did you get out of the hospital? Are you all right?”

“I’m feeling better,” he said, an educated voice. “I lost 25 pounds. I was trying to sleep, but I couldn’t with all his yelling.”

“Who is that guy, the mayor?” I asked.

“He thinks he’s the mayor,” said Raymond. “I said, ‘If you’re the mayor what are you going to do about all that trash?’ I had to call the sanitation department the other day.”

“But you feeling better baby?” Nuria asked.

Another kid, Raymond’s age, 21 or so, came up and greeted Nuria with a hug and nodded at me with a smile.

“Yeah, Look at my pants. And I got thermals on, and they’re still baggy, so you know I lost some weight.”

“Why don’t you just stop eating that junk food?” asked the other guy.

“Yeah, stop eating that Chinese food you love,” said Nuria.

“I can’t stop eating Chinese food,” Raymond said.

“So you’re just going to wait till you get sick again?” the kid asked.

“Basically,” he said.

The kid went back up the street to the mayor, who was prancing across the street, leaping from one foot to the other. “I’m gay, I’m gay, and I’m happy about it!”

“Everybody got pneumonia,” Nuria told Raymond. “My friend’s co-worker just died at 31 years old.”

“31? Mm,” said Raymond. “And Marlon Brando’s son just died of pneumonia at 49.”

“The one who shot the uh, the crazy one?” asked Nuria.

“Yeah.”

“Man, everyone’s getting pneumonia,” she said. “Something weird is going on. You better get some rest Raymond.” He left.

The curtain that had just closed over the moon was now re-opening from the same side.

“I thought it was going to be from the other side!” I shouted.

“That’s how it was last time,” Nuria said, “from the other side.”

“Did someone make a mistake?”

“Something weird is going on,” she said again.

The moon was half unveiled again, but now it was multicolored. I thought I saw red, green and blue in there.

“Look at those colors on the moon,” I said. “That’s crazy.”

“Yeah, it’s different colors,” she said.

“What colors do you see?” I asked.

“I see red,” she said.

“And green?”

“And green.”

Prison is Scrabulous

When I was a child, I liked bread and butter. I liked it so much that when I got word that that was the staple of prison life, I told my mother I would like to spend the rest of my days in prison.

Now I have a new reason to want prison. (Please hold the butt-sex letters.) My new Scrabble partner is Luis, my upstairs neighbor who spent ten years in the pen playing Scrabble every day. He memorized the Scrabble dictionary and last night threw down TIMINGS on me for 80 points.

I'm not really dreaming up pathways to the brig. (I had a good chance last night with the undercover cops rounding up men on the corner and tossing them into an unmarked black van. The white officer was actually singing, "Let my people go." I went up to him and said, "What's going on here?" He averted his eyes, which I could tell from his tone was an eyeroll: "Police investigation, sir." It would have been so easy to join my neighbors in the van for a couple months of Scrabble. "I'm a member of this community and I demand to know what's going on here. What is it, drugs? Violence? Theft? Harmless prostitution?")

But having seen the way Luis memorized the Scrabble dictionary, I am searching my memory for concrete, measurable things I've learned in the past ten years. Let's see, I've honed some journalistic skills, learned the names of the members of the Hartford, Vt., school board, mastered the budget process in several small towns, familiarized myself with trucking laws and...my mind's drawing a blank. I haven't memorized a dictionary.

I should point out that Luis paid no attention to the meanings of the words he memorized. Every time he puts down a word I've never seen, I ask, "What's that mean?"

He shrugs. "I ain't too good on what they mean. But I know all of 'em."

Luis comes up to about my chin. His whole arm is the length of my forearm. There's a tattoo of a flower on his shoulder. I have no idea what he did, but to get a decade it had to be pretty bad. "Whatever it is, I know he didn't do it," jokes my roommate Claudia, who knows Luis's wife. But he's gentle as can be. His wife, double his size, punched him into unconsciousness once. "I wasn't talking to Booboo, I was talking to Pookie," he said during our game today, referring to his toddler and puppy, respectively, his voice like a child's.

"Quaige, what the fuck is that?" I say.

"I dunno," he said. "But it's in there." By "there" he means the phantom dictionary that hovers near our board. We don't have one because his kids disappeared it, but I've challenged him enough to know he's always right.

I tried to put down "tu," thinking of French, perhaps, and assuming most two-letter combos that vaguely sound like words are.

"That's no good," he said. "Ta, to, ut, nu, those are good, but T-U, that's no good."

He's kind enough to explain what's good and what's not instead of issuing a challenge that would lose me a turn. Sometimes when I'm stuck he asks to see my tiles and suddenly a word springs out of nothing.

In the kitchen his wife and three daughters (some of them steps) are cooking a lasagna. His wife's voice booms through the neighborhood. "What the fuck you doin' you little bitch-ho, you wanna smack?!" she yells at her seven-year-old. There seems to be an understanding in the house that she's walking the line between joking and not-joking, but everyone watches her carefully for the difference.

"Hey, watch your mouth in there!" I yell from the living room floor. There's a silence, then some female giggling from the kitchen. We don't know each other that well, but they know me well enough to have me down as a "loco."

"Damn, she got some pipes," I tell Luis.

He nods firmly, repeatedly, relieved someone has finally noticed.

Two daughters, a seven and a nine, periodically sit on the floor watching the game, taking a break from peeling potatoes. They and their little brother keep begging me to play Wii with them, but I tell them I have to concentrate. "I'm learning from the master," I say.

Today was my day, thanks to a lucky draw of letters, including all four S's.

"Go down and tell Claudia you stomped Luis's ass," he said. "She won't believe it."