Deservedly Unsympathetic

“My hand is old!”

“What?” my husband shouted back from our bedroom.

“My hand. It’s old!” I was lying on the sofa with an ice pack on my lower back. My sciatica had been creeping up on me for a week.

“What are you talking about?” He had given up the other room and now looked down at me over the couch, folding a bath towel. I would never have pegged him as someone who liked doing laundry, but then we bought a washer-dryer and I can hardly get him to stop.

“I have liver spots on my hand. I’m thirty-seven years old and I have liver spots.” Small brown spots flecked the part of my hand at nexus of the wrist, thumb and pointing finger.

“You do not have liver spots.”

He took up my hand and flipped it one way and then the other.

“Oh. Yeah. Those are liver spots.” With that he dropped it. “You can get those lasered off.”

That last sentence trailed off as he walked away. His reaction wasn’t unfriendly, just efficient.

Why I Hate Third Party Candidates!

The endless news cycle around the presidential elections - 'change' anyone? - has reminded me of a story I wrote: "Exhilarated (New York City, October 2000)." It tells of my own personal reasons for calling Ralph Nader a 'spoiler.'

This story was effectively homework for a writing class I took at the New School in the Fall of 2004. The teacher gave me some really good criticism on the first draft: "Okay, we get it. Your ex-boyfriend is a jerk. So what? What was it about you that made you want to be with this guy? That would be infinitely more interesting." I took that to heart and turned the mirror back at myself.

There's an interesting coda to this story with respect to Seth Rudetsky - a very talented musician, performer, and writer. He cyber-pens a very entertaining, weekly, theater-related column on Playbill.com. Among the theater news and tidbits he introduces his new boyfriend James. Week-after-week he goes on-and-on about James and I just wish he would get back to the Broadway gossip. Then he suddenly drops James's last name into a column one week and I'll-be-damned if it isn't the same James from my own "Exhilarated (New York City, October 2000)!" He's a regular Nancy Cunard for the gay virtual blogisphere!

Never Make Eye Contact

I heard the ring - a pulsating tone from one of those two way radio things. It came from behind me, at the front of the subway car. Knowing better and ignoring that sense, I turned my head to look. I hate those things. People end up shouting into them with every turn in conversation preceding by a thought scattering "beep-beep.'

"What're you looking at tall guy!" I had already looked away, so the shouter was anonymous. It could have been any of the kids.

"Yeah, I'm talking to you in the beige! What do you think you're looking at!"

It's not beige. It's camel. Why am I letting these black, ghetto, teenagers bother me? Shouldn't they be in school? Am I being racist for hating them so much because my own thoughts and conversation keep getting derailed by their nonsense. Maybe I'm just a classist. Does the volume have to go up as the family income goes down? Why is every sentence punctuated with "n*" this and "n*" that.

Mark shook his head and gave a disapproving smirk, an inaudible tsk-tsk. He stood opposite me, holding the same pole, as the L Train passed underneath the East River.

"What're you smiling about guy in the green! Something funny!?"

Poor Mark. He had wanted to board at the front of the train but I had insisted on this position, calibrated for a perfect exit at my stop.

Then I compounded one mistake by making a meager gesture of defiance. To stand my ground or not show fear or protect my husband, I tuned back and stared. I looked some of them in the eye and didn't look away. I still didn't know which delinquent had been the shouter.

Nothing happened. I turned back to look at Mark.

"What're you lookin' at tall guy! Yeah! I'm going fuck you up. Seriously. What the fuck does he think he's lookin' at?"

I thought for sure they would get off at 1 st Avenue. There are still pockets of those neighborhoods that are poor enough for these jerks.

The taunts continued, through third avenue and onto Union Square - where Mark gets off the train to go to work. It didn't escalate, but remained a banal, persistent menace.

"Get off the train with me here and change cars. Please." Mark is often the most practical person in our marriage.

At the Union Square stop, we got off and quickly kissed goodbye. We ran back a car and passed the conductor. Mark held the door open so I wouldn't miss it. As the doors separated us, he waived good-bye. The L train all but clears out at that station so I had most of a bench to myself.

Should I do something? Tell the conductor maybe. That could be a whole other thing. They'd call the police. Could I even pick any of them out of a lineup?

The train stopped at 8th Avenue, the end of the line. As I walked out, I glanced back at the offending car. Those same kids were sitting there on the idle train as it waited to go right back where it came from.

Above ground, I sent Mark a text message to let him know that I had arrived safe. He worries.

Crap Generosity

"You've got to be more giving!" said Tracy.

I laid on the massage table, cradled to my left side in the fetal position. I turned my head over my shoulder to watch my own feces travel across a clear tube - no more than a few inches in diameter - behind a small clear pane. I felt like I should have waived good-bye as it passed by my window.

"You've got to be more generous!" Tracy loves poop, or more correctly the total elimination of it. She runs the M.A.R.C. Holistic Center on Spring Street.

"How many of these do you do per day?" I asked.

"Maybe ten."

"Seriously."

"Yes. It's very serious." Her voice had a subtle lilt to it of the Caribbean or some such balmy island. "I was studying medicine in college when a friend of mine died of constipation. The toxins built up and poisoned him from the inside. So I changed my focus and studied massage and colonic. People hold on to all this shit. If I can help them release all this crap that they hold on to, it can change their lives. It can lighten your mood, improve your skin, give you energy. You'll see."

She stood up and started to rub my belly very hard. Tracy is a bodacious lady. She used her full strength to loosen the inside of my colon from the outside.

"You're being stingy. Look. Do you see that? It's gas. You're full of hot air!" She made herself guffaw with that one.

I groaned. The pressure and pain indecipherable but total and overwhelming.

This first session (in my package of three) happened just before Christmas. Giving this year had become a task list rather than an act of kindness or love or appreciation. Maybe that was my own fault because I wasn't "giving." So preoccupied with myself, everything I was taking in was not entirely coming out, agitating my guts. As for Tracy, I didn't know how to give her was asking for. I didn't know how to trigger my body into releasing.

"Come on, come on. You can do it," she coaxed in a soft voice.

So I tried to stop doing anything physically. Thinking about "release" and "letting go" I suddenly felt the pressure drop out.

"Look. Now you're giving. I knew you had it in you!"

Waving Hasids

"Do you think that they're gays?" asked Mark.

We were walking our three, yes three, dogs up Spencer Street around 11 PM last night, for they're final pee prior to our going to sleep. We live at the corner of Myrtle Avenue and Spencer Street at the North-West tip of Bed Stuy Brooklyn, in the land of Hassidic Jews and empty warehouses. It's an emerging neighborhood although it's hibernating from the look of it.

"What are you talking about?"

"There." Mark pointed at a min-van across the street, engine running, with it's light on, but going nowhere. "Didn't you always say that they hide out and meet in their cars?"

"Oh, right. I forgot. Who? Them?" I gestured by nodding my chin up and out. "What is he doing?"

The Hassid in the driver's seat, furthest from us was waving at us. The gesture had a "hello" format to it, but he was doing it frantically and furiously.

"Oh god. He's waving!" Mark panicked. "Ah! Now the other one is doing it too! Hurry. Let's go. He's about to roll down his window!"

To add to that pandemonium, our golden retriever, Maddy, started bark the gay Jews in the mini-van. She is an old, cranky lady. She barks at strangers regularly, especially if they're running or wearing a hoodie.

As I dragged her up the street, she kept barking. Usually she stops as soon as the irritant is out of range. Not this time. She kept pulling back and barking.

"She does not like them!" Mark had the other two dogs - Misha the mutt and Gabey the cocker spaniel. They hadn't noticed anything, sniffing and meandering along. "What do you think they wanted?"

"Maybe they are gay Jews and they were waving at us out of solidarity." I was glad to be clear but we still had to U-turn back down the block to get home. "I wonder if they are gay and have to hang out in their cars to meet. There's got to be a better way. They're the Internet for Christ's sake. I wonder if they have the Internet, if it's allowed."

"How're we going to get home?" Mark asked.

"Head down. Eyes forward."

My Stories

Flora likes to tell this story. So much so that her version of it has replaced my own memory of it.

For some context, know that Flora and I met on our first day at NYU in the fall of 1991. We've been BFFs ever since. For a year spanning 1995-96, we shared my apartment in the East Village, as happy roommates.

Some night in January 1996, she walked into my half of the apartment - a living room separated by a cinder block and 2x4 bookshelf, with attached folding doors. As she tells it, I was sitting on my bed, watching “Friends” and inhaling a huge bowl of air popped popcorn. (Although we were both tall and thin and leveraging young people's metabolism, we had become obsessed with fat-free eating and emboldened each other in that pursuit.)

“Dave, aren’t you interested in travel?” She was curious because she loved it. She even lived in Italy for six months after college.

“Nope. I like New York. Why do I need to leave it?”

A year later, in January of 1997, Christine from my temp agency called. Her voice was sweetly adenoidal: “How do you feel about international travel?"

Six month prior to that, my agency had pulled me out of a Word Processing pool to try me as a computer trainer. I was still a little green.

"[Major international lawfirm] needs trainers to go out to their foreign offices. They're migrating from DOS and Word Perfect to Windows and Word. You interested? How do you feel about international travel?"

I didn’t feel particularly anything about it. I didn’t even have a passport to leave the United States.

My first assignment started in Warsaw, Poland, on Valentine’s Day 1997. Over the next three years the Firm sent me to London, Singapore, Istanbul, Moscow, Almaty (Kazakstan), and Riyadh. As part of a “Phase II” for the software conversion/migration, I made return trips to Warsaw, Istanbul, and Almaty. I also took several side trips and vacations in between: Brussels, Paris, Bangkok, St. Petersburg, New Delhi, Tashkent (Uzbekistan), Penang, Bali, Krakow and Gdansk, Prague, Dublin, and Edinburgh.

Overlapping this trajectory - and preceding it by a few years - was my involvement with a group called "Queer Stories for Boys." The group had formed out of some workshops Tim Miller had done at P.S. 122. I joined Queer Stories after one of Tim's workshops in the fall of 1992. We met every other Saturday at the NY Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center. I had just turned 22 years old. We would sit in a circle and tell stories, share our experiences. Some of the guys would take the material we generated organically at the workshops and put on a night of storytelling, usually at Dixon Place.

I watched those performances from the audience. I didn't feel like I had any stories worth standing up to tell a paying audience.

Amidst my travels I found some stories worth telling. I had this idea that I could write a story for each city I had visited. I had just returned from Almaty, Kazakstan. With that fresh in my mind, I wrote A Halloween of No Consequence.

My story frustrated some of the guys at Queer Stories: "Nothing happens!"

"Well, that's Almaty," I replied, "Nothing really happens there and you have to deal with that."

I broke with Queer Stories. They tended to fixate on tales of adolescent angst and unrequited-boy-crushes-on-their-gym-teacher. I didn't have any of those, so they didn't interest me much.

I went back out for another year and a half of work travel. Except for megabytes and maybe gigabytes of email, I didn't make any effort to further document my trips. In early 2000, I took a deep dive into a new position at the Firm. I even went into the office on 9/11 after the first plane hit the World Trade Center because I had a project meeting scheduled!?! I sat alone in the conference room for 15 minutes before I came to my senses and joined my co-workers huddled around the only television we could find.

In late 2002, the Firm fired everyone I worked with, including the smartest and most decent people I knew. Some of them had worked for the Firm for 15 years or more. Disillusioned and depressed I meandered through the next six months into the summer of 2003, when I realized it was time to create something besides work product. I signed up a course at NYU's School of Continuing Education, "Creative Nonfiction." (I also found another job, at another firm, but at least not that one anymore!)

Our closing assignment was labeled "witness to history." Our instructor Carol Bergman wanted us to write a narrative where we personally witnessed some event that was reported somewhere. Well that's easy. I had arrived in London the night before Princess Diana died. I witnessed all kinds of crazy as the reserved British public came unhinged with collective grief. I watch the procession as her casket moved to her funeral. I would write about that!

This story would become my personal rosetta stone as a writer. Carol was far more demanding than you would expect at an adult, elective education course. She poked and prodded and pulled a far better and more personal story out of my details. The resulting piece - Another Drop in the Ocean - juxtaposed that collective grief against my own lingering and persistent sadness. (You'll have to read the story to find out why!)

From that point forward, I took more classes and continued to write - slowly, with many gaps of not writing in between. I'm still writing those travel stories - one for each city visited, during those formative years. The table of contents exists, as an inventory of what's written or drafted or only thought of.

How would I answer if Flora or Christine asked again, "How do you feel about travel?"

I feel a lot of things about travel. Ten years later, I'm still working that out - one story at a time.

***To read what I've written and worthy of an audience go to "My Stories" on the side bar. ***

Dylan Jugger-what?

"I can't imagine caring that much."

"That's a sad statement. It's all Britney Spears and who cares."

This exchange passed between me and my friend Flora post-screening of "I'm Not There" at Film Forum. Everything reduces to Britney Spears now. She's the litmus by which we measure our cultural degradation.

I knew nothing about Bob Dylan walking into the movie. That would account for the tedium I experienced during this otherwise spellbinding film.

That night I started with wikipedia. I wadded through the article, mystified by Dylan's constant "existential metamorphosis."

It all left me nostalgic for a time before my time when people would go ballistic because their favorite artist changed his genre.