Pancake Breakfast

In addition to the pain of being the token "hetero" at any gay girl scout meeting (as well as many design groups in the city, as an adult), I also hated everything they did as an activity, because I had pretty much learned it already on my own, or with my brothers and my dad's boy scout troop, and it was all the cool stuff like making fires, swamping out canoes, basic CPR, hiking, and making fires. Done. Why did I have to do it again with these chicks? They were horrible. My mom was also invited along for girl scouting, and she took the opportunity to join this gay movement with a gusto that frightened me in its bitchiness. As the only straight kid, it meant that almost every conversation excluded me, plus I didn't have the right hair length (too long, curly, and feminine) to make it plausible, even as afterschool banter with these queer kids.

It was excruciating, but because my mom had felt excluded from our boy scouting excursions that we loved as a family, she clung to the all-gay girl group like a pit bull biting down on its prey with its jaws locked. Finally, as a mom, this was her métier: a bunch of short-haired, gender-challenged bitches who worked on becoming better fucking bitches like it was the only badge in the book. It was pure hell for me, and it went on for far too long. Because my mom thrilled with this same-sex "be-in" like we were beret-wearing hipsters listening to jazz music at a smoky club in the Village (except that would have been infinitely better for me as an experience), I was also forced to go to their gay day camp (run by another large butch female), and overnight trips that made me cry bitterly. 

The idea of it was so repulsive to me, because I knew what waited for me there: more hazing and brutal abuse, with the continued betrayal of a mother who liked gay kids way better than her own straight daughter, at times. I went on one camping trip with them, and it was one of the worst experiences of my life, in cruel contrast to the great outdoor experiences I had with my brothers and their friends, led by my dad in our childhood, and then on our own. We had barely made it through the night, when my mom (finally) and I decided it was enough. We conferred via a brief tête-à-tête by the morning campfire, sullenly cooking breakfast with wet wood that blew thick smoke in every direction. "Yeah", my mom finally agreed, "there's something really wrong with Chris (the troop leader). We should quit. Never again." Yes! Finally! Sanity had returned to my usually savvy New Yawk mutha. You're back on the right team!

Because of this joyous news, I moved closer to my mama as we tried to salvage pancakes over a poorly made fire that would flavor anything we made with charred wet wood, not anything like the gourmet "smoking" techniques you see on t.v. cooking shows. "This sucks", my mom declared, and I was overjoyed. Never again. I'd never have to see these fucking cruel bitches again on my free time, outside of the nasty jeering they performed for each other as they passed us by in the hallway. We were finally out of this hellish scene! They were so fucking crazy that everything we did sucked, which only pissed off their butch leader even more, as she saw her troop spinning out of control with lowered attendance for each passing weekly meeting, because of her incompetence.

I leaned against my once-again pretty mama as we whispered back and forth over the campfire. Sensing a disturbance in the wicked dark forces, the angry butch had, just moments before, pulled back a tent flap in anguish, as her little spies reported back to her about my breakfast badge that went up in flames with the poorly made fire and soggy pancakes. Sabotage, like ballet, is a big part of the bitchy gay world, and each passing second confirmed what I had pretty much known since birth: I do not belong here, and in case I ever forgot that fact—with momentary lapse of politeness and genuine conversation that's "normal" for Rockland County—they snapped back at me way harder than was necessary, because that's what being a bipolar gay scout troop is all about, like cheerleading and reality t.v. shows.

"Mom", I said to her quietly, "can you flip these pancakes for me? I have smoke in my eyes," at the exact same time as one big looming butch stood over us aggressively, who had also passed the night poorly, like we all had. And it was true. The smoke stung my eyes so badly that they watered and reddened badly. It really fucking hurt. But, seeing this tender scene between an actual mother and her biological daughter was more than this bitch could take. She snapped out, screaming and yelling at us, with her eyes bulging and her hands balled into fists. "THERE ARE NO 'MOTHERS' IN THE WILDERNESS!!" She jeered down at us hunched over the fire. My mom, not to be bested in "bitch-speak" by anyone (she's from the Bronx, and they made it famous), said back to her, "That's not true, Chris. We saw a mother bear with her cub, like, yesterday, right near this campsite." And that was true, too. 

She hated us even more for having the right facts. "That's not what 'scouting' is all about! You have to 'pretend' she's not your mother to earn this badge!" Yeah, fuck you, lady. I'm, like, ten years old and scared. Anyway, I choose my mom and my family, you fucking freak. And that was it. "I don't care!" Fuck this, bitch. I threw down the spatula, and walked away from the campsite to pack up my gear. Lady— or whatever the fuck you think you are—you can take your fucking gay girl scout troop and shove it, and just like that, I was done. So was my mom. The spell over her was finally broken, and I had my real mom back. That was the best thing out of all of it. I got my family back. Shove that, butch! No badge in the world can cover "loyalty", when it comes to blood bonds. We'll always win.

Footprints

It's no secret among creative communities that envy is the biggest obstacle in any of our workflows; in other words, our toughest problems are human. I can design anything I want to, for any type of budget, using any kind of tool, in any language you want, but how does that help you if you're uneducated, illiterate, learning-impaired, or brain disordered? It doesn't, does it? 

Hence, the literary world has almost always been comprised of top-tier intellectuals, because it isn't fun (or fair) to make us describe the same text, layout, or picture to you again, when our job is to make art that soars above the heads of those who come after us, sometimes by a millennium or two. We address special needs in the books designed for the people who tend to them, but books for the blind is a rare genre, indeed. When was the last time you met a Braille-reading typesetter? 

Audio books fare far better with the vision-impaired market anyway, because who has time to learn Braille, especially if you began life sighted? You see images in your head, and that's what creative content is really about: your imagination. No one else can do that for you. You have to supply that. I suppose that's why artists and designers are treated with such extreme prejudice and suspicion in any type of company: it must be threatening to talk with someone who knows (comparatively) all the answers, but that's the point. Our higher education is your knowledge base to tap into. Being angry at superior intelligence defeats the whole point behind hiring creative genius.

And so, it was no surprise to me that I worked with a quiet old Jewish man at the end of his career who still carried a huge chip on his shoulder from that big promotion he was denied many years ago by the major leagues. Why? He told us many times (when he wanted to scare or intimidate us into silence) that he didn't need anymore money. Okay....but we do. How does your point of view on the subject matter? It was totally irrelevant. Either keep the company going or don't. His employees would simply go to work elsewhere. It was a baffling bad strategy that highlighted his lack of abilities the big companies must have noted as quickly as I did the first harrowing week in his employ.

Of course, the old man's very first employees were rejects who never really worked for the big league companies, as a skeleton crew comprised of typical industry cast-offs, and a bigger bunch of pompously pretentious art fag "wanna-be's" I've never met. One of his "lifers" (Hi, "Scooter"!) was a glorified salesman/paralegal who worked boring contracts for us, and the other some lazy idiot fired almost immediately by a bigger brand-name publisher, not that I thought higher of larger publishing companies, anyway. I was better than the nut-cases working for abusive bosses who practically tossed people out the window by ignoring their pathologies for mere profit, because compulsive crazies do the grunt labor better left to machines than humans with fully-functioning brains.

His oldest "hires" were those two nut cases strange enough to work out of his home with him, as his nut-job family wandered in-and-out all day long. What kind of legitimate person does that? No one with a reputation to protect or their good name, like, say, me. By the time I came on-board his company, he realized that he needed real talent to work with B&N; not the crazy hangers-on from his daughter's bullshit screenwriting class for tacky no-talents at the local "Learning Annex" location. The two biggest douchebags who gave me the most condescending attitude right away were the exact same two dicks who were so desperate for validation, that they worked for almost no salary in some crazy old Jewish guy's apartment.

I'm not talking about building computers in your parents garage, or publishing original works through the public library's Internet access, either. Those two douches couldn't pen a novel if their lives depended on it, but they could be immoral enough to profit from the works of others. It made them constantly irate, especially when heavy-hitters like me and my production manager created a profit-producing workflow without their input. Ever hear the sound of teeth grinding? That's it. They did the mental version of gnashing teeth every single day. 

Most of the staff avoided them. They were windbags who preferred sucking each other off, in meetings rife with odd head-games over the making of any real art, which suited us just fine. They were nobodies, and they acted like they knew that already. They were "easy come, easy go". And they did: first, one was fired for physically assaulting the old man in a meeting, then the next for a lack of available funds, because they siphoned cash to various family members before their "seniority" that was bragged about. Without constantly sucking the talent from their betters, they became snarling vicious losers in our absence, bringing the company down brick-by-brick from the crazy old man's final incompetence, and that was this: his inability to see through his overly emotion connections to the friends and family who were the sickness that tore his businesses apart.

The very first month that I did a favor for their production manger of a dead classics series (feeding off the souls of writers they would never be) told me everything about them that I needed to know, besides their widely telegraphed disdain that existed around every office corner I turned. That big douchebag for their classics series threw down an easy layout his incompetent designer couldn't do on the ground of his office floor, to walk over it on the way back to his desk, thus leaving a big dirty footprint on the piece of paper that I would easily see, because he thought it would get to me somehow, except for this very prurient fact that the demented always seem to miss: that old layout can turn to dust, because the books I made are still for sale throughout the country, not to mention on the shelves of the book-buying American public printed with my name on them, and not his.

How's that for a "make it pretty" housewife decorator of a designer, Mark? Those were his actual words to me, as an already-famous art director and book designer that they didn't know because of their industry irrelevance, after flipping some minor layout from his dead imprint disdainfully across my desk for me to correct, because his designer was too stupid to keep up with a single female rock star like me. Besides, right after they "hit it" big with their classics series, B&N simply pillaged their idea in-house, creating an award-winning Classics series of their very own, thus cutting out the middle men forever. Thanks, Jo. Nice one!

One night I dreamed I was walking

Along the beach with the Lord

Many scenes from my life flashed across the sky.

In each scene I noticed footprints in the sand

Sometimes there were two sets of footprints

Other times there was one set of footprints

This bothered me because I noticed that

During the low periods of my life when I was

Suffering from anguish, sorrow , or defeat

I could see only one set of footprints.

So I said to the Lord. "You promised me

Lord, that if I followed You,

You would walk with me always.

But I noticed that during the most trying periods

of my life there have only been

One set of prints in the sand.

"Why, when I have needed You most,

You have not been there for me?"

The Lord replied.

"The times when you have seen only one set of footprints

Is when I carried you."

http://h2ofootprints.wikia.com/wiki/Footprints_%28Poem%29 

Candyman

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

My next door neighbors in New City were the remnants of the old Dutch/German farm families of Rockland County, and they were not happy about the changes around them. Family farms were split apart to make room for hastily-constructed tract homes, and the farm families who had long relied on those plots to make a living soon tore apart, too. Country life is significantly different than city life, as immortalized in the cartoons we watched as kids, like Tom the zoo-suited city cat who slickly tries to two-time good ole country mouse Jerry by stealing his girl. They were afraid of us, and deeply suspicious of our motives, as we were with them.

My dad got into property disputes right off the bat, and the folks up from the city were "coloreds"; just on our block alone, we had a Puerto Rican street preacher with a storefront church who never once signaled our existence to us. Not once, in all the years we lived there. The Italians next door were just as weird; Tino was a typical con artist of a jerk who hated everyone except Italians, including the black people he served pizza to in the Bronx, where he kept his store. The Evretts were African-American, and they had the last house built on our quiet country lane. They were extremely reserved as well, which only fueled the fires of our imaginations further. They kept a nanny goat in their backyard, which was so odd for the time, we joked they had "voodoo" rituals at night, hence the need for discretion and their relative distance from the rest of the pack.

There weren't many play options available for hip city kids like us, which led us to make a sometime acquaintance with the farm kids next door, though truthfully, they had a mental retardation that served more often as comic fodder for our bored country brains, rather than forming any real alliance between us. You did what you had to do. The nearest store was a mile walk away (and a hard one at that), to a tiny convenience store...sigh. So, sometimes when the country kids came a-knockin', we let 'em in, but the window was a very short one, since we'd passed them intellectually at birth. Eddie, the youngest, was so markedly effected that he couldn't speak real words, only a homemade kind of patois that his older sisters had to decode for us. "Drin" was his name for Kristine (she was the girl I played with), and "Grog" was his name for his middle sister Margaret.

He got into all sorts of trouble, the kind of trouble that retarded kids got into, like banging his head on the family tractor in their garage, causing a rush to the emergency room that only further hastened his decline of a lifelong condition that never fully cleared up. I re-connected with the sisters using social media to find out he had passed in his 30's, which didn't surprise me at all, though I expressed my condolences for our childhood friend. His nose always ran, and his eyes were either red or watery, giving his wide country face a streaked, mad appearance. They ran around without shoes or parents, which scared us, too. Who are they? Where are they? Their insular culture was only reinforced every time we saw their fat mama on the porch. She hated us on sight, preferring to team up with their uncle next door to strip our plot of its' rich topsoil, in retaliation for the humiliation of having to split up the family farm.

She was a tall, plain, fat woman with short mannish hair, who screamed at her kids to get back into their yard every time she saw them on our yard or playing with us, which freaked us out even more. The only time I heard her speak was when she came out of the old farmhouse to tell her kids that Elvis had died, and that was because my mom was in the yard with us, playing badminton with the family net we set up running parallel to their family plot. It was so odd for her to even speak to us, that I have never forgotten the event to this day. We saw her more infrequently after that, what with school and winters spent indoors. There were whispers going around that she was unhappy, and we kids just figured it was more redneck static about "city slickers" that they were expressing to our parents, because our mom and dad clammed up almost totally when we were at the kitchen table, giving each other silent adult-like looks instead.

The only other time I ever remember seeing her again was the next summer, when my mom told me she was pregnant again. I tried making out the swell of her stomach but honestly, because of her weight, cheap baggy clothes, and ugly demeanor, spying was hard, plus I really didn't care what women did with their husbands when playtime was to be had, however infrequent it was at times. After that, we waited for the baby to be born so we could see the farmer's wife at suppertime, when she opened the kitchen door to shout for her three kids, who may be anywhere in the vicinity, and we were not disappointed. Finally, one evening the screen door banged open loudly to reveal her large frame with a small swaddled bundle in her arms. The kids were in the yard with us again, with our family group playing badminton, and we were rewarded for our patience with a closer look, bolstered by the presence of my mom.

We creeped up to the line of tall bushes they planted to separate us from their view, a harsh property line to obscure the horrors of city-folk in close proximity to their sturdy farmer's stock, or so we thought. Emboldened by my nosey mom, we stood right next to the bush line to get a closer view of the baby in her arms, my mom telling us that she was indoors a lot because newborns needed a lot of attention (to explain her relative absence as a country housewife, which was weird in hindsight), to see tiny arms and feet moving. There's the baby! We've always been a child-loving family, so the sight of a newborn made us really happy, and for once, the farmers wife seemed proud to have our attention. You see, dear readers, as the baby squirmed in his blankie, he pushed down the part that was covering his face, a face that was not "white" in any way, shape, or form.

Our snobbish uptight farmer's wife had just given birth to a beautiful and obviously "black" little boy, and that was the last time we ever saw her again. My mom couldn't wait to run indoors to tell my dad, and neither could we. Gossip this good didn't break 'round there very often, and when it was as juicy as this, no one could refrain from talking about it. After all, the indiscretion was already out, right? She'd cheated on her farmer husband with a black man, and their wasn't enough land in all of New York State to cover up that fact. They moved away after that, the kids with the mom, with the father alone in the house for sometime on his own. I kept in touch with the oldest girl via "Pen Pal" letters for awhile, but given how little we had in common besides proximity, the friendship died out. None of them would attend college or attain the status that was always my destiny to reach, leaving little besides New City goings-on to message each other about, which is exactly what we did during my brief foray into common social media.

As hard as the break-up had been at the time for their family, the girls enjoy (to this day) a happy, healthy relationship with their younger biracial half-brother, choosing to have a loving family instead of perpetuating the typical prejudices of the day, a rare but very beautiful ending to the beginning of this witching hour that is the start of our traditional Samhain season (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samhain). Get ready for the real bugbears* of this world. It's Halloween.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candyman_%28film%29

Brown

Every day of my life I'm the target of abuse, because I am not like you. I know! It's weird, right? Weird but true. I'm an actual ethnic minority, which is also really strange, because most welfare offices operate on the flawed premise that people who come from the biggest continent on Planet Earth (also known as "Africa": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_diaspora) are rare as human beings, hence the marketing terms "urban demographic" and "minority", which is not actually true in any of the numbers I've ever seen (creative accounting aside), you know, because of the size of it. Nor does your status as a descendant of the formerly vast Spanish Empire entitle you to cash money, gifts, and/or prizes, or anything else that's totally free. Again, see the real numbers here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaniards. You read it right, amigo. That number is 48 MILLION PEOPLE. Stick that on your flag and smoke it!

With that in mind, I use an herbal-based cleansing conditioner that's oddly shelved in the "ethnic" section (read as "black" or "brown"), because apparently the only weirdos with this kind of fucked up hair must be marginalized at each and every opportunity that presents itself to the makers of said products, just in case you somehow wake up one day to realize that you are not alone. In fact, there are BILLIONS of you muthfuckas, a'ight? I know what you're thinking: "Mommy" is trapped in a weirdly fantastical bubble that is suburban America, a place where "white" people think they are normal, and you are the oddball. I know, because every time I go into a commonly overpriced drugstore chain here in New York, some bitch behind the counter pretends not to see me if I may (rarely) need her help because the self-service machine is fucked up, just so she can signal to me anew my lowly position in relation to her, in case I forgot that my status as "Other" did not scrub off my skin during bath time.

It's become such a joke with my peeps around here, that I openly signal my understanding of the situation to any other "minorities" waiting in line who are similarly ignored by retail clerks (read: black folk. Yep, in 21st century New York), by pantomiming a scrubbing motion up and down my arm, mouthing to them: "It didn't wash off me, either!", then pointing to them, "Didn't wash off on you neither? No?", finally throwing up my hands in mock frustration to shrug my shoulders and just walk away. What's a n***a to do, right? The ad copy on a brown-colored bottle of cleanser marketed to "n****s" is so offensive, I had to read it a couple of times just to get it down. I think I counted at least six references to my "unmanageable" "unique" "twisted" "natural" hair, like I am some fucking Aboriginal Pygmy from New Guinea, recently discovered by a jauntily-dressed British explorer on safari.

I am not your particular pygmy dream child to fret over, Weird Marketing Wacko. I am just not entirely "white", like billions of other muthafuckas on the planet. Deal with it, yo. 'Cause we fuckin' do, every damn day. Every day we deal with your inbred isolated pocketed of protected weirdness, ya frightened Hobbit folk. Get wit' it in this century. People MOVE AROUND the globe. Fuck! Alright, now that we got that mess taken care of, let's look to my numbers for the real deal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A9tis_people_%28Canada%29. Join me here in my land that is without delusional fantasies. It's fun! Ain't no one throwin' a better party than Acadians. Trust! I am your "One Percent", and I am the home you seek in this time of sickness among the rare who remain healthy. Come back to me in this world. 
We are forever, my love.

"To infinity and beyond!"

Trail of Tears

http://bit.ly/1OtyMcW

I heard about a lot of holocausts growing up in the New York area: the killings during World War II (naturally), which led to my schoolmate's telling of her family's Armenian genocide, but the only story of mine I knew was in a book, albeit infamous epic form*. The grandeur and longing for home and love is something that never leaves you, even when my family left it out of family gatherings, the way my parents hinted at darker histories by naming our cousins "Dark Irish"; an apt way to describe the twin horrors of deliberate starvation through The Potato Famine** in Ireland, and the marking of Métis children by the darker color of their eyes, which must have sank a pit the size of the Atlantic Ocean in both of my parents' stomachs. Who would see it? Would they know the story? Who can they tell the knowing of it all? What would happen to us, in any time period, given the collected badness of centuries past?

And so they sank it way down deep below, like a hidden headdress fitted for a beautiful little girl, or a pair of handmade Baptismal moccasins that may be tucked away forever; two sharp shooting pains forever felt by burying it within, like a treasure chest to be discovered by someone strong enough to survive its' telling. And so I leave it to you to gather up all of our fallen tears, on a trail that leads the way back home, through a river journey I can feel like the wetness shed by the cries of so many parents who felt their beloved ripped out of their arms, in an act of murder so painful***, I can't really wrap my entire consciousness around it, let alone take on the pain of a mother and father who did nothing wrong in G-d's eyes but love each other willingly and with open hearts (http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/11204).

Today I give thanks to the loving qualities we have present in our free society, ones that many people have fought and died for. May we love each other always, with gladness in our hearts.

For My Beloved

 *     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangeline
**    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_%28Ireland%29
***  http://bit.ly/1QmerFQ

Jimmy O.D.

Years ago, I worked for a small Jewish family business in trouble. The two kids hated the business of publishing, which they tried to use for their "creative" endeavors, like screenwriting and music. It didn't work for them, because publishing is about books. And so, I was left with two spoiled "Manhattanites" who'd been told all their lives that they were gifted from their parents. Into this mess, I was charged with righting the ship of one of their Barnes and Noble imprints. It had been ditched into the gutter for being "crass" in comparison to the other Classic series of copyright-free works, which was a total joke. 

The bargain books were face-out on the shelf in every store in the nation, a fact that had become a traveling game for me. In each town, I'd look for my name on the jackets of titles I worked on, and wherever I went in America, there I was in book form, too. Because I broke my ass for two years to put it back into shape, I had a lot of pull in the company (and the industry), which gave me the power to make some tricky decisions, especially uncomfortable ones that included their family who drew income but produced no revenue. Their single daughter would sweep in from London to treat me like a Kinko's kid making copies for her, because she wanted to brag about her designer apartment that just got a write-up. Did I want to see it? They had tons of people in their lives like that, but such was the era of housewife decorators and artsy stay-at-home moms. You know the type.

When I finally conflicted artfully well with their small son over IT support (it'd been a handy weapon from Day 1 of my time), I knew I carried the whole history of desktop publishing and Mac computers with me. My enemy camp kept making petty remarks about Apple's business tactics and the inherent snobbery designers had about their corporate-sponsored trophy computers, neither of which I disputed. I pointed that out in several meetings with the enemy camp; a row of rich white men on one side, with me and my cowardly deaf mute designer on the other. She always backed out of speaking up in meetings by citing her deafness, which usually worked at stalling the machine, but not for me, because I have a deaf father. And so, when they finally realized that shutting out design and technology had dearly cost them their business edge, the son surprisingly decided it was time to finally pursue that music career full time, by touring and cutting a self-made CD, another type of business he knew I had under my belt, too.

Enter the scene one dramatic and showy character named Jimmy. The company admin gave him "advice" within my earshot about how to work me over as a client, by giving him "tips" like appealing to my Irish side and being charming, Yeah, Mick. Fooking do that. I liked Jimmy, as I typically do with my kind. He was smart, gifted, quick, and good with the older crowd who feared computers like they were boxes sent form Hell to deliberately torture them. Because he was older than me, he knew how to mock and demonize technology so that the older rich guy would cough up the dough. After all, Jimmy was a trained actor, as well as an IT guy, professional musician, lapsed Catholic, martial artist, and newly graduated fine artist.

He showed me pictures he took of his beautiful wife and classically Celtic sons: a striking "Black Irish" clan with bright blue eyes, fair skin, red lips, and dark dark hair. Yeah, I know. The boys were into Mohawk hair designs and boxing poses, which slayed me, but I wanted him to play me like a fiddle to get us what we needed, and he knew I knew the game cold. On one warm St. Pat's evening, I took the publisher's intern nephew on a long walk with me that spanned from the East 30's all the way down to Stone Street, to hear him play. It was loud brash standards (which embarrassed him a bit), but I could tell he was good. I wanted to show him support in lieu of his recent divorce, a shock that rocked him to the core.

I didn't know how bad it was until he showed up at the job with a bagel and hysteric tears, which frightened me. I told him about my own brief brush up with a marriage I'd been suckered into, but I realized it was much worse for him. His wife had done herself up buff at the gym while he worked and played around, which couldn't have meant he spent much time at home, and the kind he did was questionable at best. You don't cry onto your client's keyboard without a really bad heartache, because I paid him every penny he was worth. 

When he broke down in front of me, I knew I could either save him or lose him in that very moment. And so I did what anyone like me would do: when he bitched about his weight gain, I caught his darting red eyes, locked in on him, and told him the truth flat-out. He was in danger of something a lot more serious than a brief spat with gluttony, and he knew what I meant, because he bowed his head down for a moment. I left to get coffee in the company kitchen, and let him collect himself. By the time I came back, he'd put on a brave front with a sheepish grin. He knew I'd never fire him, but he'd embarrassed himself at work, and that was a lapse I knew he didn't do often, because I worked under the same threats as he.

After St. Patrick's Day, I only saw him once. The struggling family outfit finally let me go to "clean house", after they'd tried to use every political card they had against me. He'd done me a right turn by getting me an interview at his day job. I wasn't suited for it as a lowbrow market and I knew it, but it was good PR for me, because it let the industry know I was shopping around. I heard him gossip to the art director of a splashy photo mag there that she'd seen my portfolio with CD's. He asked her quietly: "How did it look?". She said she caught one minor error about a tiny line of 5 point copyright info placed too close to the donut whole on one disc layout (I did all my own layouts and production), but that my music creds were solid and true. I did have a famous musician or two in my book, complete with logos, booklets, cases, and all. "Shit", he said under his breath. I could see them out of the corner of my eye in his office from my vantage point in the conference room, him at his desk with her standing over him. 

The interview was over, and the next time I heard anything about Jimmy was on Facebook, because he committed suicide that winter by taking a handful of sleeping pills while home alone in Woodstock, packing up his stuff during his first Christmas alone and without his family. He'd been gracious enough to post us a good-bye photo on Facebook, with a caption below his last self-portrait that read about how tired he was, and that was the last of it. Forever.

For Jimmy 

 http://www.silive.com/obituaries/index.ssf/2011/01/james_odonnell_55.html

Immigrant

http://teacher.scholastic.com/activities/immigration/tour/

Each new generation thinks they have the roughest immigrant story ever. Mass murder? Pshaw! That's nothing! My Chinese Mom caught AIDS and died from your hospitals' bad blood transfusions! That's an actual true story by the way: a Asian bookkeeper I worked with years ago didn't want to believe that my family had any difficulties at all, because I'm "white". She kept repeating how I had a "rent controlled" apartment as an example of my so-called "white privilege", which wasn't actually true at all. I found the listing on Craigslist out of sheer economic need, and it was rent-stabilized when I lived there, which is entirely different than inheriting some fixed rate kind of deal. 

My people don't get those kinds of breaks handed to them, ever. But, true to her ignorance, she shut down when I tried to talk her through a tiny (and easily accessible) fraction of my actual family roots. I gave her a brief bit about my maternal New York story; a simple-to-follow story about Italian and Irish immigrants that's easily looked up online or at Ellis Island's interactive computer. Just type in "M-E-R-C-A-D-A-N-T-E" liked I did in five seconds, for my great-grandmother's passage to America. She sputtered and stumbled over that, but's typical for a generic office environment filled with strangers. I may be Ivy, but she sure as fuck isn't, except she doesn't know how many levels my people passed on the way up to get there, because she thinks she's had it tough, and she has. We all have. That's how you become an American. 

If she couldn't handle poor Italian farmers and the Irish potato famine, she sure as fuck can't handle the Acadian genocide, or the innate racism behind the hunting and mass destruction of Metis folk, which is anyone of European and Native American ancestry (GASP! "Mixed" races getting along peacefully!!), which pretty much covers my father's early American Dutch, English, and French Canadian ancestry. I felt bad for her, but not so bad that I didn't remember that my grandmother told me she cried every day for years walking home from school, because people shouted "Guinea!" in her face as a little girl, or that people spit at my grandfather for being a lowly "Mick", as every door in the city slammed itself shut in their faces, when they had to quit school as children of "The Depression" to work in factories to support their entire family.

http://cahiersdufootball.net/blogs/teenage-kicks/tag/no-irish-no-blacks-no-dogs/

It was so bad for my grandmother, that she changed her name from "Angelina" to "Ann", pretended to forget all of her native Bari tongue (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bari_dialect), and removed her kiddie earrings that marked her a "dago"; my mother never got over the stigma behind baby Italian girls with earrings. And so, she has never pierced her ears. I had to go with my friend's British step-mom to the mall at 15, and get it done myself. Or the fact that my great-grandfather never found work again, after refrigeration closed down his job as an Iceman in the city (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_trade), forcing my brilliant grandmother to quit elementary school, which she also cried over for many years, because all she ever wanted was to be a teacher or nurse. That's how much she loved to learn. She also helped him to collect his route's fares by riding up and the dumbwaiters for their fares, as a little girl. But it worked out. She became the MANAGER at her factory job by 20, or something extraordinary like that. I know, because I've seen the old black and white photo of her all dressed up and standing over one of her employees, who sat in a chair beneath her for their work portrait. I'm not even getting to my grandfather's long ConEd experience, or his tours on Vaudeville to earn a buck or for his Brooklyn family, or my Dad's small-time hustles as a shoe shine boy and pool hall player.

I hope you fucking choke on one more true life story from me this weekend, Cindy, as you read these real words about my researched and verified American Immigrant background. It's not some fucking  joke I made up to make you feel bad about yourself, you fucking idiot. You worked against me every single day in that bullshit office, while I worked my ass off overtime (and without pay) to cover all of your fucking asses, because I was the only Designer/Production Artist/Art Director in that fucking company with any real skills to earn us money, so that your fucking family, and your teenage kid's illegitimate kid, could fucking eat, because you're a fucking tourist to me, shithead. Choke on it, and if you don't like our hard times here, or our real life coming-up tales of woe, go the fuck back to Communist China. I'm sure they'll work you hard to kill you off in some forced labor camp, because you're one in a billion to them, and as such, easily expendable. Go fucking choke on it, bitch. That's my fucking Lady Liberty in the harbor.

And a "Happy Mother's Day" to you, as well. Bitch.

http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2011/06/the-distance-to-the-past.html

for Ann

https://www.libertyellisfoundation.org/passenger

Christmas Movie

Two little Christmas trees: one for Bernard, and one for me (2014).

After my father left his family for points west, seeking fame and fortune with a new model wife that was (and is) his secretary, we were left to our own devices, and we knew that, because our mom repeatedly told us so. Mommie Dearest wasn't just some histrionic soap opera of a movie that appealed to gay men; we lived its' truth each and every day. Not long after my father left with his money, borrowing against the home we lived in, we almost immediately fell onto hard times financially, which was the exact revenge he was looking to put upon our heads, as a price for his supposed long term suffering. It was cruel, childish, spiteful, and mean, which was exactly what he wanted, because he wanted us to feel the same hurt he felt as the child of alcoholics, except this hurt he would deliver by alternating giving and then withdrawing money from us, giving him the power to hurt us and then publicly pretend to heal us whole with his generosity, as he saw fit: a cheap phony publicity stunt that fooled no one, and it still doesn't.

Suffice to say, my mother began having nervous breakdowns, which was the burden he wanted to fall on us, like reigning blows down upon our young heads, except this wasn't something he and my mom could get caught for by the local child protective services. It was cleverly vicious, secretive, and mean, which again, was the whole point: to make us feel that, whenever he wanted to, he could bring a sharp blade down upon our necks to hurt us from afar, if he so choose, for whatever reasons he saw fit, so that we could never win and "beat" him, sick as that is. And so began his pattern of control with money as a resource, always keeping us needy and afraid, the exact opposite of the comfort a father is supposed to provide for his children, so that we would forever relive the horrors of his childhood over and over again, using my mother's mental illness as the delivery mechanism he employed through covert manipulation. It became a simple equation: squeeze her = hurt us. Easy. He would continue to do that forever until his death that would reach to extend long after he was gone, until I finally put a stop to it, but more on that story some other day. His sneaky nasty behavior would be done quickly, shakily, and hastily, like that of a furtive sidelong glance over the shoulder, looking for witnesses to his crimes. He refused health care for his mental problems, again, to cause suffering through his arrogance and spite, like the mean drunks who so harassed and terrified him in his youth.

And so, my mother told us during one very histrionic episode, when my young teenage brother and I tried in vain to console her, we said we would chip in for all our household expenses by financially carrying our own weight, which we already did through household chores in excess, supposedly to "earn" our "allowance", but really, we kept the entire house going through our continued labors. In retaliation for the gift of offering her our services readily, (My brother: "Come on, Mom. It won't be that bad. We'll get jobs and chip in. It'll be okay."), my mother burst into childish angry tears, turning bright red, bringing forth the veins on her forehead, horribly contorting her features into a wrathful mask of hate, and spitting out curses at me when I backed him up. "YOU STUPID BITCH!" she screamed as she turned on me, "You don't get it!! We're broke!", slamming her bedroom door in both of our freshly frightened faces. My brother and I stood in mute horror for a moment, in the hallway outside her shut door, before slowly and quietly walking back to our rooms alone, to sit in quiet contemplation of our lives and this new found responsibility as heads of household. I was just 14 years old, and my brother 15. "What are we going to do?" I softly asked him. "I don't know. I guess we have to find jobs this weekend." I wearily sat down on my small twin bed, keeping my door slightly ajar so my Irish twin could see me and come talk to me, if he so chose. Oh. Yes. That. Work.

We had worked on and off since childhood, with our kiddie elementary school work permits for paper routes, but this was different. If we didn't figure it out, we could die, and neither of us really wanted that. We wanted to live. I began my official work history with Social Security services at age 15, as did my brother, which found me and my mother alone one Christmas day, because he had to go to work. You see, for many Jews in New York, Christmas is just another inconvenience of closed shopping malls and restaurants. Their holiday fare eventually became Chinese food, after discovering their shared non-Christian status in the "Open" sign glowing brightly in the window of the local Chinese restaurant in their neighborhood, such is the close proximity that is our vast Melting Pot in New York City, thus beginning their own New World tradition. 

But, that still left us to tend to them here in Rockland County, just as we tended to ourselves and every other person around us who needs us, and there were legions who sought us out, even back then, tender and young as we were as new parents, but we did do it, by the grace of G-d's gifts bestowed upon us, the least of which are our extraordinary patience, incredible work ethic, kind and generous compassion and empathy, with a deep sensitivity and regard for the suffering of others. I still thank G-d for keeping those qualities intact in us, especially in the soft bright blues eyes of a young boy who went to work for the local Jewish people here in our home county, as a clerk in a movie theater one rainy afternoon, returning home with a huge bag of popcorn to surprise us with, when we let out a sigh of relief at his safe return home, finally beginning our true Christmas Day together as a family, a holiday we could only start after his labors ended, alone and derided by the very people who understood our suffering the least. 
They mocked him for being slow behind the food counter (because he was working alone on a holiday, as a teenage movie theater manager), or if he got their order mixed up due to the sheer volume of their derisively snorted requests, or because he didn't take their money fast enough for their tickets, mocking him when he swept up the aisles of the theater for having the decency to tend to them on his holiday, while they rested in comfortable darkness to watch some banal movie onscreen, like a zoned-out legion of half dead zombies.

I want you to think of him this holiday, when you belligerently complain about the delayed or postponed or cancelled release of some stupid ass-kissing buddy comedy that you've been so "cruelly" deprived of this year. You see the pure face of a beautiful blue-eyed boy in a dark theater on a dark Christmas morning opening some mall theater alone, as I had to see him, with tears in his eyes, cleaning up the garbage that you threw at him when he walked past you slowly up the aisle to do yet another task for you, like clean the bathroom you fouled up with your mess of mocking graffiti and strewn toilet paper, mixed with piss and vomit and shit and stink and mess. You think about that this year instead, and May G-d have mercy on your soul for your cruelty, selfishness, false pride, and injustice. May G-d help you during His Final Judgement when He weighs your sins in front of you one by one, when you cannot turn away from them. May G-d be with you then. 

Amen to you on this Christmas in the year of Our Lord, 2014.  Amen to you, with my blessings for a safe, healthy, happy holiday.

Religious Signs, and Other $ Matters

Jesus and Mary, Co-Pilots in Suburbia.

Oh. This Acadian will keep her money, then.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acadians