WUTR: Utica/Rome

Me and my best friend had way more than altitude to adjust to, deep in the remote mountains of upstate New York. Before the Internet and cell phones, we had a pay phone on the first floor that we shared with an entire dorm and a television in the common room, also on the first floor. We'd already broken a lot of rules in the dorm and around campus, the least of which was having a hot plate in our room for heating up cans of soup or making box mac and cheese, in direct violation of the dorm's fire code. There were no microwave dinners, no cable TVs, no personal computers, and no anxious "helicopter parents" circling overhead. We were free.

Our relative isolation from the rest of the world created a bubble for young minds to thrive, especially in exploration of the past through our art history and history textbooks. It didn't really matter what day or time it was, because we lived through our studies, anyway. The allure of being out of touch in a cool way has trapped many a hippie perpetually in college towns, like the demon from the movie 'Krampus' captures souls stuck in so many snow globes sitting on its shelf. There was something eerily dead about going to the same bar forever, dating the same tie-dyed wearing sophomore over and over again.

We'd shudder in the frigid evenings over the possibility of a similar fate, which propelled us past incredible odds to our respective educational careers: Karen from urban-based Yonkers, and me from the projects in Queens. Sometimes we wondered like 'The Talking Heads', "....how did we get here?", only to be brutally reminded of our commitment to our ideals by a six-hour bus ride through the frozen tundra of a nearly deserted landscape. In the overheated dorm rooms of our engaged minds, we always left a window open to catch the coldness of the crisp, clear mountain air.

After a night of Old Milwaukee and weak pot, we slunk down to the first floor to watch TV on the sly, with our reputations preceding us. It was late, so we'd escaped the voracious Long Island crowd that were more supported in their daily habits by their similarly enabled parents. Used to the abuse that comes with shared family spaces, we sank into the old, sunken couch with a sigh of relief, in a mostly dark room that was empty of other kids. Finally! We had the TV to ourselves, without the petty power plays or bitchy stand-offs that happened among the factions of hardcore viewers in the dorm with time and madness on their sides. Kids would plot TV "takeovers" in the cafeteria with their dorm-mates by shouting down anyone who objected to their "Must See TV" during coveted time slots.

But, like two weary, single moms at the end of yet another tough day, we just wanted to put up our feet and relax without making a highly charged political statement about how spoiled and compulsive we weren't. We'd had enough of that growing up. So, one late night found us turning the dial on the TV unmolested by cries of outrage, to catch Letterman or maybe a "Honeymooners" rerun. Didn't really matter. New York City channels usually showed black-and-white classics or freaky monster movies for the overnight crowd working the night shift at the precinct or in the ER; great, working-class stuff.

We'd gotten to the right point of mellow before bedtime when catastrophe struck. We'd lost the signal! Some old movie started playing, then cut out to a screen full of static. What the...? We were left to spend the rest of the night in wondering paranoia. Had the Russians attacked? Was it nuclear war? A media blackout based on alien invasion? What? WHAT? WHAT?! What the fuck just happened? We'd adjusted the rabbit ears, unplugged and replugged the set, banged on the side of it until horizontal lines shimmied across the tube; no such luck. Our electronic babysitter was dead. It was humbling to our superior senses of self, as well-adjusted freshmen.

The next morning in the cafeteria, we immediately told our friends the bad news. Someone had to approach the Residence Hall Director with the creepy molester 'stache about buying a new TV ("dude, we should totally draw straws to see who does it"), because the old one had just cut out. Huh? What are you guys talking about? Our friend from Buffalo was a blue collar girl used to working the early morning shift at the local convenient store, so she'd already been up to catch "her programs" at six a.m., and the set was working just fine. What'd you two do?

Nothing! We protested. We did absolutely nothing but turn the thing on and sit down. Must've been a signal drop, because we were watching some old movie and then the fuzz came on. Wait a minute...our friend from Syracuse asked us around what time. Oh, we didn't know. It was late. Letterman had been on, then some war movie started with this big flag flying and the National Anthem playing...no, wait, dude! Probably a baseball movie, hence the music....yeah, that was it. Totally.

Our upstate friends erupted into hysterical shrieks of laughter, crying at the cafeteria table, clutching themselves and each other. Me and Karen just looked at each other. Now what? <shoulder shrugs> We were called "Abbott and Costello" behind our backs by some of the kids, because she's a big girl and I was a beanpole. Sometimes, we were funny without even trying. Okay...mind letting us in on the joke? Finally, good ole Tracey told us the truth, and it was so much weirder than The Cold War or the end of the world. "No, you guys." Hahaahaa! "Lemme tell 'em!" What? WHAT?

"That wasn't a movie. That was the station signing off for the night." Crickets. I looked at my friend again and shook my head. I had nothing. We turned back to them. What do you mean? They, in turn, looked just as baffled. A sign-off! The station "signed off" for the night! What are you talking about?! Finally, Lisa from Rome kicked in, "Guys! GUYS! That means no more TV!" No. More. TV. What is this strange Bizarro universe? "That's it! The TV goes off the air until morning." Holy....what frigid level of hell is this?! We struggled to assimilate a place with no late night take-out, or Ralph Kramden banter with Alice. 

Suddenly, two hip girls from the 'burbs realized how far from home they were, and then our real education began. "Humbled" wasn't exactly the word for how we felt. We were almost completely cut off from the outside world, and we were alone in it. After that, we had a new nickname around campus. 'Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure' had officially arrived, and it was massive in its scope. Like, totally, dude. And dudettes! It was the start of a whole new era.

Garbage Picker

I often find handy little critter signs around my environment that tell me you are a loud, abusive, crazy, chain-smoking drunk because I can mysteriously "read into" obvious cues like a stubbed-out cigarette butt (I don't smoke and when I did, it wasn't the "Ghetto Menthol" brand now made with even more harmful fiberglass, yo!) near the container made for plastic recyclables, because your broke ass is looking for bottle deposits to cash in. See, if you were legal, you could get a real job. In this case, I frightened away the crazy Hispanic female flipping the lid right next to my door in broad daylight by simply opening my door to let her know that I keep bottle deposits indoors to return myself because I understand that she's a sick illegal fuck haunting my 'hood. She chose to play the ever-handy "no habla ingles" routine followed by a wavering little smile delivered with the important casual shrug that lets me know she feels superior to me as a welfare queen picking through my fucking garbage. I don't see her around anymore. Huh.

Much like Donald Trumps' wildly trumpeted assertions that capture this country's imaginations daily, New Yorkers learned a lonnng fucking time ago that if we want any of our real cultural interests, influences, and/or lifestyles accurately represented, we need to speak up. LOUDLY. That includes bad minstrel acts with broadly comedic bits included for the crowd living in the provinces: there's no time for subtlety when your cabbie speaks Urdu on his Bluetooth all day long to his family back home, with the backseat t.v. blaring away. "Turn right! NOW!" Yes. You do this now. In addition to a daily influx of every single language currently spoken on planet Earth (plus a few phased out that only our excellent scholars still know), we learned how to communicate with "other" perfectly well, with or without our elegantly beautiful and highly educated Shakespearean flourishes added in expertly spoken "High English"...because you don't understand it.

We even adapt our native language to your foreign-import cab business, is what I'm telling you today, because we understand concepts like "world" and "trade" and "capital" and "empire" like it's written on the backs of our hands, because it is. It's in our very DNA. Suffice to say, grunts newly arrived to our mostly peaceful shores signal our unique status back to us by aggressively shouting thickly-accented words like "money" at us rudely and repeatedly, usually accompanied by a greedy, grasping, grabbing hand gesture of "give now" that are somewhat lost on our more delicate sensibilities, which is also why we deliver curse words in regional accents so very well, like I do. You evil fuck! You can't give everyone you meet a cultural lesson with each and every transaction, though Lord knows we try.  
We really do. 

That's why Chinatown has signs in Mandarin and Cantonese, and Spanish Harlem is bilingual with ESL classes for your Hispanic son ("Spanish" in NYC, get it?), plus restaurant signs in Koreatown are....? Right! Crafted with signs designed by us in both Korean AND English, because we do notice that you are not quite like us, and that's OK. Not in North Korea, of course, where you come from, but here in America, you can be free to be you and me here, and no, this is not some advertisement made just for t.v., like the trashy shows you pretend are representative of us and our genuine, caring communities. It's called the "House of Representatives" in our government. Scary, isn't it?

So, when I tried in English and Espanol to tell the disordered people around me and my environs that recycling is the law, the natural response in "evil" and "crazy" is to openly pick through my trash right in front of me, or pretend not to understand "Ingles" on this particular day, like a bad actress from an overly exaggerated show on an equally lame Spanish soap opera, because that's abnormal to do in any country, using any human language. I know, because I also wrote about other like-minded Hispanics who live right next to their trash and love it (http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2015/08/hecho-en-mexico.html). They love it so much, they make "art" from their garbage for money!

But, we don't do that here, so adapt, you dumb-ass. Pick up your fucking trash, get a real job, or go home. You can do any one of those things here, because freedom really does mean "free", and not some perverted totalitarian version that you and your fucked up family pretend that it means, in your state-mandated history books. I understand that drones, minions, and slaves want someone to whip them in their dysfunction until they cringingly behave, like some horribly abusive slob in a weird S&M "scenario" that's been scripted with gay costumes and cues and special words and...wait, where the fuck are we?!

You're on my land, ass. You're living in New York and the Americas. Get with it, or get the fuck out. Simple, n'est-ce pas? If you like garbage so much that you want to live near a mountain of it, Paraguay has just what you need (http://www.landfillharmonicmovie.com/), and I am most definitely not some rich white businessman writing that to you today. It's all me, babies. This is all me and my values, plus all of yours, too, because in this Warrior of Nations, we fight for what we want, and that includes the right to recycle our own trash without funding your illegal move here and back from wherever the fuck you came from. We are a nation of immigrants. We know the routine. Trust me. We know every move you make. Twice!

As you can see in this case, a hood rat who managed to secure a very important government job picking up recycling (with a finely-paid full benefits package), decided it was okay to illegally hit me up around Christmas with a card meant to shake me down for extra "dinero". I sent him a very sincere holiday card back to him, taped to the inside of the paper receptacle where I found his card (mine has to be taped inside because people steal shit around here) thanking him for his service to the community and I meant it, because I do not hand out my favor lightly. This week, I decided to give him a beautiful travel brochure from a tour service that my family has used with great results, and some beautiful bookmarks from a woman's museum in our nations capital, to see if he was truly interested in "Americano". No, senorita. Huh. My mom loved the pretty bookmarks so much, she put them up on her well as part of a display (they are printed excellently as high-end color reproductions, which is a mark of quality to a refined mind, but I digress), and my father's family has visited many of the tours presented by our friends in Montana who book eco-friendly, one-of-a-kind tours all around the world (including Hispanica and its outlying areas), but they were obviously not good enough for Senor Correando, or "Eduardo the Recycle Guy", as he familiarly addressed himself to me in his Xmas card. I guess our real national treasures like beautiful bear cubs in Yellowstone Park, and our world-famous female artists (myself included) are simply not good enough for this superior recycler. Clearly that must be the case, because he carelessly flipped over the lid I prepared just for him, and left it out in the rain, making it soggy and no longer useful. Here's a handy tip for you: I AM NOT YOUR PERSONAL ATM.

"Buenos dias, Eduardo!"

http://www.dol.gov/general/topic/wages/wagestips

Bodega

Bill Clinton was considered the first "black" American president because he came from the lowbrow South (earning him the name "Bubba"), with a crazy-ignorant mama and an alcoholic brother who's in-and-out of jail, before, during, and after his Presidency. It was something that people like us from the 'hood could understand, with a huge sigh of relief. It certainly made a lot of sense to me as I entered the Ivy League, because I'd never met that many fucked-up rich white kids in my life. I wasn't "out" as Acadian, because I was close enough to Canada that a New Englander with an axe to grind could destroy me through bias against French-Canadians as the key to my college career ruination, which is exactly why my people were mass murdered centuries prior: for a supposedly shameful act of love between a European man and an Indian squaw with offspring so defying beautiful, that many of us are still hunted in envious sport.

Think I'm exaggerating? The Canadian government has just officially recognized the "ethnic cleansing" of Acadian Métis (or "Aboriginals", as they derisively insist in calling all natives  common to the Americas), let alone admit to the child abduction and rape that was a common practice for wealthy Europeans hoping to wipe out key witnesses to their crimes. It's not unlike the United State's checkered past with it's own native peoples, that a President like Barack Obama has been actively working to address with Sally Jewell, the Secretary for our Department of the Interior, by taking meetings with tribal elders to heal the hurts here, from way back when.

Instead, I stuck to what I thought were the relatively easy immigrant-bias experiences of my maternal Irish and Italian forefathers, but I was wrong on those accounts, too. I was attacked in an advanced photography class for daring to refer to me and my ConEd grandfather as "working class," by a British git who thought he could get away with it, and he was right. The teacher was a grad student I knew, who chose to smooth over my revelations with an "across the pond" type of cultural misappropriation that was grossly ignorant, preferring to refer to their welfare childhoods as much more severe in poverty and bias than anything we could have possibly have endured in New York City, paved with gold as the myths were.

They co-opted my conversation (which would have opened the door to further inquiry with the mostly New England student body present in that class) between the two of them; he as a poor boy from Mississippi with torn jeans he couldn't afford to fix (?), and he with council flats and a company coal-mining dad. Both were older than me, too, and so it was easy for them to swipe my background to the side successfully, as having the most hurts from the working class, and it certainly didn't end there.

In the tony Painting Department (I was in the relatively "working class" major of Illustration so that I could get a job after graduating which I did. I was also the first in my graduating class to obtain a full-time job with "health benefits", too! I also had 3-4 part-time jobs while attending RISD, in stark contrast to the po' white boys who were on scholarship just for singin' their song), and I was openly laughed at by the slightly dykey, arty, rich white lady with the short, mousy-brown haircut and the "John Lennon glasses" for daring to make a painting about my Irish great-grandfather's work on the iron and copper work around New York City. When I asked her why, she just huffed at me, "I don't know 'why'...it's just so...so...so...funny!", because she'd never seen a project like that before.

Me and another kid from New York (a rich Jewish Long Islander in school for film-making, but with a populist bent that was extremely unfavorable at the time) decided to prank her for being a delusional rich asshole with no sense of reality, but that's a story for another day. Suffice to say, my working class housemate Riddell helped me forge the copper frame for the piece, and I used copper wire to sew the denim to the frame as a canvas, direct references to his bridge-building and metal shop-work (he was a master craftsman who made a copper version of "The Last Supper" that still hangs in my mother's place, and which I cleaned myself many times, so as to carefully note the finesse and detail attached to it as being very finely done), as direct references to our "working class" history that couldn't be denied, and that was just the easy Irish stuff from a century ago. I could not have built with my current lexicon the full story of my people, built on the backs of murder, rape, and theft as they are.

I ran up against white bias and European prejudices all the time, in almost every critique I had in studio, or outside-of-class social encounters. Out as an "Indian"? Do you know what they did (do) to us?! It was a family secret that had no time during my tenure there, fraught as it was with all the above reasons I just noted, easily observed as they were by my friends and classmates. I barely made it out of there with my life, as a crime victim of robbery while working a job, and "blacklisted" by rich profs afraid of losing their tenure, as they lost their minds at our expense. You see, "The Ivory Tower" is only good as an edifice if you uphold their traditionally white WASPy values tied to lip-service and exclusion, not by extolling the real, true, expat rebellion with a long-storied past, as actual descendants of the "Daughters (and Sons) of the Revolution" like I am through my paternal grandmother's line (http://www.dar.org/). It was too much for their warped, privileged minds to bear.

It was in this way that I became infamous as the first openly "black" student at R.I.S.D., which I didn't really know at the time, because I always had three or four part-time jobs and a full studio schedule, which is unheard of among the plush upper crust set who struggle to read and write, like the illiterate cast-offs from wealthy families who were in the majority against me and my offensively real New York roots. I could get away with "ethnicity" if I did phony displays of African Dance (like my friend Riddell did), because the museum wanted African artifacts and a faux arty display would play well overseas with fancy donors, not with actually beleaguered native Americans hip to the game. Money came untied with that kind of awareness.

And so I found myself in a car ride with my punk rock housemate Sue and her weird hippie friend Ellie, who I naturally thought was a rich Jewish girl from Michigan, because she had all the superior airs typical of the boho "Trustafarian" set with no real talent, but who liked to spend time in academia as pretentious intellectuals. She never really liked me, open as I was about my ethnic roots (as much as I could get away with, alone and unsupported as I was), and it wasn't until many years later that I figured out the specifics as to why. I knew she hated "pretty girls" (not that I thought of myself, even as people openly gape and stare at me). I thought she was embarrassed because she and I had to take basic drawing class (with my mentor, Lenny Long), because we were really far behind the older and richer matriculated students.

It didn't bother me, especially since Lenny had gotten to me at my core (he's from New York), by giving me an infamous speech about not letting "them:" win by making me quit, and it worked because I got angry enough to channel it into energy I could use, like fighting does for me as a warrior), plus I also knew that I had the deck stacked incorrectly against me, through no fault of my own. So? Do the work, he said to me, and that's what I did. That's what real working class kids from New York do, but Ellie didn't know that. I knew she was a former forest ranger in Oregon during the Mt. Saint Helen explosion, alone like a lot of anti-social hippies are in a fire tower for many months on end. 

She had that typical awkwardness about her, often wearing the usual Birkenstock-with-socks hippie garb that marks the warm weather kind who does not cotton to our climate well, because they "winter" in warmer climes. She also had the type of curl that we call here on the East Coast a "frazzled-haired yenta" and her last name was "Leon", a new Jewish name that easily could've been anglicized years ago for the MidWest, from what might be the original Leonberg(er), like they used to do with newly-arrived immigrants to Ellis Island, which coincidentally was the photo essay my first photography teacher from S.U.N.Y. had been assigned to through a grant from New York State: to document the renovations of Ellis Island in New York. She also told me back then that I could get into R.I.S.D., if she got into Yale as an Italian-American. "You can do anything", she told me. Thank you for that.

We were on a beer outing that went comically awry one afternoon, for reasons that puzzled me for many years. As we drove up to a shady-looking joint, I immediately balked about going inside to get beer for our group. "Uh uh," I said, "I'm not going into one of those places." Ellie turned to me in the backseat, with her childishly barretted hair in plain metal clips, and the de rigeur makeup-less face that are necessary components for the rich hippie crowd, "What do you mean 'that kind of place?'" I knew I said something wrong, but I was only 21 and living outside of New York for the first time, unlike my housemate Sue and her friend Ellie, both women in their 30s on their 2nd, 3rd, and 4th careers and educations. "That's a bodega!", I giggled slightly like she was a dimwit, or she had deliberately set a trap for me, and it was the latter. "Yeah, a bodega.", she huffed impatiently back at me. Uh, okay. Poor thing. "Yeah! That's a Puerto-Rican joint in New York." She turned up her nose at me, turning slightly in direction without looking at me in the backseat of their car, "And what exactly are 'those types' of places?", like a sour-faced teacher calling on the retard kid who never knows the answer.

"You know!", at this point I was the exasperated one. Where's she from, yo? "A Puerto Rican grocery store!" She sat still, so I went on, "See those 'booty' posters in the window", and I pointed to the ass-shot beer posters typical for a Hispanic deli in the 'hood. "They always have those in the window". She huffed again, "They?"...uh, yeah..."THEY always have those?!", she continued, working up steam to make some unknown point, "I'll have you know that I'm a 'Catalan'!!" Me and my friend Sue from Boston waited for her to finish her sentence...yeah...and? So...? "Tsk", she tsked-tsked fussily, still in a huff. "I'll have you know I'm a Catalan Spaniard* from my father's line." Ohhhh! Whew! What a relief. That's it? Yeah, bitch. We know! You're a European white girl, esse. I laughed, took their money, got out the back of their car, and bought us all beer for our party back at the old house on Benefit Street.

Shit, that bitch just wanted us to know that she was better than us. Just another day at R.I.S.D. for me, and then I didn't really think about her unless I made contact with my former housemate, Sue. How come she never reconnected with the rest of our transfer group? And then, a couple of weeks ago, I got an email from Sue that finally cleared it all up for me. She was more than embarrassed by her time at R.I.S.D.; she was mortified. You see, Sue went to see Ellie in Michigan, her home state, and on that trip she finally learned her really shameful secret, the one that she really didn't want us to know about back then (besides some banal European history) and that's this: she's the daughter of a well-known and much more successful illustrator father that she could never compete with or keep up with, and that was why she picked on the one "negro" she felt she could safely get away with picking on: me. And she did get away with it, until today.

This one's for you today, Sue. Long may truth and freedom ring with a loud "Yanqui"** rebel yell! We know who we are, girl, and we are revolutionary. Keep on shining, my true punk-rock friend. We tore it up rough enough to scare 'em, didn't we? Yes, we did.

Kirk Lazarus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropic_Thunder

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_language
 ** https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yanqui

The Third Eye (Blind)

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

Ever since my childhood bout with chickenpox (one that I don't remember), I've had a fairly visible scar on my forehead. My mom was worried about that, because I'm the only girl in my family, and she didn't want any physical evidence of sickness conflicting with my looks, which is the first real currency women are given in society. 

My market value as a marriageable mate is still very important (to her and to me), so she did what she could to keep a little toddler from scratching, including putting on those little mitts sometimes worn by newborns who scratch at night. Despite her vigilance, a few areas escaped her notice with my unconscious scratching: an area on my thigh, a little spot on the side of my face, and a big one almost dead center. Woe is me!

With time and the thickening of my skin, it's become almost invisible in most lights, excepting those occasions when it isn't. In my quest to normalize a semi-arid city out west, my then-boyfriend and I drove to a suburb of Denver that housed the one Asian section of that sprawling, modern (and almost characterless) city. He was still nursing serious internal hurts borne by an abusive mother and violent stepdad; abuses that included sexual molestation, as well as the usual beat-downs from a stressed-out, working class Brit trying to manage his émigré status, a new marriage with kids, and another country.

I was still licking my wounds from an aborted marriage, illegal as it was, due to my college friend's legal Unfit for Marriage status, so both of us were hurting from complaints not of our doing, but deeply effected by other people's collective traumas nonetheless. Because my ex didn't eat during his manic binge phases, I had greatly changed my lifestyle to accommodate his diseases, which left me in a serious deficit all around. I went a little wild with food on my own, eating and eating and never really feeling full. It was out of control, very uncommon for me, and really scary. I could see myself ballooning up daily.

I remember my mom visiting me in Littleton (right after the high school massacres that happened there), as I sat down to eat a 2nd heaping plate full of pancakes and sausage at the cheap kitchen table my dad and his wife bought quickly for the apartment I had to relocate to. My mom asked me what was going on, with the understanding that she already knew, because she did. I have always been a size 6 as an adult "Miss", but under the stress of earning a living and righting societal wrongs, I gave in to my new boyfriend's huge Scottish appetite. We ate at any restaurant we wanted to, revelling in our escapes from the incompetent horrors of other people's homes.

With this in mind, we sought out Colorado's version of "Chinatown" to look at exotic eastern goods and, of course, eat. He went into one shop to look around, while I stood on the pavilion sidewalk outside, smoking a cigarette, another teenage escape valve I still had in place. As I strolled around the storefronts, a gentleman dressed in the tourist garb of a "guru" stopped his robotic pamphlet distribution for "Ancient Eastern Readings" to open his mouth at me. I wasn't used to agape stares at the time, because weight gain and untanned skin is considered "ugly" out west, but this was more. He looked...scared.

After a quick recovery (like most immigrants learn), he began speaking to me in a language I didn't know, pointing at the middle of his forehead over and over again. My boyfriend was out of the shop he was in, and I was walking quickly away. "What did he want?", he asked me smiling, in the non-threatened, jocular way men who are 6' and 250lbs have with shorter, smaller, and darker men. "Oh," I laughed. I was constantly tired and hungry all the time, clear depressed signs both, and I knew it. Smoking had become a dull chore that made me feel sick, too. I hated my life; a life in a foreign land that felt stiff, colorless, dull, and flat, like an out-of-body experience, and I was acting out a role in someone else's boring movie.

"It's my chickenpox scar." Where? He didn't notice things like that about me, busy as he was staying alive and staying afloat, despite the dragging down qualities of his life, too. "See? It's right here. In the middle of my forehead." And just like that, he promptly forgot about it, because that's how little spiritual significance I had to a big blond, tan, western guy with a very large and showily dramatic depiction of "The Rapture" tattooed prominently on his forearm for all the world to see, because that's exactly how limiting the scope of America can feel to someone who is perpetually outside of the cultural norms.

He lasted ten days in the cushy second story of an extremely wealthy and well-appointed Park Slope townhouse that I secured for us, upon my return home. Ten days, before he bugged out to drive back home, to a dull place where generic red trucks for good ole boys are respected as having more value than the people who sleep next to you for years. Ten days. That's all I got to right his world for him, as my world turned upside down, once again. Ten friggin' days.

Born Agains

I knew two religions growing up: Judaism and Catholicism. One of the Rockland County-born boys (who'd later challenge me to a fight after school one day) said he was "Christian" when we asked around at lunchtime, which started a conversation about what exactly that was. We figured out in the fourth grade that a "Christian" is someone who believes in Jesus Christ, because the word "Christ" is in it. I remember it because the doors to the cafeteria were open, and the weather was warm. I even remember some of the kids at lunch: Molly, Vinny, Michael, me, and a few others. We were all Catholic except for Michael; a Gerlach with Dutch/German roots, whose family did not like the "ethnic" people moving up from the city during the 70s.

During my post-college career, my fiance/husband chafed under the conditions that New York City imposes upon the individual. He was struggling, and he needed my help. I knew a change of scenery wouldn't cure his alcoholism and manic-depression, but I was up for an adventure. My career and my hometown would still be there when I got back, and I knew that, too, despite a former classmate's prediction that I was committing "career suicide" by leaving New York. I didn't actually believe in my impending suicide, though, so we made the move out west to Colorado, anyway.

I'd never been to Colorado before, but I'd seen enough pictures and done enough research to have an idea of what was there. That, and I already scheduled an interview. We reached Boulder at night, and the hotel room looked like anywhere. The next day, we woke up to a blizzard with lots of snow, which I liked. I love the mountains, having grown up near the Adirondacks and the Catskills; hiking, camping, and exploring rural New York. I discovered during college that my genetically thick skin was still intact after that first winter in Oneonta: a city in the hills, where winter begins in October and ends in May.

After a bout of altitude sickness, I adjusted quickly, as is my way. Culture is another story. It's very different from New York, as anyone who's ever been to both places can attest to. Within a week, David found carpentry work that was easy to find during the town's construction boom. My work? Not so easy. It took me six months to get an excellent freelance position at a museum, which launched my career there. During that time, I got a lot of flack from both sides of my family, even though I lived off my savings and paid all of my bills on my own, without my husband's help. I am the first professional working artist in my family, and the time frames are different. It's slow and hard to find, but the work is exciting and challenging. It's worth it.

Of course, there are a lot of other differences than just geography: the weather, the people, the food, etc., but the first real bristling always happens at an office, where people brush up against one another. Needless, the women I encountered at my first job didn't like me, so I moved on. The excuses were the same as New York, though: the hemming and the hawing, the awkward avoidance in hallways, the gossip and the sniping....how....human. The next job was a fun, frat-like, all-male recording studio. It was filled with emigrés who couldn't tolerate the East Coast lifestyle, like my then-husband, but I wasn't bent on recreating myself into a mythic Western ideal like they were. I had an identity already, and from an early age. Part of the secret handshake of that world, I learned, was a disavowal of one's past life, with fretful hand-wringing about my time in New York. There's even lingo devoted to it; a sub-culture of hatred, envy, and regret, for "escaping" from New York. I was barred entry for not performing my lines correctly.

Another bout, this one with severe flu, no health insurance, and my husband's arrest, brought about some quick changes. My marriage was over, I had no health plan, and I was alone. So, I got a corporate gig with regular benefits and "stability", though I know those aren't real, either. I was part of a design group within a large company that went bust. Working right next to me was a woman who'd gone to my high school. She was immediately freaked out by me because she'd hoped to be a pioneer out west, cobbling together a "fun" identity borrowed mostly from Seinfeld episodes. My appearance blew her cover and her routine, which made her skittish and uncertain around me. Naturally, she wanted to be my "friend", which is called a "frenemy" nowadays. She hadn't lived in "New Yawk" since high school, and I threw her off because I wasn't serving up Brooklyn cliches just for entertainment. She was also the only practicing Catholic I knew out there.

We had a mostly Colorado work group, people who alternately avoided me and competed with me, which I expected. They feared and disliked me, making an uneven peace with my presence through an avoidance that they played off as their folksy, country reticence. The other out-of-towner was an unfortunate transplant who shivered all winter long in his resort-wear from Arizona. No amount of talking could persuade him to buy a coat, a scarf, gloves, or a hat. He had a large poster of a tropical palm tree in his pen, which shouted out his climate preferences to anyone who passed by. We got along well, though, as outsiders. He's a devout Christian and a wayward soul, wandering among the scriptures like a beach-comber looking for treasure. He doesn't quite get it, but he loves to talk about it. 

During another slow union-funded afternoon, he made the mistake of handing out religious pamphlets at work. I felt an obligation to tell him the truth, albeit discreetly, that he was breaking the law. He's originally from Mass., so I used that as a reference point, guiding him along as gently as I could. He wouldn't do that if he was in New York, would he? What if he handed this to an Atheist or a Jew?! It's not only offensive, he could lose his job over religious solicitation during office hours. He had the fire of a new convert, but it was also extremely condescending to anyone with a serious religious background. As a Catholic, my parents and family had introduced me to our ancient faith before I could speak. These spiritual concepts were not new to me.

Years earlier, my then-fianceé and I lived in my aunt's old apartment to save money for our wedding and moving expenses. I often went to other neighborhoods to shop and run errands they weren't available to me in the Kensington section of Brooklyn. I don't often take the bus, because I prefer to walk within distance, so I usually take the subway for further trips. I took the bus one time, a real rarity for me, and I was delighted when a normal-looking young woman asked if she could sit down next to me. Oh, good! I lost touch with a lot of female friends during the post-graduation phase of my life, and I welcomed an opportunity to make a new one. She was an average white woman, clean, neat in appearence with straight brown hair. She asked me a few questions to break the ice, or so I thought. Wow, friendly, too...nice!

Then, she dropped the "freak" bomb. She became chirpy and glassy-eyed, a little too keen to talk, speaking much quicker than before. "Me and a group of friends like to meet every Wednesday." Okay...."Would you like to come by?" Uh, what for? Shit. Too late. "Have you accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as Your Savior?" Yeah, and a long time ago, too. Welcome to the club.There's no gift basket, by the way. Since then, whenever I'm approached by a zealot, I just blurt out "I'm Catholic!", which seems to frighten them off right away. And, yes, I also carry an "I'm Catholic" card in my wallet.  

Blessings to you and yours this week.