The One-Armed Bandit

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit

The first day on my new job years ago came with a directive to take down one of the weird black-and-white "head-shots" from the company wall, for scanning into some brochure that expensively advertised their version of classics from English literature. They were ridiculously pompous about a rather simple business model, which was disseminated by my old work mentor who I ran into at an industry function, into one neatly condescending sentence: "Oh, right. They do domain-free stuff." It was so right-on, I instantly remembered why I found myself grateful years later for her stewardship as an apprentice.

Yeah! Basically, they had some compulsive low-paid editorial assistants work the annuls of public domain in the NYPL for previously-printed material that lapsed from its original legal copyright protection to become free for public usage. Of course, we still have to pull the material into something as beautifully cohesive as a finished bound book in this century using our technology, but that's essentially it: reprinting old works that they paid nothing for, as a company. 

The only real investment was upfront in the manufacturing process and labor costs associated with the edition's making, which means that they sold the book to B&N at a profit already, and yet, when I began with them, they had absolutely no profit-sharing programs available to their employees. They didn't even have a decent 401K for the employees to roll-over any of their older plan monies from other businesses into a retirement fund, but as their resident "Art Star", I guess they thought I wasn't supposed to know the business at all, even though their VP of Production and Design had already verified and tested my bona fides in New York City media, and they are real.

My first day was a complete set-up, because no sooner had I taken down the photo to scan, than I was immediately beset by the old publisher's crazy old wife, because their rabid Israeli-born receptionist played games with people all day long, and I guess she thought I was an easy mark for her. Uh uh. After she had her bitchy way with me over some uncommonly douchey photos fashioned after the portfolios of professional actors and most definitely not publishers, I ratted her out to the program manager who asked me to do it. He was a dick, too, so I watched their power struggle from the sidelines of yet another business I would pick apart to put back together properly. 

Another day at the office. Ho hum. But, the crazy old man's wife played a key part in their inabilities to handle their business well, because their family pockets always came first, and they married into their family those employees that they thought they could bait on the hook with a guaranteed steady income in uncertain times. It's the same old economic ruse that pulls the chain of every starving would-be artiste who gets their ass kicked by the city. They had a lot of out-of-towners and spoiled suburbanites in their small office, which culturally signified to me that their world was mine for the taking, and their overtly nasty behavior proved to me that they already knew it. 

After a few more exceptionally douchey encounters those first days, I got the message quickly. We don't like you: we need you. Okay, fine! I don't really care for any of you headcases, either. This is just a job to me, in your rented office space. My content belongs to me and my brain, and after the old man's bitch got her head ripped off that very first day, she stayed away from me on purpose. I'd hear her jabbering away to their crazy bitch of a receptionist (before she made her move as a false "frenemy" that I played to the hilt) about how to do it, too.

So, they gave me a lot of room for the practiced tactical strategy that I needed to clean up their imprint and own it through their insanely orthodox marketing bitch at B&N, a woman infamous in the industry for being a cold hard bitch. But, she wasn't me, so I played her, too. Eventually, they all figure it out. My program=my rules. No? You want more fucking money? Do it, bitch! It kept me hands-free for the first few years, until the wheels came off their secretary who dared to infiltrate my world by elbowing into it unbidden. People get hurt around warriors, know what I'm sayin', and she most certainly did. I wrecked her for anything else but rehab and a psych hospital forever.

The wife thought she was safe from me because of her husband's money, but I knew too well from my family that money comes and just as easily goes. She played evasive tight-lipped games with me when she was forced to be near me in physical proximity, thinking she was avoiding my careful scrutiny, and she was somewhat right. She's not really important enough as person (or a pampered Jewish housewife) for me to be outright concerned with her deviant behavior. She knew from her husband that messing with me carried a stiff price. Messing with me messed with their money, and they loved money really badly.

It bought them coveted committee seats on prestigious theater boards, so they could press their dip-shit daughter's work on people as some phoney "playwright", and she was a total bitch, too. She treated me like a copy machine once (ONCE), which landed her in her father's office for the next "hands off" speech. I also got their very own son put-out to pasture as bogus IT support who couldn't hack it in the real world of professional publishing, because I introduced our more sophisticated machines into their work-flow properly, and not as some fancy wonky sideline to entertain arrogant art fags with. He blew his lid after a a few months under my tenure, as I reoriented their work queue to be at my scheduling through my production manager, by dividing the workflow equitably between the two imprints. Done! Next!

She'd make scared small talk with me when she had to in the company kitchen or the bathroom, places where her obvious ignoring didn't work because it was too obvious a slight to me. I knew the crazy old man fired a lot of employees on the spot for no good reason because they are a family with serious mental problems, but as rich pseudo-intellectuals, their pomposity suited my purposes fine. The old man outlaid the cash I needed to perform and then out-perform them, which is the poser amateurs greatest fear: discovery.

Marlene would only speak to me in vague little mutterings made to simulate a doddering old lady, until the one day when her act actually took hold for real, because old age catches up with everyone. We had a brief exchange in front of her office, because I showed her how to attach a file for submission to some poetry contest for nobodies, and it wasn't even fresh: it was old stuff from the 60s, after her very first ejection from career life to mommyhood, which she must have chafed against as a pompous Baby Boomer Art Fag. She was the very last person I'd want for a parent, and you've read about my crew.

Turns out, I hadn't noticed the stiff arm of hers that she never used, and she was proud to show that off to me, as recognition of some sort of prowess on her part: "Oh, that's because I compensate so well that you don't realize it!", in a fake sing-song voice that marks a poor teacher who condescends to the very children who sit in front of them. Ah, that was her first ousting from real New York business, then. Okay. Over the next few years, she'd elaborate in small bits that she hoped I couldn't digest into a whole, but I did so anyway.

She told me a good bon mot after I helped her use the paper-clip thingy on her computer's PC-based email software to attach a file to an email (basic, bitch) so I could see that she could type well, too! Wasn't I impressed? Huh, so, yeah, how did you lose use of your arm? She knew by now that I grew up with a handicapped mother, and her MS trumps anything this poor old rich bitch has. Trust on that, peeps. She began speaking to me with her usual vaguely flute-voiced routine "Oh, you know....." No, I don't, and I looked right at her, which their disordered staff hated. More scrutiny, you see. "Well, I had a bout with breast cancer years ago...."

And? What? Bad surgery left you with no arm? That's a libel suit! Well, no....Okay, still no answer. Cough it up, bitch, I have work to do. She had very small time windows with me, by then. What happened? She thought she staved off discovery until today, when I write to you that the crazy old bitch didn't lose the use of her arm from a badly-done surgery years ago. No, that crazy old bitch had paralysis brought on by the "trauma" that must come from successfully surviving breast cancer, just like my mom and her two sisters did, sans limp arms. She had to back-off from me then, because her big winning story about survival was just that: bogus as any day-school business model I could've written in my old black-and-white notebook, back in the day. Booyah, bitch.

When you see disease in one limb, just look to the source. In this case, it was their very own family tree: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_disorder

How they did it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_content

Where's your non-disclosure now, huh? Yeah, just as thought. Silence.

Spy vs. Spy

Genius isn't something people enjoy, like real beauty that frightens without airbrushing or makeup applied. You can't fake it, and for people who lie their way through life, authenticity is very scary. I never understood the weird tactic behind pretending to know more than you do, because it's a viciously anti-scholarly mindset to have about life and the world. Curiosity is the driving force behind intellectualism, so someone who hides out daily from reality represents crass ignorance to an openly inquiring mind. And so, with no surprise, I wasn't welcomed into the arms of the publishing industry by anyone besides my mentor and her supervising V.P.

Even though we were transparent in our agenda to have me apprentice first in Production Management before I moved upstairs to the Art Department, it was considered such a huge intellectual leap to make at the time, that we were greeted with suspicion from the very start of my employment. Just like the limited scholarship that represented a typical S.U.N.Y student in the 80s, destined to spend a lifetime working in a series of barren offices, R.I.S.D. students were often functionally illiterate, unable to write even the simplest of essays in their native English language, so I'd seen limited brain function before I hit the big hallways of Academia.

Still, it was shocking. Some departments, like Production Editorial, hired English Lit majors from the Ivy League, drawing heavily from the pools of Brown, Yale, and Harvard, and those were just the folks who managed copy-editing and proofreading within the workflow. From someone like me, it was downright revolutionary. I did business like a non-artist, drew like a professional, and thought with any side of my brain I could tap into to get the job done, which was in direct contrast to the big bestselling "Left Brain/Right Brain" publishing hype.

People felt comfortable with the darkly brooding hipster stereotype who preferred sitting alone in a corner doing highly repetitive layouts, but that's not an Art Director, which is what I aspired to back in the day. Conversely, the short bespeckled editorial assistant with the flood pants, thickly rimmed glasses, and bad dandruff fit easily into their preconceived expectations about what "intelligence" looks like, like bad casting for every cliched Hollywood movie you've ever seen: beautiful blond bombshell with the charmingly absent-minded but kind-hearted nutty professor. Where did I fit in? Mostly, they hated me.

And so began my real office career involving staving off covert attacks done on the sly, to delay the inevitable firing that marks the deeply insecure incompetent working in an office of actual American scholars. We spoke and wrote in an English that was frightening to the uneducated and unknowns in our very own houses. It was shockingly ignorant to behold, because we made the stuff we sold, which is one of the clearest, direct lines to any serious business transaction. More days were spent clearing houses of the weak than in pursuit of the labor behind making books, which is one of the most complex commercial manufacturing processes in the worlds of art and design.

People whispered in the wide stairwells of the Flatiron Building (a historical landmark) that I was a "spy", which made me laugh. For who, exactly? Production? Why would the VP and the Senior Production Manager want me to ask questions for them? That's what they did every day. For the book cover designers?! They couldn't even attend weekly production meetings without a liaison like me involved, living in some constant pretend fear about book manufacturing schedules and deadlines, which is like an accountant who's afraid of balancing his or her checkbook. Why that? It was utterly bizarre in its limitations to me, but that was the vacuum I filled that was so badly needed during the technological shift to desktop publishing.

One of the quickest managerial stints at SMP was a certain penguin-identifying Design Manager with poor book design skills but a fussily meticulous eye for administration, efficiency, and bureaucracy, which again, was something only businesspeople could apparently perform without having a nervous breakdown like any true designer would. Oh, the pressure to file! So hard! It was pure bullshit to me, but that's how they angled their way as a department out of "boring office work" to stick it onto me, because I "didn't know computers" or design according to the rigid New York school kids who were trained to be one-trick ponies, again, about as far from a scientifically-informed scholar like a da Vinci-based RISDoid as possible, but that's exactly why I excelled so far ahead of my class.

She rode me temporarily as a target to do dull shit she called "organizing" the enfants terrible of the art department, who were (and still are) a group of learning-disordered people who can only handle so much mentally, but that didn't stop their fearful marginalization of me anyway. It was nothing new. Within weeks of that crazy skinny bitch writing me up for (get this) READING on the job, a big art/design department "no-no" apparently, she quickly went downhill into psychosomatic back pain so bad, the company had a crane lift a couch into her special office so she could lie down between bouts of her pain. That's who they chose to be their "manager". She flew back to her old imprint within months after I quit for less crazy-filled pastures (which worked!), and she's stayed there ever since.

During her entirely panicked, whirlwind stewardship of a multi-billion dollar publishing company with strong international ties to Britain and now Germany (after a few carefully leveraged corporate buy-outs), not one higher-up ever thought to inquire whether or not one of our competitors would actually send over a genuine corporate spy over to us, for the real deal of sneaking around without getting caught, choosing instead to center their hysterical drama around one particular Acadian Métis girl who could give a fuck about their petty head games, because here I sit, and there you are in the exact same seat. Still. Spy, indeed.

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

P.S. - I just fucking looked up Jaye's suicide obit online, SMP'ers, another fucking "Design Manager" back then!!! You hateful humps. You owe me.

Cry Wolf

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

During my last full-time gig working for other people's families before my own, I knew in my gut that the term to my lasting apprenticeship was finally waning to its rightful conclusion. I'd made bargain books for the premier English-language retailer of the world resemble its fuller priced editions for richer whiter companies, which was my mission. The best of us then graduate to "Publisher" after many years of service given to others (and their pockets), but it's never an easy graduation.

I'd made the break real during the height of my MMA/BJJ training, and like co-founder Dana White of the UFC, the best fight league in the world , I found myself in the unenviable position of couch-surfing at 40+, which is the true sign that you're actually doing it: you're making the break from the system that held you down to make a run for it, and it is ugly. I couldn't have done it with kids, dogs, and households in tow, dependent on me as they typically are, because temporarily-had crack shacks in the 'hood ain't no child's game. You have to be free, angry, and loose to do it and survive with your sanity intact, which (luckily for me), is not the problem. It's never been the problem.

So, what was? Can't you tell by now? Other people's problems, and working them out for them for free (without getting any accolades for it), just to get my job done for some old rich white dude. Same shit, different day. I knew I'd be sweatin' it hard, and I knew they'd be gunning after me just as hard, because that's the price true talent pays when you fly from the system reliant on people like you, or they all fail. A freakish silence was all the recognition I needed to recognize my power, through that circle of their fears surrounding me. You can do that and not die?! Geez.....it blows them away, know what I'm sayin'?

The small Jewish family business I worked for trained their rabid dog to attack people, and then when she went full-on loco (aided by a cult for wellness operating a seriously illegal pyramid scheme, and a lack of properly administered pharmaceuticals supervised by a serious medical professional), she turned on them, too. I think they mistakenly thought a fucked-up Israeli girl from Long Island wasn't a match for their monied control, but they were wrong. This wasn't some neurotic crisis. She was a full-blown suicidal psychotic, which they had glimpses of through her failed relationships, like the death-threat text made to our cell phones in the middle of a work day by a fired employee (her former "bestie"), and they cut loose people wholly dependent on them.

Not only did Becky threaten suicide after her firing to me, Ayelet, and some other employees, but my friend Jimmy OD'ed after hooking up with them as a freelancer, too. They kept sick people on the payroll only if they sucked their dicks, then cut them off knowing they'd be vulnerable. I blamed them for each former staffer's mental health issues and subsequent deaths just as much as any "feelgood doc" who over-prescribes Oxycontin to create a drug addict for their heroin hook-up later on down the line. I knew my rigorous comebacks from serious bone breaks and DVT on their salary without any support from them knocked them ajar, and that's what I needed to do to take them out of the business for good: prove them wrong on each and every level they'd ever had, as seriously deluded pseudo-intellectuals.

They played G-d with their sick staff in codependent plays for leverage, power, and domination, which means nothing to me. I knew my real howls at the moon beat their "Crazy Jew" schtick any day of the week, and I was right, because here I am on a Monday writing for you instead of working for them, which is proof positive in the game of publishing. One of the last times I had a verbal exchange in "human" with their disordered receptionist, she was talking at me as soon as I walked through the front door, which was odd, because she took pride in ignoring company staff as they came into the office at the beginning of every workday. She thought being a bitch was some sort of superpower, but to this New York girl, she was just another fake blonde out-of-towner drowning in her own incompetence, unfit for the game.

She forced me to take off my headphones to hear her speak to me, without waiting for a proper conversation cues to be established at my convenience, as the first stab in a series of dully petty power plays of controlling manipulations done spitefully, writ upon me first thing in the morning to catch me off guard, except for this: I use music to work with and train by, plus I've Art Directed musicians professionally, so...yeah, no go. I asked her to start over, and she did. Did I know today was the anniversary of her famous Central Park rape? Sigh....here we go. Uh, no. How would I know that? I gave her a tired look to let her know that her simplistic, childish shock tactics failed with me (yet again), because I don't have time for bullshit in my day.

She tried to make a Broadway play out of her madness anyway, by describing her annual ritual call to the detective who supposedly handled her case back in the day. Yeah....what did he say? Let's move this scene along, okay? It was one of her last attempts at yanking my chain before she curdled into a rather typical manic/depressive hatred that she controlled manipulatively, like the fucking psycho she is. At this point in my employment, I knew she screwed half the ugly staff and got "dirt" on the rest, or so she thought. She had nothing on me.

I have no idea to this day if she lied about her Puerto Rican rapist because she seemed to have a "thing" for dark guys, or whoever paid any kind of attention to her, male or female. I noticed she'd vacillate between attractions as personality/identity disordered to center around the stronger core personality of the key people in power, like me. If she sensed I liked a man, so would she, and then she'd start some weirdly secretive contest that only she knew about. But, back to her bitch post at the reception desk. So, what is this really about, Ayelet?

Well, she just happened to have a picture of the suspect who she thought was still at-large, because she just felt it in her gut, drama queens, like a pit in her stomach, you know? Like, right here <press fist to stomach to represent a knot>....NO! Not her anxiety disorder. Not that! Conversation over! Whenever she got hip (and it was hard with someone as dumb and impaired as her) that you knew she was lying to you, she'd turn on you, in the same pattern over and over again. OK, I'll bite. What the fuck....I'm waiting for the office coffee you don't make anyway. What else?

Oh! Her carefully crafted mis-en-scene was back on! We could pretend to role-play with our famous Art Director again! Great! She immediately brightened up, to produce a grainy police sketch of this:

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

That crazy bitch was so far gone, she thought a brilliantly educated Maestro (who reads practically every fucking day of her life) didn't know a picture of the fucking "Unibomber". Their crazy-ass bitch showed me, someone who worked at a newspaper during 9/11 to tell the tale to all of you, a picture that was in every fucking newspaper and media outlet for years, as the centerpiece of her madness gone murderously bad. Just like the brother of such a sick murderer, guess what I did? I turned her ass in to the authorities, friends of Earth. No one (NO ONE) fools this New York mama, fake rape victim or not. Take that to the bank, and show it to them as evidence that I'm solid for it. Ya here me?


Read it and weep. I took this info to staff meetings over their madwoman: https://www.osha.gov/

I also want healthcare for the mentally ill made mandatory for employment and ongoing health benefits through insurance carriers: http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/workplace-testing-employer-requirements-29496.html

For the record, I've taken lie detector tests on job sites (as a teen for a mall retailer at an afterschool job, because Donnel used me to try stealing some clothes, and girl, you know you do that), random piss tests, voluntarily submitted blood-work, psych screenings (as written tests and other), along with everything else that goes along with being me. Now you know.


P.S. - That bitch also told me she jogged through the park after midnight alone because, you know, she's manic and stuff, and she HAD TO lose weight. Sound native to you?

Mummenschanz

http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Mummenschanz

My parents have sharply flagging tastes that can veer between over-the-top gayness to New York City realness, so one has to be careful when accompanying them to a show on-or-off Broadway, by vetting them with a carefully selected series of questions, and because of their savvy as hardcore city kids, we were sometimes only allowed 1-3 questions (per kid or as a group), which was preceded by a well-attended “tête-à-tête” with every child on hand. "Who, how, and where?!" were common kiddie questions for amateurs only, and after a few of their more excruciating choices that lasted for hours and hours on end in the darkness, broken only by badly-rushed bathroom breaks with adult-only drinks and snacks, you did indeed learn how to vet.

Are there masks involved? NO! That sounds gay and scary. Is there any dancing? Mmmm.....sort of. No! Don't do it! It could be one of the worst ballets with men-in-tights dressed as fairies exposing certain body parts you don't want to see. But, on good days (and matinees are good signs for children forced to go along with their parents sing-song delusions), you might score "The Ice Follies" with Snoopy and Woodstock (cute!), or "The Harlem Globetrotters" (totally awesome!), instead of rank-ass shit that's barely above street-level quality.

Because our brave native populace is assaulted every day by something as ordinary as commuting to some boring Monday-through-Friday, 9-5 desk job (something that barely registers a blip elsewhere on the U.S. map), you have to be extremely sharp about your recreational time. If you've ever been seven years old and sat in an opera so loudly screamingly bad (that you wish the fat lady would just shut up and die already), and it's hour three into it, you know what I mean. One bad experience can turn you off from serious tourist fare for good, if not until your own child-bearing years. It hurts that much.

And because we're often beset by a series of obstacles so severe that we call our lives an ongoing "stress test", we're used to the douchiest dirt-bags around. It should be blatantly obvious that we hold mimes in very low regard, because being made fun of by some silently mocking dick does nothing to calm you down from the lunchtime walk you used to stave off punching out that fucking hyped-up dick of a salesmen who thinks he has real balls hiding behind his higher-up at your design meeting. You know the one; you present books that sell, to cover their fucking salaries. Yeah! That'd be the one.

Being mocked by some foreign guy in white face-paint and a black turtleneck with a sneeringly French attitude is like he's begging us to have his beret knocked off his quietly mouthing fucking face, you know? It ain't fun. And they sometimes stand in your way, too! Back in our day, we had the crazy hard time of begging off this particular group of weird Euros who stood on stage pulling pieces of little paper off of the fucking distorted face masks; silently, of course. Oh, G-d no! It's like taking a holiday picture on the lap of a drunk, sweating molester-type of adult at the local mall. It's always "PASS" if you're asked upfront about it, by the way.

There were other crazy-gay acts to come along; some bad and some not-so-bad, but all came with a certain amount of out-of-town gayness that immediately lets you know how they (the artistes on stage) feel about you, the home-crowd. They fucking hate you! That's why their shows suck so bad. Then there's those dudes with more face paint wearing all-black outfits and weird blue paint-can splashes pouring out of steel drums (no thanks), and the gay circus acts from Montréal (actually, that I could see), but all come with a hefty price tag that further puts you in the hole you live in, existing paycheck-to-paycheck as we do.

Me? At the end of my latest stint in the city, I preferred rolling around on some blue BJJ mats to the homegrown sounds of subway bucket drummers (those cats fucking rock the house), the violinist from "The Met" using Grand Central Station for acoustics practice on her day off (really, they do that), and those amazing beat box kids who can swing around a moving pole on a speeding train like they're born to be in the Harlem Dance Theater's best-of-the-best, because they are. They are that good, those native kids. You go! Go, now!

My recommends, plebes. Enjoy the show!
http://www.dancetheatreofharlem.org/
http://www.elinefleury.com/#!Bucket-drumming-in-the-New-York-City-Subway-station/c1zq5/55a41a050cf21636d2fd403a
http://gothamist.com/2015/06/29/two_showtime_dancers_give_us_the_lo.php
http://web.mta.info/mta/aft/gct/keepingtime.html
http://www.harlemglobetrotters.com/
http://www.barclayscenter.com/events/detail/disney-on-ice-presents-frozen


P.S. - I'd like to take this post to also remind you that the real thing is always better than some cheap (and not-so-cheap) imitation. Case in point, my man who walked between The Towers has a phenomenally moving and spiritual documentary about what it really felt like that easily trumps the hammy Hollywood version. Check it out! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_on_Wire

A West Side Story

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

My family left the city in the late 70s because it fell apart, as captured through many fictionalized movies like "The Warriors" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Warriors_%28film%29), "Fort Apache, The Bronx" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Apache,_The_Bronx), and "Escape from New York" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_from_New_York). While they may seem like gross exaggerations to you, for the millions of displaced New Yorkers forced to leave old established neighborhoods that'd been in the family for several generations, it's hard to describe that feeling of watching your home burn to the ground. It was utterly heartbreaking in its devastation.

I met up with a few other Irish-American "white-flighters" (white people were widely criticized for fleeing bombed-out buildings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight) from the old neighborhoods at the local lavandería here in this Nua Brigadoon we've made our own 'hood, after another tragic ousting in yet another town we helped to build, patrol, and heal. Their impressions were exactly the same as mine and my family. One guy had a brother who was an engineer at Co-Op City, as part of our last stand towards crime and crack in those rapidly de-zoned blocks that created instant ghettos almost overnight, in some of the most corruptly bad urban planning we'd ever seen in a city famous for its intellectual capital. What the fuck happened?

And so we talked about committee meetings held in basements that fought obviously poor building codes with my "new" old friend from around the way, who had to type up a report as former FDNY about an escaped gorilla from the zoo that was killed and burnt to death in a city street, while an entire neighborhood slammed their windows and doors shut in response to such a weird tragedy. We were losing badly, block by city block. It was hard for us to pull up stakes in such a high stakes place that we actually helped to construct, but there were no other choices available for families living paycheck-to-paycheck. It was like nothing we'd ever seen before, a horror we could sense coming with such a power, that it actually left a bad taste in your mouth.

As me, my bud "Brennan", and Paul talked it over, the short Mestizos (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mestizo) clustered in small groups around us kept a comfortable distance with wide eyes that silently folded laundry, as we talked about roving packs of wild dogs that haunted certain city streets, burning garbage cans roaring out of control on almost every corner, and entire cars lit on fire that stayed that way until they burned out all the way, that we saw with our own wide eyes through the muddy, streaked windows of cars that didn't seem to go fast enough after the light finally turned green. "What, did they change the time on all the lights so we could be 'sitting ducks' here?!", we'd say to each other in fear of the regular carjackings (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carjacking) that happened all the time, in yet another part of a rigged game leading to our once-beautiful city's downfall, and no one seemed to give a fuck about it but us.

Certainly not the zoned-out crack zombies, part of the huge packs of drug-addicted hookers who walked up-and-down the West Side Highway every night of the week. We watched our infamous meat-packing district become a den of such evil, that the local S&M club seemed like a funny joke compared to the strange group sex that happened in oddly-named Greek club, yet another stab directly at the heart of the ancient Mediterraneans who had crossed many seas to make a happy life here. It was cruel, a hard slap in the face that we will never forget.

We moved up here in packs of our own, as average but well-educated working class families of every kind that inhabited Gotham back in the day: African-Americans working union jobs they got after their mass migration from the newly desegregated South, Puerto Ricans escaping a poverty so extreme that it sometimes still hurts to look at old pictures of their former tropical beach paradise (like the Haitian boat people and Cubanos who would float to Florida on the backs of flimsy, quickly-built rafts to run from oppression and mass murder like we had), and the Irish who met with famine greatly assisted by many a wealthy Brit with no interest in helping them out at all, in order to preserve the bottom rung of the European ladder just for them. Ditto with my poor Greco-Roman farm folk, without mentioning the mixed horrors neatly hidden behind the distinctive looks of an "Original" Acadian Métis. Who.....? How do you spell....? Huh? What?!

You know, those wily muthafuckas who bought this here island called "Manhattan" ([PDF]The Origin and Meaning of the Name “Manhattan”) from a bunch of Indians for some wampum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wampum), so that we could all cash out on those rapidly-boating Brits and Dutch looking to farm near a convenient seaport town near you....but, no! Wait!! What does that word you just said mean? Which one?! And, how to catch you up on all of our history with your kind of brain, dude? You just don't fucking get it, feel me, turista? That's what it feels like: a stranger in our own strange land to you, and you definitely do not belong here.

So, when my friend Donnel's second-cousin from Harlem, Lawrence, told me his own particular horror story about the west side gone way wrong during the last century, I could totally relate to it. We'd all been through a version of it as immigrants or indigenous people, or both, as the case may be. He told his story to me one night after a few drinks and a couple of tokes, in this native tale of woe. He'd been walking down West Street looking in the cheap juke joints (he's a musician), feeling broke and alone, pushed out of another family home gone "KABOOM!" as tightly-packed tenement apartments with four generations of kids tend to do, when you cram in enough teenage mothers and their illegitimate children living on the minimum wage of one powerful grandmother working as a nursing assistant at the local, run-down, welfare hospital because if she falls down hard, the whole family goes down with her.

Yeah, man. I get it. But, he was also working through a lot of shit that comes with being an angry young black man in the city, and as much as he didn't know about me and my history, I felt that static, too, but I also knew it was his road to walk down and not mine. I wanted him to know that I wouldn't take anything more away from him, as a New York kid who was getting just about everything ripped away from him at the same time. He saw "black and white" in everyone and everything, because that's the steady ghetto diet he was being fed at the time. I got it. Well....what happened, man?

Lawrence was used to presenting a tall strong front on the streets, and this was something he had to work up to. Take it slow, kid. He was nervous. Deep breath....okay. Pass me that joint. Inhale....now, go. He was walking down the street when a friend passed by in a car (a car! WOW! Rare treat for "hood rats" to have moving vehicles that worked right in their possession), and he hopped in. They cruised down West Street with the windows open on a hot summer night, looking to catch a breeze, score some weed, or make some kind of deal....something. You know that feeling on certain warm nights when you're young, right? That was it...waiting, and also moving along with it, which they did.

Suddenly, he saw a young woman walking by struttin' her stuff like working girls do. She was obviously a hooker, but there was something else about her, he craned his neck to look....yo! Turn around, bro! He got out of the car and walked down the block, turning the corner she just passed by. He followed her for a minute or two before she turned around to meet her attacker/pursuer or potential "John", with an expectant look that quickly changed to astonishment. "Larry....! Is that you?!" Unfortunately for him and her both, she was right. He was her former classmate from high school, and they both knew it in that one instantly-recognizing moment. That hooker you passed by in Times Square (now dressed-up in a furry cartoon costume handing out stripper bar fliers on the sly), yeah, that one, man.

She went to school with one of us, yo. Hope you score cheap tickets from the midtown kiosk for the musical, though. And don't answer knocks on your pricey hotel door in the middle of the night, either, bro. Because that hooker there? Yeah, she's a "lady of the night", too. She's also someone's daughter, former classmate, sister, or cousin from the 'hood. I know you only give a fuck about your stupid fucking tourist trip, though, so enjoy the show. I hope it was worth the trip, while you pretend to see and understand nothing about our pain. Asshole. One more time! <jazz hands> Entertaining, isn't it?

Walk On The Wild Side

Lou Reed

Holly came from Miami F.L.A.
Hitch-hiked her way across the U.S.A.
Plucked her eyebrows on the way
Shaved her legs and then he was a she
She said, hey babe, take a walk on the wild side,
Said, hey honey, take a walk on the wild side.

Candy came from out on the island,
In the backroom she was everybody's darling,
But she never lost her head
Even when she was giving head
She sayes, hey baby, take a walk on the wild side
Said, hey babe, take a walk on the wild side
And the colored girls go,

Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo
Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo
Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo
Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo
Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo
Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo
Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo

Little Joe… Full lyrics on Google Play

Show Tunes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Showtune_%28musical%29

My parents have some of the worst tastes in gay Broadway musicals that I've ever encountered outside of heterosexuality, which sometimes makes me question them on the daily. I grew up with all of their overly-dramatic albums and accompanying soundtracks for crappy hits like "Hair" ("Haaaiiirrrrr...the sunshine...the....sunnnn...shines...iiinnnn!"), "Jesus Christ Superstar" ("What's the fuss? Tell me what's a-happening...what's the fuss....tell me what's a-happening..."), and the really bad suburban off-Broadway dinner theater on Friday night that's annoyingly repetitive. 

I can recite and/or sing almost all of their bad art, in an overdone "American Idol" type of up-and-down warbling that goes ONNNohhhhoohhhhohannnddddOHHNNNN!!! It's actually really bad singing, because it's lacks the technique and authenticity of much better singers who can break their voices mid-song to improvise with the riffing back-up band, unlike those terrible show-ponies trained to bust vocal chords while on tour, over and over again. Who cares, right? You're only in town for the weekend.

In addition to this questionably suspect and obviously gay facet of their musical lives, my mom occasionally thinks it's fun to torture me with her paper hoarding by pretending to me during clean-ups (after yet another bad bone break) that her old unsigned "Playbills" might be worth something on eBay, because my parents like to mess with me during their down-cycles. She also shoved a plastic baggie at me filled with those badly done ceramic animals that you get when you buy the big-ass package of tea bags, because she HAS TO have tea at the same time every day. After that false pretense (I had to make a show of pretending to care, by looking up her poorly-made animals online), she went back to sticking the weird little animals into her potted plants, where they rightfully belong.

It's not that I care overmuch about their sexuality or poor choices in art, it's just that New York kids are slammed with enough "out-of-towner" shit made for tourists. We don't need it at home, too! Some of their music is really great (like their Beatles albums and "Le Jazz Hot"), and some of it is just simply blah-blah-blah mental-patient "sing-alongs" any crazy nitwit can do, if only we would willingly injure ourselves by singing it for them compulsively, fifty times in a row, for the exact same badly-dressed matinee attendees (cheaper with their AARP discount) , and I am not willing to be their soothing fodder. Ya dig? 

Ravenous public, your homework today:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oversinging
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocal_fold_nodule 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocal_cord_paresis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spasmodic_dysphonia
BUSTED!

Performance

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

When we were students at the Rhode Island School of Design in the 90s, we had a few interesting guest speakers and the occasional crazy prostitute who used "shock value" to sell a really horrible performance to a bunch of fucked-up WASPs afraid of everything. It wasn't like I had tons of experience with middle-aged Jewish hookers, it was just that I already knew the deal: that it was a long dull prelude to her inevitable down-spiral into rehab, where she will try to shock the shit out of a bunch of mental patients who desperately need genuine psychiatric care over the hubris of some Jewish lady opening her legs without prompting from anyone, in a lame attempt to top the crying Albino Asian girl rocking back-and-forth in the corner of their white room because she fears being raped by her scary rabbit doll. 

It's just another game of one-upmanship for most native New Yorkers, used to seeing weird shit in the middle of what was once a normal workday, until some crazy guy flashes onlookers crossing a city street wearing nothing under his drab khaki raincoat other than a deranged expression, but that's a story for a rainier day than today. What's next? Toads falling from the fucking sky?! You know what I mean? It's, like, just another fucked-up thing you have to deal with because of other people's problems, when you really want to be at home with your feet up on a cozy ottoman, sipping a nice warm cup of honeyed herbal tea.

And that's exactly what it felt like for me to be in the audience of an Annie Sprinkle "show", and I use quotes as a description because there's no fucking way that what happened up on that stage was "art" for anyone other than my particular brand of fucked-up WASP's who were also my vegetarian housemates back in the day. I saw it as a cry for help that two very suppressed individuals needed, along with meds and sex therapy, the exact same boat as the poor ugly hooker onstage striving to be someone other than a banged-up prostitute looking for a second act. It was sort of like the political game of art school itself, albeit as a nastier version of the real school, where your psychotic prof is searching for shit-on-a-shingle served up to her as "art", as part of her anger issues with her more talented artist daddy....okay, but, fuck! Me and my broke-ass crew are paying for this joint right here!

Why give our hard-earned money to this fuckin' chick?! Why do I have to do art therapy with these fucking headcases?! Shit...I mean, man, I needed solid drawing skills like a daVinci born yesterday, not this shit right here, yo. That's how angry a R.I.S.D. experience gone wrong could be for us, because the meter was running at an exorbitantly high rate that was much higher than the highest priced call-girl in Manhattan, and that chick wasn't all that, bro. I felt that nervous with each passing dollar thrown away on crap, but my richer WASPier friends didn't care. Sue had (has?) a trust fund from her rich Boston lawyer dad (a well-respected tort lawyer she used to work for as a paralegal in between her questioning phases, like punk rocking in San Francisco), and Riddell worked the "perpetual student" angle as a local-yokel from rural Connecticut who got sympathy money from a New England state that still wants to believe they have strong homegrown talent among them. 

So, there I sat as a last-minute tag-along with them in a somewhat full auditorium, in the middle of the day, that was nowhere near as fully attended as the works of other major art stars of the day. We sat in one of the back rows that had a limited view of the stage, which suited me just fine. I had a feeling she'd be even worse up-close than from this relatively comfortable distance. She then asked the audience to line-up in front of the stage for a "viewing", which basically meant that this particular crazy lesbian spread her legs on a table, inserted a speculum, and then said through her mike that we could look at her cervix. WHAT?!!! Why the fuck would anyone want to get near her?! 

I guess that was part of the point, because even with heavy makeup and bleached-out hair, some of the attending lesbians couldn't get past the reality of her pasty flabby skin and banged-up face. I chickened out at first, but Riddell (as the hetero male in our trio), hopped up quickly from his seat, ready to have a look. I stayed in my seat looking at my assignments, but luckily for me, my hippie-mom Sue went to the stage to see firsthand. She came back to me in my seat, and said there wasn't much there. No shit! We went back down to the stage together, to give Riddell moral support for waiting on line on a side staircase leading up to the stage. We milled around the front of the stage, looking for any print materials that would back up her performance or artistic cred but, of course, there was none to be had, because she's a complete fucking hack. There were no drawings, no brochures, no artist statement (other than her onstage ramble of fake "artspeak" followed by a mental prepping to her audience about her nudity and insertion that was supposedly her "piece"), and no actual art at all. 

Oh. It was kind of exactly what we expected, which was nothing. Afterwards, we grilled Riddell about what happened: "Yeah, it was awesome!" He said that he went up there, spoke to her two female "assistants" who may direct your questions to her as she reclined on a surgical table with a gynecological instrument and a microphone, then you peeked between her open legs that were covered by a white sheet like a doctor's exam, and then he saw a cervix as a 30-year-old guy. 

Jaded as we were becoming about our burgeoning learning in the art scene and its lurking pseudo-denizens, it actually bolstered our faith in our sometimes difficult-to-follow classes, because the real thing is never a substitute for pure bullshit. It was actually a great life lesson to learn, delivered to us during a critical time in our studies when we sometimes felt like giving up. After that, I knew without a doubt that I could be beat that crazy fucking bitch in art, design, photography, painting, nudity AND health care (along with everything else) any day of the fucking week, whether awake or asleep. Thanks. I guess....
 

Here's what it really takes for a "free ride" that's for less than half of us: http://www.risd.edu/admissions/student-financial-services/types-of-aid/RISD-financial-aid/

Dress Rehearsal

Cover for the single "Pass the Mic" by Beastie Boys

New York kids have it rough. Every day is a big fucking drama (without the show business money and audience applause), that your overly histrionic parents stage for disordered friends and family in a rigidly codependent cycle with a distinct pattern, and all you want is some fucking milky tea with cookies after a cold rainy day at school and your after-school job. You know? Everything's a big fucking show, like an act that has three distinctly separate parts with different hair and makeup, sparkly outfit changes, and obligatory curtain calls made mandatory just for them. It's a horrible place where you have to figure out for them (as a three year old) why they don't just get up and "go", because none of it has anything to do with you in the least, and you're a genius toddler who just wants some fucking hot chocolate with whipped cream on top when it's cold outside.

It's excruciating solving other people's problems all day long just to have the simplest, most basic human needs neglected right in your cute lil' kiddie face (and you did nothing wrong, again), whether it's done intentionally or during their self-proclaimed "mental health day", and you know how that goes down: the shades HAVE TO be pulled down so no light can penetrate the tomb-like darkness of their inner sanctum (like a parents' bedroom), you wet a washcloth for said drama queen's head (ahem, hi Diane), and absolutely no noises can be made by anyone or anything, because it's three in the afternoon and you just want a fucking snack like any other young human in your tribe does. 

Children of New York, and other peoples of the world: today I officially declare that the hyped-up bullshit act ends. Tell someone (anyone!) that you have a rabid drama-queen for a parent, and teachers: get involved. It's us or them, and we fight for human rights violations as social justice providers on the daily that our societies so desperately need. We can either take care of each other, let them burn us out completely, or we can take back the day by not letting their madness win. I know what I decided a very long time ago. Don't let it happen to you and your life, or you might go down with them. It's time to drop the act. Stop acting like life is a big commercial, and get real with it. Who's with me?!

https://www.nami.org/Find-Support/Family-Members-and-Caregivers 

For my Rockland peeps: http://namirockland.org/index.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamite_%28magazine%29

Pass the Mic

Beastie Boys

If you can feel what I'm feeling then it's a musical masterpiece
Hear what I'm dealing with then that's cool at least
What's running through my mind comes through in my walk
True feelings are shown from the way that I talk and this is me, y'all
An M.C., y'all my name is M.C.A. and I still do what I please
And now I'd like to introduce (what's up?)
I'll pass the mic to D for a fistful of truth

The name is D, y'all, and I don't play
And I can rock a block party 'till your hair turns grey
(So, what you sayin'?) I explode on site
I'm like Jimmy Walker, I'm (dy-no-mite!)
And now I'd like to pass the mic
To Adrock, c'mon and do anything you like

I'm the A-D-R-O-C-K, in the place with the bass, I'm going all the way
I can't stop y'all, tock-tick, y'all
And if… Full lyrics on Google Play

Meet "The Daltons"

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

My ex-boyfriend from college was in way over his head with me and he knew it, because people told him that over and over again. His manic obsessions bounced around in his head, making him sometimes think that people are fucking with him when they aren't, like classically paranoid hippies think about "the government" (as in "We, the People"), and sometimes people really are fucking with him, because he can act like a total fucking dick. He made a series of rude racist comments that he thought he could get away with as a six foot tall ex-quarterback/bouncer, which didn't help out his rep with us at all.

A tall annoying Jewish kid pledging a Long Islander frat lived next door to him freshmen year, and because the kid was a spoiled skateboarder with a rich daddy, Bart decided to mock his prominent nose in front of us one afternoon, when we were just hanging out on their dorm floor. That's how it went down with him: we could be drunk and high and having fun boarding up-and-down the hallway badly giggling about it, then Bart would trip when someone pointed out that he sucked at something like boarding, which he didn't do as a kid in his tidy whitey Bay Ridge neighborhood, because he's a fancy prep school boy.

After that, their "Cold War" began in earnest. For years, Mike Z. told Bart (after he told me he wanted to "see other people" in Montreal, because he didn't want to marry the woman he lost his virginity to) that he swore he saw me walking around Benefit Hill in Providence while I was at R.I.S.D. with a "black" guy (which wasn't true), but Mike had landed a direct hit on his target, square in the chest. I dated a handsome architect/furniture designer in the M.F.A. program from New Jersey who was newly divorced from his bipolar ex-wife, and he was a blond Dutch boy. I went on one date with Beau Bernstein, a good-looking Jewish boy from Manhattan whose famous father produced "The Beatles" first American tour (seriously), and he is definitely not African, not that there's anything wrong with that.

I also dated a messed-up cute sculpture student playing weird games with my Jewish, pot-smoking, and possibly bisexual hippie friend Beth who was "slumming" it in worn clothes that screamed "bohemian" loudly, with requisite woven-knit African tam placed on her long, scraggly, and frequently unwashed dark hair. They were experimenting with naked friendship, when they both lied down on a bed without touching, and then she scribbled manic sayings about worms and penises on cardboard for me to see, which she hurriedly crumbled up when I asked her about it. "Is it an art project?" I don't know. I was just there to help them grow some pot in her attic with his help, funded by their growing trust funds for the raised electrical bill and the equipment ordered from "High Times", like grow lamps with special bulbs. 

I have no fucking idea what was going on between them (still don't), except that maybe identity/personality disorders, trust funds, drugs, and really difficult art and design schools do not mix together well. Oh, and there was also a nice boy I fooled around with during the beginning of art school over a summer session (my Mom really liked him, but I barely remember him), and that was it. Truly. For years, Mike Z. played games with Bart's head in revenge for his racist and anti-Semitic comments, and I can't say I blame him for it. Bart used to grill me about the penis sizes of my exes (not that I had many to compare with, at 17 years old), asking me how much bigger he was.

It was kinda gay, but the kid was a virgin, after all. He was so fucked up about it, that he couldn't perform on the night we designated for the act to take place in my dorm room (Karen went home for the weekend, which was rare for her to do), and of course, we had to talk about it for way longer than was necessary. Go to sleep, I finally told him. We'll have sex in the morning. Really? Really. He was 18, and that's how it was. He believed me after that, pretending I was like a prescient "witch" when really, I was healthier and more mature than him, but he would argue with that, too. He could become arrogant, self-defensive, and boastful in a heartbeat, looking to place blame on the people around him, like blaming me for his failure at science, which blew up his boyhood dreams of tending to hunky football players as a P.T. 

Uh...sorry, bro? He didn't help me with any of my schoolwork or art projects because he couldn't then, and he certainly can't now. It was reactionary in the extreme. "Dutch Boy" called him "Old Man" to his face for being choosy, fussy, or picky about fucking everything, and there was something really weird about his fears that he forced us to talk about at length (as therapy for him), because he never really solved any of his problems. He was abusive towards me, too, saying crazy shit about my mixed heritage that he disparaged as a "Bourbon" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Bourbon) Quebecois (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qu%C3%A9b%C3%A9cois_%28word%29), a way of putting himself above me as an Original Métis because he was supposedly "whiter" than me, eerily similar to the color games African-Americans play with each other to disrespect each other as less colored or "too" colored, you feel me?

It was okay when he developed a red tan in the summer because he had eczema on his upper arms (don't we all?!), trotting out exotic stories about a French-Canadian Great Uncle with prominently full lips who could have been part Indian...what did I think? Uh, sure, bro....they didn't exactly keep records about indigenous squaws and their fur trappers back then, you know? Except for my line, they did. In fact, I have a copy of my ancestors' handwritten diary with names and dates. In this century, we even have a genetic database! Hard to fake or beat, but like any desperate "student of history", Bart searched for clues among the stacks to prove that he was better than anyone else, when we were just a bunch of working class New York kids trying to make it, you know? It was oddly striving for someone of his age, but he wouldn't be the first bad scholar who can't compete with the actual chops of an impassioned academic and we were that as a group, overall.

Because of my beauty, brains, drive, and work ethic, his comments never really bothered me as much as his questioning seemed to knock him off-kilter much quicker than anything I ever did to him. I felt bad for him, actually. He could be a sweet boy when he let his guard down. He reminded me of the chesty character "Gaston" from the Disney version of "Beauty and the Beast" (http://disney.wikia.com/wiki/Gaston); an overblown cartoon character searching for himself by breaking apart other people into shards that he could examine at his leisure, except life didn't move at his pace. It got even weirder after I broke up with him. He dated and married a plain-looking teaching student who liked him from afar during college (typical, typical) with the "horrible" brown eyes that he supposedly was worried about mixing into his precious blood lines through me, because blue eyes are recessive genes to my stronger line, and perhaps domination by childbirth was his real fear with me, because it's true.

After we met up several years ago (he heard I was back in the Slope, and tracked me down via my phone number after a supposed random drive-by when he saw me walking Teddy down the block, because his boss just happened to live in the neighborhood), and he was still in love with me. He told me years ago when I broke up with him that he was upset because I was the best-looking woman he ever dated, which should have been a big clue, no matter how many times he heard it from me and other people. Yeah... major douche chills, right? So what?! He had aged poorly as I had aced aging, as we both predicted in our teens. I've always been younger looking than my actual age.

He didn't stop with the texts and emails, as I knew he wouldn't. When I was in a tough spot after my early morning accident with Teddy, I met up with him after work for a beer so he could carry me upstairs to my apartment on his back while I was still on crutches. He naturally disparaged my rent-stabilized historical apartment for looking "just like "college" because I was a rather recent move-in to the place, similar to my former "frenemy" Cheryl's comments about my aunt's "starter" apartment in Kensington, as cues to me that they were far ahead of me in life. It didn't work, obviously. He's reading me along with her right now, eh? But it did give me cues that I was 100% correct in dropping them from my life, not that I needed much verification. After that, he got weirder with his rapidly responding emails.

He'd told me we could have an affair because he had Lupus from those poor recessive genes of his (we hadn't known that in college), and as a result of his diseases, he was sterile. Ha! He'd boasted so often about his virility and rugged good health that it was the greatest justice I'd ever heard of. Poor kid! What an ass! He'd forced his lower-earning wife to bear triplets in a hospital bed through many in-vitro sessions (poor thing!), which I accurately described to my family and friends as "dodging a bullet", true in every sense. The Loup Garou of our mythical pasts had returned (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loup-garou_%28homonymie%29)! After that, he sent me a series of emails under a series of weirder pseudonyms, as a prelude to an affair that never happened. I married an Indo-Euro, bro! No going back from that.

One of the last email account names he used was so weird, I just had to ask him about it. What the fuck does "Dalton" mean?! One email name was an easier trace to a certain "Star Trek" episode (we'd met in our dorm as he watched Star Trek alone in the common room smoking a cigarette that I bummed from him to make conversation, and our pretext to meeting him as our new college-age drug dealer who lived in the room right beneath us....ha! Nice one, Karen!), but this one was more obscure....WTF? His reply was just as bad as I feared for him. He wrote that he was tired of explaining and spelling out his obviously French-sounding name to the movie people he worked with out west, so he decided to "Anglicize" it for their comfort. WHA???!!!

This was the same kid who'd openly bragged about his roots to all of us in college over and over, about how much of a real "working class" champion he'd be for all those poor union people after graduating, but this? This shit....?! The "sell-out" moniker he'd always feared becoming had landed squarely on his shoulders, and not ours. His brother Quentin's girlfriend Shelley had been a "sell-out" for straightening her curly hair like girls sometimes do (I did it in the 90s, too), but not him! No, becoming an entertainment lawyer who watches show-biz types for contractual violations that he can sue over, well, that's just great. Not a sell-out at all! Except he was, and poorly so. 

I didn't respond to him after that, even after he pretended that we established some sort of yearly check-in pattern as old friends that didn't exist. He goaded me into responding to him by insulting my obviously Acadian last name through his description of a Toronto band with it, a name I am fiercely proud of. It was the first legal stipulation I made in the paperwork I filed at a Colorado courthouse for the no-fault divorce I paid for on my own, after a 1/2 hr. consult with a bitchy female attorney who insulted me for taking up her valuable time, as I scribbled away all the legal advice I could afford for the $75 it hurt to pay, because I felt I'd lost something I would never get back when I gave up my name. I was so relieved to have my last name back that I immediately knew on each and every level that I'd absolutely done the right thing, just as I'd done with every other bad boyfriend I had in the past. I'd kept my name and my identity, even when it wasn't convenient for me to do so, and people, it has never been convenient for me to do so, but I stayed true. I got to keep my soul. Hard to beat that.