What we eat off of...

I ate of her, ate off her, ate her whole.

In the highchair -king of the iron high chair, “Feed me,” was my only language. I ate off the porch on my rocking horse, blanket, plastic bear in hand, sister now in chair.
I ate in hotel rooms.

I ate from the dirt in the backyard.

I ate off the wagon.

I ate out of your hand.

I ate off stunning serving ware in France, Greece, Spain, Israel, Bahrain, Italy but not Turkey.

I ate out of your mouth…Ben and Jerry’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough and Dulce De Leche by Haggen Dazs.

I recall stacks of bright colored plastic bowls & plates with spaghetti, meatballs, tuna casseroles, goulash, stuffed peppers, liver and onions, Lucky Charms, Lipton cup-a-soup, potatoes, meats, pickles, beets, Pop Tart’s and other candy colored treats. Lots of bright colored plastic cups with Koolaid, lemonaid, milk, ice cream floats, water and pop.

“Have anything you want!”

“I’m having shrimp.”

“--The hell you are?! What are you goddamn nuts?!”

“But you said, whatever I--“

“Order anything else!”

I ate pizza off paper plates 3 times a day as a kid in Seaside Heights, I ate crullers in the morning from Wyckoff’s, and crabs at night from the bay. We caught those crabbing crabs in the early morning, caught in cages with fish heads and turkey necks, put in bushel baskets. In the dark bay sat our little dingy…with those crabs running nuts at our tiny toes.

-Ate steak and lobster for a couple nights in the Persian Gulf with Captains and ranked officers. And a few weeks before that, I shared a thanksgiving meal off a metal tray on a shiny ship off Naples with 1000 others.

-I took notice in the fine blue detail of a particular piece of late 1800’s Stone China; it was a dinner plate that a few of us smoked hash on.

-We eat off the Mikasa we got from our nuptials…It’s our daily dishware. And the 1960’s dinner set given to us. Thank God for Replacements LTD.

Burning with sunlight to this day from an eight course banquet; fresh succulent mango in a puddle of Indian oil with ginger… served off the back of her knees.

The Liberty Bell

I performed a performance one night not so long ago and it was not a first time performance of this performance, but one in a series of a thousand performances…maybe hundreds. It was an abandoned rail car packed with hobos, heads on fire, everyone screaming and trying to remember their lines, the rail car goes off the tracks, down a steep embankment, careening between red-coral canyon walls, two of the iron wheels fall off, three sides of the boxcar open, the car flips, yet the hobos keep singing and screaming, now ad-libbing the dialogue…holes in the floor appear, hobo’s falling into the hole, off the sides, some being scraped along the walls; blood everywhere….this goes on for appears to be about 18 days. Finally the boxcar comes to rest in a crevasse below the ocean.

I talk to several people after and they say,
“Great job, that was funny.”

I explain to each person that “this happened and that happened, and I really wasn’t pleased about how we did this then, and the before moment came after, and the cue for the other thing didn’t go right, the 3rd act reveal broke in the 1st act and we couldn’t find glue so we used paperclips, the tech stuff killed us, the hobo fire was too bright or didn’t have enough orange in it, the two wheels came off and they were the wrong two wheels and we knew that you knew, we could see that you could see, we could feel what you were feeling, AND, the parking lot where you parked was fucked up, I stubbed my toe a couple weeks ago, fucking gas is expensive, man is hot out or what? -My haircut is wrong, this gum is too chewy, my lawyer is suing me, fucking hummingbirds are in my backyard again, the ocean is broken, the greeter at Walmart is an asshole, my coffee was tea, black is black, white is white. Did you like the thing? That really didn’t work. No it didn’t. You don’t know anything. Fuck you, it was horrible and you’ve deluded yourself to think that what you saw was good cause you paid a lot of money... -If you paid nothing you would’ve seen all the flaws that we experienced in the moment. Fuck you, you’re not my friend!”

Finally a woman stopped me and said, “You just say thank you.”

“What?....What do you mean?”

“You need to just shut up and say, thank you….after your little show.”

“I don’t know what you’re saying.”

“It’s diminishing…what you’re doing--”

“--Doing what?--”

“--No, it’s rude. …Someone is trying to be gracious and you are refusing them. You are diminishing them. You need only be kind and say, thank you.”

“Oh.”

Get the picture?

“Everyone is gay and Asian,” Laura said.

“Huh?” I thought to myself for 7 years.

I was now sitting across from Early Smith, a burnout from Morton.
He didn’t give a fuck. It was just plain. Why didn’t teachers see it? Why didn’t cops see it?

Evil poured out of him.

He was…

Burned out.

…smoldering at 15.

I was on the Lexington Local one Halloween night, a few of us got on the train after watching part of the parade in the village. We got on at Bleecker, and at Astor a wilding pack of ski masked, hoody wearing 12-15 year old's burst into the car. I could see they had no regard for anything. I mean nothing was stopping them. They were all street. Had absolutely no sense.

They didn’t fucking give a shit about anything, didn’t know enough to care.
They broke into the conductor’s car and started beat boxing and rapping on the PA system. A few of them ripped out the plastic separators that held advertisements over the seats. They placed one of the separators in the door, so when it opened it would bend and then shatter, sending plastic shrapnel through the car.
This was something out of a Lessing novel.

His pal whose name I can’t remember, Carl! No, Steve, Brad, Jeff, Doug, Mike, Todd, ….all of these names conjure knuckle dragging cavemanism, all are single syllable grunt names, never full names, were they born Steven, Bradley, Jeffery, Douglas Michael? They are guttural people of mud; eyelids still sealed shut, misshapen teeth, noses to one side, fists of sodden potato's, beefed and clenched, thumbs like hydrants.
These two pillars of delinquency chose on this lunch day to sit opposite me with their smirks, their ideas…greeting me with fists. Destroying my mother’s sack lunch, crushing my Hostess Ho Ho, peanut butter & jelly sandwich, crackers and apple slices.

Listen and Follow

Filmore, late 80’s.

Was hanging around the band that was playing up in the other room for New Years, or maybe it was Halloween. Doesn’t matter. Maybe I’d be asked to climb aboard for a song or two. Why not? It was happening more and more. I would wait…hang around, carry gear, be a mate. This was my gang, somehow I pushed and got inside. These were fun dangerous people, these were quiet days and long nights, this was youth, this was everything I wanted; staying stoned, watching trees, seeing music every night, chattering on about nothing, strolling on the Haight, tripping at the Kabuki 8, sleeping on couches, listening to Anita at Ibeam, Sushi Sundays at Nightbreak, reading Edie on a rooftop off Baker & Turk, pesto pizza, meeting women with Mercedes, standing at the Other, curbing outside Dal Jeets, cold to the bone...endless, directionless, perfect.

The hall in the afternoon was bitter, dank, run down, dimly lit even with work lights on. The place was busy with circumspect workers standing around, moving kegs and cases of beer around on hand carts, bottles of booze, decorations, lighting, all of it was in a slow motion.

We had been relegated to the upstairs lounge, it was a VIP club within the club, it was perfect. The band was best in this kind of tight setting, rocking best with those right up front.

The rip, buzz and horror twang of Ivy’s guitar will never leave my pea brain…it is… undeniable… historical…sickening to the soul, to generations of me, and yet seductive... It is death scratching…It is mayhem…It is a razor; magnificent…It is pure volume to cave one’s chest to….Reverb to pull me out deep…It is evil…It is animal….It is the echo in my head.

Buck heard it first.
He set his guitar down.

“I think they’re checking.”

We followed like rats, sliding in the dark. We stood up in the balcony looking down on our heroes, not knowing what to expect.

“Is that them?” I wondered.

They were dressed in funeral attire, a Sunday best kinda thing. Sharp, dark suits for the men, a dark trench coat for Ivy, and she wore a headscarf that went over her slight bouffant. Dark sunglasses all around…

Classy folks.

Listen and Swallow

I wrote a single joke that has been released as one of the top 10 downloadable ringtones in the history of downloaded ringtones. And it’s not even a joke really, nor a punch line, but more of a catch phrase, or a line. And it is now part of the American modern lexicon of slang and noise.

But this joke cut through the din.

This single ringtone has made me over twelve million dollars a year for the last 5 years. Yeah, I know. This one mindless thing that I recorded in less than one hour has given me an incredible quality of life, for which I am really not that grateful.

I made up the joke years ago in a shitty club outside Atlanta. I was opening for a comic magician who was a typical comic magician with a coke problem. He’d come out and try to be a stand up, try out his horrible new jokes til he couldn’t stand it and then forced to do his tricks. He ended his set each night by swallowing a table leg, the crowd would give him a standing ovation every single night. He would pick up his special magic table with the machine made cylindrical table legs and shove one of them down his throat. Standing ovation.

My joke must have originated from the disgust and contempt of that moment, night after night. Or maybe it came after the 3rd show Saturday, when I watched the drunken waitress, whom I’d been working on, escaped to the mens room with the conning conjurer. Either way, it was written out of anger and resentment.

Intimacy

I am at my most intimate self when I am in silence.

And as I write this, my first thought applies to memories of lying beside my lover. But as I consider it longer, it could apply to myself. When I am in silence, in my deepest meditation perhaps then, when I witness the monkey jumping at the speed of light from one thought to the next. That awareness is when I am at my most intimate. Maybe?

It’s funny how quickly I associate intimacy with sex or love, or the ideas of closeness with another. Where am I the most intimate?

Is it with you that I can lose myself?

Is it with you that I can reveal my most true self,

Is it with you where I find my most frightened self?

Is it with you in silence, through your eyes, telling me, “All is okay?”

“We are okay?”

“We will be okay?”

“You are okay?”

What will it take to tell myself that?
Who asked you anyway?

The levels of closeness in all my relationships continue to ebb, flow, build, burn, grow and reveal with new parameters of intensity with every interaction, some of which have yet to register in my conscious mind at all. All of which are based on the openness of my limited conscious mind.

My imagination is great with creating intimacy. I can blow a little air on an old box of coal and stir those embers, is that intimacy? Is it intimacy if you blow on the coals?

My brain was buff-- Her brain was faster than mine, which was too fast. Her mind made her mouth move and sound came out faster than my ear holes could take. My brain was buffering. She spoke so fucking fast and so fucking smart and built so many fucking mouse traps with trap doors and black holes and time warps, it was only when she stopped-

And I stopped-

And we stared.
In silence.
Into each other.

On the blanket...in the park...that we could feel everything in each other.

Lies

Everything I write is a lie.

I am sitting down in a chair that I never sit in. I am typing on my brand new iPad. It is perfect and it completes me. I waited online with pirates in the valley for over 2 days to purchase it. One fellow with a beard and not from this country was set to buy more than one. We argued about that for a short time, about only being allowed to buy one and it escalated quickly. He seemed to know the rules. He offered to settle it by, “cutting my fucking balls off if I didn’t shut my fat fucking face.”

Pretty sure that’s what he said.

I wanted to be the first in my neighborhood. I wanted it more than that ice cream sandwich the ding ding man sold in the summertime on my street just outside of Bonneventure.

So now I have one. It is fast and shiny and powerful. I can now begin my novel and or screenplay.

The rain has started again.

A dog barks at the approaching mailman. The mailman maced a dog down the street last Friday, but the dog kept charging. Got a good piece of the mailman. The dog will be destroyed tomorrow if no one comes and adopts him. I think the dog’s name is Chet. He was a mixed breed mongrel. His owner came to my house and asked if I had heard anything, if I’d be willing to testify in a court of law. He had a beard. And his wife who stood five feet behind him as he did all the talking also had a beard. They were curious to me. He spoke fast with an Albanian accent. His hair was almost gone on the top of his head, but he had a strong beard.

Once when I worked at a bottling plant there was this married couple Pat and Pat. Pat ran the label machine. It was an archaic machine that slapped wet labels on glass bottles of soda. It was the last step in the process before they were boxed and then laid on pallets. More than once a week the label machine would fire up too strong and the metal slappers would miss the labels completely and then they would slam onto the bottles, smashing one after another, spraying glass and soda everywhere. Pat wasn’t deaf but he spoke as though he never learned to speak properly. He had a high-pitched squeak. He was able to form letters but his voice was so high and raspy, it was uniquely odd, especially when the machine would go berserk and he would yell and scream, never really knowing how to shut the thing down. Hundreds of bottles would explode before he could stop the line.

Pat’s wife Pat was perhaps the ugliest woman I’d ever met in that town. She too sounded funny when she spoke. Maybe she took on Pat’s voice the way couples take on the queer patterns of their partners. She was shorter than Pat and wore glasses that fell off her face. She was short, with short blond hair, average body, bloused in work shirt and pants one couldn’t gauge much. She was smelly up close however. She worked on the line somewhere else. She and Pat barked at each other on and off work, in the warehouse, in the break-room when we played spades. They were a freakish couple, but had senses of humor. One afternoon Pat put a live boa constrictor someone found in the warehouse inside Pat’s locker in the break-room.

What connects me in my relationships?

At dinner last night, Church and State, I was reminded of so many nights out, hundreds of our dining dates; Hama, Il Vagabondo, Roku, Joe Stone, 88 Noodle on Columbus, Cicada after the twins were born, sitting motionless, staring in space, lost…One if by Land, Two if By Sea for our engagement dinner, later joined by Greg and Angela. As Uri worked effortlessly pouring French Martini’s, I touched the back of her hand and smiled and kissed her cheek, then lips. “I like being out with you. I’m lucky to be with you… thank you.”

I am drawn to her.

I still want her.

I still crave everything about her. I am longing to feel her, even when she sits beside me. I seek to smell her, to hear her, to watch her.

I remember the first time I touched her. It was a hug. We had never formally met, but spent formative years around each other. We were now in the same city, directly across the street. It was her front door. She was wearing an angora sweater, although it was probably a knit or a poly-wool blend, my right hand reached behind her and I felt a softness that sent a lightening bolt to my childhood. These were layers of quiet pillows, her sweater and then her skin, all of it was beyond soothing, all of it invited, “You are here, you are safe, you are home, come into me.”

We exchanged pleasantries, stories, I could smell her from across the room, we were adults in the world now. Her roommate Janelle joined, we went downtown to Union Square to the newly opened Coffee Shop. We left Janelle out. The months that followed were about cappuccino, walks in the park and food; Pappardellas, Around The Clock, Mamoun’s, Mary Ann’s, 6th Street, Teddy’s, Odeon, Tomoe Sushi, DoJo, BBQ, Kiev, Veselka, Nirvana, Mesa Grille…it goes on.