The Etruscans

My best friends’ father Charles was her first inspiration for studying history, though he'd pursued a psychology degree instead, which got him a stressful social workers’ job in the Bronx during the height of the citys’ struggle with crack cocaine in the 70s and 80s. After his idealistic post-college stint in the Peace Corps, a time of hippie experimentation with native sweat lodges and hallucinogenic trips on peyote buttons in the Mexican desert, he struggled to find meaning and equilibrium among the hard-hit minorities who came to his office for help. 

Instead, he found bitterness and a lack of understanding that ingrained in him a casual prejudice fueled by his own inertia and passionless marriage. It was hard for us to watch her hip, smart, educated parents from the city, the first to attend college in their families, go down so deeply into alcoholism and madness, but like so many of their "silent generation", they refused to admit the seriousness of their illnesses to anyone, so they could condescend to the people stuck in the ghetto, who they wanted to see as having so much less than us.

We'd find him puttering in his garage during summer breaks from school, sweating in the heat and avoiding his wife inside the house. He'd made a little workshop for himself there, so he could paint tiny military figurines in exacting period detail, while he expounded upon his favorite topics like the Etruscans, always delivered in the exact same way: "Girls, have I ever told you about the ancient Etruscans? They were a very advanced civilization that pre-dated the Greco-Roman time period. Most people don't know that." Ah, okay. It was better than the usual power struggles between her parents, with their tense silences and chain-smoking drunks that'd go on for days. We'd go on beer and cigarette runs for them just to get the fuck out of the house.

With a little encouragement, her father would go on to describe Etruscan burial mounds and their sophisticated societal hierarchy that would inform and inspire the later governments of the much more famous Greco-Romans. We found it touching that he clung to Italy's historical underdogs out of some sense of loyalty to them and their almost-forgotten world, like any real historian would. Though her parents never made it out of their personal struggles with addiction and mental illness, I can still see him in my mind's eye working in his garage, at a time when the whole world was opening up to us from between the pages of our college textbooks, in the cold mountains of an upstate New York winter. Ta, Charles. Thanks on that. 

Werewolves of London

Me and my best friend from school were genuine in our desire to get a good education at a great price, but it was most definitely not reflected back at us. The spoiled upstate kids of our generation saw it as practically a free ride that was easily dismissed, so good were the deals of the SUNY school system back then. The application was a simple two-sided form you could write in your sleep to apply to ten schools at once, which made college acceptances rather anti-climatic. I think I applied to five schools at once, as a fail-safe.

Just like my passion for narrative was derided by supposed industry professionals in publishing who just happened to "land" a job in the field, my friend Karen was looked at as an oddity for knowing she wanted to be a teacher and then going to a teacher's college in New York for her NYS certification. I know; too straight a line between points, right? One of our favorite sayings is the basic "clarity is key" phrase, often seen as a threatening balm to the rather scattered psychoses we would encounter throughout our lives, starting in our fucked-up family homes.

We became adept at explaining concepts to disordered minds over and over again, wearing down even the most brutal game of repetition to brass tacks, as a necessary part of any real educator's toolkit. Before our generation would take to "Special Needs" and "Special Education" like the obscuring terms for mental illness and retardation that they are, we had levels at school: Above Average (that's me), Average (occasionally me, especially if I didn't care for the material), and Below Average, or those BOCES kids who will fix your car for an exorbitant price after graduation from high school as a petty revenge for your hard work and natural aptitudes.

At Oneonta, we had a lot of financially successful "white-bread" kids from upstate New York riding the first wave of affluence from their orthodontist/lawyer dads, like the rich Jewish kids of New City. Irish, Italians, and Hispanics were still coming up through unions and the police force when we were kids, commuting to a loud ethnic city with stronger ties to the motherlands "across the pond". For upstaters, America was a generic Rachel Ray type of "EEVEEOHOH!" accent, spoken in an annoying "doncha-know" MidWestern twang. If they were Micks or guineas, they sure as fuck didn't show it as much, up there in north country.

Fiona was like that for us. She'd been born in Ireland, but with her softball mullet that somewhat expressed "butch lite" and her yuppie turtlenecks with the alligator icon on them, we had no idea she even was a Mick 'til we invited her over for a pre-party beer on St. Pat's Day. She's "Dark Irish", like Colin Farell: someone with dark eyes and hair that's linked to the Roman occupation of Ireland, leaving behind their genetics with their legal system and paved roads. That's a harder thing for a lot of Americans to understand with their weaker grasp of world history, but with a History Major roommate/best friend and boyfriend, I didn't have much of a case for pleading ignorance.

Just like Latin folk are pegged as Italian-looking for merely having dark eyes, dark hair, and olive-toned skin (see the show "Jersey Shore"), so did many Irish in America "pass" for other ethnicities, simply by not being the fair-skinned, freckle-faced "ginger" stereotypes portrayed on t.v. True to form, Fiona came from a hard-drinking family rife with tensions, which made her the right fit for our crowd and most of our occasions, but she just as often blew a good party by taking risks that were connected to her deeper ties to addiction than the ones I manifested in school. At first, we thought it was a lark: a Catholic schoolgirl away from home "stretching her wings" sort of thing.

But then she took a bunch of serious nose-dives that me and Karen stayed far away from, like taking full hits of blotter acid with her on-again-off-again boyfriend from high school that she cheated with while he dated another girl, introducing this blond girl from back home as his "girlfriend" at our parties, when he'd been talking our friend Fiona "down from the ledge" just the night before in our suite. We'd find her next door in the boy's suite, sitting with him in a corner on a beanbag while he petted her hair and read her a children's book in a creepy dad voice. What the...?

Back at our homes, we were the adults who handled stress well, not the other way around. This...this crazy shit that they did? It was everything we were afraid of becoming: a bunch of brain-dead drones with loose morals cuddling each other in the light of dawn, rocking back-and-forth like retards. We wanted to experiment and have a good time, within reason. Who attends a teacher's school just to soothe their fucked-up dark-haired mistress? Not us, man. We'd just as soon cut stuff into halves, think about it, and then divide it again into quarters. We wanted to run things, not sit it on the sidelines of life like the deranged people around us.

My final break with Fiona happened gently junior year, while I was the sole inhabitant of the ground floor (barring any party crashers on the two couches) of the big old house we shared off-campus, while she and the two Karens were on the second floor. I had volunteered to take the one bedroom on the first floor because of my big boyfriend who frequently stayed over (or vice versa), since it was a bit of a hazard not to have the front door locked 24/7. Nothing bad actually happened, besides some of our wilder parties that were starting to get a little bit out of hand and scary, as the addicts busily sorted themselves from recreational party-goers like myself.

Fun became besides the point, with so much freely-floating booze and drugs around. Despite Fiona's brush with a nervous breakdown sophomore year, she decided to trip out at one of our parties again, probably in retaliation for a visit by Steve's girlfriend, or something like that. That's the "alchie" way of problem-solving: become an even bigger problem, forcing someone else to sort it all out. By the time the band was unpacking their gear and setting up amps in the huge basement of the house, Fiona was already getting into vicious fights with my punk rock crew who wanted better music than the same old hippie song for trick-or-treating kids on Halloween being played over and over again, to calm her down while the first rush of blotter acid kicked in.

Once again, there was a square-looking Steve by her side, who studied meteorology so he could do the t.v. news of upstate New York in a strait-laced suit and tie, talking his mistress out of stabbing someone with a kitchen knife in his weird "dad" voice of calm authority that was as fake as Fiona's whole "white girl" routine. I may have partied like a rock star with other rock stars in my day, but this down-home girl knows that when the lights come on, everyone goes home. Now. Party's over. I gotta go to work tomorrow, ya dig? This shit, though? Some things were way too kinky to handle well, even for a hardcore city kid like me. This was one of those things. "Aah-ooo!"


I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand
Walking through the streets of SoHo in the rain
He was looking for the place called Lee Ho Fooks
For to get a big dish of beef chow mein

Ah-hooo, werewolves of London, ah-hooo
Ah-hooo, werewolves of London, ah-hooo

You hear him howling around your kitchen door
You better not let him in
Little old lady got mutilated late last night
Werewolves of London again

Ah-hooo, werewolves of London, ah-hooo
Ah-hooo, werewolves of London, ah-hooo, huh

He's the hairy-handed gent who ran amok in Kent
Lately he's been overheard in Mayfair
You better stay away from him
He'll rip your lungs out, Jim
Huh, I'd like to meet his tailor

Ah-hooo, werewolves of London, ah-hooo
Ah-hooo, werewolves of London, ah-hooo

Well, I saw Lon Chaney walking with the Queen
Doin' the werewolves of London
I saw Lon Chaney Junior walking with the Queen, uh!
Doin' the werewolves of London
I saw a werewolf drinkin' a piña colada at Trader Vic's
And his hair was perfect, na!

Ah-hooo, werewolves of London
Heh, draw blood
Ah-hooo, werewolves of London

I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand
Walking through the streets of SoHo in the rain
He was looking for the place called Lee Ho Fooks
For to get a big dish of beef chow mein

Ah-hooo, werewolves of London, ah-hooo
Ah-hooo, werewolves of London, ah-hooo

You hear him howling around your kitchen door
You better not let him in
Little old lady got mutilated late last night
Werewolves of London again

Ah-hooo, werewolves of London, ah-hooo
Ah-hooo, werewolves of London, ah-hooo, huh

He's the hairy-handed gent who ran amok in Kent
Lately he's been overheard in Mayfair
You better stay away from him
He'll rip your lungs out, Jim
Huh, I'd like to meet his tailor

Ah-hooo, werewolves of London, ah-hooo
Ah-hooo, werewolves of London, ah-hooo

Well, I saw Lon Chaney walking with the Queen
Doin' the werewolves of London
I saw Lon Chaney Junior walking with the Queen, uh!
Doin' the werewolves of London
I saw a werewolf drinkin' a piña colada at Trader Vic's
And his hair was perfect, na!

Ah-hooo, werewolves of London
Heh, draw blood
Ah-hooo, werewolves of London

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.

Reefer Madness

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reefer_Madness# 

Yesterday afternoon, I watched a popular entertainment program like I usually do, to be somewhat familiar with today's pop stars, because it's hard for a punk rock fan like me to identify with such rabidly followed trends like its the final Wimbledon match or the last game of the World Series. I wasn't exactly a "Tiger Beat" reader* growing up, and I'm pretty sure it would've been banned from the house for being stupid, anyway. My parents can be really egotistical about their educations. Like a lot of bourgeoisie in suburbia, they're still uptight about their relatively recent "escape" from blue collar life in the city; they can be fretfully uptight as a result.

And entertainment news is considered lowbrow t.v. fare, but I am thankful I'm not working their celebrity beats, too. They all look, sound, and act the same to me, anyway. In between the latest "bad boy" arrest was a refreshing live interview with former t.v. host Montel Williams, a proud American military vet and an outspoken advocate for fellow MS sufferers, which speaks to the heart of my family. He spoke about the relevance of medical marijuana to his treatment, and it wasn't the first time I'd heard of it. My mom and I talked about an article I forwarded her about cannabis for her MS, and she didn't reject it as an option outright, which was surprising at first.

When I was growing up, a common attack amongst my mother's family was the demonizing of anything illegal, like smoking pot or underage drinking, that served as an effective cloud cover for their shopping/sugar/pill-popping addictions that had thus far escaped mainstream notice, though times were quickly changing. With the advent of reality t.v. came widely-available media content about mousy fringe types, like the extremely anti-social cat hoarder, or the guy who dresses up in diapers to heal from his abusive childhood. 

Unlike obvious (and legal) social behaviors like smoking and drinking, mental illness became a mainstream topic, thus blowing the lid on their hereto hidden afflictions, especially when my aunt's "dear friend" died from botched surgery as a quick fix to the hoarding habit that placed her in a low-rent apartment around the corner from her late mother's Bronx multi-level townhome that she filled to the roof with junk, floor by floor. Nowhere to run, after that. Still, their semi-public bristling at my lifestyle differences behind their closed doors worked well among their small familial group, where clinically-diagnosed paranoia reigns supreme. Pot smoking became attached to schizophrenia through their compulsive repetition of it, aided and assisted as their pea brains were by so much widely available "newsie" propaganda. 

With the crack craze of the 80s and 90s, lawmakers were desperate to end the murderous rampage from the drug's use that practically bankrupted the city, causing the "white flight" that my mother and her family still rant about, comfortably entrenched as they can be in their casual racism. There were news reports after news reports about "gateway drugs" and "latch-key kids" that my mom and her sisters passive-aggressively sent as news clippings to one another, in a search for the minutely incremental leverage that marks the habitually anti-social. But, they were just following along with the masses.

Of course, me and my friends attending a well-regarded teacher's school in upstate New York knew better about a plant called "MaryJane". Me and my Irish/French-Canadian boyfriend referred to it as "herbe" and "l'herbe" at the same time that classes like "The History of Jazz" and "The History of Rock n' Roll" were filled with students every semester. And therein lie our generational cracking open of the case, forever. I mean, we were taking astrophysics and/or high school SAT's on weed and beer, yo. We already knew what science would eventually catch up to. But one cult movie classic really tied up the loose ends for us, culturally.

Marginalized as African-American people and their works were, no one could deny the artistic relevance of jazz and blues as predominant musical forms that were (and still are) undeniably American. Classes about another American artistic import, the movies, showcased cultural prejudices on a world stage, like the stigma portrayed in the old film "Reefer Madness" turned white audiences against some jazz cat's homegrown stash, versus the huge pharmaceutical megacorporation's factory-manufactured outputs of "Class One Opoids" that are much more addictive, and much more of a gateway to hard street drugs like heroin than some ole weed could ever be. And therein lies the brilliance behind co-opting artistic businesses for mass coercion.

I was impressed by Mr. Williams for being a public proponent for research about alternative delivery methods of medical marijuana that don't open patients up to smoking-related health issues (which my mom and I had already discussed, because she's a pill-popper), as I also noted that he is no longer a daytime t.v. talk show host, either. Still, he represents a celebrity voice in the African-American community that stands by its roots, one rational conversation at a time, now that the real junkies in society are dying off in droves. Finally, GenX gets to share its healing message of peace, love, and understanding through traditional medicine, one patient at a time. "You're welcome" for saving your lives, once again.

* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_Beat

100-Pound Weakling

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Atlas 

Like the weight-gainer powder my brothers bought in huge cans or big jugs that came with a plastic scoop, the idea of becoming a massively big man had an instantly easy appeal to it. Drink to gain muscle? Who wouldn't?! But, like any ad placed in the back of a fanzine or comic book, the claims never quite measured up to reality. My middle brother lifted weights to ease his stress, chill out, and bulk up, fueled by his fears that he would never measure up to society's expectations of him. He wanted the protection that size would bring him, along with the added assurance of Tae Kwan Do.

Just like his earring stud, mini mullet (like that kid from the 90s horror show "Saved by the Bell"), and his guido taste in fast red sport cars, it spoke to his cultural leanings towards quick visual cues that would keep him out of trouble long enough to make something out of himself. He had a strong preference for drunken bar brawls right around the same time he wrapped a shiny, brand-new sports car—the only new car my dad ever bought for one of his kids, as a moral lesson we would all hear about for many years—and his martial arts skills weren't always the guarantee he needed to win a fight.

And just like the t.v. shows and movies we favored, the star athletes who performed these roles for us often typified our society's exaggerated ideals about masculinity and male beauty. To my college boyfriend, "Ahnold" (Schwarzenegger) exemplified this overblown physique "to a T", and he struggled to understand why I didn't also make a fetish out of a freakishly muscled man covered in shiny body oil, too. Yeah...maybe because I'm heterosexual? He also loved the WWF (before it became the WWE) as his chosen comic-book escape from the pressures of the real world, in a choreographed show that played broadly to the crowd using the exact same stereotypes.

It was telling to me, as I asked my brother about his weight-training one afternoon at home while I was on break from school, in the downstairs area that was his makeshift gym. So, is it working? Oh, yeah! He stopped lifiting for awhile, pulling off his tan weight-lifting gloves, like the cheesy leather ones (or fake pleather ones) that so many guys used in the 80s to drive with, too. "There's only one problem", he said to me while he sat on his weight-lifting bench. Just one? Ok, what is it? "It kind of makes my heart speed up", as he rubbed his chest, right over his heart. "Like, even when I'm not doing anything!"

Uh oh. This is not good. Both of my older brothers sought to dominate their college scenes through Vivarin and heavy caffeine consumption, risky behaviors that they simply added onto a bigger list of items. "Sometimes my heart will start racing out of nowhere, like climbing the stairs!" Holy shit, dude. You need to lay off the substances. As we walked upstairs to look out that bottle it came in, there it was in small legal copy: Do not combine with any other stimulants. Consult your doctor if this, that, and the other thing happens, yada yada yada.

Yeah, bro. You need to chill with this! He'd cite something like his upcoming beach vacation, or a special date with his girlfriend, but, really, he was simply jacked up and it needed to stop. Like, quickly. Except that it didn't, and as I was went back to school to navigate my own success, he fell prey to an ever-escalating series of highs that mark the serious addict, as someone who can't cope on just willpower alone. He had an addictive disorder, a brain disease as bad as any other brain-based illness, and without the proper medicine, it was like pouring gasoline on a fire, lighting up all the wrong synapses from the bad part of his brain, and it was sold over-the-counter by the gallon.

For Joanie: http://www.cnn.com/2016/04/21/entertainment/chyna-wrestler-dead/

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.

Drive

In addition to cooking poorly, thinking poorly, acting badly, and behaving terribly, Cotto was a horrible traveler and automobile driver, which was no surprise to anyone but him, and that was a total lie on his part. His dumb ass gets caught all the time, like the time he overdosed on cocaine and "working out" in Florida as a mechanism for coping with his manic bipolar identity/personality disorder with active schizo-affective features. It was based on his flawed perception that life was totally different in another state, which is only partly true, Yeah, sure, dude: the scenery, climate, culture, foods, and people could be different or dissimilar to you, but you're still on Planet Earth, motherfucker. You're still a fucking human being, you dumb dick.

And that was the other excruciating thing you have to do with severe mental patients who avoid long-term healthcare so they can use it as an abusive weapon against their fellow human beings: he made you repeat shit all the time just to "fuck with" you, except he just came off as a stupid dumb-fuck, which isn't exactly criminal genius, is it? Of course, I know mental patents with Ph.D's who can hardly figure out how to get dressed in the morning without taking lots and lots of drugs, so we went over (again) my part of the lesson plan that includes mental illness and I.Q., and how they are not always related, except when you forget to take your anti-psychotics, dick. Off his meds, he has the fucking mentality of a retarded ten year-old sans Ritalin.

So, when he told me that he pounded lines in Florida and "worked as a personal trainer", the cocaine part of his sentence made sense to me right away, with perhaps some manic-compulsive dieting and exercise thrown into the mix, because addicts with serious mental disorders totally do that. He was a part of "Narcotics Anonymous" (that's N.A. for you "squares" like me), weirdo street-front Evangelical churches catering to madness for the zealot-minded who seek immediate relief with loud shouting and lots of absurd arm-waving, and crazy life goals that include personality changes with any switch in one's geographic locale. Uh, homeboy...how exactly does that work?

Oh, it didn't, he assured me. Thanks, Cotto. I think I figured it out. He always tried to impress me with his intelligence, but coupled with delusional paranoia and his criminal record, I wasn't buying it. When he told me he was arrested down south for driving under the influence, that I immediately believed. Of course, his story came readily-equipped with a "white power" angle concocted in his over-heated tropical Nuyorican brain about "racial profiling" and "The Man", even though he was drunk and high and swerving all over the road when he was arrested. Without a license. I know! Not exactly "12 Years A Slave" material, you know?

But, that's the thing with chronically sick fuck-ups: he actually likes being sick better than he likes healing, so he creates a ton of lies to cover over his inability to adapt to human society, because he can be an evil fuck, and he likes that. After our acquaintance continued in his prison-like quarters of our temporary Park Slope tenement housing, he also let it drop that he stole his dead grandmother's "Sears" credit card from her mail (for what, we can only fucking imagine), and that "his lawyer" advised him to pay the $3000 he put down on the card back.

His theft shocked me less than the fact that he had a lawyer to advise him on complex legal matters, like his subsequent incarceration and rehabilitation program in Florida (that included job training, psychiatric treatment, and free anti-psychotic drugs), that was a mandatory part of his release as a drunk, high, thieving, mental patient on welfare. You get representation for free, too?! I was stunned that he got expert legal advice as a convict. Ain't we supposed to be "gaming" him for the facts, yo? How did it get to be the other way around? The criminal gets legal counsel, but the sweet old "mam" I met on the "Legal Aid" line in Brooklyn has to do chemotherapy for her cancer along with solving her wrongful eviction case. How the fuck did we get here?

At the end of our quick friendship that was always destined to be short-lived—just like his too fast life—I thought he was one of the sickest, most vulnerable people I'd ever met, who been further brutalized by his codependent, drug- and alcohol-addicted Nuyorican parents (and grandparents), and every so-called social system we'd devised for practically untreatable people like him, because we'd rather sell people on this fantasy that with enough money and condescending "programs", he'll be just fine. He just needs to work in the back of dirty kitchen washing dishes, you know? He's just "underprivilieged" as a European-American into several consecutive generations.

It was some of the worst healing and care-taking I'd ever heard of (or seen) first-hand in my life, wasteful and ignorant in the extreme. Most of the welfare workers I met were just as sick and poor as Cotto, with a lot less intelligence than him. He wants to be lazy and unproductive because, and here's the kicker "America", he's really fucking sick. Do you know what he needs? He needs a fucking institutional facility of supported apartments with full-time healthcare workers to take care of him during the rough spots in his life, not your fucking sadistic bullshit about "job training" that you can use, to pose with some retard in a fucking photo for your next political campaign fundraiser. Cut the fucking bullshit with me and Your Holy Father. It's time. Really.

Your homework, plebes:  
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2006/11/welfare_spendin.html

http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/01/24/1489091/americans-just-cant-afford-mental-health-treatment/ 

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

The Teflon Septum

Charles liked to brag to us, in between his flagrant bouts of work avoidance, that he was a complete burnout because of the 70s and the disco scene in New York City back then. Of course, it didn't hurt his existential angst that he was also a complete asshole to the entire company, but that didn't seem to deflate his overwrought sense of self at all. I'd never met someone so arrogant with so little skill before, because I never saw him actually design anything. Nothing. Not one book cover. It was fascinating to me. Not that it stopped him from taking credit for other people's designs made under his "direction", which was such a fucking joke compared to our grueling schedules and after-hours work that we began a more honest and realistic process of each designer claiming credit for his or her own work. 

He never talked to me about books, computers, design, technology, or publishing, except if it was to order me to help him through another horrible crise, in staged scenes with tons of sighing and nasty looks made from his inert position behind his desk. Oh, and he liked my handsome new boyfriend Dave, so he thought up a way to take pictures of him by using a potential book cover design about Jewish people with us as the romantic couple in some test shots, but after just one cursory glance, the design was immediately killed because Dave and I are so obviously goyim, even in profile, just like his dip-shit test Polaroid of us taken in the office one afternoon. Before his budget was completely cut-off, though, he made me take the train to some far-out Brooklyn photographer's fancy brick studio in the middle of a work day for yet another test shoot. I was just happy to get the fuck out of the office for a little while.

He was also one of the most grossly incompetent people in power I'd ever worked with, which naturally led us to question his position of authority at the company. How? How the fuck had this even happened? The "higher-ups" at the house gave us a string of excuses, like he had a lot of work experience, and that he'd been bounced from every single work department we have in publishing, which didn't make us feel any better about him, especially because we were all working class kids busting ass in a too-expensive city not designed for us. It was like the city had become a gay stage set for rich white out-of-towners, which we clung to as more favorable than the nightmarish 70s and crack-fueled 80s. Of course, Charles had loved that time period the best!

He'd sweep through the office with his air of superiority, stopping by our desks only to share more of his greatness with us, like his rank of Buddhist priest (get the fuck out!), or his splitting headache that required pills from the nurse's office, or his clogged sinuses that were the result of poor drainage because of his, ahem, compromised nasal passages. Okay...whatever. It didn't take with me as even a casual recreational drug reference, because during my supposedly "hippie" days at O-Town that were greatly exaggerated by my much more productively "high" group of friends (I worked too much, went to classes, and got tired in the evenings or nursed bad hangovers from too much drink in secret), I actually got a real education.

So, Charles, had to gear up for another wittily dropped bon mot that seemed cool and casual, le tres chic. The next time he had a diva fit of "the vapors" in the office during actual work hours, waving around a gauzy, thin, brightly-colored hankie while dancing around to George Michael (hint, HINT), he dramatically paused by my studio desk to declare the same poor nasal passages with the clear sign of a finger held against the side of his nose. OH! You were..in the mob? That's what it used to mean here in the city. Tsk! Nooo, Marie. Sigh...I was so dreadfully dull and uncool to talk to. "I have a 'Teflon' septum!" Okay, wait a minute, are you telling me that you have an artificial bridge in your nose? The conversation only became more baffling to me with his continued explanations that he thought were so subtle.

Finally, he gave it up to me in a normal voice that was his alone, and not the affected soprano he usually trilled around us airily. "No! I had a deviated septum that I 'burned through' completely that had to be replaced." Jesus! I didn't realize allergies could be that bad! That actually happens...huh. No! Marie! His shoulder sagged as the hot pompous air deflated right the fuck out of him, only to be squared again while he quipped at me that "children" today were soooo ignorant. "I did a lot of 'coke" during the seventies!" Oh! Aha! I had inadvertently caused one of the biggest douchebags ever to work in publishing to declare loudly, out in the open, that he was a washed-up addict, right in front of a bunch of rabid designers who hated him with the passion of a thousand burning suns. My day was finally done.

Of course, the bitch that replaced him was even more insufferable, but at least we had our jobs and cover designs back. And one less "former" manager of "The Village People", but only during their really early days on the club scene, like wayyyy before their peak Studio 54 days, so if you look him up, you won't find him in the liner notes credited as their manager because he worked for free back then, just for the love of music. Sigh...he was so naive back then. Uh huh, of course not. Why would there be an actual documented work history for him to have that we could verify and see? We had all the ammo against him that we needed for his ousting, and that was before the hot pants-wearing gay boy messenger service became a regular thing for him. Thanks, Charles! You finally did me a real "solid". 

for Orlando, Florida - June 2016