Son of a preacher, man.

I'd been single for about ten years in 2012, and after the Internet dating bubble burst, I went back to good ole' fashioned, face-to-face contact with the same limited results. Based on the sound reasoning that I'd made a female friend of sorts at an alumni function quickly after my return from out west, I invited a Korean friend (also somewhat lukewarm) from my dojo to an alumni function downtown that served as an equidistant meeting point between our respective subway commutes from Brooklyn and Queens.

My fair-weather friend agreed to the get-together, which was somewhat surprising to me after she rebuffed other fun invitations, but summer in the city makes even the most winter-shocked South Korean eager to be outside. The theme was a disco dance party, which made my older friend happy at the prospect of enjoying. Something was in the air that night, because soon after she showed up, we started doing shots, and then time seemed to speed up. The music got louder, the bar got more crowded, and after an older man hit on me early on, the younger office guys started showing up from their pre-game bar hops further uptown that led them to our downtown soiree.

It got blurry after that, but I remember a spinning disco ball with lots of flashing lights, and dancing in a group with a cute, dark-haired guy. We took breaks from the dance floor to talk to him on the sidewalk outside, and then we were too drunk to go on. I didn't remember getting home that night, which scared my middle-aged self a lot more than the younger version of me. The city was rapidly changing with this latest wave of gentrification, and a lot of the newcomers didn't know the rules, which made it even more dangerous than it'd been before, in direct proportion to their out-of-towner paranoia. You could see the tension in their eyes walking around.

It must have scared off my friend, too, because other summer alumni party invites got turned down right away with no hesitation. We even emailed each other over the contacts we made that night, with both of us given the same info for the guy we'd been dancing with. She declined the idea of dating him while we were at the beach in Coney Island, silenced by my bodysurfing in the same way a Filipino friend from another dojo would be during my first, successful bodyboarding attempt using his board. He also never accepted an invite from me again, and they'd both been afraid of the murky Atlantic Ocean.

So, my new alumni friend and I struck up an easy correspondence at the same time I'd met another younger guy at a second alumni party that summer. Ryan was in his 20s, though, so we didn't get as far as my other paramour in his 30s did, but I was working a freelance gig midtown that made lunch dates and after-work excursions easy to arrange. He was good company, too, of a sort that I'd been accustomed to for a long time: an intelligent, educated Nuyorican making good after leaving the 'hood. I was proud to see other hardcore city kids get through "The Ivy League" system a lot easier than I did. 

That didn't make life problem-free, though, on account of us being natives. The manager at his landscape design firm was a real bitch who kept hitting on him, years before this recent spate of sexual harassment suits y'all are thriving in began. Every time she knew he was heading out the door, she'd drop work on his desk due immediately, like she'd done for our lunch date he was late for, and now this dinner date he thought she was weirdly trying to sabotage. 

She was a much older, extremely aggressive, non-native blond lady having fun jerking the chain of a young brother on the rise, in a classic RISD "pas-de-deux" of sexual tension marred by intense career competition. Poor kid couldn't tell if he was attracted by all the attention or if he was afraid for his life, when I asked him about it over pre-dinner drinks, which worried me even more. She was a seasoned cougar accustomed to muddying the work-waters with her shirts unbuttoned just the right amount, so that whenever she leaned over his desk, she showed her thickly tanned "creasage" to the newest kid on the block, confused and stressed out as he was by making it to "The Big League" firms of Manhattan.

Based on that disclosure alone, plus the rapturous detail he supplied to me about the technical qualities of the soil in the street planters we passed as we headed toward our destination, I knew he was "hands-off" dating material for me, but I liked the warmth of a humid summer night on the water. We were going to see a Muay Thai fight at the Hudson River piers later on, so even if our dinner date didn't go as planned, I'd still see some action that night. We were finally seated in a really loud restaurant that seemed to immediately perk him up with its Hispanic-flavored appetizers. We got more drinks and with our entrees, I leaned in to ask him some serious questions, as the Mojitos started to give me a fuzzy "halo effect" I could see reflected on his now more-amorous face.

Alright. Let's get down to it: food, family, faith....all the really good stuff. Here, he faltered a bit as the evenings' sheen wore away, like I suspected. Just talking about his hardened single mom from Puerto Rico brought about a dampening effect, as we dived down into the reality of our respective situations. I'd come from a broken family that did time in the projects coming up, too. I knew that without a very solid foundation, and if our careers suddenly "went south", we didn't have anything or anyone to rely on besides the stuff that got us to this point in time, and I needed him to feel that pressure a little bit, because I was way past the age of random hook-ups. He started responding to it, opening up beyond the bland office demeanor we used to pass through midtown offices, but I could see his confidence was fading.

By the time we got around to religion, he was almost done talking to me. I spoke haltingly about my traditional Catholic upbringing, and I could tell from the chill falling over him that "The Ivory Tower" we attended was still unreceptive to people of faith. Oh, well. I stopped talking so I could listen to him describe his mothers' descent into the extremes of Evangelical Christianity brought on by the stress of single motherhood, including demonic possession and public displays in the churchs' aisles while writhing on the ground speaking in tongues. Huh. I did not have that kind of upbringing. Candles, yes. Stained glass, yes. Beauty and discipline, si. This shit you sayin' to me? Uh, hell, no.

I truly did not know what to say back to him. He told me as his mom worked her way up the small, storefront church hierarchy, she'd egged him on to make up phony scenarios that would promote them even higher within the parish, by babbling gibberish and making a false conversion. "I lied about it", as he laughed uncomfortably in the face of my genuine experience. Yeah, I hesitated, but your moms...."Oh, I know!" He said it too loud and too quick, which meant he wasn't over anything. "She's totally nuts!" Right, but, that doesn't mean your spiritual life is over, I gently advised him. You're Hispanic. Catholics can always come home. And I meant it. He was my Brother-in-Christ. He was more insistent on putting all religions in the same category as UFOs and Bigfoot sightings. This brush-up with sincerity? He disliked that even more. It had happened to me more than once at RISD, so I knew the deal: the door was officially closing.

When he saw the stage version of my real-life warrior act down at the pier, I knew we'd reached the end of our destination. Now it was his turn to be silent over post-fight beers at a makeshift cabana by the water. "So, that's what you trained in, huh?" Yeah, my man. As the sun set over the river on a romance that was never-to-be, he suddenly seemed to want the evening to go on, with another round of beers and a renewed sense of energy, in pursuit of a feeling that left quickly with so many fighter men milling around the bar, dressed in tight t-shirts emblazoned on the back with a trendy design motif: two big, graphic angel wings with the feathers articulated in a highly realistic, line-art style. And just like that, it was time for us both to go home. Alone.

Happy Feast Day to Our Most Blessed Mother, The Holy Virgin, 
Our Lady of Guadalupe. Forever She Reigns as Queen of Heaven.

Mad Man

My dad absolutely hated working in the city, even though he'd beat the odds against poverty and a "lowly" ethnic background with a supposed "mixed birth" in his ancestry that plagued him wherever he went, because that's the reaction his last name elicits. He was been born in Rhode Island before moving to a farm in Maine with a little red schoolhouse down the road apiece, which lent an idyllic air to the surrounding countryside, if not his actual home rife with spats of violence and severe alcoholism. His family sold the farm and moved to Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, which probably seems to you like the cruelest joke to be played against a young boy, and you'd be right.

He never really got over the change of pace they'd made to be closer to the family who'd help a single mother like my grandmother, even though every place he lived afterwards would never quite measure up to our fair city, because he retained a grudge against New York City from the strife he endured. I totally understood. I hated Rockland County as a kid, mostly because of the viciously competitive yentas of New City who liked to constantly remind us—through their spoiled brats at school—that we were considered lower than them, they who were destined to become doctors and layers, and failing that, dentists and chiropractors. They'd threaten to sue.

Unlike other typical "white" childhoods, we never really passed muster the way outsiders might think we did. Yeah, you had your definite skin tone and features that placed you squarely within a solid group of other "minorities" (and that status has always been highly suspect to me, though not the subsequent abuse and racism after many Americans emigrated, whether voluntary or not), because we still proudly carried our last names and distinctive features. It don't pass notice 'round the way, trust on that, and it always starts out the same way, too, albeit deceptively innocently: "Oh, is your last name 'French'?", in a pseudo-airy style. Of course, they don't really want to recognize European conquerors and other unwanted invaders to someone like me.

Then, they (my purposefully distracted audience) pretend that our real ethnic story is so hard to understand (or dull), that it's quickly followed by theirs. My dad had trouble from the very beginning in the city, because everything about him was wrong. He wasn't Italian, or Irish, or Puerto Rican, or black, which are much easier ethnics for average urban Americans to assimilate.

It became the first conversation that our attackers learned to avoid with us, which they would only signal when hard-pressed with something vague like, "there's something 'different' about you", becoming white code for "I know you're better than me and I'm a fuck-up, but I'm crazy, so if I admit you that to you, then you 'own' me". Well, yeah, kinda. By my rights. The thing is, me and my friends all had it rough, and we couldn't explain our parents crazy on just some po' oppressed n@gro story, feel me? We were all considered lowly downtrodden ethnics, be it a loud Dominican, or drunk Irish, or a greasy guinea (all those "dark" kids runnin' around yellin', ugh...Catholics), or Africans, or my "Half Breed" cousins.

It made him want to reinvent himself at every opportunity, and combined with his learning difficulties and sometimes serious cognitive impairments, it left him feeling extremely prone. He told me half-truths about joining the navy at 17 because his home life was "so bad", when in truth, his drunk dad had left many years ago, to be replaced by my loving, gentle Italian-American grandfather who stayed with my grandmother for the rest of her life. His cousin (also a serious drunk) told me he was on the reserve list before he was enlisted, and I knew what that meant. My dad doesn't make the cut right away, or sometimes at all, which he hides out of an embarrassment and fear that never seems to go away, no matter how much money he has.

He also told me that he was in a gang, and the way my dad gambles and works the pool table tells me the rest of the story about his greaser past as a small-time hood. Like his papa, his mama probably pushed him into the military, in yet another attempt to dry up one of her folk from dying, but unfortunately the military does cure disease. He said his "best friend" was electrocuted for murder as a teen, after a knife fight in an alley went wrong. Like most of his family, it was fucking crazy enough to be true, because we have/had hard-bitten convicts doing serious time in my family. It might be right.

And so, he did what millions of American men have done, since the start of our military: he flipped money from the G.I. Bill into an education, because he found a real mentor in his Naval C.O. He hated military life, but he loved the results, so he set out to remake himself into an American ideal, like the old black-and-white movies he used to escape a rough home life or the troubles he causes, preferring to sink into a dark movie theater cooled with air conditioning that he didn't have at home, so he could check out of reality for awhile. He always carries around this deep sense of need wherever he goes, you know what I mean? Like, a deep sadness settles over him and whatever evil he thinks he's done that he can't quite recover from in a really honest way. It may not even be real, the depth of his pain, but in his mind, it is.

It didn't really hit home for me until I saw the first few episodes of the t.v. show "Mad Men", a show about so many striving city people of his generation looking to ditch their identities for fake ones that Madison Avenue churned out for them in a siren song. It was alluring for them, escaping a reality that hated them for who they were. Everyone and everything had to change to suit some commercial sameness. After watching every episode, I felt an pit in my stomach that was backed up by my mom's impressions, too, and she totally sucks at media. "Yeah", she said to me, "that's exactly what it felt like back then." She paused, "G-d, what are horrible time it was." And it was. People hid anything that they thought was "bad", or less likely to sell in a corporate marketplace, like their homosexuality or their ethnic roots, to be white-washed with the latest lead-based paint or cosmetics that passed FDA approval.

I remembered it in bursts during my own bus commutes, battling homelessness and starvation; his pressing of hot spoons in the mornings to clear up sinuses he always complained were made worse with stress, his heating pad treatments and cookie binges that left him prone on the sofa while we attended church services with our mother. When he did attend, he never mouthed any of the words to our liturgical services, before he finally left the faith for an easier version that he was raised to believe was utter blasphemy in its creation against the church of Jesus Christ. Some protest.

That was just his "downtime". He'd take us into the office for weekends when my mother didn't want us around, so me and my brother could draw pictures on old office papers and eat sugar cubes from the kitchenette area for coffee breaks taken during the work week, after we'd done a thorough search of the office drawers for candy and gum. He got his suits custom-tailored at a Wallach's store in the old Nanuet Mall by this short Jewish guy with a measuring tape around his neck who had his measurements on an index card in the back of the store. I loved it, because it was like attending an exclusive gentleman's club, with expensively-tufted leather chairs and the smell of good fabric hanging on every rack.

He hated every minute of the weird head games and strange office politics, even as he was complicit in the same type of crimes against the public trust, through every deal he'd do that put him deeper into a moral hole that followed him before and after the city that gave him his first family. I felt (and still feel) sad for the lost boy he is, even as I hate(d) his abuses against us. May this weekend, and every weekend after, find him peace, as well as for all the sufferers of the unfair, the unjust, the sick, and the poor of spirit. May they inherit the earth through their humility. This mother knows it firsthand.

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?

Espresso

My friend Elvis had a lot more problems than his over-priced "caffeine delivery system" cleverly marketed to addicts. He hoarded beyond control when circumstances in his life caused him stress, like helping out friends in need, or waking up in the morning without a hangover, or not having a stash of coke hidden somewhere in his rat's nest of a room. So, it wasn't like I took it personally when he "kicked me out" of his place during my bout with homelessness, because I knew it freaked him out that he couldn't abusively control me, like he does with the sicker people in his life around him, so he can feel like he's the "king of the hill".

Quite a tipsy structure to maintain isn't it? His life was never built on totally solid ground, besides his ethnic parents who had emigrated to New York from Puerto Rico. I could tell he missed it there, too, with his morning mango/guava Entenmann's danishes out on the kitchen counter for his work crew of illegal immigrants. You can tell when a person is homesick, you know? He had adored his mother, who was ailing and under his brother's full-time care (he's also disabled) when we first became more acquainted. After we knew each for awhile, he told me that her death had rocked him to his core. She had bed sores his brother had to dress every day, and neither of them were mentally stable enough to handle such a mature scene. 

He told me more than a few times that she had sores on her vagina that caused her pain, which I could have surmised from the medical term "bed sores" (which regularly occur in elderly people who are hospitalized long-term), so I knew he had sexual identity issues to go along with his obsessive-compulsive, manic-depressive, schizoid-affective, addictive personality disorder. When I was forced to couch surf with him for awhile, after I lost my rent-stabilized apartment in a rigged scheme designed to do so, I knew he would think I was his captive to pore over and possibly romance, though in an interim period of our friendship, I found out that he had repeated his psychotic pattern of severe relationship dysfunction without any help from me at all.

He'd done work in a building for a family made homeless by a strong hurricane we had in the city years ago that had greatly affected the lowest-laying, poorest neighbors of Brooklyn. During that process, he'd made friends with a disturbed young woman who was fragile, vulnerable, and needy. Perfect! He could swoop in as her "rescuer" to give her items that she and her dependent family needed. She had her parents and brother living with her in the cheap basement apartment, too, when it flooded out completely. I met her briefly after I left my apartment, when Elvis gave me a lift to a nearby hotel in Park Slope that was, ironically, housing hurricane victims through a city agency, as the residents there wrestled with complex legal paperwork that was out of their depths, given their socio-economic strata.

She was twitchy and weird, pulling on her hair repeatedly and answering Elvis' questions abruptly, leaning over to play with her smartphone so her hair would cover her face. If she was the "stable" one in her family, it was small wonder that Elvis saw an opportunity he could manipulate to his advantage. While they dated (or whatever the fuck two head-cases like them do), I cleaned up a tenement room on Ninth Street and went back to work. After that situation went bust (or "Cotto Crazy"), he offered to help me out, per his typical pattern. I was originally going to live with his brother temporarily, but that deal went bust because they can't do business properly, so I couch-surfed on a sofa made-up for his brother, while Elvis stashed his slightly sicker brother in the apartment of their chain-smoking Nuyorican friend.

His brother complained incessantly that I had deprived him of his "home" while I slept on a couch, which is a crazy thing to think about some guy's sofa, but that's family for you. While I stayed there, his cardboard boxes remained in the hallway, as if in limbo, and Elvis quickly lost his mind over a woman too beautiful, brilliant, and healthy to be in his company for any real length of time, but that's my life. I don't have any reliable help in my family. I am the help! And so, Elvis started going downhill almost as soon as he realized I wasn't going to be his fellow shut-in/nursemaid, like his cousin living in an illegal apartment in his basement (he'd bought a Park Slope townhome with his parents money), and his nervous brother who stopped working years ago, so he could use their mother and her age as an excuse to live with her for free, as her makeshift caregiver.

They pretended he was starting an "Internet business", which was laughable to me, because they were also embroiled in a crazy lawsuit over the apartment deal that went bust after Elvis did work there, leaving his brother effectively homeless, too. Elvis also told me he had "put his hands" on his last girlfriend (also while homeless), who had moved in with him shortly after he bought her and her family used clothes, so she felt like she owed him, hence the speedy courtship. They "broke up" after he probably tried to choke her to death one drunken evening together, but with me, he played it wayyy cooler. He knew about me and my martial arts background because his brother had a black belt, and he kept a samurai sword (a rather cheap display one, not the real kind) behind the sofa where I slept, which I effectively displayed one night after he tried to get "touchy feely" with me.

He had tried to get me to touch his stomach because he stopped eating while I lived there, hiding it behind some diet-and-training routine along with his snake oil pill cabinet. I freaked, which put him on notice for the remainder of my stay. He grew paranoid, rifling through my stuff while I worked days at an insane office in Manhattan, saying it was the price he charged for my non-payment of rent, even stealing a street sign from me that I had found cleaning up the other place I lived in for a short while. He tried to play it off like I had problems with touching and intimacy, which I blew up like the phony case it was. He grabbed me and forced me to touch his body while he lifted up his shirt, in a move that gave him a taste of my body and muscle that must have stayed with him long after that night, because he almost immediately dropped my hand after grabbing it. I don't feel like his soft crazy women.

And so I came to understand that his make-believe coffee machine was deeply anchored to his delusional fantasy life, and that he desperately wanted me to be in it with him, as a savior to his rotten life. He'd made a fake picture in his head of me in his garden during the summertime as his maid/cook/lover, beautifully dressed and expertly serving him and his friends wonderful iced drinks. Huh. I then told him how many weeks I was out from getting my own place due to my calculations, now that I'd secured a gig as the design lead for a small publishing company headed by some trust-funder looking to go bust in a financial scheme with his publisher dad. I made (and spent) a lot of money working at professional houses around the city, but only enough to support me and my expenses in a place as expensive as New York, where most natives are only one paycheck away from homelessness and bankruptcy.

He immediately grew anxious after I shattered his artificial construct, as so often happens with the very sickest among us. He could earn a living if he was enabled by the sometimes sicker people around him, but on his own? Elvis merely drowned, clutching at people madly to help him out of yet another mess. He also told me he was guilty over a murder he and his friends committed many years ago; he and his friends had killed a bum sleeping in the park, in an end-of-the-world vibe that sat over the entire city during its last down-spiral in the crack-fueled 70s and 80s. My college boyfriend had also tortured a bum sleeping on a park bench with his best friend in a similar scenario as a teenager, too, as the city veered out of control into anarchy.

As soon as he realized I'd be moving on quickly without him, he began planning his attack, packing my stuff into garbage bags while I worked hard, padding himself with his fucked up brother, his dependent cousin, and an old girlfriend of one of them, who gave me a fake look of sympathy (really, it was fear), because those poor muthafuckin' Nuyoricans finally realized that they had actually met one of the kind of people who had originally inhabited a land they can't live on peaceably. 

They had actually done battle with their first real ethnic minority: me. And guess who won? As he and his brother shook my hand (after putting my stuff in the trunk of Elvis' car), I could see that they learned from my lesson well enough. No more. No more abuse. And just like that, I was back on my way to a nice hotel with cable t.v. and a free Continental breakfast, like the rest of my homeless Brooklyn people. Thanks for that.

https://www.mentalhealth.gov/get-help/health-insurance/

Dirt Weed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Art Fags

Attention all humans of Planet Earth: this is the official "Art Fag" hairstyle. Please note that it hasn't changed much through the years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louise_Brooks.

People in genuinely creative industries like mine suffer from all manner of indignities and degradation, not least of which are the groupies and hangers-on that we call "Art Fags". They are: that chick who likes art, dabbled a little bit in oil painting during college, and then went on to the much easier Art History degree to work a vaguely arty job. Or, he's that overly-opinionated gay guy at the cocktail party; you know, the loud drunk one who thinks shopping is design, as he makes his way through his circle of friends, family, acquaintances, and fellow barflies to redecorate rich people apartments all over New York City. 

She's also that rich housewife "decorator" who wrongly assumes that design is searching for "rare" stuff that's sold in catalogs. To justify her time (and billable hours), she spends a lot of time finding old chairs in quaint little towns upstate, which she has reupholstered ridiculously in bright showy patterns, thus making the whole point behind this personality: it's an annoyingly immature "Look at me!" posture towards the world that marks the amateur every single time. Ditto with the "photographer" wife (with the rich husband who buys all of her over-priced camera equipment), who takes inane head-shots for other arty types with dreams of the theater and "trodding the boards" of Broadway, pretentiously wearing a showily bright and a pronouncedly jaunty ascot that may or may not be included in the onstage act. 

Same with the emaciated "Fashionista" who mistakes magazine work and extreme dieting for thousands of hours worth of pinning, sewing, cutting, and fabrication. Instant "art" career? Move to New York City, "pretty" girl! I've seen many an Art Fag go down that way. How do I know? These are all the types I encounter(ed) first-hand out there in the world, where the amateur mixes with the highly-trained professional every day, sometimes even getting away with it, especially if there's Nepotism* involved. How can you speak out against it, when your paycheck dangles in the balance? You can't, which is why the company's owner is such a fucking bitch to you and every other person in the office; she's not talented and she knows it, and it's all your fault because you're in the same room as her twisted ass. 

Luckily for me, the best art and design school on Planet Earth prepares us for mixing it up with the provincial locals by schooling us rigorously in techniques that do not come undone with time, money, or any type of rigged network connections. It just doesn't work that way for a Maestro. We do not come undone under stress or with distractions, nor with any other kinds of abuse that mark the amateurs' envious attempts at sabotage, which must be extremely irritating for all of you who try so hard each and every day to rock my boat.

I saw my very first pair of openly-sported assless chaps (worn by the slightly less leather-clad partner of a young "out" gay couple), at my first (and last) RISD Artist's Ball, so unless you plan on turning your office boardroom into the gayest drag show ever ("No T, no shade!"), with lots of rainbow feathers, weirdo angel wings and garish makeup, set to spinning strobe lights and people with really bad attitudes wearing brilliantly homemade costumes constructed by the fiercest creative minds in the world, drop the fucking act. Now. Because it will never work. It never has, and it never will.  Le Fin.

https://www.tumblr.com/search/risd%20artist%20ball

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepotism

Blood for Oil (Fuel-Mad Americans)

http://bzfd.it/1GUWZmk

The one weapon worldwide that warring people always reliably count on against "evil" America is our supposed lust for oil and petroleum products. Speaking as someone who walks downhill daily as part of her commute, I can assure you that there is no such person, at least not how it's portrayed overseas as an excuse for violence and murder.

Americans use transportation regularly because one of our states, that land called "Texas", may be the size of your entire country and then some, which is difficult to envision if you've never been. When I lived and worked briefly in Germany, Arnold Schwarzenegger was a newly-elected Californian governor. The next day, my studio-mates in the atelier tried to use it against me, which was baffling, because I lived in New York City. I tried explaining it to them, but without an illustration like the one you see below, it's almost incomprehensible to a Euro.

The distance from Berkeley to New York City is 2,900 miles—driving time of 42.5-48 hours.

It felt like my time in Denver, when I tried (in vain) to explain to the designers and editors around me how many people we watched die, live on t.v. during the 9/11 attacks, because they also tried to dismiss it immediately. America is so vast, it is a state of mind that's much bigger than other countries on the globe, which makes it unknowable to anyone who hasn't seen it or tried to travel across it. Freedom, like being American, isn't a state or ethnic group; it's a choice.

When I explained to my German co-workers that I would have to fly on a plane (or two, or three, depending on fares and airline hubs) for SIX HOURS just to reach California from New York, I could see an "Aha" moment spreading through the group, which was solidified later on in  my trip when an editor and I blithely mentioned we were driving to Amsterdam for the weekend. They were shocked and scared beyond belief by such a journey as ours (and by beautiful women, too!), until we once again mentioned that we could drive for hours in New York and still remain in our home state. 

To us, driving a mere 2-3 hours to be in another country is so easy and ridiculous a hurdle to accomplish, we cannot imagine NOT doing that regularly. Same thing with the English language: if you had to fly for 10 hours just to get to another country, you'd probably use less languages, too, Euro. Trust me on that. Anyway, English has become the lingua franca for world business and trade, which makes sense to me, because New York City is the capital of the world. 

Writing that is still no excuse for gluttony, just because you may like shiny new things. I love good design and classic American cars as much as the next person, but to pull ourselves out of this mess, we have to buckle down and conserve. This means you! I really liked the German system of limiting car usage and petrol to orderly days of the week divided by neighborhood, like so: on Mon-Weds., these streets conserve fuel and cannot drive, so my co-workers biked as part of their daily commute instead, to a train equipped with bike racks. 

"Petrol" is considered a very expensive luxury in Europe overall, which is the right idea to have, because the cost of using too much gas is a price we can't afford to pay anymore. Think about the melting of the polar ice caps, and you're already there. Same with your air conditioning running at full speed whenever you feel like it, because you're overweight and always overheated. Fuck that! Staten Island has already experienced crippling power outages and it's not even August (the hottest month here), yet.This world needs to go on a diet, and not a Texas-sized one either. We need to change the world.

Cybercrime

Much hype and paranoid thought is devoted to "Cybercrime", a word right out of bad sci-fi, if ever there was. Truth be told, shoplifting (http://wordhistories.com/2014/08/16/shoplifting/) is as old as the hills, as any ole descendant of a penal colony will tell you....or maybe not. Crime is crime, and criminals exist within any strata of society because evil, pathology, and bad DNA (much like cancer) does not discriminate.

I do have discriminating tastes however, and the two incidences of theft against me that occurred in my life were way before the common usage of computers. The one happened while I was in school and working solo (One of three part-time jobs I had while enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design. Yes, one of the hardest schools on the planet, I know.) at a pizza joint in Providence, Rhode Island, and the second involved a shopping spree in Virginia (caught by the card's red flag system for atypical purchases) because the thief dumpster-dived for old credit card receipts in Brooklyn which led me (through the credit card rep's sage advice to me over an old-fashioned land line rotary phone) to a lifelong habit of shredding old mail that has personal information printed on it.

In other words, crime exists everywhere people are, and some places where they are not. You can hedge your bets by being smart, careful, and level-headed as I am, by using common sense. Here's a quick primer: #1) DO NOT go jogging in Central Park after dark and/or at night, (no matter what century it is), #2) always have your back against a brace when the train comes into the station, as a guard against psychos who push people onto tracks and #3) dancers on the subway are cool to give money to but #4 (and this is an add-on bonus) buying candy in a subway car is a front for drugs because junkies use their kids to collect change by ripping off bodegas on the street for the candy, and then forcing their homeless kid to shake down white tourists on the train for some change. You're welcome!

Same thing with the Internet. No, you are not interesting (nor is your email, or Facebook page, or etc...) but you do want to keep your wits about you. Treat online content and engagements like you are meeting someone for the first time at a cocktail party. Do you tell them about all your surgeries or the nasty details of your perhaps fictional sex life? Hell, no...unless you're as crazy as the person talking to you.

Be careful out there, kids. Life can be one heck of a dangerous wild ride, so wash your hands often (but don't become OCD about microscopic germs), change your underwear, too (but don't get hooked on laundry as a cure-all for anxiety like some desperate suburban housewife), and most importantly, be kind (if you can) to those around you who deserve it the most.

And register with credit agencies like the ones pictured below that I am holding. Add on a security level or two (called "security freezes" and "fraud alerts") et voila! You may now buy from an online retailer, which is safer than talking to a human over the phone who might write down your information, because (and this is very important) a computer is a machine with no agenda that is only as good (or as bad) as the human who programmed it. Now get back out there and live!

Register with one, you register with all. Safety should always be this easy!

http://www.equifax.com/home/en_us 
http://www.experian.com
http://www.transunion.com/

P.S. - Recent emigres please note: the IRS does not, repeat DOES NOT collect taxes over the phone. They use our federal agency for mail called the "United States Postal Service" for official business (unless you're a criminal), because post offices use legal things like dates and time-stamps for verification purposes. Postal workers are also agents for the government. You should be able to trust them (unless they're having a really bad day, and look like they may go "postal". See link here for our lingo: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=go+postal.) Then, call 911 for help.