Alley Cat

The backyards of brownstone Brooklyn are a magical hidden world that the rest of the world doesn't readily know about, and before the massive explosion that brought about its gentrification by so many white Americans to our fair city, that was just the way we liked it. The apartments were beautiful and affordable, though not to my newly-established boyfriend from upstate New York. He was saddled by credit card debt elicited by his manic phases of unrest and urgency that told him he needed to do something now nOW NOW! It didn't dig him out of his depressive holes, but rather kept him there with something more to be upset over, which got him back on the binge cycle of drinking all-nighters that kept his diseases well-fed, if not happily cured. 

But, my aunt's old apartment by Ocean Avenue was sad to be in, and the neighborhood was too far a commute to Manhattan. I told him I would pay any monthly rent he couldn't afford, and for the next year, we had full use of the entire first floor of a garden apartment in central Park Slope, for the now mind-boggling low fee of $950/month. It was deemed an extraordinary luxury by some, and a horrid "frontier" land in the ghetto by others, depending on the individual's agenda. After we pulled out the fridge to clean it and found hypodermic needles, one could presume either a diabetic lived there or a heroin junkie, again, according to the bent of your imagination.

We didn't care. The neighborhood was great, and the apartment was gorgeous; a classic "railroad" style place where each room opened into the next to the garden in the back, separated by old wooden pocket doors that closed off the bedroom from the living room. The kitchen opened up to the garden by sliding glass doors, and by the reactions of our guests, I knew I'd struck gold. My dad joked about my lack of a green thumb because of the tree in the middle of a concrete area that died before we got there, which meant that some envy had taken hold. We hung sparking white Christmas tree lights on it that lit up at night, and as the evening wore on, the magic took hold until there was nothing else but happiness around the patio table.

An opera singer did her warm-up scales almost every afternoon with the window open in the building behind ours on the next block over, and thick ivy covered one of the walls that had a simple bench of concrete blocks under a bower of grapevines from next door. Without the partitions of so many walls, the whole city block is basically one big garden that no one can see from the street. Back there, it was a different world; gardens sprouted lush vegetables every year, as the bees and butterflies fluttered around huge sunflowers in the summer sun. Like our beautiful neighborhood with great rents, it felt like a secret we had earned as hard-working New Yorkers. It felt that good and that right, to me.

My friend from RISD had a place in Brooklyn, too, in a different neighborhood that's also well-considered, though less of a garden district. He'd gotten a kitten to ride out the loneliness that comes with the single city life and long hours at the studio. He'd found work at MTV Studios: a factory of drafting tables where he was one of hundreds of production artists who painstakingly filled in the minor details for the then-popular "Beavis and Butthead" show that caused him painful embarrasment as a classically trained draftsman. The creator, Mike Judge, could give a shit about the fine art of animation, and basically told them that at meetings. Oh, well. Looked good on the resume, though.

His parents still lived in Mass., as well-to-do Armenians who owned a successful car dealership. They spoiled Ed and his siblings rotten, but that's first generation affluence for you. Any problems could be solved with money, right? That's the American Dream! It wasn't, of course, but who were we to tell them that? They went on ski vacations every year, and turned out functional illiterates who could draw alone in a room for many hours. Done deal. Back in Brooklyn, we agreed to babysit Ed's kitten while he flew home for a holiday, with the warnings that me and Dave were solid dog people, and that a lot of cats roamed through the gardens, getting into loud fights almost every single night.

He tentatively agreed to drop off the cat with a backup plan of a kennel, in case the deal went bust, and it did, no surprise to us. He'd assured us that the animal had been well-socialized and could mix it up with other cats, but within a half an hour, me and Dave ran back to the kitchen to the sound of a deathly kitten scream, finding it being clawed through a window screen by a big orange tabby street cat with a really angry look on its face. That kitten won't make it through the night, here. We called him up with our concerns, and once again he was back at our place in a quick cab ride to drop it off at the kennel. Within a few months more, Ed and my other RISD friend Lisa would leave the city for southern California, never to brave the streets of New York again. Ain't that the way of it, though?

Oooh, Oooh, Oooh, Oooh,
Black and orange stray cat sittin' on a fence
Ain't got enough dough to pay the rent
I'm flat broke but I don't care
I strut right by with my tail in the air

Stray cat strut, I'm a ladies' cat,
A feline Casanova, hey man, thats where its at
Get a shoe thrown at me from a mean old man
Get my dinner from a garbage can

Yeah don't cross my path

I don't bother chasing mice around
I slink down the alley looking for a fight
Howling to the moonlight on a hot summer night
Singin' the blues while the lady cats cry,
"Wild stray cat, you're a real gone guy."

I wish I could be as carefree and wild,
but I got cat class and I got cat style.

I don't bother chasing mice around
I slink down the alley looking for a fight
Howling to the moonlight on a hot summer night
Singin' the blues while the lady cats cry,
"Wild stray cat, you're a real gone guy."

I wish I could be as carefree and wild,
but I got cat class and I got cat style.

Scouts Honor

My dad was the Scoutmaster for my bro's Boy Scout troop growing up, and it was awesome. We did really fun things like canoeing, wilderness hiking, and history tours that became treasure hunts to find the most building markers in Philadelphia at nighttime, which kind of felt like that t.v. show "Sleepy Hollow". I learned about camping (always pack extra white socks for makeshift bandages, and triple-wrap matchbooks in foil and plastic for waterproofing), orienteering (moss almost always grows on the north side of a tree, but always carry a working compass anyway), reading trails and the landscape, but I mostly knew that anyway. I was the best scout my dad ever had, until I joined "The Brownies" and then "The Girl Scouts".

Then, the pace slowed to a crawl, and there were no boys around. At all. There were absolutely no menfolk or boys around anymore; just a really "butch" troop leader who'd adopted two kids with "her" "husband", which was jarring to me outside of a girls-only softball practice that I did not attend outside of school hours. Ya dig? Country queers were deeply closeted back in the day, but we knew who was who anyway because we knew "gay", even as very young children. For instance, at Chestnut Grove elementary school in New City, his name was Patrick, and he was (is) a very nice, quiet, devoutly Catholic Irish-American boy with a blue pen type of birthmark. In junior high, his name was "Bryon", and he did funny things like foil bullies from pulling on his pants for wedgies and compose sonnets on the fly while pursuing an acting career in the city that he continued for years.

In high school, "the gay kid" was Pete and he's an awesome painter, albeit with a lifelong appreciation of goth music and/or the lifestyle, but I digress. We're talking about lesbians. In our school, her name was Gina, and she was famously found in bed with her "best friend"—a petite, highly-freckled Irish-American girl one grade behind her—by her mom the summer before we all left for college. Unlike the average suburban "sports dyke" though, Gina was (and is) the real deal: an all-star athlete who attended college on a basketball scholarship, not that it ended there. She played almost every sport that we had a team for, like volleyball, track and field, baseball, swimming, etc. So, we knew "gay" and we knew the real deal, too, not just the awkward "closet case" lurking around doing vaguely "faggy" stuff. We were "out" with each other about who were were, because we were all we had back then as a generation.

Still, the crazy dykes in my troop surpassed even my sophisticated New York understanding of gay culture. They were fucking horrible. They were cliquish to the extreme and insane, and instead of feeling ashamed about it, they reveled in their loud queerness like the assholes they were. My mom loved it. Unlike, say, dancing or art, she could excel in this. My mom remains one of the bitchiest gossips I have ever met in my life, and she's also kind of an "art fag", too. She loved the little cliques she could giggle with like a kid, over weird shit like different colored strings that were made into bad crafts no one really likes. That's a fucking badge for chicks in this troop?! The good sportsmanship of my father and my brothers had wrecked me on this gay girl experience, and nothing less as a scout would do.

I made it through Brownies easily because I really liked the illustrations that came with the handbook for me to read, plus my friends were part of that troop, but once the local "closet case" took over, she upped up the manic energy a few gay cheerleader notches, and I couldn't take it anymore. My mom immediately bonded and then sided with the gay girls and their dykey troop leader with the crew cut, to laugh about me behind my back and make fun of me, which is what she did at home with her sisters anyway, so why did I need to earn a badge in it? I really didn't. Plus, did I mention there were no boys? Like, no men at all, and that's hell for a straight girl, man-ladies. Turns out that hell for a totally heterosexual woman is a bunch of bitchy, bipolar, deeply closeted queers in a homocentric Girl Scout troop in the 'burbs, with no room for escape. Buckle up, boys. It's gonna be a bumpy ride.

Hooked on Feelings

For people with severe mental illnesses, emotions are a place fraught with a thousand little tensions that don't add up to a whole picture, especially for the seriously bipolar. I watched a receptionist talk (more like interrupt and over-talk) with various employees in a corporate setting for years, and she'd steal facets that she liked from different people by littering her "nonversations" with their borrowed expressions. It was the only memory recall she had; these shards of other people's personas that never added up to a real person for her. 

It was doubly odd because she came from a really strong cultural presence in New York, as an Israeli immigrant living in a strongly Jewish part of "Lawnguyland". It wasn't like she was an ethnic minority living on her own. Her parents sent her to a private schul during her formative years, but after puberty, she became sicker and sicker. There was something broken within her that never really worked right, and it was grueling to be around. She'd call herself a "painter", exhibit some drawing skills as an illustrator, then go completely downhill after that first good picture, like all the other areas of her life.

She was also extremely vulnerable to the outside world. I could tell her parents were exhausted by her ongoing illnesses, as the only explanation that made any sense after years of observation. She was too sick to live with, and she had weird tense stand-offs with her roommates at the city apartment she found while commuting from her parent's place on the island. She told me she'd been raped, mugged, drugged, knock-down dragged-out drunk, and that was just during my small time window with her. G-d knows how many horrors awaited for me in her life. I simply didn't want to know them anymore, because like any challenged child, she never got over any of it. Her alleged teenage rape was just as fresh as if it happened to her yesterday. 

When I first met her, and she blabbed that she was raped to us at a bar during after-work cocktails—as a bizarre justification for not working at a more "artistic" job—I thought it had happened to her, like, a year ago, and that's why she still lived with her folks. It was like that for every single experience she could dramatize, like gossip or dirt on her fellow co-workers, but never anything deep, real, or significant. She was the most trivially superficial thing I'd ever met, and so repulsive to me intellectually, that I found I couldn't stand her presence sober, like that one crazy bitch at a frat party you only see when you're forced back to the keg line. Ugh...you again, bitch? Sigh...fine, I'll make small talk with you to get a beer.

That's what she was to us—that crazy bitch at the reception desk who would physically block you so she could pelt you with her trash talk. It was fine every once in awhile, but full-on crazy all the time pulls at you real quick, know that I mean? She was a work obstacle we had to constantly get around, like an ill-placed traffic cone in the middle of a narrow city street, clad in a warning color like "safety-cone orange". 

She was also very susceptible to the slightest marketing pitch, because she had no genuine sense of self. It was nerve-wracking and jarring to my wholesomeness as a cohesively packaged unit that was beautifully-made through my own hard work, like the books I made for our company. Tight, yo! She'd complain to us that she had no money, then she blow hundreds of dollars every week on these grotesque white-blond dye jobs at a salon, with a full pedicure and manicure and maybe a facial (if she had time), in addition to her oft-repeated tanning salon sessions, supposedly because she suffered from Seasonal Affective Disorder as a Jew.

In fact, her short list, just as I can remember from that time, was this: PTSD (from the infamous "Unibomber/Central Park rapist"), recovered molestation memories from childhood (sent to me at work in an email in the middle of the day through the company server), manic-depression, bipolar personality identity disorder, ADHD/Adult ADD, dyslexia and other learning impairments like illiteracy, a low IQ, alcoholism, drug addiction (to cocaine and pain pills), bloating and serious water retention (hence the aggressive over-sharing about bodily functions), marked obsessive compulsive addictive hoarding tendencies with significantly ritualistic behaviors, personal boundary issues, a low self-esteem, a hyperactive sex drive that led to a series of increasingly risky behaviors like jogging through the park at 1 a.m. to shed those awful pounds, yo-yo dieting, poor self-image (hence the narcissistic grooming habits), a love/hate food addiction combined with bulimia mixed with occasional sprees of anorexia nervosa, over-spending (she said had to live with her parents because of shopping-related debt, which gave a cool "Sex and the City" vibe to her manic sprees), fixations with people that became stalking and cyberstalking, ambiguous sexual/gender orientation with slight schizoid affective characteristics interspersed with unsuccessful online dating that rarely went beyond the first date (she actually showed me the "you are crazy" text to go along with it), chronic depression with suicidal tendencies, as well as other violently criminal tendencies to go along with her markedly psychotic features.

She was also the most delusional consumer I have ever met. If there was a woman's magazine lying around the reception area for our guests to peruse, she'd blame the images for "forcing her" to buy more shit she didn't need. Huh. Uh, how exactly does that fucking work? If a new tech gadget came out, she HAD TO have it, even though she was almost completely ignorant about computers and technology. Oh, well! 

If the bland Midwestern girl made homemade brownies and dared to bring them to the office without first screening it with her manipulatively controlling codependency, we could all look forward to a work day filled with her odd sneaky runs to the kitchen to cut the already-small brownies into these tiny little pieces that she'd furtively jam into her mouth too quickly, licking her fingers and mouth nastily, saying "Mm. Bitch. Mm. Bitch..." over and over again, smacking her lips in a grossly piggish way. Same thing with the office jar of candy. 

It had to be placed behind a piece of paper and away from her desk— which was our company's reception desk—because she couldn't handle seeing it, and that was after someone busted her for starving all day long without a proper lunch break (she'd blame the publisher for that), which forced her to cram salad into her mouth at her desk, pouting and giving us evil glares the entire afternoon for being a human who eats. Even though she spent more on herself than anything or anyone else around her, it still hadn't worked. She remained consistently greasy-haired with a dirty cap jammed down onto her matted head (she didn't like her forehead wrinkles), wearing the same torn stained jeans, baggy sweater, and unfashionably clunky shoes. 

She remained disgusting, even with her expensive outsourcing of every facet of her life to other people. Her Jewish dentist cousin would give her free teeth-bleaching that she bragged about to an office of better-looking "Ivy Leaguers" who most often just stared at her in disbelief. What to say? She was so fucking crazy that there was no coming back from brain damage that bad, and we knew it. And that was before she went off her psychotropic cocktail of meds, joined a cult, and then recruited for them openly during company hours. In short, Ayelet Rand was the most disturbed person I had ever met in my life. Her sole focus in her life was her, and her confused "feelings" about life that we were forced to help her sort through during our difficult day jobs, because the crazy old Jews who owned the company found her neurosis "charming". How's that for a lawsuit? Hey, it's really not that big of a  problem, though. There's a big sample sale going on right down the block! Yeah, right. Bitch. Meet you there later. Much later.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/14/t-magazine/human-emotion-the-one-thing-the-internet-cant-buy.html?_r=0

TMI "Poopypants"

As the bargain program I packaged for the largest U.S. book retailer in the country wound down (after years of brutally hard work and unusually long hours), I finally found myself enjoying some free time during the day, even contemplating trips to the beach over long three-day weekends like any other publishing employee accustomed to summer hours. It became, dare I say it, a  more genteel and congenial place to work, much more like my way of doing business, with organization and efficiency built right into the workflow, which increased the mental static of the severely disordered around me in almost direct proportion as a contrast, because now I had time to explore the neighborhood at lunchtime and walk around the office. Oops.

I began surfing the web for longer and longer intervals, even becoming a "starred" commenter on a trendy media site geared towards the workaday lesbo, which was tremendous fun for me. As the assholes at work became increasingly rabid amid the next economic crash, killing each other off in violent work conflicts that matched their growing unease, I simply put on my headphones and went to work on another site. I'd put up "Illuminations" over one slow summer hour day before the weekend started, as a way to keep a focus on my personal work and achieving my artistic goals. 

At first, I established myself artistically through posting my photographic and design works to advertise my credentials, with a link to my extensive online portfolio to seal the deal as your new publisher, and it worked. In my business, when you don't receive a lot of negative criticism, you know it's time to go ahead at full speed, which I did. But, the rabid "Politically Correct Police" at this newsy dyke site hated me so fucking much, I immediately knew that I had struck online gold. Every single comment I posted, even the most harmlessly obvious observations, were vehemently denied and attacked in a way that meant those boy/girls knew I didn't strap on a fake plastic penis after office hours. No, it was far worse than that. I preferred the real kind, the fleshy one that comes attached to a man. Ew!

They must have sensed a beautiful hetero woman attracted to males in their midst by my writing alone, but because my comments were so good at generating buzz on the site and drawing attention to their shitty pieces (plus, I helpfully followed the site's rules by not answering their hysterics in "Common Cave Troll"), I was allowed this free pass through online lesbianism, with some temporary restrictions applied. They were boring, in their own bitchy out-of-towner type of way. Do you know the country queer moving to the city looking for an exotic good time but hopelessly inept? That! That was the annoyingly whiny tone of every overly emotional crybaby who went "wahwah" about New York City and its inhabitants; how unfair and cruel the city was to them and their "poopypants" interests.

I'm not joking, either. One of their biggest features was written by this bland WASPY bitch from the 'burbs who decided to unleash her inner "alternative" goth lesbian on all of us unsuspecting readers by publishing photos of her dirty vibrator covered in old period blood stains as it compared to her new one of the exact same model. So fucking interesting, troll. Here's my mucus in a tissue! Get a life, bitch. Every weird hick who has ever tortured me on the job came bubbling to the surface through these inane puff pieces designed to attract dykes in such a brutally obvious way, I found my smarter commentary striking lightning quick responses to their fucking bullshit as fast as I could type it, edit it, and post it, and guess who won? 

I did! It spurred me to write a lot more during the day, which was part of the point for me, and in the process, I pulled into the fray the unsuspecting crazy dykes who worked with me (or around me) to stop their work and read my posts. It became such a huge distraction in an office that conspired almost daily against me, that their publisher was forced to ask me to stop writing during the day (over his bullshit editorial staff), which I duly ignored. You can't legally censor creative output at a publishing company. It's that tricky "Freedom of the Press" and/or "Freedom of Speech" thingy we have in the Constitution. Duh. And so I typed on, in response to an injustice present in an unfairly skewed media world that sought to push me out, when they actually lived and breathed on my fucking land, on my fucking turf, earning on my fucking say-so through my design works that actually earned a lot of money for the house. If you don't like it, get the fuck out!

And so, out of those excruciatingly irritating tourist bitches with a zest to treat our fair city like a lesbian cruise ship on their "vacay", arose my desire to write more and more about my interests, which are a lot like yours, right? "Outsider" culture became no longer hip to practice, because how fun is it to read about changing a baby's shitty diapers? You know, the ADHD couple with the already fucked-up kid dancing around your cocktail party bare-ass with a stained diaper in their hands to show off? You crazy fucking bitches were that for me: so egregiously wrong in your hatred for us as a society (and your complete inability to adapt to normal human life) that I found it easy to despise a group of supposedly "marginalized" minority voices who used media to get attention, like any other spoiled football star overdosing on hookers, booze, and blow, except without the talent.

I took away their privileges at hating us for nothing more than simply being here and being healthily normal, but more importantly, for loving our lives and daring to love the city that gave rise to us. I stood fast in front of their searingly misdirected anger at me, and through the power of my words, I channeled them back into their backwater channels where they belong. And do you know why? Because this is my real prime time, bitch. I am your fucking "Major League" woman-in-action, dyke. You just didn't know it, yet. And now you do. You can thank this here mama the next time a woman gets voted into an important office, pigs. I probably voted in their primary election while you were too busy online "roasting" some plebe you wrongly perceived to be more powerless than you, and isn't that like every single prejudiced dyke who secretly hates women that you've ever met? It sure is! Who's the traitor now, bitch? Yeah, that's what I thought. Go fuck yourself. Without airbrushing, losers.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/TMI

Singing in the Key of Ella

"Annndddd....I only have eyes...I only have eyes...yes, I only have eyes...forrrororrr youuuuuu....." I've always loved jazz and the blues, and luckily my beatnik city parents did, too. In addition to rock n' roll and my dad's occasional country album, they had tons of vinyl from the greats, like Dizzy Gillespie and John Coltrane. They met at a dance club, and they often visited jazz clubs in "The Village" when they first dated, seeing legendary artists like Bob Dylan when he was just another broke Jewish kid tryin' to make it in "The Big Apple". It was something they could understand, being second-generation immigrant kids themselves. Everyone's ethnic in the 'hood, knowwhatimean?

I took to the big rock acts of the 60s, 70s, and 80s first, but after that pop cultural introduction, I found myself hungry to know more about the American roots of our music, as yet another example of a cultural heritage that'd been co-opted from us (without paying fees for creative copying, and without permission) by white Europeans, no offense. Thanks for all the money! In a big classroom in upstate New York, I took a class so fucking hard that I still have anxiety dreams about it (http://www.oneonta.edu/academics/music/biographies.asp#).

They had this blind cat in class who was an idiot savant with tunes, even DJ'ing overnight at our infamous college radio station (held in very high acclaim), to come into class with an escort on one arm, like any true rock star would, sitting in the front row, or, even better, he pulled a chair right before the instructor's podium on the auditorium floor. And he was vicious. If the prof pulled just the horn section from a track, his hand always shot up first. Man! How does he know it from just a small two-second sample? It did nothing to dispel our notions about handicapped people and their "Spidey" senses that went tingling in the absence of sight (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Spidey-sense).

After that, I always worked in design studios that had music playing (or Howard Stern, haha, Carol!) in the background while we worked (or much louder after hours, when the 9-5 staff ran out the door ahead of us, always ahead of us and the end of our real work), to the amazement of the office cows wandering through our studio spaces, aghast at this break from a typically uptight protocol that they mistook for a laxity in our disciplines, but such was not the case. Almost all of my art degreed friends are also professional or semi-professional working musicians, given credence to our supposition that the arts blend together in both the practicing and well-practiced artist alike.

And so it went. I allowed the people in my life to think that they had a big "one-up" on me when they strummed their guitars slightly, or tapped a silly tambourine for attention like a trained seal at the circus, while I declined to explore yet another avenue for my already prolific output that often scared the amateurs around me. Then I scored a recording studio gig. Of course, I didn't have the time to devote to audio sessions, though my man Randy pulled me into the studio for a few vocals on commercials and promo pieces for our business clients who needed a smooth, silky, pleasantly female voice.

But, it hadn't started there. When I worked at a pizza joint in Providence, Rhode Island, my friend Greg used to encourage me to call the guys working at the liquor store down the hill for a trade. "Do the voice!", he'd say to me. "You know, that sexy one you use when you talk on the phone." So I would, and, lo and behold, with a little bit of giggling, we'd happily traded a pie with the works for a six-pack of beer, to make both of our work gigs go a little easier. That's how it went for me. My physical presence coupled with my artistic and intellectual prowess was already way more than the average Joe or Jane. I'm half-harassed to death as it is!

It wasn't until I was laid off from my last long-term office gig that I finally let the tiger out of its cage. They had requisite "art fag" kids who wrote shitty plays and bland music that I stayed very fucking far from. Pretentiousness freaks me out, besides, if this mama don't earn, ain't none of you playin' jack shit, right? So, I did the trade I was apprenticed to, and I did it famously well. End scene. Or so I thought. After I began working from home in earnest, transitioning to being a publisher with my own voice, I realized I didn't have to hide anymore.

This stupid white dude living beneath me in Park Slope felt "bad" enough for me (yeah, right) to let me piggyback off his WiFi for awhile—until he blew that up, like a typically arrogant WASPy douche with an overblown ego and sense of entitlement to go along with his easy life and generically "exotic" Asian girlfriend built like a prepubescent girl. He told me he was a "Sound Designer" like he was proud of it, which means he holds the fuzzy boom mic on set, and then goes home to fiddle around with his ProTools all night long like a raging manic-depressive, on a pricey computer that you and I can't afford without going into debt. I know: its a "dick" title to go with his bad attitude. He hated me, but he also wanted me, too, and ain't that like every otha boy on tha block? So, I let my music play loud enough to be heard (rare as that was back then) because he earned his money from sound, so what could a bitch like him really do about it? 

To go with his flabby life, I dubbed him "BitchTits" behind his tall, pompous back. He also drove a suburban SUV in fucking Brooklyn, and then complained like a whiny out-of-towner about a lack of parking on some of the most difficult streets to do so in the city. No shit, white boy! But, in the heat of my anger simmered another tiger in the tank. I finally let myself sing, after never really trying to do so in front of average folks, and it worked. I let myself find the right pitch and tone for my classic mezzo soprano (http://www.harmonyangels.com/Verse-Voice.html), a key I had avoided like the colored plague it was marked for my life, and do you know what I found out? I fucking sang in the key of Ella fucking Fitzgerald. 

That was it. That was all it ever was. I just needed to find the right notes to go with my voice, much like my beautiful grandmother's pitch, who was so modest about the strength of all of her gifts from G-d that shone like a brightly-filled chalice of light, that she only allowed herself free reign to pour it out while she was in church, where it was safe from the kind of scrutiny that sought to rip away gifts as freely as they'd been given to us. We knew that the disordered and dysfunctional swirling around our smaller healthier group circled us like hyenas, eager for the leftovers of our greater gifts that dropped from us like leftover crumbs, smacking and licking their lips in hideous gluttony.

And just like that, the evil spell surrounding and suppressing me was finally broken. The hangers-on and wanna-be's dropped away as I fell down hard financially because I had nothing left to give, in a shedding process that marks the life of any real acolyte who seeks to walk with G-d and be in the presence of His Almighty Grace. I was finally free, free to be me, free to be you and me. Ain't life grand?

Vanilla

The rather typical Jewish family I worked for years ago liked to embellish themselves with decorations, to make up for their obvious embodiment of average New York stereotypes: they were short, annoying, bland, and "artsy", without having any real drive or talent. They wanted to appear "interesting", except they weren't, at least not for the commonly-held ideas they sold around town to a gang comprised mostly of outsiders. I liked their native roots the best; he, as an athletic man who studied ballet with some of the greats back in the day, and she, as a Brooklynite growing up in a strong Eastern European neighborhood by the beach that remains so to this day.

They met in college. She was already a risqué "gay divorcee" who had to be talked into marriage by him, a pathologically shy orphan raised by his grandparents who learned to approach strangers by sitting on park benches to force interactions with pretty girls. They were odd eccentrics with typically neurotic mental problems, and that was more engaging to me than their "New Yorker" brand of popular intellectualism, sans the real intellect needed to sustain new ideas, or even slightly visionary ones sometimes. But, they were pretentious about literature and they had lots of money, which are both my bags.

Like many people who aspire to creativity, they decorated their office with kitschy types, the same way they hired an expensive gardener to create a balcony none of us regularly used, because it was in direct sunlight at lunchtime and done almost completely for show. You couldn't sit out there at comfortably in the bright noonday sun that high off the ground, and I was often way too busy to do so, working at my desk while eating lunch. If I did venture outside of my studio space during the workday, it caused a stir that rippled throughout the office for the rest of the day, so dull were they in comparison to me. It was a reflection of their poor character, made by flashing money around where it wasn't needed (like your average bourgeoisie), preferring to spend thousands of dollars on their bullshit "outdoor garden", in lieu of creating an investment plan for their employees to retire on. They were almost completely full of shit.

Same thing with their kids. They had a grand piano lugged up to the publishing offices, hiring another expensive gadget-maker to tune the thing every week, even though none of us had the time or inclination to play, because we aren't musicians-for-hire. Both of them bragged about drawing income from the company without really giving a full effort into making the company profitable. The son liked to say he was a musician (as a hobbyist not earning from his music), hiring a company to make CD's he could pass around the office, without being good enough to ever earn a recording contract with a major music company.

The daughter was even worse. The son could do some IT/computer work they needed as a smaller cheaper company (being dumped when we leveled-up to the majors), but the daughter was a total disaster. She wasted millions of dollars, freely spending Euros overseas in London, so she could pretend to be a "playwright" over there because she wasn't good enough to breakthrough into our native Broadway theater scene. She even bragged to me about it one time, while trying to force me to make color copies about some article done over her expensively decorated flat there, while we still didn't have a decent 401K plan.

In short, they were total cunts best ignored by the entire staff, which we flagrantly did, often with wild abandon, so arrogant and condescending were they to us, as the actual hard-working talent that the back of their family business stood on. They were desperately striving and achingly insecure, which was great fun to watch, because they had to continually escalate their "quirky factor" almost in direct proportion to our greater gifts earned through hard work. I designed the cover for a hot new best-seller? Okay...let's force our bad housewife photographer friend on her as a test, so she has to look at her book without insulting her (or us by extension), as the company benefactors. Done!

I learned a long time ago about lifting money out of the wallet of a rich buffoon without actually stealing from him, making our trade the most honest kind of business they'd ever done. They were actually paying me market value for my talent, a rarity then as it still is now. Did the other Art Director receive some sort of kudos publicly in a meeting, as the lesser of two designers working in-house? Hmm...let's call in that total bitch of a rich housewife we know (the one who did weird shit to the walls in her husband's spare time and called it "interior design") and make the real designers talk to her....and so it went. They'd hire one of their rich cronies' bored housewives to be a company admin, or put one of their nephews on the payroll to gossip, spy on us, and do boring database shit we didn't have time for.

Almost every week, they played a "one-upmanship" game only they knew about, so busy were we with the real business that made money, next to their arty side ventures that went nowhere and did nothing, like the old man's wife and her bad poetry. It only won obscure awards no one heard of because she had the time, money, and manpower to use the office and its staff to submit work for her, done in the 60s when she was at home with her kids. That must have been fun. I could practically see the old man pulling out his hair at the office, back when he worked for S&S, eager to push a distraction on her that fed her voracious ego. They were monstrous to behold during their worst fits, almost pure evil down to their rotten cores, such was the level of their incomprehensive unawareness and sheer ignorant naivety.

Most of their staff reflected their poor decisions, rampant egomania, and various mental illnesses, in one way or another, except for moi. I expected to be revealed soon, as is my level of exposure in society, and so I was prepared for it. They sicced sick person after deranged weirdo after secretive lesbian after me, and none of them penetrated me in the slightest degree, because I fed them whatever I wanted them to know, so I could set events into motion, like "The Maestro" I am famous for. After a certain point in one's career, playing office games with mental patients becomes a bloodsport. Sometimes I felt bad for them (okay, every single day), and I'd tell them the unvarnished truth about themselves and their respective conditions, which they pretended to be offended by, as I passed by their desks on my way back to the studio that made the books we sold for a healthy profit. 

I did it because it was my job, not because I wanted to shock the plain-looking Jewish girl from Long Island sitting at the front desk, with her "scandals" about sex she didn't understand or know how to have properly, within clear earshot of respectable business-types with keener minds than she'd ever met before. The slutty office girl sleeps around? Huh...well, I'll be a "monkey's uncle"! And then the joke wouldn't be understood, as I stood there with a copy of a book about evolutionary theory in my right hand, held up jauntily for anyone to see. Nice book, right? Am I right?! Nothing but the sound of crickets. 

She almost broke her back trying to shock me and the other older designer working in the studio who'd been cast off by the majors for a lack of ability, plus her plush expense account (typical middle management shite), by inventing one stupid story after another, like the married Nuyorican kid she commuted with on the L.I.R.R. Oh, what should I do? We'd sit there in our swiveled desk chairs, breathing at her in false sympathy, nary a spoken word shared between the two of us, because about her a soon as she left our work area, we turned right back to our work. Uh, who the fuck is she compared to the astronomy in our books, yo? Muthafuckin' nothin', y'all.

And on and on it went, one dull fetish after another. Oh, she liked being choked, because we took martial arts classes and she thought she could fold that in somehow. Uh huh, neat, sister. Get the fuck away from me. Usually it was sex-centered, like a teenager with ADHD going through puberty while on (or off) their Ritalin, except that one of us was likely to be designing chapter heads or openers for Lady Chatterley's Lover*, with a nude women on the cover proposed as the design that set our company (and the retailer), and, by extension, the entire industry, on fire with the real scandal of an exposed woman gracing the cover of every hardcover classics version we printed for their stores, to be distributed throughout the country and then the entire world. Kinda hard to beat, eh?

And that was finally the problem with them, and all of their dull characters: no matter how hard they tried to "top" someone at a typical Manhattan office engaged in making books, nothing could compare to the writers' lives and loves that we had our noses deeply buried in. Nothing. It made them finally realize, at the end (I think or, at least, I hope) how much it takes to become famous worldwide. You can't buy it, or strap it on, or paste it onto yourself for some necessary color; you have to be actually be it, that thing that makes you print-worthy all around the world. And here we are today, my dear readers. Better than some plain ole vanilla** flavor of ice cream, isn't it? I got all the flava I ever needed, and you ain't gone none, “hon”.


*    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Chatterley%27s_Lover
**  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conventional_sex

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.

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/