Montezuma's Revenge

Around this time of year, people go "stir crazy" from winter, apparently, because it's so brutal and difficult as an annual event, Northern European white folk just HAVE TO escape all this horrid, bone-chillingly cold weather for an expensive tropical vacation manned cheaply by slaves, er, Mexicans. Mexico is such a bargain! Just yesterday, I saw a young couple on a court t.v. show bitch about having three slaves, er, employees and a wedding planner do everything but grovel at their feet for a mere $500 wedding reception, but you know, Cabo is sooo expensive this time of year. Like, it totally isn't their fault and stuff, right?

Wrong! Judge Judy hung 'em out to dry, like the stupidly spoiled shits they really are, even predicting the end of what will surely be a very brief marriage between what looked like a gay couple acting straight and sublimating their rage onto some older wedding coordinator and her husband (both straight-looking and therefore, hated), because if the worst complaint you have in this world is the cost of cheap labor south of the border, then you have no real problems. It's like fat people ranting about how much cheap food they have to eat that's readily available whenever they want it, because it's just too much! We should outsource it to a third world country, to places where hunger is truly cost effective.

It was in this spirit of discontent that my family had its last vacation together in Cozumel before my parents split, and what better place to separate from women and children than a luxury hotel resort staffed by people so poor, they probably have to steal from the leftover bread in the baskets just to live, which means I hated it on site. It was totally fake, and utterly full of crap. I could feel myself depressing downward on the way there from the airport, trucked around in this garish tourist vehicle from the airport that was overly gay, just so the locals could blatantly see a bunch of rich "white" Americans fly past them, living as they did in hovels. Honestly, I was much more interested in them and their lives than being carted around by a bunch of paid-for patsies, but I had long learned since to hide my quiet observations behind silence, drinking in the real in as much detail as I could before hitting the mise-en-scène.

The resort was exactly what I thought it would be, and as such, was completely unsuitable for children. It was more like a honeymoon / vacation spot for dumb Texans with money to burn. Everything tasted weird, and before we could pour the first glass of something cool to drink in all that oppressive heat, my mom readily unpacked her hysterical fears about the water to great effect. She had the entire floor to herself in their hotel room, while she carefully outlined the plan about water consumption this far south: don't drink from the tap, drink only from the bottled water provided (boohoo), and don't eat the ice cubes that are made from "their" bad tap water, either. Ask for drinks without ice. Oh, and don't eat the fruit in the drinks, either. That has "bad" water in them, too. The umbrellas decorating the drinks were okay, but don't pick your teeth with them. Residual germs.

One day we noticed a filthy stream of raw sewage that was suspiciously yellow-colored, and upon closer inspection by me and my middle bro that's exactly what it was, because the "lily pads" floating on the service of our collective urine from the hotel deliberately funneled directly into that gorgeous turquoise ocean of theirs were all made from plastic (you could see the seams from the molds that made them), bought and installed to simply pass as a healthy stream of water to the drunk turistas in passing, such was their desperate hope that we were all as stupid as we looked, sounded, dressed, and ate, with the exception of one very smart little native New York girl. After we told our parents about it, they tersely told us to "just stick to the pool", because we knew the jig was up.

After that, the cons were on like wildfire. My oldest brother was chasing some southern tail, in the form of an easily-had blond Texan teenager busily experimenting with boys and alcohol. I actually felt kind of sorry for her, because her fat red-faced dad was the very definition of an ugly American tourist (loud drunk twang, garish Hawaiian shirt, and the standard socks-with-sandals that mark the true amateur), so by the time we were halfway through the vacation and having our own adventures, my parents rightly pulled the dramatic focus back onto themselves by openly booking separate hotel rooms, so my mom could dramatically bathe her sunburned legs in white hotel towels, carefully leaning on me for emotional support during what she announced to me as "The Divorce" (with handy printed playbills soon to follow). We all went our separate ways after that, as was also part of the plan, and I was only thirteen years old.

At first, I was drunk from the freedom of being loosened upon a new foreign environment to explore without doing constant chronic care for the always-sick home crowd, which was quickly followed by the recognition that my parents were ceding their joint hands in parenting forever, preferring instead to put us into a feral "sink or swim" mode that signaled their cutting us loose from them, while they dug at each other in little snipes for the rest of the trip, to simulate the stimulating "highs and lows" of their exceedingly dull and highly co-dependent match, punctuated by huge public sighs at dinner, followed by long glances directed at the meaningfully empty chair of the missing parent "in grief", designed to show just how genuine their parting must, in truth, be. It wasn't exactly Shakespeare, is what I'm saying to you.

But, I made do. I looked around the hotel grounds for other signs of bullshit, and when I got bored with that (it was typically faux and overly manicured, ho hum), I stumped for a trip to the local Mayan ruins, so I could at least see something genuine and original in this sea of badly done off-Broadway theater. The drama queens pressed the heat issue and full sun poorly, er, I mean really really well and I totally believed it, while I chalked this trip up to another disaster funded by my parents with poor decision-making abilities, and began waiting for the day when I could actually visit countries on the real. That time is now, amigos. Not so for my brothers. Jim jumped ship with his dumb Texan so he could check out over beers had on the sly and not-so-cleverly hidden teenage sex (which he proclaimed loudly like an obvious douche, because he's no lady-killer), and my other brother simply disappeared.

I figured he wanted time alone to manage his feelings, which I've been told all my life he needs an especially long time to do, because he has "difficulties processing his emotions", which meant people treat him with kid gloves, as much unlike my experience as you could get. But, much like the native Mexicanas working at the resort, I'm sure I wasn't the only teenage single mother in residence, times being what they were back then. I was bored with it all, so I just said I was "going exploring", but just when I felt I couldn't wander around aimlessly anymore, my middle brother swooped in to save the day with a new show now appearing near you, called "Monetzuma's Revenge". 

You see, I "checked out" by hiking and walking and swimming and admiring the truly local flora and fauna I could find on my own, but not my family. No, my brother took our oldest brother's early Spanish-language primer solemnly given to us as young teens to heart, and that was to order beer as minors and put it on our parent's tabs, as the price of their admission to our group show. I hated beer because I had normal teenage taste buds as a young girl, but I found that for the first time in my life, I actually loved the taste of coffee. It was a revelation to me, so delicious was it to drink, that I felt like I was truly tasting coffee for the first time, and in a real sense that was true, because it was one of the few actual locally-grown foods I had while I was there.

Not so for my bros. Bernie got drunk and blamed it all on the water, an excuse that was as handily tied and packaged for him as the colorfully bowed gift baskets in our hotel rooms, as a "thank you" to los gringos for checking into their tourist trap. My mom and dad actually had to parent, by overcoming huge hurdles like speaking Spanish, a language so familiar to New Yorkers that most of our signs are bi-lingual (thank you, Nuyoricans!), and navigating the healthcare system of a country so under-deprived and obviously corrupt, my parents fretted nervously over it for days, retelling the story over and over again, with drinks in hand and jauntily smoked cigarettes, making for a delightfully fretful time towards the end of our trip that gave them the necessary conversation to spill, over actual conversation that neither of my parents can do. They talked about their "mad dash" to that Mexican E.R. for years!

Years later, my brother finally admitted that he made up food poisoning and a case of "Montezuma's Revenge" because he was scared to tell anyone around him in authority the truth, which was often beat out of us for our daring, and that he was simply hungover from ordering all the beer he could drink as an obviously young minor that the locals freely gave to him, citing later on at the hotel that "we all looked alike" with a careless "no habla espanol" shrug, mugging their parts as effectively as the key players around us did, in an almost real attempt at mimicking the human condition. We all bought into his act so much, in part because of all the other distractions happening at the same time, that my brother successfully hid his alcoholism from me for years and years and years on end, cutting me off quickly when I told him the truth about living with his condition.

For almost as long, he had bartered around the charming hangover story at family holiday parties (haha, those crazy kids!), praised for his masterful deception, patted on the shoulder for being a secret drunk, while I was cut off, cast off, cut out, and brutalized again for daring to speak up when it was inconvenient for me to do so, conveniently timed just as my freelance gigs and unemployment benefits that I'd earned since childhood were running dry, because I didn't give my Irish Twin the pity party he felt he was rightfully owned, instead of the stern and sage advice I gave him. Before long, I was homeless and agitated, because this happened just a few short years ago, in some sort of organized manner that doesn't seek justice, but rather revenge. A revenge against reality at all costs, no matter the price I paid for it. Vive México!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cozumel

Chameleon

http://wiki.waveborn.com/becoming-so-good-they-can-t-ignore-you

Competitive media companies tend to be bitchy hot-spots for gossip, as employees fight it out among themselves for the most coveted positions within a house according to their appropriate levels, or not, as the case may be. You think some of the books you read are freaky? You should meet some of the people who make them....shudder. Bookish types tend to be somewhat anti-social: think of a mad scientist who just HAS TO clean every beaker in the the lab twice or thrice to guard against invisible alien...er, germs, and you're there.

Many well-read people are simply addicts with a bent for technical and highly repetitive labor clothed in sheep's garb, but take away their main "jones", and they're like any other addict; snarling nasty vicious beasts. I love reading as much as the next professional publisher, but take it away from me and I know I won't freak out, miss it as I may, because I'm in such a phase right now when it's more important for me to produce work through writing than being your passive audience.

It's the same thing for most well-trained artists who go through different phases of productivity based on many factors that include time, money, inclination, location; same as any other field, with the exception that there is no one to pass the buck to, which makes for much more difficult productive periods than the average "joe", but such is life. Because we create content long before the public has access to it, our companies (and lives) are filled with intrigue and possibility which, in the wrong hands, makes for a potent cocktail that people not born to the work can't handle.

I see bound galleys at garage sales all the time, but it's one of the most unethical acts a publishing professional can do, because leaking a book early to the public deprives everyone in the work queue the right to earn off it as a property, the way that buying bootleg DVD's is serious intellectual theft, but catch any drunk at the bar on Friday night, and you've got a thief looking to score, hot to brag about his "already seen it" status to other junkies who use it as leverage, too. Why not just wait? I always liked waiting to see something, like being pleasantly surprised on Christmas morning, not that I need to have the element of mystery to enjoy anything. I'm happy with "spoilers" that deprive media junkies of their high, because I'm a mature adult who understands that there's tons of available content for just about any person out there in the world, and as such, I accept that I probably won't be able to get to all of it, so why try? Just relax, and enjoy it.

But, some people need dirty nasty secrets to hold over one another as bribes, just like assholes in a typical office do. We all know them: they're that shifty-eyed kid who sneaks onto your email behind your back, so he can develop some "strategy" to foil your genius without you knowing it, even though he (and every other person on the payroll) is utterly dependent on you for income, thus breeding the hatred that envy inspires. I dated a typical ad guru who knew all the tricks of the trade: hire brilliant but vulnerable people like, say, a single woman living paycheck-to-paycheck in the city, just one small check away from bankruptcy but famous anyway, even though you should, like, NEVER say it to her face or she'll, like, know it and stuff, and there goes secrecy as a strategy!

So, I know all the big personality types who peddle our wares, grudgingly as "no-talents" tend to be as a group, but also utterly dependent on us, and isn't that why they turn on us? It's a pretty easy formula to suss out, much like the reason the retarded bully in the playground hates everyone: simply because you're there, and because his father's a mean drunk, so they're set up to be that way. Anyway, during our brief time dating (most of which the ad guy spent in competition with the other man I was dating), he asked me a lot of leading questions about the "other man" disguised as "support" from the modern guy looking to "score" with a beautiful woman. After a quick while, it actually became a pseudo-gay relationship between the two of them through me. He also thought it was bitchy fun to "out" a well-known and highly respected actor to me, simply because I knew his work well and the women he's collaborated with creatively, like, say an infamous Broadway actress with very curly hair (thanks for not selling out "soul sister") who can pass for my doppelganger at times.

I was nonplussed because lots of people are gay, to which he became a little twitchy about it, "Oh, oh sorry...did you have  a 'crush' on him?" Uh, no...never really thought about it before. "Because if you did, I'm so sorry!" Yeah, no sweat, dude. Actually, we were in downtown Brooklyn on a warm day, and I was thinking about pizza at a "famous" place that's always crowded with tourists, and as a native New Yorker, I never fucking wait on lines for our food, like some gimmicky tourist trap meant to gouge the unsuspecting. I cook better than most people anyway! He seemed curiously let-down that I couldn't give a fuck about some artist's sex life, and why would I? What does it have to do with me? It's the same thing at work: why would I give a fuck about who sleeps with who, and when? I make the work, they sell it and give me the profits I earn through my own labor. It's a pretty effective formula for craftspeople that's worked since we thought of it many moons ago.

It did give me a lot insight into why people like him sell-out so quickly; it's the fear that the money will dry up, once we figure out who they really are, which isn't true for experts like myself. Like my mentors told me, do your job well and that's your security. You don't need all the bullshit. If you work hard, you'll succeed, and that's always been the case with me, because nothing beats hard work. Anyway, after he and I necessarily drifted apart because he couldn't figure out how to work with an open honest person like myself, I noticed that he drifted out west, after his ex-wife moved there with his one child, the same woman he loved/hated by alternately craving her sex and then cheating on her to get her attention, like a ten year-old in crafts class off of his Ritalin. Really? Skirt-cashing the very woman he despises? Oy....strange are the ways of the disordered classes.

Anyway, I'm counting on him cyber-stalking me today without telling me how much he loves my work (and that happens every day, too), so let me take this time to ease his mind: back in the day, we "the knowing public" also knew that Liberace was gay, as we did about Richard Chamberlain, George Michael, and the fabulously feminine Boy George, and you know what? We love their music and their art anyway, because as Steve Martin once famously said, all you have to do to be a master artist is work harder than anyone you know, and "be so good that they can't ignore you". Ain't that the truth? There...now it's out there. The truth is out there! See you on the flip side of life, kids, and all the other "minors" in my audience. I see you!

http://bit.ly/1SBWvgb

http://bit.ly/1SBWvgb 

Huggy Bear!

Yo honky, this here is Huggy Bear. You know, from "Starsky and Hutch"?

Me and my bros hero-worshipped few people growing up, because real-life heroes are hard to find (http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2011/12/ackerman-update.html). Our short list back then (and now) was: Mel Blanc, Forrest J Ackerman, and Lou Ferrigno....in no particular order....or is there? We loved the adults who made stuff just for kids, because that's a form of love every child innately understands, like the punchline to a great cartoon voiced well and excellently drawn. How could we resist? We didn't!

We loved monster movies and the heroes who fought back against the bad guys for all of humanity, as well as any kind of action feature that had the good guys winning, kind of like how we do it now;) To us, they represented the best of what we wanted to be when we grew up: actual human beings that our kids (and their kids, and so on...) could look up to and feel proud of. It wasn't always easy for us to see the kinds of people we knew and loved reflected back at us in mainstream media, marginalized as we are as minorities fighting back against oppression (http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2012/06/curly-girl.html), but like any other "good guy" out there, we persevered, living to fight another day.

The supposedly background character "Huggy Bear" from the 1970s t.v. show "Starsky and Hutch" (like the family from "The Jeffersons" and The Walkers from "Good Times") felt a lot like the people and neighborhoods we came from, trying to make their way against insurmountable odds in a cruel world, just like Fat Albert and his ragtag crew of kids from the block resembled the mixed bag of kids from around the way, in a combination of our 'hoods from the city and the country. Huggy Bear seemed to always be there went it all went down, not as the well-paid white actors in the lead, but still essential to the plot somehow by circumstances beyond his control.

But, that's how it went down in the day. Our guys weren't always played by the white actor in the lead, nor were they the sheriff in the big white hat playing up to the movie's full-face, up-close screen time; they were just there, hovering in the background, waiting to step in just when we needed it. In the meantime, we did what every single one of us in my crew did naturally, because we talked about it at length growing up: we worked hard (harder than most), went to school, entered the workforce, and kept our heads barely above water, at times subsumed by the forces of the tides as they turned, to dominate each and every corner of human life, because that's exactly what G-d promises us. Not easy or cushy, not money or houses or cars, nor anything shiny that can be bought and put up for sale, but who we are brought back to ourselves as the reality of who we really are hits us, and how strong we've become through our jointly-applied labors.

For all the underpaid, unsung glories of the world out there (and you know who you are), this one's for you today. Keep on rockin' and doin' your thing, knowing that the right person is watching you, even when it seems like we're not, because we are. We're right there with it.

(For Mo)

Club Dread

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonism_Resorts

When I was ejected out of my newly gentrified Park Slope apartment building for not breaking a city lease illegally (and for losing the income from my job), I had to stay with a gentleman friend I met at the local library. It wasn't that I thought my new friend was of sound of body and mind, it was simply that I had no other options available to me, except those fevered delusions that my family routinely plays out amongst one another while I (as the head of my family) struggle with typical life situations, but that's certainly nothing new for me.

Since I've been parenting most of my life, I trust myself to handle as best as possible the worst conditions life can throw at you, because I've never had it any differently in my life (also not of my choosing). What child asks to be born into a very dysfunctional situation rife with mental illnesses, domestic violence, rampantly unchecked psychoses, aberrant obsessive compulsive behavior, and untreated addictions, treated like huge "secrets" that almost every human family has? No one, that' s who. And so, I was under no pretenses when my friend walked me to my church for a casual meeting with some members of the volunteer charity St. Vincent de Paul, which I'm sure he heard of, struggle as he does with manic bipolar depression and paranoid schizophrenia, because they give away free food there.

Under my watch, the volunteers working actually dropped their bullshit act of pawning off old cans from the backs of their closets with food no sane healthy person would ever eat, replacing those dusty cans with vouchers for fresh food from the local grocery store instead (heavy on the organic produce), and for that I am glad. Social "do-gooders" often tends towards the obviously condescending, tentative as they often feel their grip on reality is, reassured only by kicking on the already downtrodden among us, but not so with me. I needed impromptu legal advice for my court cases through the housing court system of Brooklyn, one of the most lopsidedly corrupt institutions I've ever run into, but also not without genuine people looking to help those in need, most often impoverished black single mothers.

It's not fair, and I didn't like one minute of my introductory course with the twin worlds of our legal systems and Public Assistance, but as my friend from Brownsville told me, "You have to treat 'Welfare' like it's your job", knowing the system as he does, because he's a fourth generation recipient of tax money, but that's typical for the criminally insane. There's no way I could sit in an overheated room full of the mentally unfit popping off during their long wait for social justice because there's no real appointment system for services, like a regular government office would have or, say, like any private office I've ever worked at. It's just not in me to do something so insanely wasteful as that when I can be working, like now.

But he worked it like he was born to it, which he was. You see, you have to be taught by someone "in the know" about what time you need to get there so as to not blow your whole day, where to stand and what line to go on (and if you don't do it "right", the personnel there adopts this shocked peevish look by your newness and questions, because they see the same types of families for generations), what kinds of forms you need, what window does what kind of social service, what to say and how to say it, and so on. It was nuts. No healthy person I know thinks, speaks, or acts like anyone I encountered through my enforced labors through the worlds of the addicted and afflicted.

What I did learn after my brief tenure with the lowest of the low is that they need healthcare and supervised monitoring through supported housing for the seriously sick over any kind of fake program that pretends a violent schizophrenic with obvious tremors just needs "a hand up" with an hour of resume writing workshops and vocational training, because being able to rip off the system puts you up there intellectually with a sophisticated cat burglar rather than some pretend office bureaucrat. That's the actual mindset reflected: we're all insane here, except for you because that was the attitude I got from customers and workers alike in the public systems of New York. You, Miss, definitely don't belong here, given with a strangely quizzical look of puzzlement about why a gorgeous, educated, healthy woman like me was even doing there, because that's exactly what it felt like.

Why am I here? My friend Cotto had no such allusions. He knew he fit the system. He likes smoking pot and sitting around bullshitting with nut cases for hours, like the town drunk who takes up "his" barstool every day at noon; because that's the only kind of regular schedule a mentally infirm individual can adhere to, besides the numbing, hand-wrung, midnight laundry hidden behind closed doors that typifies suburban anxieties. They're just more well hidden than those out in public that marks city life. While I fretted every single minute I spent in a system not designed for me, wondering why free Internet wasn't available for people supposedly looking for jobs like I was, Cotto took up residence like the fat king he likes to daydream he is.

One of his favorite fever fantasies he recalled to me one evening at "Casa Crazy", in the part of the 'hood that slips quickly from Park Slope's elite privilege to hardcore Hispanic poverty and crime, involved his ideas about what a dream vacation would be like. Since he knew I was well-traveled, he must have told himself that his lies were entertaining fodder for me while I slept on the floor of his overheated rented room, and they kinda were, if you could ignore his creeping mania returning as his medications waned. On such a cold winters evening did he tell me the tale of his overblown addictions combined with overheard exploits at Mexican resorts, like I would ever believe that he went to one, seeing as he was on our payroll for, well, just about everything, vacation hotspots not included.

But, that's what he wanted me to think: he and his crazy fat ugly girlfriend went to a Club Med type of resort for sunbathing in the nude, partner-swapping in the common area hot tub (also done in the nude, naturally), followed by hours of hazy pot-smoking under the sun with his paramour, while they non-judgmentally explored the finer points of a S&M lifestyle habitue, like a sophisticate on a winery tours pontificating pretentiously about every grape varietal in the glass, which it most certainly was not. His room was dirty, smoky, smelly, scary, and not at all like my life, the real life that he wanted (at least for a little while) to pretend that he had, sick as he was when I knew him.

When I quickly got another gig (while working at the public library and using their Internet service, just like I am today) he freaked out, though I had no idea why. I took a lower level job than my experience with a no-name indie publisher just to get a paycheck so I could pay back rent on a contract designed to bankrupt me while it terrorized me, which it did. It was only later on, after I left his squalid tenement life for other not-so-fair spots on the globe, that I realized what he was actually trying to tell me: I was his dream made real. He gushed when I got home from work exhausted, using the nighttime hours to clear trash out from the wrecked room I paid fair market value for, unfit for living as it was, but those were the times as they existed.

He gurgled with excitement from another easy day I paid for, as I whitewashed the walls with thinned cans of paint I could barely afford in a baggy shirt bought at the dollar store up the block, nailing down loose floorboards while rinsing them repeatedly with white vinegar that repelled city bugs like cockroaches, because I had to. He'd created some ideal celebrity out of a tired book publishing professional who'd apprenticed into the industry way back in 1993, working my way steadily up the creaky ladder I stood on while he watched me work, squinting at me through the smoke. "Oh, snap!", he bubbled excitedly to me, in front of the super's first floor apartment that was strikingly cleaner than the upstairs rooms he rented above him, "This is awesome, man! We're going to need an 'enoturage', yo!".

I realized long after I left for more troubled pastures with greener fields, that's exactly how he saw me: as the girl that every man dreams of, doing feats of brilliance and physical endurance that a chronically sick man like him will never ever be able to do. I was his real-life action hero, right there in front of him, instead of the fictional caped crusader from the video games he used to check out of reality with, on those nights when he was too wound up to sleep and out of sleeping medication. I was his holiday vacation from his own life, brief as that was, because like every seriously mentally ill person I've ever met, he will never have the loving romance of my life over the weirdly leveraged head games that the sick use in lieu of an actual adult sex life.

There were no power struggles between he and I, no strange mind games to manipulate, no weird sexual tensions to exploit, no leveraged money to control me with, no extended overwrought, passive-aggressive coercions...no, there was nothing like that. I was just another overworked New York mama takin' care of her own, you know what I'm sayin'? That's all it was for me: just another day at the office, taking care of the sick people of this world (with no vacation days or vacation pay included), and ain't that the truth for you, too, girlfriends? You know it is. Now, hand me that silly-looking piña colada mixed drink with the tiny umbrella under this here sunlamp. At least we can pretend to take a break, even if it's for a little while, right? No vacations for us, are there? There's never enough time or money for that, when you're a real mother like me. Nope, there definitely isn't.

https://www.svdpusa.org/ 

Eat "Phresh"

Homemade, yo! This is me and my making, kids. Try it at home.

People from the 'hood are all crazy, which is the point. Hate someone different than you? Disenfranchise them through systemic abuses that are also lawful, and then push them to the margins to suffer sight unseen, where they will languish until the next generation also has hurt encoded within their DNA, like a ticking time bomb. It's certainly one of the motives behind every mass genocide perpetrated throughout human history; to deliver wrongs unto you and your children that they won't recover from, except for one minor detail. We know about it, with the "we" being you and me and anyone else reading this, hip to the game that plays out between good and evil every day, on this chessboard that is life itself.

So, while the t.v. media machine churned out canned surprise, showy tongue-clucking, and a false show of horror at some well-known sandwich shills' public downfall, I chuckled wryly to myself as I watched what passes for news these days, having been down this road before. I had a friend who nervously spit out common sayings as a means of coping with stress, or when she couldn't quite figure out solutions to the problem at hand, and that was this: where there's smoke, there's fire. It's kinda like the "from the frying pan into the fire", which is also the name of a tugboat restaurant called "The Frying Pan" that's parked in New York's Hudson River. That was one of the last times I saw my poorly beleaguered friend.

You see, when I was still a junior designer in New York, I worked with a twitchy Italian-American woman who has a constant expression of wide-eyed tension on her face at all times, accurately reflecting her nervously compulsive state of being. She could do the same task twenty million times, but she was also co-dependent on the people around her to lean on when she gave out (as long as she paid them to be her allies and friends), when they were really supposed to be co-workers and employees. She was hooked on shopping (made worse by her studios' location in a building known for wholesalers who had seasonal sample sales all the time), driving her to create fake acts of kindness ("Let's close the studio and shop!"), when we really were just recycling our pay out of one pocket and into another.

I didn't really mind the break from my labors that were sometimes challenging but often somewhat mindless (I was still paying my dues in the industry) plus I'm no addict, but her longtime assistant fared worse under her strict guidelines, for living off of what she considered "her" dime: Carrie was overweight, divorced, and living with her mother, though when I was there, she was recently spared her free "Pizza Fridays" because our boss was on a new diet, one that depended greatly on buying this company's kind of food. It was baffling, just like her heated and almost daily arguments with her second husband, a stressed-out Italian-American cop who was clearly part of her pattern. She didn't have any children, and by the freaked out way she had about her all the time, I knew better than to ask. She was a woman at that age when being barren can crack a fragile woman hard.

Because of her touchy mannerisms, I made her at first for a pampered, kept woman, but over the course of my freelance employ there (she couldn't afford to pay me health insurance but kept me on as part of her office staff for two years, which is now illegal to do in NYC), I found out that she was just like any other New Yorker struggling with a big dysfunctional family and living in a small cheap apartment in Mount Vernon, like the rest of us. It was weird, but given her odd eccentricities, it made total sense. Her arrogant sense of superiority hid obvious insecurities, with her rather tenuous hold on reality.

After a time, me and the woman who worked for her at her design firm asked her a direct question one afternoon, emboldened with knowing looks we gave each other as we turned our office chairs to her, because our computers faced the walls with our backs to one another, leaving the owner to be the only one who could see all three computers at the same time, and that was this: what exactly do you intend to do when you stop paying some company to feed you? How will you feed yourself? She shrugged it off lightly, playing busy with never-ending deadlines, brushing off our serious question with a pointedly dumb shrug, "I guess I'll just have to keep buying their food," which was our exact point to her: you need to buy their chemically laden food to stay "thin" because you can't do it on your own, despite her status at the time as a publishing expert with access to just about any type of information that existed on the planet. 

Welcome to "AA" in this century, Carol! I'll see you later on, if you've indeed mastered food and nutrition, yet. I know I have. By the way, I know you scoped me out upon my return to New York City from out west, after I visited you openly in your office empty of employees, because your business went downhill when Vince's business dried up, and you were both coasting on back-list content created by a lot of other artists and designers, like me and Carrie. You thought you were spying on me during my visit to St. Patrick's Cathedral to light a candle but, my dear, I both heard and saw you there out of the corner of my eye, mumbling to yourself that I was still "too young" and "too pretty" for you to talk to anymore, because you felt that you didn't have any advantages over me anymore. Clever, girl. You never did. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Fogle 

Pot Roast

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pot_roast

After college, me and my state school boyfriend once again lived in the same town; he after Montreal and McGill University, and me after R.I.S.D. and Providence, Rhode Island, except everything had changed. He struggled to define himself through MCAT's and what kind of grad school major he should choose from (he's now in that end of show business that enforces union contracts = ugh), and I was becoming an apprentice in publishing, which is about as far apart as the talent is from the office workers around them as it gets. One person watches the action safely from afar while hiding behind the scenes, or off-camera in the shadows, and the other person falls on her ass repeatedly in front of everyone, with jeers and cheers given out in equal measure.

Besides that, he hated art. After a time, my very open "Art Fag" fashion design friend from art school had moved into my aunt's apartment with me (I thought she could help me out with expenses), and he hated her, too, but he had opened the door widely to other personalities a while ago. He justified to me that his roaming eye for other girls was from being a virgin when we met, but that was years ago. He had attended a very expensive, all-boys Jesuit prep school in Manhattan, while I busted my ass working after-school jobs in a very good but very public school system here in 70s and 80s-era working class Rockland County. He lived in the house his grandparents had built for their family, with their prominently displayed, large, gilded Quebecois fleur-de-lis painted in the living rooms' four corners, while his very large French Canadian ex-Marine dad sat regally in his recliner watching whatever he said he wanted to, attended to by his much smaller and mousier Irish-American mother, who snapped briskly to whatever house chores needed doing.

They had six children who still lived with their parents, with the exception of their already-married sister, which is the tradition for most strict Roman Catholic families. His parents were very much that, and loudly proud of it, too. French Canadians, like Irish people, still suffer from the stigma attached to multiple child births without practicing birth control, which created a lot of largely impoverished families wherever we went around the globe, but such was not the case with his Union-funded father and his very large family. As the youngest, Bart did his chores like I did mine (he was assigned laundry duty = ugh), because all hands are needed to pitch in for a large house to run, and our families were no exceptions to the rule. Work hard, play hard. Got it.

Easy, right? But for him, it wasn't. He struggled with sometimes the simplest decisions, like what to eat and when to do it, or with whom and how many are invited? He justified his unfaithfulness to me in Montreal as necessary experiences that would satisfy me in his future as my husband, because I had been forced by circumstances not of my own choosing to become a "Lady of the Household" before I felt that I was really ready for it, which was part of the abuse behind it: to drive me out of the house and into much deeper adult waters in a world where I would get hurt and ultimately recover from, as is my natural way. I didn't really care about dating while attending in the world's hardest design university, as yet another high performing place where I worked three part-time jobs in between an unheard of school schedule that was just studio classes (please don't try it), which were much harder, longer, and labor-intensive, and which was the total opposite of his relatively easy studies that were typical for liberal arts students, where one could hide in the back of a darkened classroom taking notes and writing papers for grades; simple as pie on Thanksgiving for someone like me.

I knew back home in Brooklyn that I had to break up with him when school was done, because he wouldn't be able to move forward with me, and that he would make it prolonged for me to do so, by being his usual gruelingly overly verbal and excessively repetitive self, becoming highly difficult to handle emotionally because he cannot process change nor adapt to others around him well, or sometimes at all. It was painful and childish and I had grown up. Enough. He forced me into dating much more powerful academics than him while I was at R.I.S.D. and so I had, but that was that. I walked through a doorway you can't close shut, even as I warned him that that would be the case with me, because I know how to move on if I have to.

It became crystal clear to me about what I had to do with him, during one afternoon at a park in Bay Ridge down by the water, as we sat in the warm afternoon sun discussing the next weekend's plans. My roommate was busy getting her ass kicked at a sweater company in the city, where she was pushed to the side by better designers with much bigger personalities who fought way harder for what they wanted, because working class native New York kids have to do that just to get a seat at the table at dinnertime, and she had none of that. Neither did he, but because of his exclusive roots, he didn't need them. Plush union jobs during school were easy to get for him, at a rich-kid $20/hour working the door. Irish? You're in!

Not so with me, and I was getting pestered regularly by my friend who was already not making it in the city, because the hungrier and more talented designers were ripping her apart on the daily. She needed enabling, and with the fast track I was on as a publishing apprentice, there was no way I could tend to her on my own anymore, what with the amount of mental problems and breakdowns she was having without a full circle of friends to prop her up anymore to keep her going through her own life. And so, one sunny afternoon in Bay Ridge, I tried to introduce her into his routine badly, or as good as it was going to get given the concrete infallibilities that hid his compulsive routines. Could she come to dinner with me at your parent's place? Uh oh. He immediately stiffened, bristling at the amount of work and smoothing over that the introduction of a new person would be into his insular family circle; a stale, old place where all the grown working men still lived with their parents, with the exception of his older sister who was married. No way. Not happening, Marie. Not enough time to introduce it and then groom them with this new information.

OK....fine. How about the three of us go to dinner somewhere, like the working young adults we'd become? That was even worse. He reddened, looking away at the water, struggling to disseminate this new information given to him in his old neighborhood, "B-b-b-but I look forward to my mother's pot roast all week! I have to have my mother's pot roast every Sunday! I look forward to it all week long!", and that was it. I broke up with him the very next weekend, and I had to nurse my crippled roommate into helping me inform everyone in my circle that I had just broken up with my best friend from school, because he can't go the places I can go, and that was that. I spent the next years (YEARS) coaching everyone around me about why Bart and I had to part ways, because he isn't gifted enough to be in my world, and isn't that the way for each and every mother out there in the world, reading this right now?

You're trying to have a good cry over a glass of white wine alone in a room, and also comforting the dysfunctional people around you through your major life change. I made it through (this site is proof enough of that), but this year, guess what this hard-working girl's gonna be doing in her own apartment? Whatever I want to, friends, and "Amen" to that! I made it through alive to tell you all the tale, and thank G-d for that. There was never enough air in his parent's stuffy drawing room for me, anyway. Have one on me this year, girlfriend. You deserve it, too.

Dirt Weed

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blunt_%28cannabis_cigar%29

Years ago, after the publishing industry went bust and employers quickly set-up weirdly convoluted political climates to drive out the healthier and more expensive employees by using their cheaper and more deranged ones to do their dirty work (hidden behind a thinly-veiled agenda that was never really very cloudy or unclear, except if you had to prove it in a court of law,) my bubble burst by design, because I beat the "big boys" at their own game. 

Rich white men have always used money and the threat of impoverishment to silence those carefully observant, high-performing employees who are better than their own kids at the family business, knowing that most single women in New York City are one paycheck away from homelessness. It's a total dick way to "win", which is the point of Evil, Inc: a place where we don't do business fairly (the real company motto), but tricky knife-in-the-back games are part of what makes dysfunctional business go. Healthy people tend to share the wealth, as well as the free dispersal of information, which sucks if you can only win by rigging the game to your advantage illegally.

After that, I was on the move from place to place. At first I stayed locally, finding temporary friendship with a troubled man I met at the public library (I could tell he knew who I was behind his badly done "actor-y" facade), but times were desperate, which was the whole point behind that hurt, too. See? "If you would have just played the game, Marie, your entire family wouldn't have turned their backs on you (no one wants to see you anymore without money and help to give out freely), because you talked openly about what you saw at work." Of course, that sick family was my responsibility, too, and if I don't help sick people whenever they want it, there's abuse to be had. I should have learned my lesson years ago. I'd heard the bullshit speech thousands of times before.

Except, really healthy, brilliantly powerful women don't work that way. That's why we run this world you live in. And so, I didn't cave. There's was nothing left for me to give, anyway: no work, clothes, housing, food, rent, healthcare...all of that goes away when you speak up against injustice, whether it's at home or at work, which is exactly why I did it. I couldn't live like that anymore. It was intolerable, the injustices I've seen, like the fact that the entire Housing Court of Brooklyn, New York is currently funded by black women on layaway, hard-working women who don't want their children homeless for Christmas. The U.S. Marshall (a nice white guy from Long Island) explained to me that they are way better now, because they don't toss your stuff on the street like they used to anymore! He looked at me like he wanted consolation then, right when I had none to give.

After getting "thrown out of the inn" during Christmastime (so to speak), I lived by my native New York wits. The very woman who had illegally harassed every worker at the shop I blew the whistle on, the same one who had once bragged to me about her "street smarts" (a total joke when you face living on the streets, which is exactly what I did), while that crazy bitch went on believing that sucking dick would save her life. It didn't (spoiler alert). It did, however, buy her what she thought was enough valuable time to plot my destruction (Girl Power!), and get herself canned, too. After all, I knew it was about money. That's all it ever was, not the fact that I noticed (and documented) each and every illegal occurrence that happened there, which is why I faced off without counsel one of the company's nephews with legal experience, who asked me to hand over my notebooks to him about the situation, which I flatly refused. I still have them, dear readers.

The Neuyorican guy I met from around the way did 'hood business with me: he wanted access to my soon-to-be-gone Park Slope digs so he could use the kitchen because he was working in food service, and I wanted to get into his tenement building from 'round that way, so I could save up some money for another rental apartment. We struck a deal: I would sleep on his floor (which I did), while me and some guy named Jose cleaned the room next to his so I could move in, which is exactly what I did. I worked as a lead cover designer for some broke crooked indie outfit that was yet another spoiled Jewish kid's response to his father's valid foothold in the business, to come home at night to a bipolar guy weaning off his meds through the copious use of weed, giving him a harsh hacking cough that did not abate with time.

He seemed amazed and paralyzed by my Acadian energy. How could I work all day and then work some more at night? Where did it come from? He came from Brownsville*, a place so bad, that the main source of income is living with crazy and Welfare, which is what he did when the kitchen jobs went away. You see, my friend was "too good" to start at the bottom of the kitchen hierarchy by washing dishes. It was so obvious that he didn't want to work, even his teenage dope dealer told him so. Imagine that? Gettin' schooled by some hood rat, but that's how it went down, for real. We went over there on one really cold winter night to meet esse comin' out his mother's nice town-home apartment that's across the street from a public school playground, to meet me and Cotto on the sidewalk. At first, my friend told me to wait on the corner, but as he stood there pacing back and forth, nervously smoking his menthol cigarette, he got bored (he's manic bipolar), so he started talking loudly to me some feet away.

At that point, I was like, why not just walk up to him, when some fly kid with his "phresh" gear came bounding down the staircase to the stoop. He wore a matching bright red hat to go with his ghetto hoodie and red sneaks. Typical. He started laughing when he saw my man there speaking with me, because we looked like a broke-ass version of "Beauty and the Beast", presenting quite the pic on some slow cool weeknight in the 'hood. He made small talk with Cotto during the exchange of a dime bag for money, when my friend let him know that he wasn't happy at his current gig because he was a "real chef" (this, from an ex-con who was forced to choose a cooking program as part of his rehab in the joint), by also explaining that he never really wanted to be a chef (he sucked at it, lighting up a tea towel I gave him one night at the stove during his very brief tenure as a personal chef in my kitchen), and that washing dishes was beneath him.

The kid looked at him laughing, and to me, which I played politically correct by staying silent, to deliver one hell of a line: "Yeah, but you gotta start somewhere, though", a line his own mama must have said to him a million times when he crossed over her doorway down to the streets, buying his flashy gear and bragging about it by sporting it up and down the block, a hastily tossed up sneaker on a phone wire serving as his calling card to area schoolkids. That fuck-up from Brownsville just got schooled by his more successful teenage dope dealer, man! It was unbelievable and also totally Brooklyn, all the way down to this kid's shiny new kicks. Only in New York, you know, bro? Only in New York can a punk kid beat out a grown man without even trying, or leaving his mama's house. That's the warped view of success from around the way, and those are the people I come from. Don't you ever try to can con me again, yo. I know you.


* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownsville,_Brooklyn