*Carefree* Gum Presents: Mistletoe Moments

I walked by a bus stop that asserted all prostitutes are "sex slaves". 250,000 reside in North America. Does that make the husbands of women who married them for money or financial security "slave owners"? Am I allowed to wish that it does?

Pretty Woman came out when I was eleven. It was the first movie I ever went to alone at a theater. It was also the first--and last--movie I ever sneaked into. Over the summer I'd asked a girl to go with me to a fun park and to get out of it she lied and told me her mother had leukemia. My mother reads palms for a living, I know a curse when I see one. I was convinced that if a girl would go to such egregious lengths to avoid a date with me there was a significant chance a prostitute was the only way I'd ever get near a girl in my lifetime. I was resigned to it without much hope. Pretty Woman was going to be my Rosetta Stone in uncovering my future wife. Richard Grieco, fresh off his success as "Booker" on 21 Jump Street---shot at my high school---was going to show me on the big screen how to seduce and marry a kindhearted prostitute in fairytale-like fashion. Maybe even one like Julia Roberts, who I knew was the sister of Eric "freakin'" Roberts, star of such indelible classics as "Best of the Best" and "Best of the Best II", for which I had devout admiration.

Little did I know that my spike haired hero Richard Grieco was never to be in this film. After they misspelled his name in the credits I went on looking for him in every distant, out-of-focus leather jacket in the frame until it finally sunk in it was in fact this aging Richard *GERE* entrusted to educate me in the ways of becoming a future slave owner. Julia made it a tempting proposition. Craft? Or, perhaps, as an actress engaging in sexual relations for profit on film, potentially she qualified as a "sex slave" herself---one of those 250,000 mentioned on the poster---albeit an exceedingly well compensated one.

Looking back on the performance---with the new heads up on context courtesy of the bus stop)---I like when lies tell the truth. Or part of it. They usually do. Maybe they always do.

I have a confession: up until about 9 months ago, the best kiss I'd ever had was with a "sex slave". I'm not entirely sure I can blame Julia Roberts, but her crying at the opera Gere took her to didn't help. It took 3 years to know that my kiss was with a "sex slave" because she failed to inform me of her involvement in the sex slave trade at the time. I may also be culpable of attempting to become a "sex slave" owner as I did pick up the tab at Denny's at 4:30am after we'd walked around Stanley Park for a few hours the evening I'd met her. And, oddly enough, it never went beyond a kiss with her. Just one night that was a pack of wet matches the next night and---POOF!---gone.

It's nice when professions you don't know much of anything about, that posters on bus stops presume to speak for, mess with your preconceptions a little. While I've never minded stereotypes, I do intensely resent people who *aspire* to be stereotypes. I've always found it poetic that the one thing a prostitute is famous for withholding from their customers turned out, somehow, to have more feeling in it than, say, my *first* kiss. My first kiss wasn't a frivolous thing either. I stayed with the girl who belonged to that first kiss for nearly 5 years. The other poetic thing about them that she ("sex slave") told me---a few years later when I bumped into her---was what sort of people she had as clients. "Everybody. There's no *type*" I was working on a book about a school shooting at the time and there was symmetry in this. You know what the profile is on a school shooter? There isn't any. That's not riddle or enigma material, it's poetry.

It's burned now, but wanna know what the inside of my binder in 6th grade looked like after the movie?

Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts

Wanna know what the inside of my notebook looks like today:

Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara

Maybe Lewis Carrol was right, "We're but children growing older."

If you listen very carefully you can hear all the kids playing dress up snickering at me...

Merry Christmas

Her Giftshop In His Museum

We were close to where I was gonna be dropped off to stay that first night in Brooklyn. I was nodding off in the backseat. "Yo, Brinny, O.D.B grew up in the projects a little ways down there. On the other side of Fort Green." I opened my eyes. There was a deafening moment of radical ambiguity about *why* this information should be passed along to me. I wasn't sure if O.D.B's legend was a punchline or a solemn ambassador of the neighborhood. Our windshield had been focused and all the windows were fogged up. It was too cold and too dark to roll down the window to soak anything up. I was the first one being dropped off while everybody else was going to Brownsville. "Here it is, I'll getcha for work early tomorrow. Here's the keys."

There was a plaque outside the building for a dead poet who'd lived there that I'd never heard of.

She'd told me about his apartment. It left an impression on her. She was very uneasy I was staying there. She didn't live far off, twenty minutes walk, but she'd told me she wouldn't visit. This was a place she didn't use similes or metaphors or examples to describe or compare. I learned about it in her pauses; many different kinds of pauses---pregnant, stillborn, miscarried, aborted. The state of whatever she had with him had been the same for a couple years but she still wasn't used to it. The paint was still wet. She'd fallen in limerence with him and been picking at the scab ever since.

It was a walk-up. I was a little nervous and smoked climbing the staircase and flicked the cigarette out a window when I reached my floor. When I got inside the apartment the lights were off but I could hear two different sets of people talking in their rooms down the hallway. I walked past them and found his room and flicked the light switch. Large wine colored made bed in the corner. Bookshelves lined the walls and leaned under the high ceilings of the room. His library was 95% the same as mine. His mother was born in the same place as mine. I unpacked my shit in the corner and hunkered down with my back against the door facing the bed. I'd heard about the laundry list that stained those sheets before I'd known about her being included. Which was before I had any idea she'd be underlined in my laundry list, or that he was underlined in hers.

Couple months back, across the continent:

"I guess I might as well ask at this point. How do you know this guy?"
"He didn't tell you?"
"I didn't ask."
"He's the only guy I've ever been in love with."
"Past or present tense?"
"I dunno."
"You have the same expression as the Sphinx when you lie."

I shut off the lights and cleared my throat to test out the acoustics in the room.

The breadcrumbs lead here... so are you supposed to find this dynamic amusing or violently beautiful? Don't you want a flashlight to go prowling around her sewers? Is that smirk across your face supposed to make the room a little queasy over its secrets? It's not. All her kites become your anchors if you let them. If you can't give your phone number without giving something of yourself---why didn't her museum lure him over to her gift shop? Maybe she was waiting for somebody to steal all the originals. Trip the silent alarms.

I stole a couple pillows and slept on the floor.

Punchline

I am an uncomputed sum of what will happen ( c )

Her Moats and Subways

Pawed over a shoebox-load worth of kid and baby photos of hers while she finished up some work from the office in the other room. "If you get bored you can stop." Invading this little cubbyhole or keyhole doesn't run much of a risk of being dull, it swings a little too hard the other way. Ballerina outfits, hoisted on shoulders, backseats, Long Island fun parks, sidewalk under her little shoes looks like reels of film. So is this exhuming or really conducting an autopsy of her childhood or her parent's marriage or places and times she knew or looking in some crystal ball for some misty tarot card of my own spoiled brat kid? I like watching or hearing about pretty much anybody getting used to the shipwreck of starting out, kicking off training wheels. But I play favorites with everything and she's my favorite. Shuffle a stack of these things and the flip book reveals Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, the Bronx, Brooklyn, all of them steering for where she ended up in Manhattan. Most of these places have amounted to road signs for me, articles in newspapers, anecdotes from friends or strangers---basically muffled elevator music in a stuck elevator at the basement of a building I don't know. But there she is, not much more than a stuffed animal (koala bear), being led around. First steps, first words---rumor. Maybe the first big triumph she'd have stashed in her memory might be riding a first bike which must have occurred somewhere between that photo booth shot with her dad and that other Christmas snapshot at Rockefeller Plaza.

What kind of algebra is anybody's life for somebody who wants to tag along? Wall Street dad carrying you on his shoulders---your face swiping so much of his it's spooky and more endearing than it has any right to be---and maybe we oughta retrieve the drawbridge from this castle already. Cats poking around in different houses. Which ones felt like home? Which ones feel a bit like lighthouses now in your memory? Maybe I'll ask you when you finish in an hour two. Maybe you'll shoot me down or deal me from the bottom of the deck like you do sometimes. How early on was the prerequisite for the fella you were looking for, "Someone I'd like to write to"? What brought that on? You're taking a bath in that one and I'm now in possession of child porn.

I got home last night around 2am. There was an opened letter waiting for me on my desk from January 2nd, 1984, written to my mother by my grandmother---my dad's mom---a year and two and a half months shy of her death on St. Patrick's day. I had a Shamrock shake in my hand when I found out. Her handwriting leans a little and if you hold it out at arms length it flows over the page the way a current creases the surface of a river. She had a little river bend at the foot of her property in countryside when she wrote the letter. Now my uncle owns that property and I helped him uproot all the peach and plum and cherry trees and dig all the holes and pound in all the posts and string all that wire and plant all those grapes for a vineyard eight springs ago.

I don't remember much of her, but I recall she was one of those people who had no weaknesses when it came to beginnings, middles, or endings with people. They were seamless and warm and welcome. I caught up with her late in the game, but she wasn't any different with me.

In her letter she was writing to my mother about not feeling bad for ducking out on a Christmas away from the city. Maybe she sensed some kind of rupture that might have taken place and sought to reassure. Only a couple years later my dad moved out, maybe she sensed it. It has all the unwavering bias she always gave to anyone she paid attention to. Holidays are a really rigged big deal in far too many ways. Which, at least for me, was a pertinent subject seeing how I attended another family's (and country's) Thanksgiving Dinner only a klutzy kid handful of days ago. My first time in Jersey.

Maybe it's this annoyingly true thing Dan mentioned before he left for Europe: "If you commit to somebody you worry a lot less than if you don't. Because all you have to worry about are the problems you've got together and figuring them out. But you're free of all the problems surrounding the actual or fantasized commitment bullshit. Which usually are way more and feel way bigger."

Dan's another guy whose got beginnings, middles, and endings down.

I only like the first two---and only if the first feels like the 2nd in all the important ways.

In keeping with lousy endings, there we go...

Ninth and Broadway

No matter how many times I come here I can't scratch the itch of wanting to have a cigarette on every fire escape clinging to those brick buildings, something like wanting to kiss a girl with braces I guess and her streets that I'm well aware are more like lanes in her mental scenery and hobos lumbering against the tide of wealth, resembling far too closely Sinbad and Issac Hayes, wearily dragging past the tourist stampede for the comfort of an alley while out here trench coats pop their collars and light cigarettes inside them against the cruel frigid wind with all the while me a little nervous to take a cab and rush back to her apartment from Penn Station after just arriving maybe because Tolstoy had a good point with the shitty thing about trains being that they destroy the natural distance between people even though it would be fair to say telephones have kept my little long distance deal alive for the last nine months and I'm here doubling up on Thanksgiving even though I'm a little worried all this cold might work one over on the spark which so quickly remade me afraid of the dark only because it wanted to be my nightlight and pretty soon the doorman will call up to her that I'd finally gotten here and maybe it's better to move here because I'm very taken with the idea of having a doorman, I like saying hello and seeya here, sorta mercifully murders my home town in gentle doses, but maybe taking my time getting south isn't such a bad idea cause if it works out this time we're both gonna have to make the decision to move in together either here or there and if she doesn't want to she's not gonna say she doesn't want to because it's far easier to rig this week with passive aggressive explosives or drop a few comments in like suicide bombers and 1+1=3 will very very very quickly diminish and shrivel and wither---better to snap than rust---but she already knows I really really don't need more taxidermy or autopsies on relationships since believe me I'm content to leave several establishments mysteriously lacking plaques and even more mysteriously set ablaze by underground arsonists in my heart commemorating a romantic rendezvous of mine where Cupid's arrows were suction cup tipped and didn't stick to her the way they should've instead just one big lousy jewelry box that I'd like to exchange for nickles in order to shove them up those dirty sentimental memories asses until they'll submit to being a regret and finally sing a sad song in that delicate beautiful way Jeff Buckley hits certain notes as if he knew he wouldn't be around for long before that Ophelia act of his and it makes me sleep a little better than I do currently what with this grinding jaw thing going on lately and we've only covered 15 blocks so far and I'm far too cold and the stars are out and I'm tired of looking at windows when I guess it's time to look out of hers when after all the stars always remind me of the first time I figured them out at seven or eight years old, cause I was convinced instead of everything being a void of darkness maybe the stars were poked like breathing holes in a shoebox which meant the pinpricks showed that outside everything was really bright and I asked my mom and she agreed with me and bought me some liquorish to reward the hunch and the doorman opens the door and I give the apartment number and he calls up says, "Yeah, Brin's here" and I can hear her say, "let him up" and I know her doors already open even before I get in the elevator and hear the Gerswhin serenade on the way up and get a chance to apologize for this drawn out stutter.

Sleepwalking

I heard a secret not too long ago about a couple I know who got married but didn't tell anybody. While I'm a little puzzled about the secretiveness surrounding it, the news was a pleasant surprise. I hate weddings, but I've always been fond of marriages where 1+1=3. This two halves make a whole business is a cheap, rotten lie. They're one of those couples you meet where you like both of them *more* as a result of each other. Perhaps I should say they ARE the couple you like more as a result of each other. From where I'm sitting that's a sneaky ass trick. But there it is: their partner is the best thing I like about both of them. Fuck me. Even if it makes you feel a little sloppy in the arena yourself, when your friends give that sorta thing to you, no matter how hard you try, you can never quite get the ribbon off the gift. But in this case what's special, at least for me, is I was there the first night they saw each other. Maybe you'll get a kick out of the story.

I've known the bride since I was five, but I met the groom on the same night, eight years ago, that she did. On that same night, for the first and only time, she made a pass at me. We've never spoken about it since.

I'd gotten a phone call from a friend asking if I wanted to play with fire that night. I like fire. He'd lined up twenty people to show up in the middle of the forest at a concrete covered over reservoir at midnight with 800 bucks worth of gasoline and various means of using it, along with a tripod and piles of film. I didn't know any of these people except the bride to be. While I have some balls one-on-one, I'm fairly gutless in groups. Everybody was gonna be high on different stuff except the guy who'd invited us, because he wanted to photograph everyone. Nobody was really sure why. Which was EXACTLY when I wanted to go.

The only drug that's ever interested me was acid. I liked it back then. I'd only done it a few times, but eight hours of turning everything into a wet painting appealed to me. This was before I had a first date with a girl on it and watched one of the more horrifyingly twisted things ever created, a film called "Rebel Without A Cause". In case you've ever wondered if the Antichrist exists I can put it to rest that he does indeed: his name is Sal Mineo playing a closeted teen in that movie. If a Hitler can be sewn from a failed pastoral painter, what the man who stabbed Sal Mineo to death saved us from cannot and SHOULD not ever be imagined.

I wasn't really sure how it was going to play out being there. Everybody was out swinging fire from a chain or juggling it in all these arty Hawaiian sorta ways, so I watched for a while. It had that spiritual and ritualized angle to it and the skills on display were fairly impressive. I don't really get my spirituality from Hawaiian luaus but it seems more honest than a lot of other places. But those new age junkie, fast food experience faces get to me at the best of times and there they were on a couple faces.

So I picked up a couple gas cans and Charlie Browned it over to a corner of the reservoir and began spelling my name over vast quantities of cement. My WHOLE name. FOUR names. WITH the fucking hyphen. Then, soul searchingly, in an act of etymological suicide, I crossed my name out. Once completed, I tried that movie trick of dropping my cigarette into the gasoline. And missed. On the second try that irresistible scratch sound of ignition and pure, almost clitoral, domino effect skimming across the ground.

The bride to be walked over. She's small and freckled with straight shiny red hair and was friends with all kinds of pretty girls in school because where they were beautiful she was interesting. The best they could do was be interested...

When we were kids I used to spend a lot of time watching her interact with beautiful girls. Those girls you look at and get handed over a whole wing of the Prado but no lunch included. Their beauty always took something, it didn't give much. Back then it broke your heart even worse because they didn't have a clue what their value was, all they cared about was the asking price. Casing stuff you wanna steal is a rotten habit if you don't know what to do with it. She'd be talking with them, watching them, and it was like watching sunsets stain the ocean. She could soak up beauty better than anyone I ever met. She had Hungarian blood like me, love and beauty are seen as curses to all Hungarians. But they orbited her more than she gravitated to them. They wanted each others' endorsement in a way. You could tell. I was trying for a backstage pass in my imagination. One time she'd told me that girls walked around naked in front of her a lot. She wasn't bragging or provoking with the disclosure. It wasn't matter of fact either. I could see them wanting to. I knew the pretty girls must have gotten a little something extra out of doing it in front of her. The tease of it, maybe the dare too, picking at the scab of her dirty little secret: maybe she'd trade-in being deep for being beautiful. Maybe she wasn't above superficiality at all, just a sore loser. Her body and features never went beyond sculpted cookie dough. Her eyes were arresting, blue had to stick it's finger in an electrical socket to get THAT blue. Maybe because she didn't have it, maybe other reasons too, but she understood beauty. Whereas the boys could smoke it, she mainline that shit. In the early days the pretty girls weren't going home with any of us, they went home with her.

So she's standing there beside me on the cement edge of the reservoir and we're both looking at my writing on fire, the flames like a thousand golden and drunken belly dancers hamming it up. I asked her what everyone else was doing and she grabbed my arm and turned me around. The moon looked like a tipped over container of Whiteout pooling in the night, then trickling off into clouds, stars just poked breathing holes in a shoebox, and all of it hanging off center and off key over the jagged cutout treeline of the forest and all those crates of black Magic Markers that must of been used up to fill in that stolen coloring book sky.

FLASH! Camera guy caught us from a distance and she handed me a bottle of some sorta snot colored liquid in the firelight.

I get really queasy having my picture taken. Probably explains why every photo of me looks a little different. My signature isn't too regular either. Nearly got denied my passport on account of not reliably demonstrating that I'm me. Which I felt sorta flattered about, to be honest. I mean, if it doesn't match, then what? Maybe I don't wanna be the same guy much of the time. Moving targets are harder to hit. Maybe the ID in my wallet isn't doing such a good job convincing me of this identity, ATMs are more forgiving.

"You look like a little kid Brinny. Don't make that face. You DO."

In my whole life, aside from family, only about 5 people have called me by that nickname. All words go in your ear and fill your brain except your name. It gets your heart. So why's she doing that? Leave it alone. Please stop staring at me when I'm vulnerable. Why does defenselessness bring out the mother in girls who in turn sorta wanna molest my little angelic kid? I'll pose it this way: if two girls get raped, the one who fantasized about it is worse off than the one who didn't. She feels responsible. So why am I wearing a leather jacket here? Is that a statement? Okay, okay, okay. Bad thoughts. Don't freak out. LSD is not necessarily an enlightening drug. Everything's fine. You're okay. Let's take a benign topic, Alex. Etiquette for 500. "That's the daily double! How much do you want to RISK?" Jesus Christ, don't fuck with me Trebek. Okay, I'll risk everything. "The duration of time one shakes hands for?" What is, until you make out the person's eye color? "Correct." Yeah, and her eyes are blue. Blue eyes see better in the dark. You know, so why's your wedding ring on that finger. Cause the Romans thought there was an artery running from your wedding finger to your heart. It protected it. ASK HER A SIMPLE, PLAIN, DECENT QUESTION...

"What's in the bottle?" I asked.
"The green fairy."
"Hey! Don't say something goofy like that shit. Fairies are pornstars in G-rated movies."
"Absinthe. Homemade."
I took a swig. "It's heinous."
"It tastes like ass but the wormwood might make this look nicer."

She'd fooled around with the guy taking pictures. I knew that from both of them. They'd told me separately too. They never spoke about it when they were together in front of me. So it was that cool kinda tension fiddling with their vibe. I love that stuff. I love getting two different takes on what lead up to a big thing, how it met the expectations or swooped somewhere else, where they think it's going, all the trapdoors and minefields. I get off on just about anybody falling in love. I want box seats. I sorta got they weren't sure but were enjoying finding out. That's a nice place to find anybody. They'd hooked up after his girlfriend wasn't sure about a full on commitment and recommended they see other people. But then, after seeing the effects, she changed her mind. Too late? Acid for me is like sneaking into a movie theater and swiping a balcony seat. These two and what was going on between them was the main peg the painting of that night hung on for me.

"You wanna see how he's doing?"
"Sure."

We started walking towards him while he was filming a guy in a trench coat, wasted out of his mind, hurling a chain over his head with a beach ball worth of flame attached at the end. Suddenly the guy saw us coming over and opened his arms wide as if to give us a hug. The fire came down crashing onto his head, sparks shot out, and he fell on the ground laughing with the fire creeping up to his cheek. There was smoke coming from his head. He was clowning around with the fire getting closer. He couldn't stop laughing until he started choking on it. It was a disturbing image out there in the open night. I went over and took his sleeve to pull him away but he slapped it away. "I'm fine." He clearly was not. I was deeply worried that physical contact had infected me with lifetimes worth of paranormal psychosis. Then the paranoia took hold of someone dying out here and ambulances or police or crazy neighbors or hobos living in the forest moving in with some kinda confrontational stampede. Our friend put down his camera and ran over and pulled the guy out of the fire and threw him on his back. After a second he rolled over and started crawling toward the fire again. It was clear the guy wanted to take a nap in it. Our photographer told us he'd taken Ketamine after finishing half the bottle of that vile homemade absinthe. He dragged the guy back to the tripod and pitched him over a pile of jackets.

Me and her watched him taking more pictures of people out there. Some were dancing in the moonlight. New people came up the trail and shook hands and joined in. Nobody was sinister. No Mr. Potato head creepy bullshit where accessories mask that everybody is pretty much the same. Everybody was easy to delineate up close and inviting. It was hard to pick who you wanted to walk up to and start talking with. And I liked the shapes of people if they were far away. Nobody really paid attention to the camera flashes. No camera faces or poses.

"He didn't take anything tonight?" I asked her.
"No," she smiled. "He wanted to see all this chaos sober."
"Jesus. Who the hell comes up with something like this? Organizes it?"
"That's what turns me on about him. He's totally in the moment."
"Hmmm," I looked at her and over at him. "Maybe that's it. I *see* it. I do. Maybe you're right. I can't quite put my finger on it. But you're right, he's right here isn't he?"

She left my question alone and turned to me. I kept looking at him taking pictures. I wasn't sure why she was staring at me exactly. Finally I looked down at her.

"I also think that's why you'd turn me on more than anybody."

I took a massive Neal Armstrong moon step backwards and mumbled something about flashlights and band aids and Uncle Tom's Cabin and she said "what?" and I shrugged and kept on and sped the hell up retreating over a slippery plank while ferociously pointing at a patch of some cement until with concern she hollered out about what I was pointing at and I shrugged again, shouted back, "Steinbeck probably! What about next week?" Moonwalked for a second to emphasize the point and finally dug into my pockets and scowled asking what I'd done with my matches. It was an ugly, egregiously cowardly, theatrically horrifying retreat.

Even though I was facing her during the retreat, I couldn't look at her the whole time. I kept her in the peripheral. But I saw her posture change and I felt awful. Then I saw her swivel and in a heartbeat she marched over to the guy passed out on the pile of jackets and grabbed his hand and hauled him into the forest. She lifted a branch and in they went for half an hour doing who knows what. They've been together ever since.

He turned out to speak 8 languages and is getting paid to go for his PHD at an Ivy league school right now.

All Right Then, I'll Go To Hell

My dad was a lawyer up until a couple years ago when he retired. He had a little private practice and worked for the government protecting and defending kids until he decided the system he was a part of did more harm than good for them. He used to joke he fell into the law because he loved office supplies. He *did* love office supplies, but if you happen to know any lawyers and you get a chance to ask them what area of law they'd least like to practice, chances are the kind my dad chose would be near or the very bottom of their list. Most lawyers don't like much that has to do with feelings. Besides, it doesn't pay as well and there really isn't anyone you can engage in pleasant conversation over what you see or deal in on a daily basis. I won't say it drove him to be an alcoholic or a 2 pack-a-day smoker---but it didn't help much either. Once I asked to see files about what parents did to their kids. I was 8 or 9. He got upset and wouldn't show me. So that night I broke into the basement and raided a box of files and found a photo in one case entered into evidence where a screaming kid was hoisted onto an element over a stove. The context was provided in text while the damage was documented with a kid pulling down his jeans and exposing the harm. No face of the little boy, but it said he was my age. It was a confusing moment for me. I wanted to cry from what I'd seen but couldn't, because what seemed more chilling was that my dad *chose* to be intimately acquainted with that aspect of the world. And I couldn't understand why my mother would marry someone who *chose* this world 10 or 12 hours a day when he didn't have to. He couldn't stand most lawyers or the judges who tolerated them. I never saw him in court. I never met one his clients. When I was a baby I slept in his office a handful of times. He had an original framed painting of a Don Quixote-like knight in his office that might be the only heirloom I'd care to have from him. I watched them implode that office building when I was ten and helped move boxes of office supplies to the new office he had. We took in a foster kid for a few months when I was around three, but he called my mother a "fucking bitch" and my dad had to find him another foster home. My dad published a text book for social workers that sold very poorly that he dedicated to my family with a one sentence inscription. It embarrassed all of us, mostly because it was heartfelt. Heartfelt inscriptions in textbooks work on me about as gracefully as Christmas carols (say "Silent Night") in July.

These details made me biased for somebody like Atticus Finch defending a black man in a racist town. It made me biased for Harper Lee telling a story like that. I was even more biased after they showed the movie of "To Kill A Mockingbird" during two English classes in 8th or 9th grade and Gregory Peck played Atticus Finch. I wasn't the only one in class choking up when Atticus lost and was packing up his briefcase while people stood for him and his children had to be reminded to stand along with them. But I never understood what gave that Finch family such clarity about the issue of racism when everybody else in town was sipping the Kool-Aid of hating black people. Atticus had no arc to his goodness. He was born with it. And I remember feeling really annoyed KNOWING that most white people who read the book probably identified with Atticus when most of us would probably have gone along with the mob if we were around. I resented a book that flattered a lie. That profited from a lie. If Harper Lee knew what allowed Atticus to stand for good, it made sense she would have included it. But she didn't. There's no explanation.

That's why God punished Harper Lee with not being able to write anything else : ).

I'm really glad Barack Obama doesn't remind me of Atticus Finch. He reminds me of a cross between Huck Finn and Robert Jordan. UNLIKE Atticus, Huck Finn actually had some fucking soul searching going on to figure out racism was wrong. He got upset he didn't spend enough time in church to understand why slavery was okay and chose hell over giving up his friend Jim, whom he'd decided was a person after all. Obama smokes cigarettes, he smoked weed, and he snorted coke. I don't recall Atticus Finch even requiring the use of a bathroom over the course of the entire novel.

I dunno if you read the NYT on Sunday, but both McCain and Obama mentioned Robert Jordan from "For Whom the Bell Tolls" as one of their major sources of inspiration. Which floored me. McCain took the title of his autobiography from a dying soliloquy of Robert Jordan's, "The world is a fine place, and worth fighting for." Robert Jordan was a fucking communist by the way. A professor from Montana who went off to fight in the Spanish Civil War. Which is sort of a joke because MOST of the Americans who went off to fight in that war didn't look like Gary Cooper. The vast majority were Communist-leaning Jews from New York. I met one of them over Christmas in New York back in 2002. His name was Mo and he had a fancy white suit on. I was trying to read a copy of The Sun Also Rises in Spanish I'd brought back from Havana. He asked what *other* Hemingway stories I knew with a glimmer in his eye. In his eighties by then, but he was 19 or something when he fought. All those kids never shook the wrath most Americans heaped on them when they came back. Mo had seen Hemingway in Madrid on a couple of occasions. Never talked to him.

Robert Jordan spends a fair bit of time contemplating suicide when it's clear he's not going to go home. That it's last time he'll ever see the sky. As in Hemingway's case, Robert Jordan's father had committed suicide. Unlike in Hemingway's case, Robert Jordan doesn't follow his father's lead. He keeps on fighting.

I read this book when I was 20 after making a VERY dumb decision of borrowing a few grand and skipping town without telling anybody to shipwreck into Madrid in the dead of winter. I had no Spanish and didn't know one person and the cab dropped me off at midnight at a pension just off the Gran Via that really was operating as a brothel for transvestite prostitutes. I don't really know what constitutes a nervous breakdown, but I know that I didn't eat or drink or move, let alone leave that room for 3 days. I felt like a wild animal stuck in the jaws of a trap. I smoked cigarettes and I read For Whom the Bell Tolls, the only book I'd brought along that I'd started 50 times without getting past more than a few pages. This time I went straight through. It was the first time a book really made me cry. And after I was finished, something sawed just above the area that was caught in the trap and I could leave again and did.

I'm terrified about what could happen to an American president whose hero is somebody like Robert Jordan. But for now, it just feels so nice that somebody like that could win! Fuck man, Castro learned guerrilla warfare from For Whom the Bell Tolls. He was reading it up in the mountains before he came down and took over Cuba. Shucks...

Bermuda Triangle

She might move here, I might move there to New York. I dunno yet.

So I was thinking about the first day I met this girl and all the ways it coulda gone. Then it gets too much and I have to think about my friends with the girls who had their number. Some of them are still with them, some aren't. Some might never find better. Some might not bother to look for better. Some had ones where they could feel it slipping away and others had it where it felt like a hit and run. I think about this stuff all the time. It's backdrop for me about all the people I care about. Way more than their job or their childhood or their parents or stuff we've done together. Girls have dibs on your life, probably more so when you pretend they don't. I never met a player who hadn't had his heart broke and wasn't trying to get even for it.

Okay, but that first day you had with them. Imagine if it went all the ways it COULD'VE gone. All those poor little Brins out there moping in parallel dimensions on a day like today with all those colored autumn leaves on the ground not looking pretty but more like different species of butterflies poisoned---tennis ball green, cinnamon, scraped knee blood red, honey in sunlight.

Every week or two we talk about it. Go over it. The set up, stakes, implications, subtext, rules, expectations, results, consequences.

On the downside, when you line this shit up from a different place before you've even met you've got a tense, precarious situation. At a certain point when meeting becomes imminent---everything intensifies. First off, whose gonna fly to see who? Central issue: whose turf? What does that say to be the one to fly out? Are YOU the desperate one? Are YOU the sucker?

I've done it both ways. Mixed results. I don't know that you're better off one way over the other. Maybe. If money's a concern you are. Girls are always really nervous about it. WHAT IF HE'S A RAPIST! is what they SAY. It's the knee jerk reaction, but I don't believe it for a second. For starters, it presupposes as if being a rapist wasn't bad enough, apparently you're the kind so demented by a twisted long-range fetish that instead of lurching around a park or an alley, you spend 30 hours on the phone with your prey and successfully seduce them and THEN drop the gauntlet.

The nasty thing about the internet, in terms of dating, is how much in favor it is for women. Which puts the advantage heavily in the guy's camp.

How does meeting somebody on the internet from a new place coincide with what women want? If the sales of romance novels are any indication, quite a lot. Romance novels are all about OBSTACLES. You've delivered plenty right off the bat. Apart from that bowled over by a truck, fuckability, immediacy-factor, anything you're doing with communication that's exciting her starts a domino effect. Right after talking to you, as a stranger, they're violating prohibition. They tell ANYBODY they got off to some STRANGER on the internet their friends give them shit about the dangers of it and the overall tackiness and so on. But that violation is exciting. And their in charge of throwing gasoline on it with their fantasies whenever they want to in private. AND all the dull ass shit and left overs most guys they've encountered works as the best publicity department money could buy for you. Then there's the distance, which brings on an immediate ambivalence. Overcoming ambivalence in these initial stages stokes the fire for years. COULD I LIVE WHERE HE IS? WHAT DOES THAT SAY ABOUT HERE? DO I LIKE WHERE I LIVE? DO I LIKE MY LIFE? WHAT ABOUT A NEW LIFE? I DON'T EVEN KNOW THIS PERSON. WHY AM I EVEN THINKING ABOUT THIS? And if they got turned on by your exchange that distance harmonizes with their longing about what it would be like if there WEREN'T any distance.

But this is just the sexual psychology side of their equation. It's not really addressed directly. Not really.

Which is the next thing: look at nearly every girl on facebook and whether or not they have a boyfriend their profile is set up as a marketing tool at shaping and forming the most desirable template possible for attracting a mate. Once that template attracts a guy (let's say me, for arguments sake) they then get to explore their data with you listening. This dynamic essentially operates like a diary that writes BACK. Even if you've become entirely uninterested by the guy, he might have some useful tips about what's dull or engaging or tantalizing about you that you should emphasize.

Okay, so all that's clicked and you've decided YOU'RE gonna fly over to meet him (me). The trouble here is that the main reasons you've decided to go you're embarrassed telling anybody but him and NOW when you actually meet him everything, in a fashion, has to start all over. A huge list of shit has to be met first: smell, movement, appearance, touch, voice, manner, nerves. I'm not really sure if it's a shopping list in the first place that allows people to fuck or fall in love---but the pressure's on when at least through communication you feel the need to explore NEW methods of communication.

After I picked her up from the airport and drove her to a little clearing near the ocean to have a cigarette, my girl took nearly two hours to even LOOK at me. The entire drive she stared straight ahead so I was naturally forced to switch the radio to 96.1, the Asian station, pulverizing us with Gatling gun Cantonese sprinkled with English slogans, "Brain Freeze at 7-Eleven", "Janet Jackson eeez BACK!". Nothing could make her look over or laugh and break the tension. The whole while I'm sitting there flooring it wondering if everything about this experience is a completely wrong for her.

It's an aggressive set-up because there's no middle ground. It has to succeed big or become a nightmare. Nobody goes for such a rigged set-up unless they're really unhinged in the first place.

So you bring her back and say some bullshit about finding a wine from Burgandy that for some reason smells like girl-smell. You load up the fireplace. You get used to her voice again even though it's not coming through a phone but bouncing off walls. You see her looking around at stuff you tried to describe. You shouldn't have let her read your book. She still hasn't mentioned whether or not she liked it. This is not likely an oversight. Big question, has she already decided whether or not she's into kissing you. What about fucking you? I'm not twelve here. It's far too awful to contemplate making out with her and NOT fucking her for the implications. Cause you're gonna have to qualify it. In all the tedious trivial ways she's keeping score but in all big ways nobodies keeping score on this shit---BUT EVERYTHING STILL COUNTS. Everything. Right now. In the pauses when she's looking at, rather than through, that window. What the hell's she thinking about? Probably how strange THIS is. But the fireplace is impressive. The comment about what a gypsy tarot reader mother and a lawyer dad produce in the psyche of their child was not a wise thing to give her. She didn't need to know THEY are responsible for your wiring.

What can we determine by the manner in which she's sipping? Is she afraid to get drunk? Is she examining the fluid for cloudiness implying I've slipped something in it? Does she even remotely agree that it tastes like woman-smell?

Eye contact: WONK.

Spotlights.

If She Snores

The fat girl in the doorway is actually the last photograph taken of me before my sex change. I had it the following afternoon.

Actually my hunch is that fat girl up in the photo is probably recreating some slumber-party event that Emily Dickinson lived through over at her place in Amherst. The kind of event that forged and baptized her as a poet forever. Just a hunch. I feel traumatized LOOKING at it.

It's winter and somehow reality's the same only with a little more emphasis. All these little greasy details I'm picking at with the dirty utensils of my brain:

I tried to write her a letter today. I had all these questions lined up. Or I thought I did. Stuff she could tee off on. Wheelhouse material for her. Girls get asked a lot of stuff all the time, so when you come up with some fresh original questions she's never heard before about herself she probably figures SHE'S the girl to raise some NEW questions in your life. And she might be right. I'm not talking a one-night stand or a revenge fuck scenario---I mean two people with chemistry who've had a little time together. It's another hunch, but I think this is the sort of stuff maybe they think about while giving you sexual favors. When you know they're going that extra mile. NOT because they know you love them. It's because it makes them feel better than their friends.

In the letter I was trying to figure out if everybody's heart is a pawnshop of the detritus from everybody we care/d about, if all her people were herded into a room at one time, did she think I knew enough about her to return their items? Could she return mine to their rightful owners?

What exactly makes HER my big fat redeemable coupon and me hers, anyway?

Whose responsible for all the dents, ditches, gutters, sewers, training wheels, rats, unworn baby shoes, crop circles, tarot cards, affidavits, hornets nests, trapdoors, hedge mazes, daughters, wives, mothers, mistresses, priestesses, princesses, widows, turned tricks, busted etch-a-sketches, scattered building blocks, wine stained teeth, dirty sheets, stolen bouquets, penthouse balconies, limos with nowhere to go, whirlpools, parking meters, lost grocery lists, copper glowing street lights, carpeted hallways, secret gardens, invisible inks, fountains, burned libraries, video game fairies giving my little hero-self life from a heart shaped box, scars, fortresses, moats, intercoms, Ivory towers, safety deposit boxes, jukeboxes, questionnaires, horoscopes, morning breath, cat naps, uniforms, masks, Ophelias napping in the pond, Sphinxes, belly dancers, mermaids, aquariums, sticker books, gum under desks, alleys, statutory holidays, proms, birthday cakes, tree houses, childhood files, family vacations, bridges, suicide notes, crossword puzzles, love letters, dungeons, convertibles, islands, outhouses, umbrellas, pinups, bed hair, hubcaps, science experiments, blowup dolls, motels, cookbooks, backseats, private petting zoos, snores, posters on your wall, flowerbeds, summer camps, explosives made from commonly found household items, calenders, long weekends, Indian summers, toothbrushes---YES I've fantasized about if you had an older and younger sister---speeding tickets, cracked windows, broken vows, prenuptial agreements, odor eaters, crib deaths, Franklin ovens, plungers, suction cup cupid arrows, rest homes, Yoko Onos, stutters, field trips, flat tires, pacts, Indian givers, everlasting gob stoppers, tanning salons, no-tag backs, coloring books, lottery tickets, instead-of-living-together

-maybe-we-should-consider-living-next-door considerations, signatures, contracts, cataracts, orphans, Orpheuses, airports, casinos, autopsies, nervous breakdowns, near misses, ghosts, get out of jail free cards, Monopoly, Risk, IOUs, the fact that you look like a koala bear half the time and you're a little sensitive about it???

Hmmm?

Laputa

Last year a Cuban on the flight over to their hometown told me a story. When Che left Cuba for the last time he changed his identity and radically altered his appearance in order to sneak out to Bolivia. But he had dinner with his family one last time. His wife introduced him to his children as "Raoul" and they didn't recognize him. When dinner was served, out of habit, he sat at his usual place at the head of the table. Instantly one of his small children confronted him and grabbed the chair. "You cannot sit here. My father sits here." So Che politely stood and left it empty while his wife smiled.

I'm pushing thirty this June and it embarrasses me that I don't know more of these kinds of stories. I should.

Whenever I touchdown in Havana I never have a place to stay. That isn't especially specific to Havana actually. I hate reservations. But Havana IS one of the only places I know that rewards you for having no plans and just hustling. All I'd lined up for my first week after leaving home was going to the movies with two Cuban girls, one on a stopover in Toronto, the other in Havana. I'd never gotten around to catching a movie at the Charlie Chaplin theater and I didn't feel like going alone, I wanted a stranger.



The cab dropped me off on the Malecón near the Hotel Nacionale. It was that strange hour between the sun sinking out of view and the street lights turning on. Still warm out as the colors drain and begin smear and stain stuff, in this case the rooftops in old Havana behind me and ahead of me the whole chocolate Christmas calendar of hurricane bruised apartments skirting the edge of the sea. Bike taxis hustled rides while the fisherman worked barefoot and shirtless, smoking unfiltered cigarettes next to a bucket of today's catch pulled in. Some work alone with rum, others in groups with conversation. Jineteros (jockeys---as in, RIDING the tourists) keeping an eye out for an easy wallet while jineteras arch their backs and hiss, "Warr joo frawm?". I prefer their guesses to my honest answer. Kids too busy flirting with each other to mind another gringo looking around for a stall to buy some cigarettes and a juice box of rum with a sipping straw. Lots of people alone walking, turning over decisions made a little easier with the proximity to the sea. Old women with sacks of candy holding out fist fulls of lollipops and bags of popcorn to families sitting or leaning against the seawall near lone musicians with trumpets or guitars. Tourist cruise ships off in the horizon, some warships too. Out beyond the perfect line where the sky and sea kiss, only 90 miles, three days float if you make it, and pay dirt of the whole shitload of Florida relatives. Get lost thinking about anything and some wave might wash over and soak all your baggage to hell. Not that I ever have much. Nobody gives you shit if you wear the same shirt all week if you have to. And everybody likes to swap.

Back in 2000, the first time I saw Cuba, five minutes after arriving I went over to the Habana Libre (which used to be the Hilton until Castro rolled in and set up government headquarters on the top two floors) and asked everybody milling around outside where the "maricon" was, not knowing I was using the vulgar pronoun for queer. Also not knowing that this was the unofficially designated cruising area of town. I do most of my research on the fly. Anyway, after a quick glance at the policeman on the street corner I was ignored. I approached somebody else, "How do I find the maricon please? Can you show me?" This woman was more helpful. I was pointed in the direction of a handful of homosexuals across the street at an ice cream stand and when I seemed confused by her advice someone corrected my vocabulary and walked me around the corner until I could see what I was looking for for myself.

Then it turns into a wet painting like this:


And the girls with price tags offer a little company, whatever you want, but I'm always too shy to go for it. It's too easy to get thinking about the people you've been with where you're just a stepping stone for someone hopefully a better fit. Likewise them for you. Musical chairs was just practice for it and for death's role in things too.

Beginning of November in this place where the seasons tap a shoulder and don't mind if you don't pay attention. Whenever you get lost all you need is the sea to get back on track. I have one of the worst senses of direction on the planet but this is redeemed by the golden rule I discovered of asking only the most attractive local women for directions. It's fun going out of your way to get as lost as possible as the purpose of your day---or life for that matter. Nearly everybody I've ever met I found just asking for directions.




I met her in a hotel lobby but she didn't come up to my room until the second night. Now she was still back in my country while I'd arrived in her hometown. There she was in the lobby dressed up:

"What deed I tell joo. No chemistry."
It was our joke about each other leading up to meeting. But I wasn't sure if she was joking this time. And I knew she could tell.

The human voice is really fucking creepy when you think about it. Usually you don't. But It's not really PART of the human body, it's sorta BETWEEN the human body. Which makes everybody a ventriloquist. Whatever thing possesses the voice sorta CONTROLS the rest of the body. Or it feels like it. Some bodysnatcher-effect.

But her voice was familiar cause I'd talked with her a bunch of hours leading up to this. I was used to her voice, excited and comforted by it. My favorite ingredients with anybody. Used to it singing or falling asleep or laughing or flirting---leaving her movie trailers to my imagination from the still images I'd seen. This is how her mouth moves when she talks. How her hands gesture along with it, fluttering like wild trapped birds over her head as all Cubans use them. I was used to her letters. Everything's a conversation, the SAME conversation really.

That's why even if I get to fuck you it's still gonna be the same argument, guapa. Stop glaring at me. Stop trying to rattle me when you already know I'm nervous. You're gonna force me to unleash many many 4th rate Marlon Brando facial expressions. Don't make me do it Carmen Miranda...

"Look at deez silly face. You're nervous. I can understand. No chemistry and you're sad you came all this way for nothing."
"Did you eat something?"
"Stop making your goofy faces. I'm hungry. You told me to come hungry."
"What are you hungry for?"
"Reebs."
"What the hell is that?"
"Reebs."
"I don't know that word in Spanish."
"It's not Spanish. REEEEBS. Puerca, what you always call me. Barbecue sauce. REEEBS stupido!"
"Ribs?"
"That's what I said."
"Sure you did."

Then leaving the restaurant with her licking her fingers clean, snow under her feet, wandering around the corner and spotting a movie theater. We find our seats and during the credits she sings along with the song in the movie, really belting it out, until a guy down the aisle turns around and tells her to shut up. She freezes stiff. Make or break time. I have enough things to worry about on my own without French Canadian testosterone interference, so I get up out of the seat and approach him. This settles affairs. She starts singing again at operatic volumes. He leaves. I reach for her hand and try for a kiss. Shot down. Wallow a little while until I catch the breeze from her batting her hair straight out of a mexican soap opera. Try again and do better. I love making out at the movies in the dark.

But it's a strange feeling consummating something over the page, on the phone, then in person. Every time you're translating something into a different language... it's this goofy shell game in many many cases.


I recognized this new girl in front of the Yara movie theater in a yellow dress, school books under her arm from the university just down the street. Very sweet, open face. She looked embarrassed but it was because they couldn't show the festival movies instead only some Kevin Costner movie and wondered if I minded. I said I didn't. It turned out it didn't matter anyway. Cubans treat the movies as an interruption on their conversations anyway. They yell over whatever the American movie stars are pretending to be concerned about so we just sat there and talked under the screaming at the screen. Got an ice cream across the street at Coppelia's after the show.

Ferris Wheels vs Roller Coasters

This is an abomination. Push pause immediately.

I can't, Gerry. It's Tecmo Bowl. There's no *pause*. I'll have to call a timeout.

So call a timeout, tabernac!

If you were paying attention you'd know I'm in the middle of making a comeback. I only have one timeout left in the whole game. I have to save it. You're cheating a twelve year old kid.

Save it for what? You're down 28 to nothing in the third quarter against a 70 year old man who has never PLAYED Nintendo before.

My offense has the weapons to come back.

Call a timeout or I shut the game off.

Fine. I called a timeout. WHAT?

Are you listening to me?

Jesus. YES.

Are you aware the San Francisco 49ers have a punter on the payroll?

So?

Do you know what his job description is?

I don't care what his job description is. If I could I'd fire his ass.
We'd be the only team in the NFL with no punter.

His job is to bail you out on fourth downs and assist the gaping holes in your Castro Street defense.

What's Castro Street?

Where all your defensive players spend their nights. Trust me. Tabernac, use your punter once in a while.

My punter's job is to ride the pine and watch Joe Montana hit Jerry Rice for a 95 yard touchdown pass. And then another. And ANOTHER.

You'd still be a touchdown away from my lead.

We'd get more.

Joe Montana can't wipe his ass. You haven't completed a pass the whole game.

You cheat and look at my controller when I call my plays.

Look at my driver's license. I'm legally blind, tabernac! You throw hailmarys every time!

It doesn't mean you have to PICK IT every time.

You run your offense like I run my love life. We have the same offensive coordinator. Where has it gotten us? You're down 28 points and I've been alone for the last 9 years.

I don't punt. Punting is for queers.

Is it, now? Well, well, well---Mr. San Francisco 49ers is a burgeoning homophobe. On top of everything that ought to set your reputation back at least five whole minutes.

I'm always gonna go for it on fourth downs, Gerry. That's how I win.

That's how you LOSE. And what other twelve year old kid do YOU know who needed to borrow seventy-five dollars to payoff their Tecmo Bowl Nintendo debt at school?

He cheated by looking at my controller like YOU do.

YOU CALL THE SAME PLAY EVERY DOWN!

So?

So is this the philosophy you'll use everywhere else in life?

Maybe.

Only the best looking girl?

Uh, YEAH. As if I'm not taking Murphy to Playland this summer. As if I'm not gonna kiss her on the roller coaster.

Roller coaster? You don't kiss a girl on the roller coaster.

Why the hell not?

Because everybody knows you do it on the Ferris wheel.

I hate the Ferris wheel.

You hate the Ferris wheel?

Ferris wheels remind me of chemotherapy.

But they stop at the top, tabernac!

Stop calling me fucking tabernac, Gerry.

They stop at the top! And they wobble and creak and you're up high and she's been waiting for you to kiss her. With roller coasters you're liable to puke on her if you tried to kiss her.

I'm not kissing Murphy thinking about fucken chemo treatments.

Who do you know whose gone through chemo?

Mom forced me to watch "Beaches". And the only thing worse than watching somebody go through chemo is watching Bette Midler turn on the faucets and belt out that "Wind underneath my wings" chemo lesbian incestuous love song bullshit.

And have you ever BEEN on a Ferris wheel?

Fuck no.

But you're quite sure, if you did---

Which I WON'T---

That you couldn't kiss this Murphy---is this Murphy some red head Irish boy?

It's her last name!

I'll take your word for it. So you couldn't kiss this Murphy because in your mind you'd hear Bette Midler singing a chemo lesbian incestuous love song in your head?

Yeah.

But on a roller coaster you see yourself scoring with this Murphy?

She's not THIS Murphy. She's MURPHY. There's only One.

What about Eddie Murphy?

Not even close. If you saw her Gerry you'd get it.

So you see yourself going for it and having her as your first kiss?

Sorta.

Sorta?

I'm nervous.

Really. What happened to Mr. No Punter? Mr. Hail Mary? Mr. Always Goes For It On Fourth Down?

I'm scared to ask her.

You're afraid she cheats? She looks at your controller and knows all your plays?

She knows I like her. I'm pretty sure she does.

What's the problem?

Put it this way---

No, put her as something I understand. Put her as restaurant, Brinny.

What does this Murphy serve at Murphy's?

As a restaurant? What does that mean?

Is it HOW she serves what she serves, or WHAT she serves that makes you scared?

Man...

Why do you look so sad?

Because.

Because what?

If Murphy had a restaurant called Murphy's I don't think anybody could eat there.

Why?

For starters the reputation is too intimidating.

What's her reputation?

She's like the eighth wonder of the world, Gerry.

No she's not. I saw the Eighth Wonder of the World last week on Saturday Night's Main Event fight Hulk Hogan.

Nah, not like Andre the Giant. Like the real wonders. The Sphinx or something. The Pyramids. I dunno. One of those things you can't really do much with besides just look at or something.

What are the waitresses like at Murphy's?

I dunno.

What is the hostess like when you walk through the front door at Murphy's?

I dunno, Gerry. I think she's a virgin, so I guess nobody knows what that stuff is like.

You KNOW she's a virgin?

Sorta. Some guy tried to fool around with her but he told me she was frigid.

What is frigid?

She doesn't put out.

Oh.

So I THINK she's a virgin.

Does it matter to you?

Not really.

Take her to dinner first.

Why?

Do you know why people ask people they're interested in to dinner?

Not really.

Because you can learn a lot about somebody by how they eat.

Yeah, but then if I picked her up I'd have to shake her hand or something in front of her mom. I hate that shit.

Shaking hands is a nice custom.

I hate it.

Do you know how long you need to shake hands for?

No. Did somebody SAY how long you have to?

Yes.

Who?

I don't know.

At least you admit it.

You shake hands with someone until you notice their eye color.

Really?

Yes.

Good, then I don't have to do it. I already know Murphy's eye color. Can we finish the game now?

Okay.

Hawaii Interstate Highway

"I've already told you: the only way to a woman's heart is along the path of torment. I know none other as sure." ---Marquis de Sade

Stop shaking your head. Gimme a chance to explain...

I like stealing stuff. I case every woman who catches my eye trying to see what they're hiding. You can't give your phone number without giving something of yourself. Every little hair on a woman, even the peach fuzz, is a fuse.

I watch some guys staring at their girls like kids staring at a candy store window. Which gets me wondering, along with the girl in most cases, is he making that sweet expression at *her* or to himself in the reflection? So the girl looks over at me and sees the crowbar in my eyes. I can't hide it. Fortunately it's not WHAT you do but WHO you do it with. I find my markets.

But every time it feels the same when it sticks with somebody. I pick the lock and break into their life and instead of trying to steal everything, I end up wanting to move in.

I'm in full-on burglary-mode when all of a sudden I find myself liking the way you crookedly hang that painting, the way your bookshelves lean, where you dogeared pages or underlined stuff, your pajamas, that you're a packrat for every letter ex's sent you, sticker books and photo albums, you kept a lock of your hair from when you were six and now your hair's a different color, you had a street portrait artist embellish your likeness when you were going through an ugly phase and everybody pretended you were that pretty, you were entirely frigid with one boy and put out on the first date with another and you don't know why the difference, you want a dad and your cute little boy at the same time out of a husband---oh yeah---AND the guy you'd risk all that for to cheat with, you want to have your blueprints for the rest of your life approved of, you want your history to be a rumor that YOU spread, you want me to cast my net at you swinging over and over and never get more than half your butterflies, you want to be my private petting zoo, I want a muse who fucks like a whore, you want to be able to hurt me and build me up, you want me to trudge through your sewers and step out onto your penthouse balconies, you want to take your top down in conversation and and have my breeze run through your hair, you want me to contemplate every guy who ever wanted to get into your pants, you want jealousy, you want me to be loyal but only because you're amused that I'm a born serial-cheater, you want our sex life to be a cookie jar (actually that's projection, I admit it), you want to get our plans on wheels, you want somebody with no plans, you want Monopoly on weeknights and Risk on weekends, you want somebody who can fight but also listen, a caveman with a rather daunting reading list, you want every smart person you know to feel castrated next to goofy imaginative things we've come up with, you want me to be fucked-up but fairly lucid, you want relativity here and there but stuff that comparison can't touch other places, you want love letters and suicide notes, you want your melody to feel like a symphony, you want to be my God and have me as your bible at dinner parties, you want me to accept that you have an abiding, unadulterated crush on Adrian Brody despite the fact that both our mothers are Hungarian, you want to be my fire escape---more architecture than utility---and you can still fall in love 10,000 times but it has to be with ME, over and over, like some karma that slums it on spin cycle, and we can be off-key, and every soliloquy can be one long stutter, and why the hell am I inventorying all this shit, oh yeah it's Thanksgiving, so do we have a deal?

Deal.

I got a phone call last week that fucked around with my weekend even though I didn't do much besides reread Cannery Row and some Kafka diary entries and move over some pavement percolating some new stories and talk on the phone to S. It threw a phantom weekend in of what MIGHT have happened. But no dice.

Long distance relationships open like pop-up books, hers is in Manhattan. I like my pop-up book.

"What are you doing this weekend? I'll come out and see you," she said. You cheat on every girl you were ever with hearing a Cuban accent. It puts out over the phone.

But hesitation shuts the whole fucker down.

"You don't sound excited. Is it because of the..."

"Yes, guapa."

"Then I go to Miami."

"I'm sorry."

"Change the subject."

"To what?"

"I have to go."

"That's not changing the subject."

"Jes eet eez."

Click.

Rosetta Stone

In a few weeks, on the anniversary of Camilo Cienfuegos' disappearance back in 1959, all the school kids in Cuba will throw flowers into the sea or, if they're inland, in rivers for him. His plane went down in waters near Havana and nobody ever found the wreckage. Che named his son after him. I nearly got to meet this Camilo Guevara last year as a marine archaeologist friend of mine over there knows him. Didn't pan out. You'd like the original Camilo's face, especially under the huge hat he wore. He was the last man to join the 82 members on the boat that Castro led to kickoff the revolution. They only let him on because he was skinny. His smile just has a way of forgiving you for everything you've ever done. It's everywhere over there. I was thinking about you checking in over here today. I had some wood that I'd left out in the rain that was a little disagreeable in the fireplace. Lighter fluid proved persuasive and the cat came over to keep me company. He has a nifty habit of dancing around every time the wood crackles. After a while he regains his composure and settles down again and reads over my shoulder. Marquez keeps his attention. I had all these little points written on the back of both hands to mention tonight but the rain smeared them. Now I have to wing it. It's weird writing when you talk on the phone everyday. It has this sorta lame perfunctory feeling, like kissing under Mistletoe or posing for a photo. One time an ex told me all my knee-jerk, 3rd rate Brando mirror and camera faces never carried over to real life. She enjoyed this because it meant I'd never know what faces she'd fallen for. That was something I was turning over in the rain this afternoon: is everybody rigged to fall in love with somebody? By *somebody*, obviously I mean YOU. By *everybody*, obviously I mean me. I walked a long way watching clouds as if they were people I knew sleeping. I want a mask of the face of everybody I've ever known. Maybe a few from everybody. The kid mask, grownup, and geezer. I want to mount them on a wall. From the first face to the last. When I was a kid I had this deal with crushes, I always made a pact with myself to see their face as the last thing before I fell asleep. I have a lot of trouble getting used to faces. I figured this practice would help me get over the real dozy numbers so I could at least have a hope in hell of not giving the whole game away every time they asked me for an eraser or what time it was. But it made the problem worse. Too many people grow on me. I look around for neighborhoods I think you might like around here. Ones without perfume. Nothing in this town has any baggage or childhood files except one place, which is all junk halos under humming neon motel signs. But there are a bunch of pockets. This one's close to the park that steals the show when the leaves turn color. That one looks like it's made of LEGO and I'm just showing it to you because someone paid to live there. I lived in this area for a year and if you're high enough up in some apartment all the others look like chocolate Christmas calendars at night when the windows glow in the dark. It's weird trying to pick. There was one neighborhood where the only thing I knew about it was one summer afternoon five years ago I fucked a girl who stole the key to the roof of the building 16 stories up. You had the whole city up there, off one edge of the roof the forest was a doormat and everywhere else the mountains spun in different shades of blue all the way across the milky sky until the after-dinner-mint colored skyline of the city looked like a sandcastle. Everything's glass here. Sunsets catch it occasionally and you get molten smothering over the whole town in a tidal wave of glint. Where else is some pay dirt? A lot of the homes have a weird way of welcoming you with, "Hi, when are you leaving?" Let's avoid those. Traffic lights wink continuously, because this place goes to sleep at 10pm. Power wires and bus lines and telephone polls are sheet music. Logos and insignias all over the place stamps to a shitty love letter or suicide note depending on how you look at capitalism. They all talk about themselves in the third person. Try to keep a straight face. Horoscopes on the bus, revolving door eyed pedestrians, train wrecks of guilty cigarettes in ashtrays, the zoo is still there but it's extinct, my ex worked at that tanning salon across the street... Yeah, but it doesn't matter anyhow. You'll be using my hometown as chaser for Havana.