Ghosts

My father retired this year after, I think it was 405 years as the librarian in a public high school on Long Island. He also retired from his second job as night librarian in the research library at a giant, science-oriented and bunker-like state university. Also on Long Island.

To commemorate his retirement; he is now embarked on a three month solo motorcycle journey to Texas and back. There are many things one could say about the idea of one’s retired father riding a newly purchased Harley Davidson Sportster (known in Harley circles as the “dyke bike” for its popularity in the lesbian community, something my dad didn’t know when he bought it) by himself through Mississippi and Alabama.

First and foremost, why Texas? Don’t get me wrong. It’s a lovely state. Well, it’s a big state. It’s a state not without great significance to the storied congealing of the US of A, and not without creepy ramifications on the world scene in 2005. It’s a state that, perhaps rightly, still envisions itself as its very own country.

It’s a state that has the Alamo in it – a small fort which, conceptually, contains ideas that could span several volumes worth of pop-culture associations. The auto rental empire. Ozzy Osbourne’s public urination. Fess Parker as “Davy Crockett” in the eponymous film – and my first crush. General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, and other pesky Mexicans. Bravery and sacrifice. Idiocy and executions. Xenophobia.

Anyway though, and on a personal note, I’ve certainly had some big ol’ fun in big ol’ Texas. Valentine’s Day on the Riverwalk in San Antonio. Backyard barbecue and pool party in Waco. Breakfast at the Waffle House in Amarillo that time I ran away from home. Hooking up with that boy in San Marcos. My freshly PhD-ed best friend getting his first full professorship in Nacogdoches – a place I’ve actually been to and, while I’m proud of him, I feel sort of dreadful that he’s there. Wandering across the border from El Paso to Juarez, Mexico. I won’t get into the debauchery that ensued, but I will mention that I was referred to several times as “El Diablo Blanco.” I am still very proud of this.

All that aside, my dad isn’t riding his dyke-bike to Texas for any of these reasons. He is going because his own boy-hood best friend lives in Dallas. I should say here that the idea of “my dad’s boy-hood best friend” continues to make me slightly queasy.

My father came to the States when he was 7 on the sailing vessel, The Queen Mary. That sounds very grand in 2005 when discount air travel is the norm, and sea travel is a luxury. In 1949, it was a bit more like those awful, dirty Irish people who were interminably dancing jigs, playing recorders, being happy amidst disaster, and trying to get past all those locked gates with Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. Whenever I watch James Cameron’s “Titanic” – which I do from time to time – I inevitably recast L. DiCaprio’s ethnic sidekick “Fabrizio” as my father.

He was born in Nice, my dad, on the French Riviera. That sounds pretty glam, but he wasn’t born in the glam area. Apparently, thanks to economic crisis, and dear family friend Mussolini, things in Italy were looking grim. So, for some time, poor Northern Italians had been moving to Nice, just across the border, to live in tenements, and to be poorly regarded by the French. So did my family.

My dad was born to a multi-lingual painter, sculptor, musician, smoker, drinker, fighter, opera-aficionado, and all-around bad-ass father, who painted houses, inside and out, to support his family. My grandfather was an artist, and subverted his art to labor for his family. My dad’s mother was sixteen when she met his father, and she was a child of some influence – her father was an Italian immigrant to France who had actually become successful; he was mayor of Menton, and won the Legion d’Honneur. My grandmother was beautiful, and was more loving, sensual and nurturing than she was artistic. This is precisely why she fell in love with my grungy grandfather.

Anyway, and horror stories about German occupation and American liberation notwithstanding, it came to pass that in 1949, my grandfather scraped together all of his money – about $47, the story goes – and the whole family leapt into steerage on the Queen Mary to join a cousin in America, who had sponsorship, housing, and some commercial painting gigs available. My father was 7 – and very cute, if a bit girly, in the one on-deck photo that has survived – as they sailed un-smilingly into port for screening on Ellis Island.

Anyway, they get here and settle in to yet another immigrant community in western Nassau County, Long Island. My father, to make a long story short, has some difficulties adjusting, and falls in with a bad crowd. Ultimately, though, he meets “Mel,” the now-Texan best friend, the story of which I won’t get into. As all best friends do, they ultimately go their separate ways, and create lives for themselves. My dad becomes the only person in his family to graduate college, meets my mom, and moves further out on Long Island to raise a son (I am that son, am named for my grandfather, do not have any kind of degree, am, miraculously, some sort of artist, and am haunted by the childhood memory of seeing my own name on the tombstone of a grandfather I never met) and a daughter (who has a graduate degree in social work and is more loving, sensual and nurturing than she is artistic).

The boyhood friend “Mel” now lives in Dallas, is basically retired, but continues to do pro bono work for the ACLU. Mel is something of a social pariah in Dallas, insistent as he is on immigrant rights, the ludicrousness of the death penalty, gay rights, and the various and sundry causes celebre of the ACLU in Texas. My dad and Mel hung out more and more as retirement approached – to climb mountains and jump out of planes – and they decided to meet in Dallas for their retirement, and bike down to Mexico.

The whole thing is so excruciatingly the opposite of “Motorcycle Diaries” that I could almost shit.

But what of that? Two things.

One:

I went to my father’s retirement party out on Long Island a couple of weeks ago, and I can’t even begin to say what a joy it was. One can scoff at 405 years in the same position, with extra jobs on top of it, and all of the time-constraints that that requires. My father has been something of a quiet enigma to me over the years. Going to his retirement party, I now realize that I am the enigma. He has been busily functioning as a human being, continuing to charm everyone he meets, continuing to be a bad-ass, and assimilating the fact that he has sired some sort of twisted reincarnation of his own father – albeit a creepy, cowardly, and homosexual version. Moreover, he has done so with quiet grace and complete availability, every step of the way.

Two:

When I think of fathers and sons and 405 years and creepy availability, I also think about ghosts. And Shakespeare.

Shakespeare sired twins, a boy and a girl, called Hamnet and Judith. Hamnet was named for Amleth, the Norse hero whose father was killed by his uncle, whose uncle usurped the throne and married his mother, who feigned madness to avoid execution, and who ultimately, re-claimed the kingdom, restoring honor to his own father – also called Amleth, and whose ghost had appeared to him, starting the whole jimmy in the first place.

The brilliant thing is that Shakespeare took that story-idea, and wrote one of the most influential pieces of literature that the world has ever known. Also, he changed the apocryphal story so that, not only does Hamlet die in the end, but he causes the deaths of almost everyone around him. The kingdom is left in a state of confusion, probably to be occupied by the army of Norway, and, for all the philosophy, we are left with nothing. The rest, as they say, is silence.

What am I talking about? I’m not entirely sure, to be honest. Certainly Hamlet and ghosts and frustrated communication resonate deeply in any relationship between father and son. But that’s probably not it.

Maybe it’s that my father married a woman whose father was also an immigrant, and resolutely Norwegian.

I think though, probably, ghosts are more to the point.

At my father’s retirement party, I met all sorts of living ghosts. Or, more selfishly and, thus, more accurately, I met the living ghosts of my own childhood. They have frightened me yet again.

“I wouldn’t have got my job without your dad,” said the new librarian with the butt-chin.

“Your dad turned my life around,” said the 30-year-old professional wrestler, who my dad encouraged when the wrestler was 15 and skinny.

“Your dad saved my life,” said the dorky son of my dad’s colleague, with whom I grew up and is now a clinical psychologist in Cambridge, Massachusetts – and who, I am told, my dad saved with a single gesture from adolescent bullying.

“Meet your cousin,” said one of my dad’s nieces to her 13 year old son about me. We’d met once, when he was an infant, and here he was, a proper boy, and the embodiment of the next generation. He was a nice kid – we talked about cellphones and the Internet.

Someday, we might talk about ghosts.

Dog Walker

I will now confess that, on a handful of occasions, I have indeed solicited for sexual congress over the Internet, and then engaged in said sexual congress. This is not a very nice thing to do, and is probably not a very healthy thing to do but, well, what’s done is done. Also, I very well may do it again at some point. What can I do? A man has needs.

I came very late to the whole on-line solicitation phenomenon. When one can pick somebody up in a bar, what is the point of the cold dodge and parry of the Internet? I had been asking this of myself for a celibate year before I finally broke down and decided to take a foray into the steamy underside of the Internet.

Of course, I had looked at some pornography on-line before. It was, if nothing else, easier to scan for the good bits than it is on a crappy old VCR, or with clunky old dial-up. To be “pro and con” about it, though, the VCR may have been crappy, but it never once asked me for my credit card number.

This is exactly the problem with the Internet; everything is available to you, but for the good stuff, no matter how egalitarian it seems, you have to pay.

It’s not even that. It’s that, once you get yourself good and going, it’s almost impossible not to enter your credit card number. For instance, do a Google search of “free porn” and you get all manner of enticing images and video clips. You have a look, your visual cortex gets really, really engaged, and right when things get really interesting, they ask you for your credit card number.

In a way, this just adds fuel to the fire. You relax for a moment, you fumble around with your wallet and your identity-theft paranoia, you take stock of your mania, you fumble around with the fictional “free monthly pass,” and itinerant fine print, and off you go.

You settle in again, the images are firing into your skull at light speed, you align your libido with your hard won hand-to-eye coordination, you laugh off your credit card, you get close, and then – and then they ask you for your credit card number again.

Now you’re annoyed. But you shake it off. You read the fine print and sign away your left nut and click your most personal information away into the ether. Mother’s maiden name? To hell with it!! She doesn’t even use it anymore!! Social Security Number? You bet!! That system will be bankrupt within the month!! Personal Security test question? I don’t even know what that fucking means!! No, no. You click it all away, you betray your immigrant heritage, you thank the sweet baby Jesus that you were born in a time when you can really, solidly gorge yourself on electronic images of penises. You buckle down, and decide to give it another go.

It’s sort of sick, isn’t it? I don’t know. Maybe it isn’t. But probably it is.

Anyway, I’d hit a dry spell, sex-wise, and didn’t really know what to do. Suddenly, I couldn’t convince anybody that I met to have sex with me. Nobody was falling for it anymore.

It’s not like this was hugely shocking – I’m okay looking, but not exactly the sort of person that people indiscriminately throw their aromatic soccer shorts at. Either way, it was traumatic. I had to do something. I have needs. Furtive, creepy needs. Needs that need fulfilling.

Admittedly, I was traveling when this all came to a head. When one is traveling, it becomes a lot easier to subvert oneself. What I mean is, hooking up is sort of harmless in New York, because the worst that will happen if you don’t like a guy is that you will see him again across a bar crowded with lots of other appealing people who can help alleviate your discomfort. There are eight million fucking people here. As follows, it also seems okay when you can leave a place with the assumption that you will never be back. I can’t vouch for what it’s like to see your postman at the bar after you fucked him, against your better judgment, and it didn’t quite work out – and suddenly you’re the only two people sitting in the only gay bar in a 75 mile radius. And he’s holding your tax refund in his mailbag.

Anyway, it came to pass that I found myself in a hotel room way outside Pittsburgh with nothing to do but stare out the window at the abandoned steel-mill or go to Pizza Hut again. A quick survey of the sterile, hideously wallpapered room revealed a high-speed internet portal. “Hmm,” I thought, randily. “Perhaps there’s something to this.”

I fired up the computer, and plugged it right in, and went to the only place I knew of to trade information and services. Craigslist. Prior to this, I had only known it as a place where one could find apartments and subletters. I knew they had a “casual encounters” area, but figured that this was where people advertised their availability to see the new Fassbinder retrospective, or their services as a dog-walker.

In any event, my notion of Craigslist as a nexus for subletters and dog-walkers was, to understate, incorrect. I clicked my way to the Pittsburgh page, and then to the men-seeking-men page, and there was suddenly a whole sordid little universe opening up to me.

Well, it wasn’t so much a universe as it was ten scared and “questioning” guys living in parts of Pennsylvania that are Pittsburgh in the same way that Iowa is Hawaii.

No matter. I was game. I went to the “posting” area, and, taking into consideration the vernacular being spoken on this particular website, composed my bid for some “company.”

I actually wrote something like this;

“Subj: lonely in the burgh

Msg: hey im just visiting but would like to meet u. ru lonely and do u want to meet a nice guy from nyc. im horny and have hotel and cn host. 420 ok and mabey some beers.

hit me back. going to bed soon. lets do this.”

Please, never mind all of that. I like research, and misspellings seemed the way to go.

Point is, within about an hour, which I spent lying around naked, watching HBO and sucking on the free ice, I had a response.

“hey i go to college near u do u want to meet i have a curfew but i can get out i will meet u what is ur phone number”

Well, suffice it to say, this was all very intriguing. Curfew? “Getting Out?”

Suddenly, these prison metaphors made my paranoia kick in. You know, one hears so much about how the 13 year old girl shows up for a rendezvous, only to be met by some – well, geeky, balding, thirtysomething who is subsequently imprisoned. I certainly didn’t want to meet a 13 year old, or an undercover cop, or myself. I replied;

“hey cool do u have a pic”

Within minutes;

“yeh here it is”

The picture came through. It was a grainy, poorly cropped “wacky dorm photo” of a 19 year old college dude with big wide eyes beside a bunk bed, wearing an athletic jersey and an innocent smile.

It really wasn’t what I had in mind, but I looked out the window at the steel mill and the Pizza Hut, considered my recent celibacy, figured “what the fuck,” and replied;

“ok i can come by where ru?”

As it turns out, where he was was half an hour away. I drove to a “Sheetz” convenience store to buy a Budweiser tall boy and some cigarettes and snacks for the drive.

I arrived at the stone-lined entrance to what was clearly some sort of religious college. This fueled my paranoia and got me scarfing down snacks and smoking cigarettes as I phoned this boy.

Him: (with a stuffy nose) Hello?

Me: Yeah, so we were – talking before, and now I’m here. Just across from the enormous statue of Saint Peter. Where are you?

Him: (sounding like he has tuberculosis) Oh, I’m in my room. I’ll be down in a minute.

A whole circus of finding each other and diving behind shrubs and stone walls in an attempt to avoid The Holy Homo Guard ensues. We finally meet, and he is petrified and not like his picture and has no idea what to do and seems to think that fooling around in the back of my rental car would be really great. Finally, I suppress my nerves and impatience, take control, and find us a hideous room at the hideous motor-lodge that his parents probably stay in when they come to pray with him that he’s less gay here than he is at home.

After a hugely embarrassing encounter with the elderly Indian couple who run the place, and who were clearly sleeping in a small apartment just past the lobby, I get a key to a “bungalow.” We go inside. It smells of vomit, air freshener, and feet. I go into the paneled bathroom to piss out all of the Sheetz coffee and the tall-boy. I get back into the “bedroom,” and the boy is there with athletic jersey on and his pants off and is making some sort of awful noise that I find hard to categorize or repeat.

In any event, the whole thing takes him about three minutes, and leaves me grossly unsatisfied. I cut my losses on the bungalow, drive him home, and stop at another Sheetz for coffee and cigarettes for the drive back to my hotel.

Do I feel guilty? Sort of. Do I feel depressed? Always. Was it good? Emphatically, no. Would I do it again? Listen, I am an optimist. The next beer will taste better. The next cigarette will heal my emphysema.

This was my first on-line “encounter.” I’m not proud. It really didn’t do much for me, except embarrass me profoundly. More than anything else, it makes me both queasy, and ragingly jealous that there wasn’t such a thing when I needed it most, at 19.

What can I do? A man has needs.

Playwrights

I am attempting to write a play. I am not doing this primarily because I want to do so, but because somehow, through a series of events I’m now finding it difficult to “understand” or, in fact to “remember at all,” it is suddenly a big part of my job. In other words, terrifyingly enough, I am being paid to write a play. Presumably, this means that I actually have to do that.

At this point, I should mention that I have never written a play before. In fact, I haven’t really written much of anything before. I once did a bunch of short stories to amuse myself and to keep sane, but they all lived in isolation on my old computer and died a quiet, unremarkable death along with that old computer’s hard drive. In other words, I am rather definitively not a playwright or, in fact, a writer at all. I certainly couldn’t show you a single thing that I’ve “written.”

And yet, here I am sitting at the head of a long walnut table on the top floor of a townhouse in the West Village, in the offices of the people for whom I am writing this play, staring blankly into the monitor of my laptop, and listening to Simon & Garfunkel songs on i-Tunes in a vain attempt to calm myself and hide the charade.

Somehow, I have managed to finish a few things, whatever that means.

Wait, what does that mean? Specifically, I have a rough draft of the first fifty pages and raw material to shape for the next fifty. But what does that mean? I don’t know. In terms of pieces of paper, I have stacks and stacks of them. In terms of a Play, you know, like those things that Aeschylus and Shakespeare and Moliere and Eugene O’Neill and Tom Stoppard and Moises Kaufman pop out in such great volume, I can’t imagine I have anything of the sort.

Moises Kaufman is the focus of quite a lot of my obsessive procrastination lately. He has imaginatively compiled and written several plays which have gone on to be Hits and, in the case of “The Laramie Project,” HBO specials which have been nominated for Emmy awards. I hope this makes him very happy.

Well, I know it makes him very happy. Under surreal circumstances I won’t bother to explain, I ended up spending an evening at a bar in the East Village with Moises Kaufman and a friend of mine. I was obviously really interested to hear fabulous anecdotes and inspirational words. I was also very paranoid and ever-vigilant that I not come off as giddy and star struck, which was exactly how I came off. I tried hard to play it cool and, thus, missed the opportunity to get the vital “how-to” information and words of encouragement that I now find myself desperately craving as I sit at this intimidating and somehow accusatory walnut table.

While he did spin a variety of fascinating and hysterical yarns – as a gay, latino Jew, he is often excruciatingly funny – none of them stick in my head as having been particularly helpful to non-playwrights in the queasy position of being employed as a playwright.

We all had a bit too much to drink. He talked about needing to watch his weight for the Emmys because the camera adds ten pounds. We had a bit more to drink. He ate an entire plate of nachos. We laughed and laughed, and hugged each other goodbye, and I have never heard from him since. Hey, that’s alright. No hard feelings.

Fast forward a year or two and, again for reasons I won’t get into, I found myself in Laramie, Wyoming. At a bar one night, I was engaged in conversation with a gentleman who, as it happens, was the drama professor at one of the Universities there. For the past few days, I’d been sort of delicately trying to ask people about Matthew Shepard, the young gay man who had been brutally assaulted and left for dead, tied to a fence on a road outside Laramie – the subject of Moises Kaufman’s “The Laramie Project.” There was this unspoken thing around town that, well, you weren’t really supposed to talk about it. Fine, I figured. Just curious. Anyway, I asked the drama professor, and suddenly he was filling my ears with rapturous tales of the charming, witty and excruciatingly funny Moises Kaufman.

Again!! There he is, indifferently intruding. Judging. Eating nachos and being nominated for Emmys.

I decided to change the subject and asked the professor if he had any rapturous tales about Bill Irwin, a clown and actor of whom I am a huge fan, and who had appeared notably in HBO’s version of “The Laramie Project.” The professor was not interested in this topic, which he made clear by walking away and starting a conversation with somebody else.

Back in New York, and still thinking about Bill Irwin, I read the theater listings and found that Bill Irwin was performing in a play he himself had written at a theater that I like. How serendipitous, I thought, buying a ticket. It turns out that that particular play was a reminiscence on the life of a man named George Fox, a famous stage clown of late nineteenth century. Fox spent the better part of his life playing his most famous role, “Humpty Dumpty” – yes, the anthropomorphized egg – until the lead-based white makeup he wore drove him insane and killed him. Nice.

Fast forward a bit to where I’m researching my play – which concerns a famous stage actor of the late nineteenth century – and I find that the number one box office hit in New York City, around the time my story takes place was, “George L. Fox in Humpty Dumpty.” George Fox is literally everywhere in the same chapters of the same theater history texts where I am researching my guy.

Curses! Now Bill Irwin is contextually judging me!

George Fox makes me think of Irwin, Irwin makes me think of Kaufman, Kaufman makes me think of success and indifference and nachos. The whole thing is becoming “Six Degrees of My Sense of Inadequacy.” And John Guare is another whole issue!

Meanwhile, I am attempting to write a play. It is going well sometimes, and not going well other times. It depends on when you talk to me, if you do. Probably, you don’t, because it tends to be what I talk about lately.

I don’t think I talk about it in an icky way; I talk about it in the way that the grunts who dug the Panama Canal with shovels talk about malaria. Or the way that the nice Japanese folks who laid down track for American railroads talk about internment camps. Actually that’s not quite it; I’m not suggesting that what I’m trying to do will have the usefulness of the Panama Canal or the railroad. Just that you sense that you’re sweating away over a treasure map that you will ultimately turn over to other people – people who won’t care that you are now nursing a gangrenous foot and are surrounded by barbed-wire. That’s not quite it, either.

Probably better would be to say that I talk about it in the manner of a hospital janitor who impersonates a world-renowned brain surgeon to consult with an impoverished couple on the fate of their sweet baby girl whose previously inoperable and life-threatening brain tumor can only be excised by this very world-renowned brain surgeon. Now that’s a pitch! Perhaps I should try to write that play.

Problem is, I don’t want to be a writer. It’s too much pressure. I just want to drink and eat nachos with effeminate people in bars.

A couple of weeks ago, I went to the Barnes & Noble in Chelsea because popular comedian Lewis Black was going to be there reading from his new book. I thought: a good thing to do, in order to stop worrying about how my obsession with random theater celebrities is impacting my ability to do a job I don’t really want and am not qualified for, would be to go see a successful stand-up comic and TV pundit talk about, sort of accidentally writing a best-selling book. It was the symmetry of it that attracted me.

I showed up late, and found that the place was packed to the rafters. I found a perch in the back where, by leaning painfully against a rack of yoga music CDs on my tiptoes, I could almost make out where Mr. Black would sit to read from his book.

The crowd buzzed, and cajoled, and exchanged banalities about how very many people were there and how it challenged all of their notions of correctness and balance in the universe.

Finally, Mr. Black arrived, and the crowd buzzed and then buzzed some more as he made his way to his seat. I was pleased to find that I had a great view of his graying mane, and thick glasses – until he sat down, at which point he was both completely invisible and difficult to hear.

He made a few endearing comments referencing some of his best-known television appearances – the locals buzzed with the buzz of ten million honey-bees. Then he said something chilling. Due to some kind of metaphysical anomaly, I heard his gruff voice say crisply and distinctly and directly into my ear;

“I went into comedy because I was a failed playwright.”

It was at this point that I left, too scared to purchase a copy of his book, and returned to Brooklyn to stare blankly into the monitor of my laptop, and to listen to Simon & Garfunkel songs on i-Tunes.

I am attempting to write a play. Lord help me.

Hi Dive

Against my better judgment, back in May of 2005, I went to the big old tacky midnight opening of the latest film in the “Star Wars” franchise at Manhattan’s Ziegfield Theatre, right around the corner from Carnegie Hall. I knew what I’d be getting myself into, but ultimately decided that, for myriad reasons, I needed to go anyway. Put concisely, I got pretty much what I expected. Modified by huge amounts of discomfort and the need to explain and append, I got something that haunts, deeply.

The whole notion of “Star Wars” gives me anxiety. Here’s why; besides my parents, my sister, and my grandfather, I can’t think of a single thing still in my life that has been around this consistently for this long. The first film came out in 1977, when I was five years old. Since then, my relationship to it has evolved. There was childhood wonder, pubescent obsession, adolescent challenge, post-adolescent indifference and aggression, early adult pragmatism and consideration, and, now, at thirty three, a kind of shocked and weary response to all of those.

I’ve had and lost friends and lovers. I’ve become closer to and estranged from various family members. I’ve endured the deaths of my grandmothers, and of Captain Kangaroo and Mister Rogers. I’ve held in my arms the quivering children of people with whom I became acquainted primarily because of their ability to drink 15 beers and then polish off a bong-load of weed and snout of coke. I’ve traveled the United States and Europe and have visited the Middle East and Asia. Through it all, I have never felt a creepier sense of resonance than I have when I’ve walked past that line of people who, for like nine months out there on 54th Street, have furtively waved their custom built light-sabres and worn their elaborate costumes and slept on cardboard boxes and sleeping bags. For a cause. For “Star Wars.”

Here’s some history.

I saw the original “Star Wars,” the 1977 one, in a movie theater. It was enthralling, but probably, I was too young. It was only the second movie I’d ever seen. I don’t count the first one; that was “Pinocchio,” and I had to be removed from the theater because I was screeching and crying at the whale. Someday, five-year olds who saw screenings of “The Matrix” in 1999 might feel the same way about Keanu Reeves.

“Empire Strikes Back” was different, and any Wookie on the line in front of you at the Ziegfeld, or peeing next to you at a urinal, will tell you so. In 1980, I was eight years old, and a far more discerning movie-goer than I was at five. Here’s how it was when I was eight.

Growing up, my family didn’t have a swimming pool. When we got bored of the ocean and craved chlorine, we went to the municipal pool over in Oakdale, where there was just enough chlorine to satisfy a neurotic and health-conscious mom, enough kids and piss-smell to entice a five-year old sister, enough pale and weak-looking dads to engage my heavily-muscled father in some preening affectation, and a diving board just high enough to send a precise, slappable, and girly eight-year old boy into a state of shock and paralysis.

It was on just such a summer’s day that my muscle-y father, probably releasing someone else’s father from a relentless headlock to join me on my chaise lounge, told me this:

“I have a surprise for you.”

“Is it pizza?”

“No. Better.”

“A new Narnia book?”

“No,” he laughed. “Better.”

Scrunching a sunburnt nose, “What?”

“The new ‘Star Wars.’ You and me. Tonight.”

This second one was a million times better than the first, and the time I spent arranging my action-figures to discuss it, on their special Mark Hamill pillowcase, only proved it.

Then the third one. “Return of the Jedi.” I was 11. I went with the parents of a friend whose name I can’t even remember now. And that’s weird, because I remember that I saw “E.T.” with a boy named Orin Link, our “friends,” and his fucked-up mom. Anyway, probably none of us young Jedis remember each other, but I do remember aggressively hugging the boy next to me when Darth Vader removed his mask, and also remember him shoving me, violently.

Then what? Left hanging. Hitting puberty, and jerking off to Han Solo. And various robots and aliens and Wookies. And anything that moved. Then what? The packing up of the expensive action figures and toys. Then what? The desire to find those packed-up toys to sell for drug money. Then what? Forgetting the whole fucking thing, and getting on with shit. Then what? A million things that have nothing to do with “Star Wars” whatsoever, the meeting of people, the engagement with ideas, with work, with bizarre circumstances, with work and work and work. Then what? A peace with oneself, boyfriends, and careers. Then what?

Then the year; 1999. Sixteen years later. Still alive. Still busy. Still precise and slappable.

What, George Lucas? You’re going to do another three films? Are you sure that’s advisable? Are you sure us kids can handle it? We probably can’t. Please be careful with the responsibility you wield amongst us kids.

That’s a total of a mere six and a half hours of film whose cultural ramifications have fucked me up forever. I’ve seen all of your movies, and I kind of love you. With the weird “THX” one, “American Graffitti,” and the new three movies, that adds up to twenty-eight years we’ve spent together, George. Hope you’re okay with that.

Anyway, I went to the newest one because of an ex whose sister administrates the Line in front of the Ziegfeld for a charitable non-profit organization and is a huge “Star Wars” geek. I showed up after a long day to meet my ex and his brother to find their sister on the Ultimate Night of her altruism and geekiness. All of us boys were gay – the odds of this notwithstanding – and, given our days wrestling with our careers and each other, we barely wanted to be there at all.

I showed up first and walked past the line. It was a bit like walking past caged circus animals. They were all so proud to be there, arrayed as they were in their Lucasian trappings. I was excited to re-connect with my inner-child, and more excited to wave my “skip-the-line” pass, and to not have to actually spend too much time with them.

My ex-showed up next, and yelled at me for not having found a more private place to meet.

His brother showed up next, and they got on cell-phones to try and call the sister to find out where our seats were. I dodged a light-sabre, and tried to spot Ewan MacGregor look-alikes.

What I lacked in practical experience of the line, I had more than made up for in having been to every Ziegfeld opening of a “Star Wars” film since 1999. All three. With the sister’s credentials.

Anyway, we got inside, and us fags sat there amongst the geeks, and I almost cried at the confluence of too much nostalgic alienation.

Several 40-year-old “Stormtroopers” disconnected their homemade microphones and amplification systems, and took off their thousand-dollar’s worth of costume to sit down beside their mothers. The mothers, not in costume, gamely tried to both share their children’s connection to a healthy community of impassioned human beings, and to try one last time to engage their loser kids on their own geeky terms. The world has changed, my mom repeats like a mantra in her frequent phone messages.

The lights finally dimmed, to cheers. The Lucasfilm Logo came up to tears and screams. The familiar John Williams score began, to various psychological meltdowns.

And above it all, a persnickety eight-year old stood at the top of a high-diving board, preparing, as ever to leap off.

I’ll jump off, he thought. I swear, I’ll jump.

The Arts

I don’t really make many friends – people find me creepy, I think – but I made a really good one in Italy. We even keep in touch, sort of, with the Internet. If I’m honest, that doesn’t work too well but, either way, two years after we met, we are still in touch. I had an e-mail from her a few nights ago.

As she reminded me in her e-mail, she is an Artist, in a way that really seemed possible in Italy. She is devoted to “Art,” in other words. Here in the States, people are more devoted to “the arts.” There is a difference.

Anyway, she draws, designs, builds, paints, and creates. When she is not doing that, she is doing things that are, arguably, way more fun. She eats, she drinks, she laughs, she loves -- she despairs, she thinks, she talks. She is passionate.

Having done many of those things with her, I then returned to the States and thought really hard. Having done that, I then analyzed a whole lot, and am still doing so right now. I despaired for thinking and analyzing so fucking much. Then, I put down my third drink and realized that I hadn’t eaten. I suddenly felt unhealthy and irresponsible, and ordered some food that I gobbled without tasting as I analyzed further. I realized that I wasn’t “creating,” so I went and tried hard to create something. I didn’t like what I’d created much, so I went to the toilet, where I brainstormed a strategy for thorough peristaltic work on my hastily gobbled meal. Then, I flushed what I’d created down the toilet. I am neurotic.

She and I spent time together in a number of far-flung locales, but what I remember most vividly was our time together in her home town of Ancona, an old trading port on the Adriatic Sea. It was where we met, where we first smoked a fat joint, and where we first drank a 3am cocktail, and laughed ourselves stupid.

It was there where she laughed at me when I scoffed at eating the head of the fish and eschewed another gristly eyeball for another mojito. It was there that we discovered our mutual love of The Breeders, and Tom Waits, and Jim Jarmusch. It was there where I met her cute, Russian boyfriend who, on our departure for Milan, charged me with the responsibility of “taking care of her.” It all seemed fine with me. I enjoyed meeting these crazy new people, and being somewhere surrounded by sand and sea and fire, and falling in love with the air itself.

There was a time, when I was just about to start tenth grade, when I’d felt the stirrings of something similar. It was at the end of another Long Island summer; my days had been spent picking sand from my private places after eight hours on the beach. I was young, and drunk with the sun and the sea and a million possibilities; my body tingled with salty breeze, and my head was filled with hazy images of glistening and toned muscles – and of the dappled light playing on the bay and the sand and my dad’s beer.

On one of those August evenings, full of the comfort of late summer and the melancholy of the beginning of my first year of high school, I bounced out of the shower down to the mailbox. Across the street, at a parallel mailbox, was an early-goth-prototype boy, checking the mail for his own family. This was Franchot (it wasn’t, really, but I’ll use the name), and he gave me an intense looking-over, the sort that I have since recognized as “foreign,” “curious,” and “homo-riffic.”

Franchot and I were slated to begin a highly-dorky and advanced set of high-school English classes together in a couple of weeks -- which classes would mix sophomores like me with juniors and seniors like him in a Sisyphean effort to re-define suburban education. I’d seen him before. I know a fag when I see one and, as a Senior, so did he. We both had the summer’s reading list, which was a steamy brew of Gothic Horror. I had read it 50 times and, clearly, so had he. We should, in retrospect, have had tons to talk about.

“See you on Monday,” he said, ominously. “Yeah. Ha-ha,” I squeaked, the panic seeping directly into my stomach and large-intestines.

For the two years that followed, Franchot and I embarked on an intensely sensual and staggeringly asexual journey that left me firmly entrenched in the ironic and scathing Gay Way, and sent him running from our mundane suburb to Buffalo and then to Paris, where he lives today with his newest boyfriend.

I still live in Brooklyn, with my cigarettes and pen-pals from Italy. The weird part is that I was his first unrequited love – and he was the first guy I ever broke the heart of by disguising my disinterest with rabid attention and politeness. I was only to realize the true evil of this instinct when I myself met my own first unrequited love not long after, a squalid story, not to be repeated.

Anyway, though, mia principessa Italiana and I arrive in Milan, and look to each other for comfort amidst the hauteur. We go for dinners, and visit galleries and boutiques. We look for discounts on fashionable clothes. We meet our new friends from Roma and Slovenia and Pennsylvania for mojitos in Naviglia. We continue to hide out, and laugh, and hug, and hope for the best. We make funny phone calls back to the cute Russian boyfriend in Ancona. We sniff each other out, and decide whether or not the poised Italian woman should bother with the silly American boy, with his continued dorkiness, his many apologies, and his thinning hair.

Thanks to the computer terminal in the lobby of their hotel, and thanks to the American boy’s insistent politeness, they get an e-mail from Franchot who, conveniently, is on holiday from his work in the chorus of an early-music opera collective. Franchot has decided that he should definitely take a very long, overnight train ride down to Milan to visit for the weekend. To be together “on his turf,” and to “settle up,” psychologically. Crazily enough, I agree.

On the day of his arrival, I hopped on the sweet little trolley at the end of the block, and politely and apologetically rode the creaky, heaving thing to the Stazione Centrale.

I am drawn to trains and train stations; I like the luggage carts, the panic and running, the enormous and confusing arrival and departure boards, the vaulted ceilings, the many languages being yelled at many indifferent children by many agitated fathers. I visited the Stazione Centrale at least three times a week, obsessively, the whole time we were in Milan. At the Stazione Centrale, I liked the cigarettes and the slick smiles and easy demeanor of my fellow Italian station-haunters.

So I attempted to decipher the big board of arrivals and meet Franchot. I found his track, and watched as a lean, European train slid into the station. I spotted him, we looked on each other for the first time in many, many years and we both saw immediately what we had fallen for in the first place, and realized anew how very embarrassing it is to be seventeen. Now firmly in our thirties, all that remained was to endure a weekend together.

We kissed airily, and with deliberate nonchalance, and went for dinner and drinks. Then, we met up with some people I’d met, and, at the insistence of a handsome twenty-something from Umbria, went along to a party in a dirty slum up in the hills.

It was a sight to behold. A group of artists and musicians and, I guess, “counterculturalists” had occupied an abandoned set of old commercial buildings, and had turned them into a bizarre artists’ collective and party zone.

Delicious food and drink were on sale for a euro or two. Each building in the collective had its own theme, visually and musically. There was a vast public square where everyone was dancing and talking and smoking and eating and drinking. There was a library full of “revolutionary literature” and poetry, and plenty of silkscreens of Che Guevara. There were enormous pot plants sprouting everywhere and everyone was fucked up on a wide variety of drugs. It was an enormous international head fuck, with strains of new reggae, trip-hop, trance, and new Eminem floating over the heads of people speaking passionately in Italian, French, German, Spanish, English, and other things I couldn’t recognize for being so high myself. The crumbly stone walls were covered with shocking graffiti of the urban-American variety in a day-glo European patois.

I thought that surely and finally, Franchot would be in his element here. I decided at the Stazione Centrale that I would look to him often, to find out how to behave. He had been ten years in Europe, after all, while I had just been ten years in New York City. He would help me to negotiate this circus, with his fluent French and his international boyfriends and his Swiss flag t-shirt and his continued dismissal of what I might say as being merely a product of unimaginative suburban American brainwashing.

The night went on, and mia bella Italiana and the boy from Umbria kept coming over to where I was sitting with Franchot, talking him out of his weed-induced paranoia to say, “Please. Leave him there. The Swiss boy is dull. He will be fine. Come dance with us, americano.”

Months later, after Franchot had gone back to Paris, and my girl from Ancona and I were giggling naughtily on the train in Tokyo, she said to me, “Thees-a boy who you know in Milano at the party. Who ees-a he?”

In a polite and apologetic way, I said, “Please. Don’t-a worry. He is scared like-a me. He is interested in-a the arts.”

“Ah. Me too,” she said.

Happy Thanksgiving

On my way back to my little prison in Brooklyn from another day full of anxiety and another evening full of disappointment in Manhattan, I passed a young Hipster petting one of the nasty and aggressive cats that live somewhere on my block. These cats are all lean and scary and the color of the crap at the bottom of an over-used ashtray. The Hipster was tall and skinny and, well, Hip.

As I approached, I noted that he had on all the tribal accoutrements. He wore low riding jeans, meticulously designed to look haphazard, with some sort of chain apparatus on them. He wore a tight, ironic 80s era stretchy athletic zip-up over his tight, ironic 80s era t-shirt. His hair was cut into the “faux-hawk” which is just past de rigeur these days, and was artfully sloppy. He had the thick, small glasses that the Hipsters in my neighborhood must buy off the same rotating kiosk at the neighborhood Superpharmacy where batty seniors locate the pre-fab reading glasses they will brandish at the indifferent, long-nailed cashier, demanding a “price-check.”

The moment he spotted me, as I was envisioning stumbling past invisibly with my six pack and lo mein, he froze. He was compromised, all of his social signifiers paralyzed, a Hipster in perpendicularity, top half extended towards an ass-smelling street cat that sniffed at his extended fingers, one of which bore a cute ironic skull ring.

It was tense. I had a couple dozen feet to walk before I could attempt to pass him anonymously, and vanish back into my hollow little apartment for the night, and he had to decide what I was and how to play off this lonely moment of betrayal of the detached Hipster cause.

It’s funny about Hipster causes. We all struggle every day with our desire to be appealing, to be read as Something. We all worry to a degree about our published images -- which, in my case, is now just archaic and slovenly -- in pursuit of an appropriate social reaction from a bunch of fuckers we don’t even know! I believed myself to be Hip once. So I was wrong.

Suddenly, I am reminded of greeting my parents in the crappy little terminal of the crappy little airport I flew into for my freshman year’s Thanksgiving break, the first time home after the first time away from them with any kind of seriousness. Seeing me, my mother cried, and my father, bless him, tried with all of his might to take it in stride and not punch me in the mouth for making my mother cry and for being so gross.

What “it” was: their promising son was now a smelly, dirty, freshly pierced and tattooed mess of a boozy and drug-addled Brand New Fag.

I was wearing a blazer that I had basically found under the tire of a Campus Security car, and had worn home for shock value. I had smuggled some weed and some acid home on various parts of my person, ostensibly not worried about airport security in those halcyon days before fascism. Frankly, nobody got too close because I hadn’t had a shower pretty much since I had left home. I had been gleefully fucking for the first time, and enjoying the fact that I stunk of undergraduate sperm too much to actually bathe at all. My hair, and I had more then, I now realize I had wasted with Hipsteriffic indifference on silly, asymmetrical “stylings.”

Worse, I was full of brand new “ideas” with which I was going to shock and alter their silly suburban perceptions. I may have started my harangue against their values before I even got off the fucking plane. A flight attendant probably shoved my stinky backpack, heavy with amazing, mind-expanding Books of Great Importance and drugs, directly into my bouncing balls just to shut me up and to get me out of her life once and for all.

Anyway, and bless them, I’ve been sparring with my mother and father ever since, though in a somewhat more civilized fashion, as I have finally stopped needing their financial support. In the 15 years since that Thanksgiving, I can say with confidence that I’ve not really worked my shit out and have continued to forcefully, and sometimes painfully, demonstrate to them that I’m not them. It’s worked really well, if dysfunctional behavior in relationships and substance abuse and anxiety attacks are any indicator.

I got nearer to the Hipster, and he straightened up and, Lord, was he tall. He shook off his momentary embarrassment, and fixed on me with a look of great challenge. Would I indicate to him how to behave, how he should play off his private moment of intimate connection with a nasty, dumpster-crawling animal? Or would I slink invisibly past, as I do these days? Or, would I do something else? Would I break New York’s strict code of public isolation and speak in earnest?

He shifted his weight back and forth on his giant knock-off designer clogs, his fingers still half extended towards the cat. Other cats had now come by to, I guess, hang and see what would happen.

That Thanksgiving was sort of a disaster. I tried, in my cowardly way, to shove my two months of “independence” directly under the noses of my family. I smoked pot in my bedrom, and cigarettes on the front lawn, in full view of the neighbors. I got another piercing in my ear. I racked up big phone bills talking to my new and, I tried to indicate, better family of smelly undergrads from the Midwest. I forcefully threw around all of my new philosophies, which I could barely articulate myself for having skipped most of my classes, and rejected every innocent effort to communicate with me as being a plot to control me.

“We’re going for a walk in the arboretum. Want to come?”

“YOU DON’T OWN ME!!!”

“OK, well, have fun cutting holes in those pants.”

At Thanksgiving dinner, over the sweet potatoes and green bean casserole my mother had slavishly prepared, I was driven into an apoplexy by my father and grandfather, who sliced up each of my awkward declamations like so much turkey. It was unpleasant, and made me even more sullen.

When it was time to fly back out to college, my mother tucked a fifty dollar bill into the pocket of my blazer, and smiled kindly as she wiped her fingers with a Kleenex.

“YOU CAN’T BUY ME!!!”

My father hugged me roughly and told me the names of a couple of books he thought I might like.

“YOU DON’T GET IT!!!”

My sister looked on, trying to understand what had happened to her big brother. Somewhere in her eyes, I could see the seeds of her own rebellion. I could see where she was tugging at the tether of her own childhood, and her eagerness to see whatever strange thing it was that I had seen.

“You’ll get out of here soon. Just like me,” I said, with gravity.

The Hipster gave me the once-over, and decided that I was some sad old loony, heading home on a Friday night to drink beer and eat Chinese food by himself. He was right. I didn’t contradict him. Without speaking, I yielded the higher ground. Without speaking, he grew confident and turned his moment of nakedness into an ironic commentary on the type of person who is just lonely and seeking comfort in a cat. Without speaking we acknowledged that he could see something that I no longer could – or that I had lost the anger to see anymore.

Secure again in his edginess and happy, for the moment, to be isolated and to bear the weighty misunderstanding of anybody over thirty, he went back to the cat, who licked his skull ring. The other cats closed in.

I sidled past, my Heineken bottles clinking in the plastic bag. He had made me sort of happy, oddly enough.

“You’ll get out of here soon,” I thought, jangling the keys to my little prison. “Just like me.”

This Is Not A Joke

Characters: Boss (male, aggressive, East London accent), and Not Boss.

Scene: A “strategy meeting.”

Lights up.

B: You’re a stupid cunt.

NB: No, I’m not.

B: DON’T YOU GET CONFRONTATIONAL WITH ME!!

NB: Sorry. I just thought –

B: Fuck off. Right? Listen. That’s what your problem is. You don’t listen and you don’t communicate. That goes for all of you cunts. Right? All of you. This is for everyone in this whole fucking office. You cunts need to learn how to communicate. Right?

NB: OK. Sorry.

B: Sorry? What the fuck is that, “sorry?” Sorry is shit. Right?

NB: OK.

B: Fuck me, I can’t believe all of you. This office is completely fucked, and it’s your fault. I can’t be expected to do all of it – but I could if I had to. I did it before and I can do it again.

NB: You’re right.

B: You’re fucking right, I’m right, you stupid cunt. I can’t even leave here for five minutes without you fetid, smelly, arse-fucking poofs ruining everything.

NB: Well, we did work on the –

B: Oh, fuck off. Right. Tell me right now what you fucking did. Tell me.

NB: Well, we took the information on the –

B: Oh!! (mocking, effeminately) We took the “informa-a-a-a-tion.” That’s right, we took the “informa-a-a-a-tion.” That’s what we did. (now sensibly) Is that being proactive? Is it? Right, is that being proactive?

NB: Well, we took the, um, we were just –

B: See? That’s the fucking problem with you stupid cunts. You can’t even speak when you need to. Stupid fucking poofs.

NB: If I could just show you the –

B: Show me what? You can’t fucking show me anything, can you?

NB: Well, I could show you the –

B: Tell me right now. Can You Show Me Anything?

NB: Yes, I could show you the –

B: (to someone) See? Fuck!! Can’t show me a fucking thing.

NB: I have the information on the –

B: (mocking again, and miming poorly) “Oh! Yes! I’ve got the information! I’m a stupid fucking poof, who likes to take it up the arse and show the informa-a-a-tion! That’s right! That’s right!”

NB: ….

B: That’s it, is it? That’s all you’ve got to say?

NB: Umm, I don’t know.

B: Course you don’t know, you fucking poof. Who’s got today’s Times?

NB: We brought a copy.

B: (mocking) “Oh, we brought a copy. Oh, I’m a fucking poof who brought a copy.” Probably roll it up and shove it up your arse like a fucking poof who shoves newspapers up their arse.

NB: It’s right here.

B: Yeah, well I don’t want to touch that, then, do I? Get your poofy arse shit all over everything. What’s in it, then?

NB: What’s in it?

B: WHAT’S FUCKING IN IT, YOU CUNT!!!

NB: Sorry. I don’t understand.

B: What reviews are in? Fuck’s sake.

NB: Well, there’s a new Brantley review.

B: Brantley? Fucking poof. Have you seen his teeth?

NB: Sorry?

B: His fucking teeth, you fuck. They’re all grotty. You know what that is, don’t you?

NB: No. What?

B: Sperm. That’s what.

NB: Ha-ha.

B: Yeah, that’s right. Do you know the thing about poofs? It’s the sperm. Sperm rots the teeth of poofs. They swallow it, and it rots their teeth.

NB: Ha-ha.

B: But girls. They drink it, and it makes their tits bigger.

NB: Ha-ha.

B: Yeah, that’s right. Sperm makes their tits bigger, if they eat it.

NB: So, the Times…

B: Are you changing the subject? You’re a poof. You fucking poof.

NB: Sorry. Just following up.

B: Following up, you cunt? (cellphone rings) WHAT THE FUCK!! WHAT FUCKING CUNT BROUGHT A CELLPHONE TO THIS MEETING???

NB: (checks pockets, has no cellphone)

B: Oh, piss flaps. It’s me. Hang on a tick. (answering his cellphone) Hello? Hello, darling. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I said the vegetarian kind. I’m just in a meeting. I can’t talk now. What? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. What? I can’t hear you. What? I’ll be home soon. What? Just buy it, then.” (hanging up) I love my fucking wife. You see, the thing about pregnancy is that they can’t do fucking anything for themselves. She’s got to call me every fucking minute.

NB: Ha-ha.

B: What?

NB: Oh, nothing. It’s just that when my son was born –

B: The thing about pregnancy is that they really want a good fucking, but I can’t do it because I keep thinking about my knob hitting the kid in the fucking head.

NB: Yeah. Ha-ha. I had that, too.

B: The thing about it is that if there’s too much of my cock around, the kid may turn into a fucking poof.

NB: Ha-ha.

B: What you laughing at?

NB: Oh, nothing.

B: Yeah. That’s right. So where were we? What’s the matter with you cunts? What are we doing, just sitting around all day like a bunch of fucking poofs?

Outfield Boy

On Saturday, I had a panic attack. I’d never had one before so, to be honest, I didn’t really know what was going on or quite what to do, the awareness of which, I now suspect, only exacerbated the attack itself.

I’d been out with friends, smoking some pot and drinking too much the night before. It had been an arduous week in the employ of a psychotic, and I’d felt that I owed myself that evening’s indulgence, in the way that addicts do. I woke up late, around noon, and brewed a pot of coffee, and sat down at the computer to read newspapers on-line and then get some work done.

Two pots of coffee later, and with no food, and having finished smoking the roach I found in my pack of cigarettes, and having read no paper and worked not at all, I suddenly realized that I was feeling sort of antsy.

That’s not quite accurate, actually. The exact moment I became aware of something strange was while I was looking at a gossip website about the dubious sexuality of a handsome young movie actor in a major sci-fi franchise. As I was scrolling up and down the page, I became aware of something that I can really only describe as “an unmooring.” I was sitting relatively stilly at my desk, but had an awful sensation of, sort of, pitching forward with my chest while simultaneously rolling back with my head, plus an odd feeling of doom.

Now, I’ve been hypochondriac and neurotic and paranoid at various key moments of my life, and, through the course of boozing and drugging my way through my twenties, had worked my way through plenty of weird, unclassifiable sensations. But this was not something I’d felt before.

For a while, I tried to ignore this sensation. I experimented with paying attention to different things in my room. The unplugged television on the floor. The mismatched bookshelves. The weights that I never exercise with, inevitably stub my toe on every time I enter or exit the room, and will never move to a more suitable location. The framed black and white stills of Buster Keaton. The set of four monogrammed glass coffee mugs that my mother had just inexplicably shipped to me.

Nothing. No matter where I placed my attention, I felt that unmooring. That forward roll of my chest, and that backward tilt of my head, all while I was sitting motionless. Desk lamp? Pitching and rolling. Vanilla candle? Pitching and rolling. The boots that I’ve been wearing relentlessly for seven years which are making the entire building smell of feet? Pitching and rolling.

Again, I thought that there would just have to be a rational explanation for this. Things would be fine, I thought.

I had a shower. No change. Still pitching and rolling. I shaved. I both initiated and executed the most surreal and disconnected jerk-off session I’ve ever experienced. I made a couple of phone calls. Still rolling; pitching backward while simultaneously rolling forward. An awful sensation, omnipresent and unchanging.

I sat down in the living room, and turned on the TV to watch, On-Demand, the documentary on a performance-arty glam-rock band that my sister had recommended that I watch. As I sat there not really watching, the rolling and pitching continued, and I tapped my feet and slapped my thighs and tried with increasing failure to ignore this awful sensation, and realized that I was going to have to do something. Maybe go outside. Take a walk. That had worked for freak outs past. I gathered my shit, and headed outside.

It was a glorious Brooklyn afternoon, on the kind of spring Saturday where the light is so nice, one can overlook how gross the neighborhood actually is. Or, more accurately, one can almost enjoy the way the light plays off the garbage, vomit, chicken wing bones and shit-smears the sidewalk so relentlessly offers. I’ve been in my current apartment for five years and in the neighborhood for eight, so I’ve sort of come to love the surrounding area. Well, I’ve learned to appreciate, archaeologically, what one must have eaten to turn their anonymous vomit that particular shade of neon.

Heading god knows where, I set forth to “walk it off,” as I was told to do countless times in my several, embarrassing outings as a child-athlete. “Walk it off!” someone’s dad would yell. “Good eye!” some cross-eyed weirdo would cheer. “What’s the matter with you?” a portly mom would wonder. “NO-body, no, NO-boDY, is GON-na RAIN on MY paRADE!!” I would sing quietly from left field.

I passed the Spanish restaurant, the Arab supermarket, the South American Evangelical Church, the Mexican bodega, the crater that used to be the bottle redemption center and the folks who think that it still is, all crowding incredulously around with their bottles – and still, I was rolling and pitching.

None of this is working, I thought to myself, and perhaps I should be honest for once, and tell someone what’s going on. A couple of friends had just moved to a neighborhood three subway stops away, and an ex had just moved two subway stops away. I can call them, I thought, and maybe pop by to try to explain myself, and feel better. I made one of those calls but there was no answer. I left no message and continued walking, relentlessly.

The sensation was not letting up and now, in context with the rest of the world, who, presumably, were not suffering with this awful sensation, the panic was increasing.

I became suddenly convinced that I was having a heart-attack. What is it one does when one is having a heart attack? Something rational in me remembered – have an aspirin, and seek medical attention.

Leaving vomity boot-heel prints on the chicken-wing bones of my neighborhood, I ran into the nearest deli, bought water and, in my calmest voice, asked the Asian dude running the place, “Hello. Do you have any aspirin?” He did. I ate it. As he handed it to me. Quickly, as if it would save my life.

I was now across the street from the Emergency Room. Trying to see this particular forest for the trees, I called my sister for advice. Thankfully, she answered her phone, and it was clear from her tone that she had also had a long Friday night, and was dealing with it by lying around her apartment in Queens.

“Hey!”

“Hey.”

“So, I’ve been feeling a horrible pitching and rolling sensation, like my chest was constricting and doing forward rolls, and that my head was pitching back. Even when I’m just sitting down.”

“Wow. That sucks. Are you okay?”

“Well, I don’t really know. It’s giving me – anxiety. Do you think I should go see somebody?”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know. I’m just feeling crazy, like I might have a heart attack.”

“Well then, you should see somebody, if you’re sure.”

This went on helplessly for a while, back and forth, as I paced creepily around the hospital. Cute doctors walked past. Also, a fleet of dogs and strollers with children in them. She talked to me.

Finally, she told me that I could go to the Emergency Room if things got dire, but I should just go sit in the park and think objectively about this.

This is what I did.

Just on the heels of what must have been a panic attack, I talked to my sister on the phone, from the lobby of the Emergency Room, and she told me that I should think carefully, have a walk, and get my shit together. This is what I did.

I walked a couple of blocks over to the park. I got a nice hot dog, with mustard and onions. I took it to my favorite bench by the baseball diamonds. I sat myself down, and watched the kids play.

“Walk it off,” someone yelled, and all the kids walked in lazy little circles.

“Good eye!” someone complimented, and the kid actually preened and celebrated and beamed.

“What’s the matter with you?” someone demanded, and the couple of kids who felt like the question was aimed at them shrugged and turned invisible.

Most calming of all, though, were the boys of the outfield. Out there, there is a parallel game being played. It resembles baseball, but is more sophisticated and dance-like. The outfield boys hear a music that no one else hears, and they each dance along to it, voraciously and independently, with the hope that the ball couldn’t possibly be hit this far, and with the assumption that no one can see them dancing.

“NO-body, no NO-body, is GON-na RAIN on MY paRADE!!”