The Mexican

Multi-ethnic families have a wide range of humor that's either entertainment or weaponry, and like any other family, we use it as both. An old family joke snapped sharply into focus for me through, of all things, an episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, starring an actor I didn't know named Adam Beach. On the show, he was newly transferred to the unit and partnered with Ice-T's character, who naturally assumes he's Hispanic. "Yeah, just the other day some guy asked me if I was Mexican!" No way! Haha!

Growing up, we called my cousin Michael "The Mexican" for growing a cheesy, pencil-thin 'stache that practically begged us to mock it. If attention was what he wanted, he got it. Everywhere he went, we yelled out a chorus of bad Cheech and Chong accents. "Eeyyy, greengo! Whatchoo doin'?" had us rolling around, crying tears of laughter. "Essaayyy! How's it hangin', hombre?" Me and my bro thought it was a funny game, but in their tough Brooklyn neighborhood, a gentle taunt could become a barroom brawl later on, after a lot of beer was consumed. 

His older brother would sneer "Spick" at him constantly, once he figured out that his younger brother could actually pass as Hispanic in some heavily Puerto Rican neighborhoods, which chafed him raw because in his family, he was the outcast for passing as white. It was shocking at times, too, especially during his first growth spurt. He'd go for the annual family Christmas portrait to be asked how long he was in town visiting his own family, like a down-on-his-luck relation come to spend time in the big city after his parents divorced. 

"You know 'Ree (my childhood nickname), I know I come off as some big 'tough guy', but sometimes it really hurts my feelings", and I could totally see why. He'd arrange to meet his family at the local pizza parlor for dinner, only to be asked by the hostess where he wanted to be seated, with his family waving him over from the table they sat at, right in front of the waiter's face. It always felt like a put-down to him; like an unwanted interloper in his own childhood home. 

The Sears family portrait in their living room showed four small, dark people with a giant-sized "white dude" standing behind them almost cropped out of frame, towering thinly above them all. It wasn't a wonder to me, as much as it took me aback, that he'd chosen to identify as Irish-American as an adult by changing his name and marrying a very Irish girl from Staten Island. It was the only place, among all of New York's ethnic groups, that he felt he could fit into, especially in the context of an inherited alcoholism that killed his parents. It felt easier for him to pass as just another Irish drunk.

But when our family got together, or if it was just him and his brother around, there was no question that, like Adam Beach, we weren't Hispanic at all. European....yeah, maybe....and then there was something else that was less available to us on surveys, questionnaires, and medical forms at the doctor's office. That "something" was a someone: his mother who'd left the reservation a long time ago to marry his Jewish father after they met at a corner bar in Brookyln, running from an upstate New York tribe of just 67 people, led by her abusive chief of a father, according to her often slurred telling. No one knew who we were. Not really. 

So, for today: here's to all the "hybrids", "mixed bloods", "mutts", and "half breeds" of the world, plus all the other ethnic blends we have that testify to a legacy of love and marriage in this country that is so distinctly American. This one's for you, cuz. Ironically, after so much separation in their lives, the brothers are the only family they have left, and they remain the ONLY Celtic Jewish Indians from New York I've ever met. Thanks for being Metis like me, before we even knew there was a name for it. And thanks to all the brave actors like Adam Beach for representing a history that so often gets taken away by someone of European descent. I really appreciated seeing our funny ethnic reference on a major network TV show, my brother. It was a first.

Here's to all the other "firsts" out there in the world like me, representing a genuinely original, distinctly American ethnic minority. This time is ours.

Moondance

I knew that my relationship with a certain young Mr. Mulvihill wouldn't last for very long because he was too proud of being inbred and ignorant as fuck, in addition to his poor diet, lack of appropriate sleep habits, and near-daily drinking habit to the point of intoxication, not to mention his utter lack of a well-rounded education. Irish-American boys had become my comfort food, best dated between long-term romances like, say, during a summertime spent mostly at the beach, to be dropped once the party turned violent, and in their battered homes, it always did. Someone else always started swinging first.

But, for a time, it was easy enough for me to see someone who lived a half an hour's drive away from me (with no traffic), so I could pursue my work life in the city. He didn't like the patterns of our weekend romance, but I honestly didn't have much more to offer someone who, while financially successful, remained a high school dropout. He was lost without his "homies", even as he hated being stuck in a co-dependent drunkfest with the old gang at Gerritsen Beach. He was a mechanically-inclined millionaire with a depressingly unfinished house in an insular pocket of Brooklyn, with horrible social skills and a peculiarly small worldview.

There wasn't anything I could do for him unless he did it himself, and with the fistfuls of cash he always had on hand, he seemed to think that he called all the shots with me, a world-class art director. It was delusional and arrogant, but money will do that to ya. He could run his yard and his demented crew, and that was about it. I'd never had a life that small, and the tension of our ill-fitted pairing showed early and quick. I broke up with him often, and the stress of being stalked and pursued yet again in my late 30s, after all my life experiences, made me angrier than ever.

I didn't want the whole juvenile "push-and-pull" dating thing; I never had. I wanted a hot love affair that lasts forever. I was the "queen of clean breaks" who bore her former suitors no ill will, but John had inroads with my family that made me worth pursuing in his mind, which also made me incredibly dangerous to someone as small-time as him. I could wreck him and his family forever with a call to the cops because of his past, and he knew it. Ultimately, after one night's big showdown, that was it. He knew better than to push his way into my life and my home, because he begged me afterward not to press charges.

His "ex" wife (not officially divorced though legally separated, as I later found out that he lied to me) had pursued domestic violence charges with a vengeance designed to chain him even tighter to her, and I was more than fine with that. I didn't need their brutal mind games in my life. Besides, the whole weird love triangle between him, his best friend, and his best friend's wife totally freaked me out, as did the strange semi-incestuous attachment his half-sister had to him. It was creepy and weird, and it felt like I was living someone else's life besides mine. I wanted out, and I got it by fighting for it.

That isn't to say we didn't ever get long. Obviously, a handsome Mick with a good job rolls off me the way water does a duck's back. It wasn't exactly unflattering, and cute New York boys have tons of confidence and charm, especially on a Friday night with their pockets full of pay for boozy food-and-drink extravagances. But, I was no ingenue. More than one girl has sat back and watched a parade of savvy boys try to play me like a fiddle. It takes a lot of finesse. Suffice to say, we had enough cultural commonalities that being with him could be as fun as getting drunk at a football game with a tailgate party full of cheeseburgers. You don't do it often, but once in awhile is fine, you know? I just didn't need season tickets to the show.

One of our last dates was one of our best, though with his crew's challenged perceptions about time, it went on for far too long. They tried to squeeze a good time out of me the way show-biz parents overbearingly set up their kids for child molestation: maybe they didn't mean to hurt me at first, but after their tenth beer or ninth hour, I could feel the suppressed rage of their intolerance towards me chafe like an ugly wool sweater that itched a red rash all over you. It was oppressive. The concert we went to see at Jones Beach* was like that.

They were a little too happy about seeing a show by a notoriously temperamental artist who'd walk off the stage in a huff if he felt the "vibe" from the audience wasn't right. I had that to look forward to, as well as the long car ride (with his sister and best friends, again) who still thought drinking and driving was fun, like being trapped in a time machine from the 70s or 80s. It was a bad feeling, especially with their young girl in the car, too. We got there way too early, which meant more boring hours in a parking lot trying to drink and have fun with people who don't know how to talk.

Finally, it was time to see the show. John was huffy with me in the seats because he hated one of my more mild college stories that I told to pass the time. His best friend defended me by saying that John had an experience like that, too, and he was more subdued after being caught in another lie. And then, just like that, the magic happened. Van Morrison sang one of his most famous songs about the moon in October skies just as a pair of swans entwined neck-in-neck swam by the stage in the surrounding Long Island Sound, sparkling moonlight and twinkling pianos and all. I wished that could have been our good summertime ending, but it was not. Still, I have one more memory to go along with one heck of a talented Irishman, diva or no. It was much appreciated, lad. Ta!




* http://www.dec.ny.gov/outdoor/66660.html

Allie

Being a natural mother can be odd. I'm often asked about my life, and how I spend my time. Do I ever get lonely? Sure, but not nearly enough to go to a bar in town by myself, to rub elbows with the angry drunk locals who never made it to the city for a career. That was high school for me. Townies are really sensitive about their lack of experience; a trait that is not well-heightened by excessive amounts of alcohol.

They prefer to remain singularly clannish and inbred by pretending an exclusivity that has successively bred the fatal Tay-Sachs disease into their children, offering roadblocks to their status by remaining exactly where their parents and grandparents dropped them, stubbornly adhering to the idea that someone who has only gone to school in one small town somehow has a leg-up on the rest of us Rocklanders. Good luck with that. I found out through their local genetic study that I wasn't "Irish" enough to be considered for their Tay-Sachs research, and my Norman ancestors would be very glad to hear that. Job well done, for a sophisticated merchant family with ancient roots.

Provincial pockets of lonely cousins are still rather common in this area, as a place built before the relative ease of commercial travel, bane as that is to the environment and our collective health. I found another pocket of genetic oddity in Brooklyn, introduced to me through my rabidly social cousin, who drinks like a good time is at the bottom of each and every glass. When I dated a friend of his, the car service driver from Park Slope was astonished at the change in scenery on the way to his house. This is Brooklyn?! He was from the Middle East, and he'd never seen a seaport town with no lawns like the Jersey Shore in a city borough, but that's exactly what it is.

The houses are built right up to the curb, often with no grass; just crushed shells or stones. Everyone was related to one another, and that was the way they preferred it, trips to the green motherland of Eire or not. Most homes had an old-fashioned nautical theme, with anchors or ropes and buoys prominently displayed. My boyfriend John had kept a boat that he didn't use often enough to justify the fees attached to mooring it all year long, and many of his friends had boats, too. The one bar in town had a pier to the jetty; we often went for boat trips to restaurants and bars that were only open in the summertime to boaters who pulled up to the dock.

His family and friends were immediately suspicious of me, because they couldn't tell just by looking at me who I was related to, in their town. Uh, probably the lot of you, though we've had a good deal mixing of the air since then, I'd suppose. Their Irish decor was also everywhere, and I remained (besides my cousin who introduced us) the only person in his crowd who'd actually been to Ireland. Twice. But, that's clannishness for you. I didn't expect a bunch of high school drop-outs who'd married their cousins and/or half-siblings to take a shine to me, and John and I were frequently on the outs from his drinking habit.

He was the only really successful man in his area, which made him both big-headed and a huge target in equally large measures. He made a lot of money with his trucking business, much more than he knew how to spend well or efficiently. I immediately suggested he begin trust funds for his nieces for their college education, to which he cynically huffed, "They ain't goin' ta college. They ain't goin' nowhere." Ah. Keen to help, are ya? And that was that. He was similarly spooked by the subway ride to my office in Manhattan, and the one work-related event where art directors are treated like rock stars, with free food and drink. He could distance himself from my life while at home with me in Park Slope, but not in the bigger world, and that's the place I lived in.

His best friend was an affable short Mick with a round, cheerfully red face who married the prettiest girl at school, and we all wondered about that. She and John seemed awfully chummy, too, which was confirmed for me by my ever-drunk cousin who manages to stay sharp as a whip, G-d bless 'em. He finally admitted that they'd dated for a brief second in junior high, and that was that. With the size of their neighborhood, there weren't a lot of options around. Suffice to say, they were cordial to me and also deeply unnerved by my presence as resident townies, which I respected by staying politely in the background so as not to offend, as I was taught. But their daughter Allie knew of no such barriers that existed between us.

His best friend's daughter loved me from the moment she met me, with her perfect spiral curls and big round eyes. She loved going to the beach with me because unlike her towel-bound parents, I actually love swimming in the ocean. They seemed to be of the belief that the beach was just one big outdoor bar, without need of a cooler, what with all that sand for beer bottles to go into. Allie seemed nonplussed by her parents bad alcoholism, preferring instead to sit next to me whenever she could, at their family get-togethers. My cousin made a lame attempt at making fun of me for playing with her Christmas toys on the floor with her on Christmas Day, but like my stale beer, it fell totally flat among so much dead-eyed, robotic arm-lifting. Ranking on the only adult present enough to enjoy the company of a child wasn't funny in his 40s.

It was like the joy had gone out of all of their lives, in service to a disease that so plagues Celtic people in this century, still. In between our horrible make-ups and breakups fueled by his illnesses, John would relay her messages to me that she missed me, and that it was the first thing she said whenever she came over to his house with her parents. "Where's Marie? Is Marie coming over?" She wouldn't be the first child to miss a mother she never really had. It's not my place to rear the children born to so many sick parents, but it is my fate to do it better than they ever could. I'm right here, Allie. I'll be right here, where you can always find me. Always.

Brooklyn Soul

Like my pops said years ago during a family visit up north, "Queens has no flavor" in comparison to Brooklyn, and he was right about that. Brooklyn was an incorporated city apart from the other boroughs for many years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooklyn), and the seventh largest one in this nation. We didn't/don't need a lot of outside influence to hold our own as an area. As a result, its become a haven for many native New Yorkers, for being way off the beaten path of the much more saturated borough of Manhattan during the summertime, teeming with angry, tired, sweaty, and scared European tourists who just want a decent bite to eat, some cold water, a clean restroom, and a nice place to sit in the shade, which midtown does not do well.

What Manhattan does do really well is gouge the living daylights out of each and every tourist who steps foot on the island, just as it is designed to do as a business district and trade center for the world, and we do humbly thank you for your business (http://www.opentable.com/bryant-park-grill?cmpid=poi_page_referral#). Brooklyn was (and I imagine, will always be) my safe haven from the madness of Wall Street and the suburban nut-jobs working there desperate for cash and blow, in that order most of the time (until payday, at least), the crazy expensive and openly gay theater district (both of my parents are just as histrionic as any really expensive theater ticket so, thanks, but I'll pass on your tourist fare), and the out-of-towners who say they want "the real New York experience" but have no idea what that actually means, unless it involves a tour guide and a shopping trip. Uh huh...well, you ain't livin' it then.

Brooklyn was, for me, blessedly free of douchebags during my years there (from 1993-1998 and 2003-2013), and the insane foot traffic of so many people from around the world, each looking to make it and cash out before moving back to the 'burbs. But, to me, Brooklyn was the starting and finishing point that existed outside of the money-grubbing madness of the average Manhattanite seeking to put us down as "B&T" (Bridge-and-Tunnel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_and_tunnel), which, for an island city, is one of the most asshole things you can say to a proud maritime people. Well, yeah, bitch, I do take bridges and tunnels to get the fuck away from insane assholes like you. Kudos! It spoke to the striving bourgeois mentality of Manhattan and their fucked up values, but not of my hometown.

In the Slope, I could grab a bite to eat and sit on a bench in peace by one of the worlds great city parks, unmolested by clusters of Asian tourists with too-big cameras, or the young Hasidic couple lost and looking for a subway to take them out it all (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borough_Park,_Brooklyn). Almost every day that I commuted from home to work and back, someone would ask me for help or directions, and I always knew why: I was the safest and sanest person they would meet that day (if not the year or their lifetime), in a too-crowded metropolis designed more for commerce than living. I looked both completely at home and totally on top of all the exit points around me, which I always tried to adhere to, like my group's motto of "Get in, get out, and nobody gets hurt."  

Word. It takes a lot of soul to do that right, and the people around me in so many office environments who were/are freaked out by the size, scale, and scope of my town(s) knew that, too. I played the game for all it was worth, and I didn't lose my soul in the process. That's "Brooklyn Soul" y'all, and it ain't fo' sale, ya dig? Yeah, you do. Sure you do. So, take a listen for yourself, kids. We're not goin' anywhere for quite some time. Get used to it. We did. All soul, baby!

http://sharonjonesandthedapkings.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharon_Jones_%26_The_Dap-Kings

https://daptonerecords.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daptone_Records

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bradley_%28singer%29
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funk

Jailbreak

 

After I went bust during the last big economic recession, I was forced to undergo severe deprivation, like Americans do in times of war. I didn't have any luxuries to begin with, which meant that I almost immediately lost a lot of weight, and fast, too. I spent a few weeks light-headed and slightly dizzy, especially when my family chose to reenact their rather ritualized behavior called "kicking people who are down" by pretending that my living expenses were the result of laziness (ha!), ineptitude (how?), incompetence (oh, no) or an inability to work, which is, unfortunately for them, not backed up anywhere by any type of actual legal documentation, like, say, my complete work history through Social Security and the IRS. Hard to beat, but true.

As I freefalled expertly into poverty like I always do (because I've compensated for familial inadequacies all of my life), I met the typical lifelong poor who live in the 'hood, and who've never accurately reflected me or my reality. "Everybody's 'crazy' in the hood!", my friend Cotto explained to me, as my so-called expert on ghetto fabulosity, not expecting a "white" girl (uh, oh) like me to come from the projects in Queens (also documented), or having parents from Bed-Stuy and the Bronx. Real but true, as our native stories from around the way. He got angry and aggressive at my "street creds" (like I planned it), tensely inquiring about street names and directions to my parent's so-called neighborhoods that were immediately under suspicion, because he lies almost every time he opens his mouth.

And that's true about critically impoverished project people who are on their 7th or 8th generation of the American Experience; they don't actually solve problems. Other people do that for them! Cotto had an arrogant sense of entitlement about his welfare the same way a wealthy white man expects "his" table to always be ready for him at his favorite restaurant, as part of his price for eating at the establishment. "It's not a law, but that's the way it works in the world, Marie", typically accompanied by a pitying gesture like the sideways head tilt and a condescending tone. Right...I'm the poor muthafucka who doesn't know what time it is. I keep forgetting that!

In truth, after my family forced me into "Public Assistance" by turning their backs on me (I got some MetroCards for hours and hours of waiting and form-filling), I needed a sit-down with Cotto so I could take notes on his lifestyle. It was fascinating. There were unwritten rules about everything that you'd never find in print, which would legitimize an already-shady situation. He had to tell me what time to get there so the lines wouldn't be painful to wait on, and after I did that successfully, he told me I forgot to go to this particular window on this floor to ask for MetroCards because "they're supposed to do that for you!" Huh. Uh, homeboy, nobody told me that. It was so fucking crazy and half-ass that I immediately knew it was designed for him and his mentality.

Nothing made sense about their process. Not one single fucking thing, and I can write books on any subject matter there is. There were secret rules about special windows, lines, locations....it went on and on and on. After his bad Alfredo dinner, I finally told him the truth. "it sounds like this is a full-time job!" He agreed. "Yep. Being on welfare is like having a full-time job, because to get benefits, that's how much time you need. You have to think of it as your job." What the...? A job? But, like, I've been working since I was a minor. Where do healthy brilliant female publishers go? Of course, the answer for me was as simple as the local library (duh), but for unskilled generational poverty on a continual course, I was stumped. I still have no idea how anyone could live within a system as fucked up as that and survive, but as I found out through Cotto, it's made to foil criminals, not law-abiding citizens rocked by changes in the economy as old as the hills, like highly-skilled managers dumped for their pricey salaries.

As I fought the final battles with my disordered family on an empty stomach, I found a temporary cover design gig, then more "Unemployment Benefits" that I paid for in full (like all of my single-girl health plans), then another design gig that was deliberately cut-off to intentionally suck cover designs out of me for catalog season before my six-month kicked in that would give me full health benefits, as they cheated me out of them for the first few months that I worked longer and harder than around me, and then a final round of Unemployment Benefits that I lived off of for months, at my mom's place. Being healthy didn't pay off for me, yet again. But, how to fake being sick? If I had to bend myself into that contorted a shape, I might as well go into the movies and acting! Who can do that? It hurt me to even try to be in a sick world for too long, like one big held-breath underwater.

Into this scary mix of crazy systemic incompetence came the necessary delve into tenement housing and shady subletting situations, like the weird OCD guy with a rental listing service who made me stand behind painted lines and follow his posted instructions written out in his tensely scrawled handwriting from behind a long counter, because he'd been beaten up too many times for taking poor people's money and then giving them bad information. Huh...so, not like my Park Slope real estate agent taking pictures of available brownstones for me to peruse while I corresponded via email in Denver? Uh, no. Not at all like that, or like me. The place on 9th Street that Cotto rocked like it was his personal prison cell gave me the creeps, but I survived. The guy who sometimes lived next to us on the top floor had invented a pseudonym named "Rex", which his friend told him to do if he dared to rent a shady sublet, as another critical piece of "hood rat" info that I didn't know. Ah.

Advice like that also originated from the same bodega that had attracted a drunk and high Cotto like a magnet, where he bought his "loosies" (didn't know that, either), and received such sage wisdom as "Don't let me hear that you actually paid Jose for that place!", which is so illegal, I can't even touch it from this angle. Do your thang, hood rat. What could I say? He wouldn't have listened to me anyway. Our neighbor Rex was deeply saddened and shocked by my "phoneless" state, which he telegraphed to me as this, "Oh, you should let me 'jack' your phone! I worked for a Verizon store." Uh, excuse me? "Yeah! You 'jailbreak' your phone from your carrier so you can get another plan!" Okay...I actually tried looking it up on the Park Slope library's public access computer, but it was so fucking convoluted and fraught with technical difficulties that once again I thought to myself, well, shit; if he can do that, why is he here in a tenement with us, you know?

I'd adjusted to having no phone the good old fashioned way: I used payphones on the corner, and the library's WiFi to access the Internet through my old iPhone. Still do. In time, I bought a cheap drugstore cell-phone, and my mom's broke-ass cousin had to tell us how to do that, too. I simply didn't know you could buy a phone for, like, $10 and then load it with phone minutes. I always paid for all of my expenses. Sure enough, the next time I walked down Fifth Avenue towards the Hispanic neighborhood of Sunset Park, there it was, advertised on a placard in Cotto's special bodega: WE JAILBREAK iPHONES HERE. Great. Yet another piece of criminal knowledge that I didn't want or need. I just wanted to live life for another day.

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

Sick House

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

As soon as I moved into a cheaper, smaller fourth floor walk-up in the 'hood, I knew it was trouble. Like my mom's typical "old lady" development, I could feel people tensely watching me behind their paranoid peepholes. It was also unnaturally quiet in the middle of the day for a New York townhome with multiple family dwellings, because gentrification has its own set of difficulties for native New Yorkers like me to contend with. Where were the laughing kids playing in the hallways, or the savory smells of homemade food that's always on the stove? Pampered white people bring economic stability with them, but with a serious fee that's often too steep an emotional price for us to pay for them, because they fucking hate actual hardcore urban living.

I can somewhat understand it. After returning home from out west, an old workplace "frenemy" of mine from back in the day took a picture of me with a rare shocked look on my face, as I took in the midtown skyscraper landscape anew with fresh eyes. This ain't like back there. What's even weirder for people like me is that after I get into the groove, I rock this town like I was born to it, which I am. That shocks a lot of people, especially out-of-towners who think they know what city living is all about. No, you don't. Unless you helped build and power this town like me and my crew for several generations, you don't have that kind of claim to this land, and that is actual soil underneath all this new concrete, "homey".

Same thing with rich white folk who've been transplanted here by their corporate firms from afar. I think they think we can't tell how stressed out they really are, because they think it's "uncool" to show the toll that this town takes on everyone, but their bulging wide eyes give it away every time. You feel it right away, too, just like every time I visited my mom's old person's development: I knew every set of retired, bifocal eyes took a look (or two) at me from underneath their old-fashioned lace curtains, as I walked it back and forth from her apartment to the parking lot (waiting to mess with me in that extremely hyper-tense way that older city people have), like the kind of curtains that Irish ladies who take tea at the exact same time every single afternoon (because they HAVE TO conform to some kind of a ritual, wink wink), ones that they put up as soon as possible to maintain that strict sense of privacy they feel entitled to in the plush suburbs.

Not so in the city. We live on top of one another atop some of the most expensive real estate on the planet. To me, it's a mostly happy communal lifestyle, but for those poor unfortunate people from wherever the fuck they come from, it's too much scrutiny for them to take. These are the type of people who lie for a living, and the kind of accountability that comes with close living is something they don't know how to process very well. As much as I will always love "Brownstone Brooklyn" (always, peeps, always), I also hated the tense, jittery prosperity that drives out people like us for cheaper points north periodically, though that's part of our lifestyle, too.

It's like you can feel their nervous juggling acts through the very walls that have absorbed the small vicious fights they try to have quietly so the neighbors can't hear, unlike the raucous drunk Micks who've inhabited these types of low income buildings for years. I don't like either type of dysfunction (the rich kind nor the drunk kind), but at least some drunk fuck is an easy mark for us natives: just add booze, and start the countdown to crazy. Easy to beat. Weirdo neighbors from other countries took to fantasizing about my "downfall" like the easy target of New York wealth and privilege they wanted me to be, or so they mistakenly thought.

The problem was (is), it took (takes) years to "push out" someone like me, because that doesn't actually happen unless I want it to, and they didn't (don't) control it; other savvier, harder, native New Yorkers had (have) to artificially rig it through a crooked homegrown system, and by the time it did (does) happen, my ousting had (has) lost all the luster that they used to spark with, over glasses of cheap white wine and overly shiny eyeballs that I never want to neighbor with. Not once. Because this native girl grew up with tea, tenseness, and mental patient standoffs like it was part of her landscape. "Sick house" or not, in our fair city of Gotham or out in the countryside, it just doesn't matter, Micks. I know it when I feel it. Don't you?

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

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

Indian Giver

Mi'kmaq warrior and dancer, Danny Boy Stephens, takes a moment to reflect on the shores of the Great Slave Lake, Northwest Territories, Canada.

For years I lived in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the world; 
a very affluent section of Brooklyn called "Park Slope", famous for its' artsy writing crowd, media types, ubiquitous designers, and lesbians, which suited me just fine. Except for the occasional coffee-house misunderstanding (volunteer firefighter "dude" with a preference for Great Danes and Christmas lights, I know you knew I was straight, girl, but thanks for being a weirdo to me when I was sitting alone), I was pretty much left to my own devices, which also suited me fine. 

I didn't have a lot of time for bullshit anymore. I was a full-time Art Director in publishing, and after I quit smoking, a part-time martial artist in training, which meant I had weekday evenings after 9pm and Saturday mornings to sleep in, which was exactly what I did, and I did it every week for years. I'd also tack on church and Sunday school classes when I worked from home, but it was pretty much the same deal, because no one around me was suitable for my company.

Sometimes I dated men I knew I could trust from my past, from places like old jobs or school, but that eventually went away, too, because they weren't suitable for me either. Mostly, I worked and walked and kept healthy, which kept me going. When the boom was lowered on me financially, I did double-time creatively by cutting out everything but food as an expense, but just like my training provided, I set up a new routine in which I could flourish and work, albeit more sporadically and with much less frills for decorating. 

It's the same productivity I have in place today: free Internet access at the library, while trying to keep the freaks off of me. But in Brooklyn, it was harder. People are savvier, and they know how to work you over. 
I met a man there that I knew was troubled, but because I grew up with it, I managed to stay safe by my own wits. He knew that, too, along with many other facts that were mixed in with his psychosis.

What my Nuyorican friend from Brownsville did not know, and had never known, was an Acadian Métis warrior. He thought his "street smarts" about welfare scams and rent cheats were powerful weapons that he had in his arsenal, along with an almost total lack of a moral compass, really bad acting skills, and one very serious mental illness. Over time, I put him through all the paces, but to no avail, which certainly didn't surprise me one bit.

If my friend said he needed a clock, I gave him the old one I'd had for more than 15 years hanging in my kitchen, because I had another one in my living room. If he said he was "learning" design at a broke-ass school on Staten Island, I gave him my old small spare portfolio to use, with deadlines in place for him to keep to, and he did absolutely nothing with the gifts I gave him, just like any other asshole white boy I've ever tried to trade with.

When I asked him to show me his portfolio pieces one day, as I was checking out his tiny room in a typical Brooklyn tenement in the Spanish-flavored part of the Slope that turns into Sunset Park, he shamefacedly opened it to reveal that he turned into a place to keep his checkbook and receipts for storage. Oh. OK. You've done nothing. Give it back to me, asshat. NO! I mean hand it over to me now.

He sputtered in shock. But, but...he's a welfare-case. Pretty white ladies usually give him stuff for being sick and broke! Yeah, bitch, meet the real deal ethnic minority. He tried to quibble with me about my genetic past, saying I just wanted to paint myself "exotic", like the mass murder in our Nova Scotian past was something I chose to brandish about town, like he did with his check from the government for school. You know, because he needed a "hand up", not a hand out.

Same thing with my room clock: you don't help me move my stuff after I run out of money "homeboy", you give me back my clock (which I eventually ditched at a Park Slope storage place when I ran out of money for that, too). By this point, I had him trained: he just sighed, took down the clock from the painted-over graffiti ghetto wall, and handed it back to me.

You see, esse, in my world, if you don't have something of equal value to trade, we don't trade with you at all, so give it back. All of it. It's okay, though. I've got a special lil' internal clock running, just to keep track of all the borrowed time you're on. Take your time with it.

 

from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_giver

Queen of Denial (A River in Egypt)

Life in tha 'hood can be fun, challenging, scary, tense, and totally inaccurate, all at once. In a quest for self-determination and a carefully calculated cutting of ties with the past (to create a false new one), folks often made up versions of their selves, in lieu of access to any real information. Enter into downtown Brooklyn me and my friend from school daze, an actual African-born woman from Ghana, which created a weird dynamic around her wherever she went, fueled by Spike Lee's wildly exaggerated and often misguided tales of Brooklyn, designed to shock and amaze his exotic-seeking (and rich) white audiences.

L.I.U.'s downtown campus was exactly what Fulton Street was at the time: an almost totally black neighborhood, with a few Hispanic girls thrown into the mix for "diversity". I was given a free ride to Howard University back in the day, because black campuses struggled to right a segregation not of our generation's creation, but it was a hard way to go. Many of the kids we met in the late 80s had never spoken to a "white" girl before, so me and my suburban friend felt as adrift and lost at sea as my ancestors were in their boat rides over.

It made for some comic times that were colored darkly, like a group of earnest but completely unrealistic young men who sought freedom of expression through their public exposition on their collective hatred of "the white man", but not literally, of course (just in case I was the "PoPo" undercover and at work in their college dorm room environment, at the tender age of 18). They mocked my friend's "white" accent, which is actually a fairly standard New York one, as she ripped into them for their phony Ebonics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebonics).

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

In the glow of Junior's cheesecake and fried chicken joint, we were forced to improvise identities for the sake of our protection while we walked the streets, and with my ethnicities, it was pretty easy for me to do. I slicked back my hair into a "fly" ponytail and painted my lips bright red, swinging my head 'round with big ghetto-sized silver hoops. It gave me room to breathe and "pass", but I still looked at Dr. Zizmor's* ads for ripped earlobe surgery with trepidation. It was the violent girl gang thang to do back in the day; sneak up on a 'ho, and rip the earring right the fuck off her ear. 
Don't even think about wearing gold or fancy sneaks on the train, which I didn't. I couldn't have afforded the gear anyway. *(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Zizmor)

And so I was privy to conversations most average white people have never heard, like how "The Man" keeps us down: "Right, sista?" said one Latino girl (no, not the ancient Latin kind of Holy Roman) to me, as she turned to me listening in, on the edge of a group in front of campus, for support. It was a shock, and I hitched in a tiny breath no one noticed without skipping a brief beat: "Yeah, girl!", and I was in.

Little did we know the depths of American ignorance about the lands they'd been ripped out of, because most of them did not know that my girl from school was actually Ghanaian from the real west coast of Africa. They'd flown over on a plane though, and had an above-ground swimming pool that I certainly didn't have. None of them could really know us, because the truth would put our lives in real danger, but we laughed about it in private and behind closed doors. Oh, shit! That girl really believes she's descended from some Egyptian Pharaoh? Is that where she think she from, girl?! Fuuuuck!

Because, you see, me and my friend from school knew one very pretty and very real first generation Egyptian-American girl named Dahlia growing up: a perfectly lovely name for a ringleted girl of olive complexion from a Christian family in Egypt, and someone who is most definitely NOT Kush or Nubian, but that's a story for another day. 

For now, let's look to the blood for our real genetic history, because the blood doesn't lie. The truth will out! See you 'round the way, some day or another, mes amis. 

Your homework for today, 'hood rats:

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nubia
http://bit.ly/1Lr7oOm 

The Praying Mantis

Shit, dude! I open the door to an extremely large Praying Mantis that scuttles towards me and a yellow grocery bag very quickly.

Years ago after college, I set up camp at an aunt's old apartment way out in Kensington, a still unfashionable Brooklyn neighborhood that remains resistant to gentrification and most types of hipsters, barring the toughie who likes to visit authentically scary, rundown Irish bars with actual Cirrhosis-nose victims. You know, those telltale purple and red broken blood vessels of the nose that come to all who spend the bulk of their days sodden and drunk on a bar stool. To give myself a break from the grind, I'd hooked up with a state school friend and her Roosevelt Island crew; a wealthy set of upper middle class kids who still smoked pot and drank mostly unmolested, because their hippie parents smoked with them, either in their upper west side apartments, or in their posh "rustic" cabins in upstate New York. 

That thing is, like, horror-movie huge.

Naturally, they were clustered around "tighty whitey" affluent Woodstock, and I felt uncomfortable in both locales, because unlike these boarding school kids, I was (and am) a product of actual working class roots, which is not so cool when you want to light up with your parents in their impeccably decorated country homes with an Acadian who doesn't play around with that mess. It was horribly awkward and the whole situation eventually blew up like I knew it would, with broken loyalties and intermittent friendships that lasted between high school and college, over divided lovers and who slept with who and when and such, the usual typically boring hippie shit, but in the meantime, summer was warm and fine in these rich kids parents' apartments around the city. 

Damn, dude. What crevice did you crawl out of?!

On one day, me and a bunch of these kids lit up on the terrace during an absolutely gorgeous summer NYC afternoon, enjoying the cool high floor breezes over glasses from a fully flowing batch of Margaritas that stood on the outdoor cafe table in a beautiful glass pitcher. The parents were gone, and harmony ruled the day. Surprisingly for such a high apartment, this kids' parents also had a stunning garden of plants and flowers, which we enjoyed greatly, watching the lazy, fat bees circle above them, surprised that they could make the journey to the 80th floor, or however fucking high we were. It was awesome! 

Great. Now it's scaling the front of the house, to attack from above.

And then, just like that, the vibe changed, when this ginormous fucking preying mantis landed on the edge of a planter, grabbed a bee as quick as a gunshot, ripped its' fucking head off, and then sucked the goo out of its' neck, like we sucked drinks from a straw. What was even weirder, is in that exact space of 60 seconds, each and every one of our group all saw it at the exact same time, as we screamed our heads off, like we just watched a 60s horror flick for the first time, high and drunk and getting more so by the minute. It was glorious, it was summer, we were 20-somethings in the city, and life was good. That was what I thought about later, after the initial shock of seeing a huge preying mantis scuttle at me on the old porch of a big farmhouse in the Hudson Valley on a warm day wore off. It was that good.

For scale: note size of house number in relation to "It".

The Tyvek House

Years ago I dated a man who was friendly with a third cousin of mine, 
a cousin who felt closer to me because he and my brother were the same age. They had a tight bond as kids and teens. We parted ways necessarily: my brothers and I had destinies that included education and great successes, while he struggled with older family issues like two alcoholic parents who died early on, car theft, and false claims through labor unions for workers compensation, the petty cons he learned early on from the masters themselves.

After I came back from my travels out west, I naturally sought him out, because both before and after Denver, Colorado, I lived in Brooklyn, and he is from Sheepshead Bay. I am the sole remaining family member of my father's line to retain any footing in the city at all, such is the length we have moved outward from it, but such is the place of big media houses and art, so that's where I returned.

And just like my romantic life, I felt I had left behind the traps of working class culture for good, like binge drinking partners, tangles with the law, and domestic violence, but such would not be the case. Like many women of my age, I had a brief marriage to a totally inept partner, only to immediately take up with a man who was slightly better in comparison, then he too fell apart when we left his comfort zone for my urban habitat. I was single, and 37. My cousin's then-girlfriend (now, wife), had just the same experience. Sure, my cousin was a violent, chronic drunk who was always unemployed, but have you been out there lately? Dating is hell! She felt it especially as a large woman, enough to frighten her back into my cousin's arms, even after he disappeared to Ireland with a girl he knocked up when she broke up with him, then returning to Brooklyn, begging her to reunite with him. 
I had reconnected with my cousin at a family reunion, listening to his tale over many drinks that day, while pictures of a boy that may or may not be his circulated around a large picnic table.

I had also tried the usual dating outlets available to modern women, like online dating (a cruel joke for brilliant women, if ever there was), and then a prolonged relief from such abuse through intentional, deliberate abstinence. My cousin, knowing this, reintroduced himself into my scene, with (what else?) bait to hook me back into the lifestyle. It was sophisticated baiting, too: his friend was, on the surface, a great catch: Irish American (as I am in part), a business entrepreneur, and a brilliant mechanic. It seemed logical: two advanced tradespeople uniting for mutual benefit. But just like life, he was far from ideal.

He carried around baggage from a prolonged, bitter divorce, his parent's broken family with kids from different fathers and mothers, a raging drinking and cocaine habit (that he had pitched to me as moderate during the courtship stage), and the insular, inbred ignorance of the uneducated, vicious closed-mindedness that marks the isolated clans of Gerritsen Beach. Enter me onto this stage, and you can already imagine the conflict. I kinda stood out. Noooo?! Me?

But, I had been celibate awhile and I was vulnerable to suggestion, so we began a dysfunctional dance that revolved around his baffled incompetence with relationships, coupled with my continued breaks up with him via text messages, like a nightmare version of me as a teenager dating in the Computer Age. It was nonsense, but it was the kind of bullshit I was raised in, so I knew it well.

Just like his typical working class woes, so the block in his neighborhood followed suit. People, okay let's just say it, a string of fucked up drunks, rung his doorbell at all hours of the day and night, and they felt completely justified in doing so. They all knew each other and had intermarried with one another, so it was kind of like the repulsive, convoluted dating done in front of a reality television audience, but with much less monetary compensation. He knew his environment was problematic; he is very intelligent. We bonded early on at a stupid St. Patrick's Day party we were invited to in the Rockaways about the idiotic drunks around us that slobbered and pawed each other while wearing daddy's cop hat as a costume, enacting terrible, deeply ingrained patterns that always got them nowhere but drunk and out of money.

The events of 9/11 were no different for the people there. It was rife with severe, long term mismanagement. Across the street from his house, which was in a permanent state of construction that went on for years, (my then-boyfriend also lived in a state of flux. He had a staircase in his house without a banister, the components of which remained packed away in a long cardboard box on his living room floor, because there was "never enough time" to complete projects), stood a house permanently clothed in Tyvek covering, the stuff that goes on before the actual house siding goes up. We used to muse aloud about when it would be done, but there were never any signs of progress.

He told me that the man of the house had received a huge settlement from the city after 9/11, supposedly for a fireman's service, but John thought he was merely "retired" on disability after winning money from some lawsuit. His drunken lurching about the block in the middle of the day would obviously suggest such a thing happened, such were our awesome powers of observation. And just like any Shanty Irish Mick with a serious addiction, his requisite blond "trophy" wife (no big prize, but she had all the stereotypical attributes like hair dye, nail polish, and leisure suits) had a bright, new, red sports car in the driveway. Such were their priorities in the wake of great trauma: permanently applied workout clothes, shiny sports cars, and a house renovation that went nowhere, a visual reminder of their perpetually stuck state.

I've since moved on successfully, finally closing that chapter in my family's history forever by physically fighting my way out of his reach, which effectively broke many years of culturally supported abuse. When I think back about the events surrounding 9/11, New York, and New Yorkers, I know that I am just one of the millions who made it out of a continual, self-sustaining abusive cycle alive, and for that, I will always be grateful. I fought back and I won, even when no one was in my corner, because I broke his arm when he put his hands on me, even before I learned (and earned belts in) mixed martial arts. I know now that whenever he feels uncertain about his story with me, he will remember me each and every time a rainy day causes his healed fracture to ache, while he tries to repair the trucks in his fleet.

Take care of yourself today, New York.

Around the Way: The Dessert Carousel

After Wayne Thiebaud

On one wearying and windy freezing day in downtown Brooklyn, when I was in town on some business I'd rather avoid (forever), I took comfort in the cheery pleasure that this diner's dessert carousel promised me after lunch. I didn't have the stomach to partake in it at the time, but part of me wanted order a slice of each beautiful, friendly, puffy pastry that swirled by, for me to enjoy at some later date during happier times, preferably while warm and safe at home over a nice cup of tea.

Around the Way: Bye, Bye Brooklyn

Cool like that.

My stuff may still live in Brooklyn, but I've moved on. This was the view from the back of a storage building, and I couldn't help but find it representing that Brooklyn flavor: the neon Kentile sign that many a weary subway commuter has looked at from their window seat, wishing they were already home. It was a great home to me, and I'll always remember my time there: funky, fabulous, freshness.  
Brooklyn rocks the house. Always.

Down like that.

Nature lovers, my blog made the news again on Nature Daily. Check it out, yo: http://paper.li/GoodBlogPosts2/1309689915.

Street Art: Hookah Jellyfish

Jellyfish likes hookah: in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

Around the Way: Earth Day Lorax, for 2013

Earth Day Lorax

I took this shot of a subway poster awhile back, when the movie premiered in NYC, because I thought the graffiti added a more ominous element. The Lorax gushes oil from its' eyes, a harsh reminder that we need to move further away faster from our dependence on fossil fuels, towards a brighter, healthier future.   

Heed the warning signs.

Around the Way: Easter is here, and so is Spring.

Easter Sunday, and Spring is here.

The light changes, the sun becomes stronger, bushes and trees sprout a fine green haze around them, waiting to burst into renewed life. It seems like overnight, daffodils and crocuses spring forth from the soil, and the air becomes vibrant, verdant with new growth. We celebrate all of this, and more. 

Enjoy the warmth of a new day, here in New York.

Street Art: The Pole Speaks

“Hey! Whassup?”

Street Art: Jerky was here

Never compromise, ya jerk!

 For David, a.k.a. “Jerky”

Toys: The Easter Edition

The biggest Catholic holiday we have also ushered in a host of good things for us as children: warmer weather, flowers, and Easter candy. Just like with Christmas, we eventually figured out that our Easter Bunny was our Mom, who, over the years, became less adept at hiding, in direct proportion to our prowess as hunters. Easter egg hunts became fierce.

I remember the day when Mom asked me for something in dad's closet, and I found the big tell-tale straw basket instead, stuffed with goodies like chocolate eggs and bunny rabbit toys. Instead of being angry, upset, or disappointed, I actually felt relieved that the bringer of happy things was my own Mom. Well, of course it was.

I found this gorgeous selection of more naturally made animal toys at my kick butt local store in the Slope, Little Things. As much as I love stylised cartoons, I couldn't help but think I would have vastly preferred a real looking rabbit like this one as a little girl, over standard drugstore fare.

Happy Easter, and shield this one from the kids ;)