THE DOMINO DIARIES

New Article on Film in Vancouver Paper

2011-08-26T07:33:00.001-07:00

http://www.theprovince.com/sports/Hero+traitor+lost+legend/5311546/story.html

Interview with Teofilo Stevenson on Muhammad Ali Fight That Never Was

2011-08-24T17:19:00.000-07:00

http://bleacherreport.com/articles/818653-muhammad-ali-vs-teofilo-stevenson-and-the-fight-that-never-was

New Boxing Articles

2011-08-22T20:29:00.000-07:00

http://bleacherreport.com/articles/813326-freddie-roach-on-mike-tyson-pacquiao-amir-khan-and-rigondeaux

http://bleacherreport.com/articles/814130-what-made-arturo-gatti-great

http://bleacherreport.com/articles/812131-dream-match-mike-tyson-vs-felix-savon-in-their-primes

http://bleacherreport.com/articles/816112-tommy-morrison-collides-with-balboa

New Rigondeaux interview on Newstalk.ie

2011-06-11T07:17:00.000-07:00

Interview on Newstalk.ie Irish Radio about Hero Traitor Madness...

Tourist Information

2011-05-16T13:39:00.000-07:00

New essay about behind the scenes of making: Hero Traitor Madness: The Guillermo Rigondeaux Story...

http://therumpus.net/2011/05/tourist-information/

Interview for Hero Traitor Madness: The Guillermo Rigondeaux Story on Boxing Scene

2011-05-14T16:18:00.001-07:00

Interview with Mr. Richard Cloutier on boxingscene.com about my film:

http://www.boxingscene.com/hero-traitor-madness-guillermo-rigondeaux-story--39169

Hero Traitor Madness: The Guillermo Rigondeaux Story trailer...

2011-05-13T09:48:00.000-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0ZVbgDG67Q

The Domino Diaries: La Lucha

2010-01-18T11:31:00.001-08:00

http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/bfriesen/2010/01/the-domino-diaries-la-lucha/

The Domino Diaries: I, II, III, IV

2010-01-05T23:05:00.000-08:00

Some chapters from my new book. Have a look:

http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/bfriesen/2009/11/domino-diaries/

http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/bfriesen/2009/11/the-domino-diaries-chapterii/

http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/bfriesen/2009/12/the-domino-diaries-chapter-iii/

http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/bfriesen/2009/12/the-domino-diaries-cuban-elevator-music-and-origami-shadows/

Clocks In A Casino

2009-03-29T23:48:00.000-07:00

I went to the fights Friday night. It was held inside a casino. The ceiling was made up to look like a starry night sky, presumably to balance off the feeling of being in a gutter looking up at it. Walking through all the tables and rows of slot machines felt like walking through a garden of weeds. For some reason it made me think about the irony of Nick Drake overdosing on anti-depressants. I don't know why. Pretty much the only thing worse than Las Vegas is places aspiring to be Las Vegas; places heavily populated by stereotypes and aspiring-stereotypes. Here's your paint-by-numbers scene: Security guards, roulette wheels spinning, dealers shuffling, slot arms jerking, cocktail waitress heels poking carpet, private poker rooms, 24 hour VIP parking, high roller tables, women dressed up, stacked chips, trays, Wayne Newton signed poster on the wall, fake tits brushing up against elbows connected to a bet doubling-down. I can't handle bets---I like dares.

A boxing student I teach bought me a ticket as a present. His dad was a family doctor who got in trouble a long time ago over some off-label stuff he was giving his patients and the medical board held a hearing about it that ruined his reputation even though he was completely exonerated. First he jumped off the side of a mountain but screwed up and didn't die but shattered his leg and permanently had a limp and a cane as a souvenir. A little while later he took some pills to commit suicide and succeeded when my boxing student was 29, the age I am now.

We watched eight fights in a row after the two national anthems were savagely gang-raped by some 3rd Rate Tone Deaf Scarlett Johansson Wanna-Be Popular Country Star's crumpled notes and sawed off-key embrace.

It was lousy boxing and I felt a little mopey and blue taking it in, but it was still kinda beautiful watching for the reason boxing always is: fighters are always far more afraid of being embarrassed than they are of being hurt. That always gets to me. And that other catch to the whole thing that the cowards and the heros both feel the same and it's just what they do that makes them different. That one does a number on me too. It's good to be a sucker sometimes, if you can afford to.

It made me miss my little gym in old Havana that's reduced to a little postage stamp to this letter.

Zapruder Film

2009-03-26T04:59:00.001-07:00

"I'm beginning to feel that no author has the right to tear his characters apart if he doesn't know how, or feel that he knows how (poor sucker) to put them together again. I'm tired - my God, so tired - of leaving them all broken on the page with just 'The End' written underneath."

JD Salinger, 1943

I come back to that doozy all the time. I have a taste for stuff laid out all pure and complicated. Salinger has a way of way of molesting you with his wisdom and making everybody else's grope feel a little too vanilla for a while. I'm still trying to figure out where you leave them or where they leave you when you're broken and it's *not* on the page. Which makes sense. I've missed a million connecting flights since pretty early I found out fiction has to make sense where life doesn't. That's why on most levels I can tell my nephew Mathew that I'm five years old too and he has to think for a second, with an impressive little scowl, before he tells me I'm lying. I tell him to ask his dad and, sure enough, my story is backed up and poor Mathew is left scratching his blond little head. I'm waiting until he understands I'm not conning him to see what he makes of it.

My best friend got engaged the other day. I'd written a story about him a while back that I hadn't got around to finishing and sorta left it like a kite rattling around in a windstorm. Most of my kid stories feel like that---except usually some girl has a cozy grip on my string along with a pair of gleaming scissors in her other hand. This story does too, but not for my friend. Dan never missed any of his connecting flights I don't think. But a girl in this story did her best to try...

DH Lawrence was bonkers over the idea of love being a stench rotting in people's noses. A stench. Basically whether or not you mind kissing her armpit on a first-date (I wear "Secret" deodorant just in case).

There are plenty of old Hungarian folk songs my mother used to hum around the kitchen whose lyrics she left out because they all described love as a curse. Figures. If you asked for a jacket for Christmas from your Hungarian sweetheart they'd give you a vest and cut off your arms, "Dare's jee-or jaggat, Bweeny." So what is the stench? The back of everybody's baseball card? All the headlines and fine print wafting off somebody.

Which is to say, courtesy of one long-ass, belabored stutter, that's how this story happened on a few different levels. So as an engagement present I figured I'd dust this fucker off and give Dan its kite-string and a pair of scissors seeing that his lady swiped my soul-mate so that he could moonlight as a husband.

Zapruder Film

Before ninth grade math's first buzzer, the mute, top-of-the-class, allergic-to-eye-contact foreign exchange student handed me Steph's note without even slowing down her pencil. The note read: WHOS GONNA BE THE FIRST TO GET LAID IN OUR GRADE???

Of our two week note passing spree this was by *far* the grandest question posed. I glanced over with approval but Steph just stared straight ahead, chewed her gum (Carefree), blew a massive bubble toward the empty teacher's desk until it popped and splattered over her lips and one cheek. I was obsessed with her mouth. The kid in the desk in front of her looked back and she winked at them as her tongue went after the gum stuck to her cheek.

I tapped the exchange student's shoulder, leaned over her desk and flashed some dimple placing the note over her notebook's opened page. She pretended not to appreciate it. I waited until I saw her eyes move over the note. She read it twice and shook her head the second time.

Ok. So who's your horse? I asked.
Shhhh.
Class hasn't even started yet!
Shhhh!
Nobody shushes me the way you do.

Steph threw an eraser at me. Don't be mean to her, she mouthed.

Buzzer rang. Last few kids trickled in. Two girls who shared the same name crammed and grinded against each other through the door. One formerly chubby now conspicuously anorexic in baggy clothes that had once been a couple sizes too-tight. The other with a hearing-aid after a fight with a brain-tumor a few years before. Death was circling and was gonna take her a couple years later. She'd get a plaque next to a planted tree. They slid into their chairs and opened their books as a few kids around class silently observed and considered them for a second. I noticed a few doing it. They noticed me noticing. Steph threw a crumpled piece of paper that whacked me in the temple and I tried to get back on task trying to answer her question. I felt a little woozy. You had to keep your head down, there was a lot of crossfire around here.

We're secondary characters in a lot of people's lives. The brushstroke that sums us up usually isn't all that pretty. Cheap, tabloid headlines mostly. Cancer and anorexia were pretty heady words lit up on a kid's marquee, especially when things are so fucked up they can't hide it but still try to. It leaves an impression. People tended to resent stains at my school. Invisible janitors cleaned up all our shit and graffiti and vandalism.

Teacher charged into class wearing gym strip. This was not unusual. Nut-hugging shorts the most famous article of the ensemble. Always a little puzzling whether the result was a desired effect or just a generational thing. He pulled down a chalkboard, turned and faced it displaying a considerable wedgie to us, started writing instructions. There were still wild, unrestrained sounds in class. After a second he crushed the chalk against the board and paused, slowly looked over his shoulder, stared at the backs of a huddled group of girls giggling and moaning encircling the desk of a pony-tailed, lisp-ridden brunette smiling closed-lipped at the back of class. They were all smiling back there with whatever news was going around but the lispy-brunette was the only one with enough composure to have her mouth closed. Which meant, as far as I could tell, she was the one dishing.

Math teacher squared his shoulders to them, clasped both sides of his waist just over the elastic band of his nut-hugger trunks, cocked his eye brows as the big lead-up to his trademark...

A kid jumped in for the alley-oop, fully loaded with spot-on mannerisms and delivery: Uhhhh, ladies? UHHHH... shut-up. Yeah, shut-up.

Teacher glanced over at the kid. Not bad, he said.
Don't mention it.
Timing, tone, cadence, tempo. Nicely done.
You're a pillar in the math and physical education departments, sir.
I appreciate that. Girls, really. Girls. GIRLS. What the hell are we doing back there? You're a little young for a sewing circle aren't you?

They dispersed and went back to their seats but still had their attention glued to whatever they were talking about. Something had blown their circuits. Their aerials all seemed a little bent.

I only have you folks for an hour. TRY, at least PRETENDING, to pay attention. Sewing circle bullshit later.

We loved that he swore. It reminded us that the nut-huggers weren't a style so much as a shot across the bow.

After the teacher finished writing up our assignments and went back to his desk, Steph crushed and snapped off the tip of her pencil against her notebook. This was a tactic she employed only in extreme emergencies. The teacher heard it and looked over. I did too. Steph shrugged and went to the back of class where another girl went into her bag and dug around for a replacement.

A minute later a Laker's "Show Time"-era no-look pass with a note: LAST NOTE VOID. GUESS WHICH GIRL.

I looked over and Steph nodded gravely until we both smiled.

Other guys looked at her mouth when she smiled sometimes. Puberty was like getting cable and I was stuck on community television. I'd had a few dreams about kissing that mouth of hers and spent a lot of time wondering if it would feel the same if I ever had the chance in real life. I knew the other guys looked at her mouth and saw getting blown. I tried to see getting blown but it never worked. I had enough trouble seeing kissing her.

You're in love with me, Steph taunted.
Huh?
Why are you staring?
I dunno.
You're in love with me.
What makes you so sure?
You can't stop thinking about me.
Oh yeah?
Every girl you'll ever go with you'll compare to me.
You sure?
You're so in love with me.

The last time she said it was strange, like somebody had stepped on the peddles of a piano to draw out vibration. The eye contact had made the real communication something like this:

You're so in love with me.
Yeah, Steph. I'm afraid so.
You're in love with me?
I'm sorry.
You're in love with me.
What choice did I have?

It was the last time she'd ever joke about it. I'd become the punch-line and it didn't go over.

I wrote the name down. Nudged our reluctant messenger and placed the note on her desk and saw her pass it across the aisle. Watched Steph's grin as she read it. After a little while she shot me a look with her chlorinated swimming pool-blue eyes.

Our teacher got called on the PA to go the office. He said Fuck under his breath and several of us beamed with pride. Our champion. When he was two steps out the door Steph and I jumped up simultaneously and sprinted back to ground zero.

The lisping brunette already had on her headphones. She took out one of the buds on Steph's side. She had the hiccups (symptom of sex???).

Is it weely such a big deal? See-wee-ussly. It coulda happened, like, at the beginning of school. Weely.

Steph acknowledged this much was true. Turning it over, I did too. The girl in question arguably had the best ass in high school. This fact was lost on nobody. Her least of all. There was a certain prudence in her fucking at 14.

Was it good? I asked.
She didn't bother to remove the bud.

Steph was smiling and shaking her head.
Listen Steph, getting laid totally isn't a big deal at all.

That's when an amazing thing happened. Dan, who was seated in front of the lisping-brunette, turned around in his seat and leaned in. He had an easy look on his face, down-playing the obvious explosiveness of the subject matter.

Steph, it totally isn't. I mean, take Dan. He's a good looking, weely smart, like, super nice guy.
Totally. He has a nice ass, too.
I slapped the desk. He DOES?
Dan smirked at me.
Weely Dan, I'd totally have sex with you. I'm see-wee-us.

Only last week Dan had worn a pair of glasses that we all discovered weren't even prescription glasses. Why had he done this? he was asked repeatedly. Because I like wearing glasses, he answered.

Weely. See-wee-usly, Dan. Any time you want.

Steph and I exchanged glances at this offer. The entire classes' attention fell towards that table like dominoes. "Indecent Proposal" was out in theaters that year but it had nothing on this offer. Dan's virginity on an indecent proposal? Way bigger deal than a million bucks to bang Redford.

Any time you want to, Dan. Okay? You lemme know.
Dan couldn't make eye contact with her. He tried. No dice. He looked at me and Steph though.
Steph smiled and I was glued to her lips.

Teacher came back into the room:

Uhhhh, you guys back there? Uhhhh, what the hell are we doing? Can you get back to your desks so we can all pretend there's some remotely useful point to any of us sharing the same room here?

At recess, after the indecent proposal, Dan had an interesting question. He took his time finishing his President's Choice soda and half his ham sandwich with the crust pre-removed before he was ready to ask it.

You ever wonder if you're a bigger person for staying with one girl or you think going for as many as you can possibly get is bigger?
Depends.

I said this because my brother always answered big questions with "depends" and I was trying to try it on. Several girls at school had seen my brother---who was actually my *half*-brother---and me at a movie one weekend and the following Monday bitterly attacked me for not being as handsome as him as if I'd done it on purpose. What happened to *you*?

Depends?
Yeah, it depends.

By Dan's troubled expression I seemed to pull it off okay. But then I wasn't sure.

But it doesn't depend for everybody.
No, I guess it doesn't. Shit.
What?
I thought maybe it did.
That's what scares me about what she offered me. I know I have to, you know, really like, RESOLVE this thing inside me before I go through with it. IF I go through with it. It's really bugging me.
A lot of people in here, when they break out into real life, are gonna get revenge. If they can't get laid to save their lives, I mean.
I know.
You just had a girl put it on the table and you didn't do shit. But maybe you did.
How?
You're not desperate. You aren't pretending to be somebody you're not. Maybe she realizes that.
I doubt it, Dan said.
Me too. But, my point is, if you go for one person your whole life and you do it because you're afraid about trying out sex or whatever with a LOT of people, you're still a fucking chicken. The same way as if you fuck a million girls because you're afraid of one girl breaking your heart.
I think I might like her. I mean like, I might wanna her to be my girlfriend.
WHAT?
I have a crush on her.
But are you gonna do it first? I asked him. You gonna sleep with her?
I dunno, Dan said. What kinda girl, like, publicly says she'll sleep with you? Especially right after she lost her virginity. What kinda girl is that?
One who's gonna shit out a LOT of kids very very very soon.
Who'd she sleep with anyway?
That kid who skipped a grade who always wears a hat.
Hmmm.
Can kids go bald at 14? Maybe he's trying to, like, hide it.
I dunno. Maybe.
She fucked a balding 14 year old?

We chewed our sandwiches solemnly and Dan broke out some Spitz sunflower seeds and handed me a handful that we cracked open for a while.

I don't even know her. How could she say something to me like that?
Guys would KILL to be in your shoes! I said. KILL.
But I've barely even said five words to her.
You can lose your virginity at 14, man. It doesn't even have to be with your girlfriend! In a way, you're doing your girlfriend a big favor.
How's that?
If you end up with a virgin you're going in all experienced and shit.
That's a good thing?
Girls dig that shit.
They do?
It's what Norman says. Make her first time special, man. What if you marry her? Everything might be hinging on the first time! You owe it to her.
Wait a minute, Dan said. He dated her before.
Who?
Norman.
I know. Last year.
Yeah.
He didn't sleep with her or anything.
I know. But still.
He won't give you shit about it.
No, he wouldn't do that.
You're right, you'll never hear the end of it.
Great.
You gotta do it for every guy who ever dreamed of getting an offer like yours.
I dunno.
You really are a tin man sometimes.
I really wish you wouldn't call me that anymore. I gotta go.

The buzzer rang outside the room, echoed down the hall. Mrs. S. left her desk and closed the door to the classroom, muzzling the effects of the buzzer. She turned back, rested a hand against the pencil sharpener, and slowly looked us over. We gathered an announcement was going to be made but Norman and I got up anyway and picked up our packs ready to go just to bug her. She pointed us back down to our chairs and we profusely thanked her for clarity on the issue until she denounced the, Effusive excessiveness of your use of superlatives in thanking me. Both of us assured her a more clean, declarative sentence couldn't be devised to address our egregious folly.

In her kicked field mousy-way, she glared at us with suspicion.

She knew every ten dollar word in the world and Norman had discovered why: she didn't have anything to say. Norman could sniff-out anybody's scam. He was that guy in everybody's nightmare who knows the score way before they do.

She took small slipper steps to the center of class and clasped her hands. Her Indian dress and scarf were matching pumpkin orange. The thick lensed glasses on her face hung from a golden chain wrapped around her soft, slightly melted candle-looking neck. The garishly bejeweled fingers and wrists sparkled under the fluorescent light.

I leaned over to Norman, Do you think she polishes them?
Are you a fucking retard? Of course she does. Nightly, man.
She has more gold than your Filipino barber.
She has more gold than all three guys who work at that barber shop combined and those fuckers have more gold than Fort Knox.

This was an exaggeration. But Carlito alone walked around with fifteen grand worth of bling on his person at ALL times. Amado and Perfecto (respectfully) were steadily gaining on him.

Mrs. S. hands broke away from their prayer-like gesture and she held one stateswoman-ly palm before us for a few moments before she spoke. Norman and I avoided eye contact while she did this. Everybody in the class leaned in because it was never easy following Mr. S. even if she had no accent. The verbiage was always a vicious curve ball, but her accent hit your mind's windshield like a monsoon so you just tried to stay with the yellow line and do the best you could.

Boys and girls, before you leave I have something I'd like to bring to your attention. One of our students is departing for a special program at a different school. It's a very special endeavor. The main reason that compels me to mention this, however, is how much---and I'm sure I speak for all of us when I say this---we're all going to miss Natalie.

Time seemed to stop for a moment. The class focus zeroed in on Natalie. She put her head down and blushed. I watched her eyes scanning, a torn off power wire writhing in her brain. You could tell she was touched by Mrs. S.'s gesture slightly more than she was embarrassed by the attention of us. I'd never seen Natalie have a spotlight placed on her before. I never thought about her besides when she happened to be in front of me, but I always thought she was pretty in a blan-way, like the kind of flowers that need a flowerbed of like-flowers to please you. Her prettiness had no sauce. No real flavor. In a year and a half I didn't know what her voice sounded like since she used it so sparingly. But there was something darker, too. It caught my attention less then than it did later on. Somewhere in whatever was troubling her, I think I had an inkling that despite being really smart and having this rich, complex internal life, behind everything was a very straight-forward desire to be completely objectified. Not really to be a bimbo or a whore, just to have the instant, arresting response that beauty gets. And deserves. Real beauty is an obscenity. It was something she would never have. It gave her the effect of an out of season Christmas tree left up in every room she entered. Her face was soft, usually fixed in expressionlessness, but you knew bitterness was going to take a chisel to it. Maybe a jackhammer.

Norman nudged me. Get a load of this, man.
What? I asked him.
He turned to the class:

*I* know why we'll all miss Natalie, Mrs. S.

You do? she replied.

Natalie tensed up as if she was facing a firing squad.

Sure I do. Because she's SOOOOOOO beautiful.

Instantly all of us in that room suddenly bystanders to the execution and participants in it too. But none of us had blanks as we stared at the carnage of Natalie's face. And Norman trained his large, famously heavy eye-lashed eyes directly on her too. His face had more in common with a sawed off shotgun that second than it did with the guy I knew from ten seconds earlier. What was the most chilling was just how deliberate his expression was, just the same as his voice in how he'd said it. You had to go a really long way into understanding a victim, having something delicate and innocent warped inside you, to find that button to push on another person. And he'd unleashed it like it was nothing---he tossed it into all our mouths like a Flintstone chewable vitamin.

Ms. S. broke the silence. She *is* beautiful, Norman.
Norman smiled. He enjoyed this topic of discussion.
Man, I said to him, you're gonna have worse karma than fucking Yoko Ono if you keep this up.
I'm just getting started... I think you *are* beautiful, Natalie. I don't know why everyone here doesn't belieeeeeve me. Do you?

Lunch hour was almost over. She was in the hallway just outside class leaning against her locker. I was sorta sad she'd never be able to joke about me being in love with her anymore. I laid off and just looked at her for a second.

Some girls just have a holiday in their eyes. At least, that's the best I can come up with to explain the nagging quality Steph had that a lot of people got hung up on. Because there wasn't anything particularly special in the color, they had the same light blue as Connecticut Avenue on a Monopoly board. Other girls had Boardwalk or Park Place-blue, but pretty soon people started passing them over for cheaper real estate. You wouldn't have to take your shoes off if you stepped into her front door. The furniture in the living room wouldn't be about impressing you so much as making you comfortable. The other prettier girls hearts might've felt like casinos or pawnshops---Steph's was a petting-zoo.

What kind of impression did she make entering a room? Not much. No entry-wound. Garden variety entrance. She never seemed interested in being the center of attention. She preferred being a member of the audience in welcoming somebody. From that setting she was a little more handy at distinguishing herself. She was sneaky about it. She perfected the art of sucker-punch compliments. And it went a long way. You'd bump into her being in a lousy mood and she'd lick her suction cup dart compliment and fire it at you and it could stick for the whole week. She had some kind of directory on where we lived emotionally and she let us know it with compliments. Everywhere else she was low-key.

But she exited a room differently than other girls and it stayed with you more and longer than even the really expensive ones. It felt like she disappeared every time. Nobody else could do that. She's the only girl I ever saw leaving a room who didn't have some kind of bumpersticker on her fender about what it meant.

Then she saw me. Then she remembered what I was worried about her remembering. She took a second before she said anything. She smiled and came over.

Do you want to give me a call tonight to talk about Dan's situation?
I don't have your number.
I'll give it to you. Lemme write it on your hand.

That night Dan slept over at my mother's house. We were in my room with a bunch of Dan's paintings on the walls. A portrait of my mother hanging over his head while he stared at the rug with the discouraged look he always made when he had to make a decision someone had put him up to.

I'll make you a deal, he said.
YOU'RE GONNA FUCK HER??? I can't believe you're gonna fuck her!
No. But if you agree to never call me Tin Man ever again I'm going to ask her to be my girlfriend.

And that's what he proceeded to do.

I picked up the phone after Dan fell asleep.

Is Steph there please?
Do you know what time it is?
It's an emergency. Some Danish woman is waving a butcher knife outside my house screaming Soren! Soren! Soren!
I heard a hand go over the phone and a muffled, Mom, just let me get it! behind it.
Hello?
He asked her out.
Asked her out?
Yeah.
WHY?
He had a crush on her.
Then why didn't he fuck her?
I guess because he wanted her to be his girlfriend.
Guys fuck their girlfriends, Brin.
Thanks for the heads up.
They do.
I know.
He should fuck her and *then* ask her out.
Steph, you're a sick maniac. What kind of---
What did she say?
She said she wasn't looking for a boyfriend. She just wanted something a little more *casual* right now.
That's what she said?
Yeah.
She'd fuck him but not be his girlfriend?
Yeah.
See-wee-us-ly?
Weely and twooly.
How'd Dan take it?
I dunno. But we recorded it on my mother's answering machine.
WHAT?
We recorded it. I wanted to hear it and he was too shy to talk with her on the phone with me in the room so he agreed.
Okay, fucking J. Edgar Hoover.
Hey, I wanted to hear it go down!
You've preserved that shit, right? That's like the Zapruder film, Brin. Dan turned down losing his vee so that he could be with her as a boyfriend! That's the most romantic thing I ever heard.
I know.
I wanna hear it. Can I come over tomorrow to listen to the tape?

Intermission. The rest of my life went forward...

If you want to.
Of course I want to.

Intermission.

Okay.
Is your hot brother gonna be there?
Jesus fuck. I can't help I don't anything like him, okay? We have different dads. I think he---
I'm just bugging you. I think you're cuter...

Intermission.

Why did she say no?
What did Dan say after she said no?
You'll have to come over to find out.
You're in---
No I'm not.
Yeah you are.

Of course I was.

Steph did come over the next day and listen to the tape. And then we listened to it again from the beginning with Dan's trembling voice making small talk before arriving at the business and the conversation going down like an animal in quicksand.

After that day we talked every night on the phone for a couple months. Mostly we talked from Norman's basement which was where I slept over most nights. Then I'd talk with Norman about strategy and tactics to get Steph. I'd done such a good job selling Norman on the idea that Steph was the most amazing girl in school that he started calling her too. And he was a lot better at than me. Then she ended up being his first girlfriend by mid-ninth grade. Then he bragged to me she'd blown him during the commercial break of 90210. Then she'd dumped him. Five years later, out of the blue, I bumped into her one afternoon a few weeks shy of my 19th birthday and she invited me to see her new apartment and a week later I did finally get around to kissing her.

Gnossienne

2009-03-06T09:10:00.000-08:00

I was working in a little run-down bookstore one night when this brunette I didn't know walked in and up to the cash register and asked how old I was and what time I got off. I told her twenty to the first question and that it depended on why she was asking for the second. She invited me to a movie. She hadn't even said which. I liked that. When it became clear she wasn't going to, I threw out the only customer in the store and closed down the bookstore by way of accepting the invitation.

While I was pulling down the iron curtain over the entrance, she told me she had to swing by her apartment next door to get her purse. She asked if I wanted to see her apartment. I followed her inside, up the stairs, through a hallway, past her door. Her smell kept playing bumper cars with the smell of the lobby, the rug in the hallway, her kitchen. I stopped at the fridge and she went into her bedroom and closed the door.

There were photos of a boy stuck by magnets to the fridge. He had a lazy eye and in most of the photographs he was holding a cat. In two he was holding the cat in the living room of the apartment I was in. I like cats. I like other men who like cats. I like girls who masquerade as girls because secretly or not-so secretly they *are* cats. I had a sinking feeling looking over these intimate pictures of the boy with his cat. My cat was living with a girl who'd left me and kept the cat. Tiamoo had declined my tentative separation agreement with the girl of dividing him up between us, with her keeping the asshole and me the remainder. That wasn't funny Brin. Tiamoo seemed to think so.

The brunette came out of the bedroom and approached me in front of the fridge. I didn't look at her.

"He's just gonna be a sec."
"Who?"
"Him." She pointed at the boy with the cat. "I woke him up."
"Your roomate?"
"My boyfriend."
"You said we were coming up here to get your purse."
"I know."
"Where's the cat?"
"Died."
"How's the boyfriend getting over it?"
"Working a lot."
"What kinda work?"
"DJ-ing. Too much E though. He's impotent."
"Say what?"

Boyfriend exits the room.

"Hi there," he says.
"Hi."
She smiles.
"You work at the bookstore next door, right?"
"Kinda."
"I've seen you in there."
"Once a week. There's a poetry reading night thing I help out with for the owner."
"How's that?"
"Catastrophic mostly."
She continues smiling. He notices her smiling and turns back to me, extending his hand.
"It's nice to meet you. What's your name?"
I reach for his hand and shake it and look over at the girl watching me.
"You have small hands."
Very observant. And you're impotent, DJ limp-dick. And anytime now can someone tell me what the baker's fuck is going on with you and your girlfriend, man?
"Does he have small hands, John?"
"Yeah. Look at them." He grabs my hand and displays it to his girlfriend. "What, are you Hungarian or something?"
"How's that?"
"It's a trait. I'm Hungarian too. Look at my hands."
So I do for a second, not entirely sure why.
"John, we have to hurry to catch the movie."
"Yeah. Let's go."

They walk ahead of me up the street. He has his arm over her shoulder and she pries it off and as compensation agrees to hold his hand. He lets go of her hand to light a cigarette and offers me one. After I tell him I don't smoke he lights his and puts his arm over her shoulder. She takes the cigarette from his lips, flicks it into the street and removes his arm while I watch the cigarette hit the side of a car zooming by and toss up sparks like a miniature roman-candle that another car plows into. She takes his hand and he releases in order to go for another cigarette.

I look up at the power wires and telephone poles rolling under the sky like sheet music. Look down cozy side streets with the trees lining the street and in the moonlight pick out the ones that have bird nests in them. At a crosswalk a Cadillac Escalade waits for us to cross. I can't see into the tinted window to make out the driver's seat so I glare at the license plate to see if it's my ex. I don't remember her license plate number. I try and remember. I realize if it *is* her she must feel sorry for me trying to read her license plate. My ego can handle being pitied, however, her feeling sorry for me significantly reduces my chances of a possible revenge fuck and as we've been the one-night-stand-revenge-fuck that lasted four years any chance of resuscitating us is going down the drain. What a doozy that reality is. Shucks.

We walk for a few more blocks toward the Hollywood Theater. They carry on their private conversation a few paces in front of me while I shove my hands into my pockets and investigate why exactly I've been invited to share this evening with an unknown couple.

We arrive late and I follow them up the stairs to the darkness of the balcony where we sit in the front row with her between us. He holds her hand and she removes some wine gums from her purse. She unwraps them, takes out a handful, holds them up and inspects the colors against the glare of the opening screen credits, selects her favorites and offers the rejected articles first to her boyfriend, and, finally, all the blacks to me. When I decline she gives them to me anyway.

I have no memory what that film was. When I wasn't obsessing over the couple I was with I leaned over the railing and looked at all the other couples there that night. First-time couples and regular couples and lesbian couples and falling apart couples and aging couples straining to hear anything and fat couples with greasy butterfingers eating each other's popcorn and interracial couples and maybe Suzy with some old dirty Greek looking fucker in the 4th row whose probably fucked her in front of Tiamoo on the couch for all I know...

The next thing I remember was her boyfriend leaning over and whispering something in the brunette's ear. She nodded as he gathered his coat and turned for the aisle and headed up the stairs for the exit. Some light splashed into the theater and got swallowed up as the door closed.

I leaned over to the brunette and whispered, "Did he, ummm, *leave*?"
"Yup."

I awaited her clarification on this seemingly important point. When it became clear I wasn't going to get any I nudged her arm.

"Why did he leave?"

"I dunno." She tossed another wine gum in her mouth and sucked on it for a few seconds before tucking it in against her cheek. "He wasn't feeling well."
"You're not going to go with him?"
"The movie's not over."
This was unquestionably true. "Yeah, but are you sure he's okay?"
"He's just not feeling well. It's fine. He just went home."

That was all she said for the last half of the movie. When it was over she put on her coat and weaved through the crowd to get outside the theater. She moved so fast I'd figured she'd taken off to get back home to her boyfriend. But she was standing outside waiting for me.

"I'd like to have a drink. There's a bar on the corner."
"What about your boyfriend?" WHAT ABOUT DJ LIMP-DICK!
"He'll be fine. I need a drink."

She knew the bartender when she got inside the place. He started the drink before she'd sat down in the corner. I sat across from her and looked at the menu when she reached for it and slowly palmed it to the table. I tried to keep a straight face while she glared at me.

"How old are *you*?" I asked her.
"I want to ask you question."
"Okay."
"What do you want out this?"
I gave that one a second because I was pretty sure even the bartender had heard her pose the question. He'd stopped poring something.
"You know what I want. I wanna get you out of your relationship."
She smiled.

"I'm thirty, Brin."

Girl Peeled Off A Cigar Box

2009-02-24T21:49:00.001-08:00

I was waiting in an empty bar to meet a Cuban for the first time over here yesterday. There might be two in the whole city. I had to meet one. I figured he'd be easy enough to spot: fourteen layers of clothing and shivering in pretty mild weather.

Some sunlight splashed through the windows into the bar, hanging in the air like suspended lemon-aid. The waitress kept calling me "sugar" out of spite because I'd ordered a bottle of wine and been drinking it out of the bottle like a schmuck. When I'm meeting someone for the first time---and it doesn't matter who it is---I get nervous and have to improvise with something goofy. Snatch a wheel chair at the arrivals section of the airport or steal the girls driver's license and keep it in my pocket over the course of dinner and slip it back into her bag before the night's over. You don't even have to tell her. Maybe it goes well and from whatever she's told you about herself somehow you know a little less. To get even you ask to read her palm as an excuse to touch her hand and tell her something's been missing and she plays along and asks what and you cough over the plastic to see how she responds.

For a long time I'd had some plans to meet a different Cuban over here, the one who really did look like a girl peeled off a cigar box. She was just my exact, perfect type: WAY out of my league.

For someone whose gone back and forth to Cuba for the last 10 years, I've only kissed one girl from there and it wasn't even on her home soil. Any filthy tourist will tell you, it's not shooting fish in a barrel over there, it's LOOKING at fish in a barrel. Which is not to say it's ALL economics either. Girls over there aren't doing their best emotional interpretation of a casino over there the way they do over here. They're deviously innocent in the same way all the best, most liked kids books by kids are the same ones most banned by adults and teachers. It never happened for me. I didn't have the guts to accept an offer without anything being said.

I was trying to come up with a way to account for this. Not for myself. I like the idea of being a few cards short of a full deck whenever I feel like playing solitaire. I wanted to have some explanation for the guy meeting me in that bar. Most Cuban men would fuck a lamppost. It's about the only thing in existence they're not philosophical about.

So what the hell are you gonna say then?

You could try something a little clumsy like: Reality is for people who can't handle their dreams and dreams are for people who can't handle reality.

Yeah, but chances are he's sat through about forty-thousand hours of Castro speeches over the course of his childhood and not all that interested in yours.

You could tell him about that first day you had in Havana stumbling onto a fruit stand on Calle Neptuno surrounded by pretty girls and getting this strange craving for papaya and asking if they had any and all eyes at once burning you to a crisp since "papaya" in Cuban is slang for pussy. And the fruit stand guy laughing his ass off because he was the only one who knew you didn't know.

Nah. He's going to want to know about that other girl you met over there. The one who lives in Playa in Havana. The one he probably fucked and just for amusement wants to see if you did too. If you talk about her you're going to have to explain about the other one peeled off the cigar box. This isn't someone to discuss her with. Because all he's going to do is tell you how many men she's slept with just to make all her men jealous since this is the Cubana's unofficial national sport and, what's worse, you're knowledge of her is going to confirm the stereotype. And be honest, partly that sorta stuff made you fall for her---they only keep a secret if everyone already knows.

So distract him.

Get him talking about the city. Boxing or baseball. Tony Montana. Or those chilling pet cemetery animals wandering down the alleys and scavenging for left-overs at restaurants. Get him talking about the tourist blonds famous for being warm at night and amnesiacs in the daylight. Get him going about the pickpockets. All those crews of Artful Dodgers working on the street with others up on the rooftops following the action next to all those wonky TV antennas piled on there like prehistoric discarded toothpicks. Or his family. The generational stuff. Something cute like the Guarapo stands all over the place with the stout women who grab a stock of sugar cane and take a run at lancing it into the cogs of a giant clunky machine that resembles the inside of a clock and produces this juice that the slaves used to drink and that everybody, of all ages, no matter who the surrounding company, sweetly encourages *you* to drink should you ever find yourself climbing over a girl.

That girl peeled off a cigar box is visiting a dad she didn't know she had, and the rest of his family too. And for a month you talked to her on the phone every night and the subject to be avoided was her more and more likely pregnancy back in that hotel room. After she (and her mother, for that matter) didn't believe that you went a couple months waiting for her in Havana and she never showed up so you flew back to see her and piled the sheets from the bed in the corner so the Russian maid could collect them because you were pretty sure she hadn't waited for you and it only took another four or five months to have her confirm it even though she lied through her teeth denying it in that hotel room. But somehow it didn't make a difference either way and you didn't even bother to pretend that it did. She was pregnant for real soon enough and not by you. But you got to have the four-hour post abortion phone call until you got her smiling again enough to sing something the way she used to. Some old song she used to listen to a million times on a record player when she was a kid. And even though it'd been hanging there for the whole conversation she asked anyway, "Are joo really in loov weeth la Nuevo York Chinita? Weeth a Chai-neez woo-mahn?"

He knocked on the window in fourteen layers of clothing and shades slapping the glass at me, "OYE! Brinicio, here we go... "

Valentine

2009-02-21T07:11:00.000-08:00

She bought a one-way plane ticket over here around midnight. She bought it on the same week, same day, same *hour* that a couple, same age as us---who it turns out might've got engaged the same day--- got smoked by an SUV that blew through a crosswalk.

The 18 year old drunken kid behind the wheel had stolen the SUV and brought along two younger girls in the back seat. Maybe he was trying to impress them by driving fast. I dunno. I do know that after killing that couple, he ran off and tried to swim across the icy-cold inlet to the opposite shore but a police dog nabbed him before he could get away.

Yesterday I went over to where that couple died. There was a little shrine against one side of a tunnel underneath a bridge.

There were some people milling around trying to find the spot because the story had been front page in the newspapers. They were giddy and confused but also ready to be upset. There are a few crosswalks to choose from pretty close by. The actual location is a bit tucked away. I was alone for a minute and lit up a cigarette after I found a poem by Rilke taped onto the wall of the tunnel and in no time a throng of other tourists piled in.

On Hearing of A Death

We lack all knowledge of this parting. Death
does not deal with us. We have no reason
to show death admiration, love or hate;
his mask of feigned tragic lament gives us

a false impression. The world's stage is still
filled with roles which we play. While we worry
that our performances may not please,
death also performs, although to no applause.

But as you left us, there broke upon this stage
a glimpse of reality, shown through the slight
opening through which you disappeared: green,
evergreen, bathed in sunlight, actual woods.

We keep on playing, still anxious, our difficult roles
declaiming, accompanied by matching gestures
as required. But your presence so suddenly
removed from our midst and from our play, at times

overcomes us like a sense of that other
reality: yours, that we are so overwhelmed
and play our actual lives instead of the performance,
forgetting altogether the applause.

Other people poking around to find the spot saw us and came over. It was them looking for it with a combination of disorientation and slight panic that reminded me of something I've never written about or really talked about either. I mean, what that crosswalk and my girlfriend's one-way plane ticket have in common I'm not too sure. A lot of it is a big emphasis on a *beginning*, a start, a first page, first sight, taking a chance.

Five years ago I took a girl to Madrid and we arrived the day after the bombing of the Atocha train station. It's not Grand Central or Penn Station, but it's an awfully nice place to see and has its own charm. I had a reservation for us at a little pension about 4 blocks from the blast. I'd picked that pension because it was sandwiched between the train station and the Prado. I boxed in Madrid daily and had to pass through Atocha every day to get there and on the way back I'd meet up with Jackie and we'd see El Greco, Velázquez, Goya, Salvador Dalí at the Prado or the Reina Sofia where little boys and girls demonstrate some of the differences between boys and girls with their approach to dealing with pigeons (girls nice, boys evil).

After the horror of the explosion, one of the most bizarre, disturbing things before the ambulances got there was the lack of silence. Hundreds of dinky melodies rang out and clashed for hours that everyone was afraid to deal with. Imagine a decked out Christmas tree except that every ornament is a cellphone: that's how Atocha chimed from all corners as families desperately tried to see if their loved ones were unlucky.

I get spooked when somebody dies meaninglessly. I guess that's why I was a little comforted when more and more details came out about that pair who died at the crosswalk. They felt like supposition to sell papers but still, it was obscenely difficult not to wonder:

She'd found out about the ring but kept it from him to not spoil the surprise. Did he pop the question at dinner that night? Her friends said she'd been looking through bridal magazines. What'd they talk about at dinner? Did they ever talk about how they'd want to die? Did he not leave a very good tip and she suddenly took in, FUCK, I'M GONNA MARRY A CHEAPSKATE! Maybe she even told him as a joke. Did they ever wonder about the possibility of dying at the same time at a happy moment in their lives and sorta hanging up their lives for everyone they cared about on the peg of never spending another moment apart. How violently beautiful is that? Boy, hit-and-run---who'd see that one coming? Probably nobody who knew them. Maybe those two little girls in the back seat for about a split second.

I was so happy when my girl bought a ticket over here to start a life with me I just stared at the confirmation for 20 minutes without it really sinking in. I never said so, but I felt like we had some stacked odds working against us. This long distance thing for the last year is rotten stuff. Penpals with the odd bi-monthly conjugal visit isn't much of a dream situation. And it's clumsy to admit I wouldn't have remembered the day she bought that ticket without what happened to this couple who never get any tomorrows together in the way I hopefully will. Maybe one day some little brat will ask me about when mommy first came over here and even though I'll lie through my teeth and talk about my seven failed Russian mail-order bride-marriages before I'm slapped by anyone within earshot (and they'll hit hard); it was February 10th, on a *choose*day, we both slipped on some kind of banana peel taking a crack on something and I wouldn't have known or especially cared if it weren't for some piece of shit kid who plowed into them. Not fate, just someone who'll have to do or accomplish god knows what to have anything other than this senseless act define him for the rest of his life. Some punk with a chip on his shoulder trades it in for a fucking millstone.

See why I sent this to you and not her?

Straight, No Chaser

2009-02-12T08:56:00.001-08:00

Double-whammy, the curse of bumping into Swimming Pool Girl again and an hour later sailing over the handlebars of my bike like a fucking human crossbow onto a busy street landing on my thumb. Permanently eliminating my prospects for a southpaw career in hitchhiking...

Out of the corner of my eye I saw her antique bike leaning against a parking meter. I'd never seen that bike before but I knew it was hers. The shark infested turquoise color of her bike matched the color of her eyes. I looked inside the window of the cafe:

She was darting around the joint like a video game fairy delivering little 10am potions to cure hangovers. Swimming Pool Girl always reminds me I need to write a story about a cat-burglar who tries to rob someone and ends up falling in love with who lives there. Swimming Pool Girl is a 110-pound feminine powder keg for writer's block. Ten seconds inside the door---five years since I last saw her---she mentions she's been constipated for the last five days. Nearly reason enough, she says, to take back up smoking.

I don't do well recovering from this information.

Swimming Pool Girl introduced me to Edith Piaf. Just as she's putting on the record, still wearing little gloves inexplicably: "You'll like her Brinny; she fell hard for a boxer."

She's very sneaky. Whatever you tell her about yourself she eats with the dirty utensils of her soul and it contaminates you. You start noticing stuff you don't want to notice. Rooms are a little hotter around her. Food tastes better. How can it be justified to spend a couple hours with a strange new girl inspecting and judging the merits of every set of revolving doors you can find downtown? But you do. And besides banging complete strangers and recounting it for your prurient obsessed pleasure, she's amassed an intimidating reading list. Oh yeah, and she can guess yours. And Brando sticking that wad of gum under the railing just before he died in Last Tango In Paris was her favorite thing she's ever seen too. Then she'll quote it:

"Torture the children until they tell their first lie."

Everyone who stares at her qualifies as prey. Her eyes always need more names on their mailing list for postcards. From a distance it looks like a holiday destination but when you get up close, all she is is a poisonous oasis. She has something I can't put my finger on, it's more greasy than slippery, but the closest I can get is that comparing her to other girls you've instantly wanted to fuck but knew you'd have to swallow a drugstore if you did---she's an antique where all the others felt like junk. Her slutty high-beam glares and the licked-damp shape of her mouth while she's glaring at you are run-down-porn-theater- cheap and yet if went for it they'd end up being VERY expensive.

If you're like me and you go for girls with penthouse balconies, she shows you what your missing not going for girls with portable dungeons.

Somehow she makes it enticing after the introductory too-close hug and her Venus Fly Trap kiss on the cheek.

I heard Swimming Pool Girl's been dating a guy she calls Dent Head. I ask her if they're still together.

"No, but we're going on a trip. What are you listening to while you write? I'll put it on the speakers."

"No."

She takes my ipod, the one I'll be fiddling with when I go over the handle bars in a couple hours from now trying to numb my commute.

I ask if I can put up a boxing poster in her cafe window and there's more of a pendulum -effect in her ass as she walks over to the cash register.

I met Swimming Pool Girl the day after the worst time I ever showed up late in my life. Just read an extra chapter in my book and that did the trick. Dusted my relationship of 4.5 years for keeps. Poof.

Twenty minutes late and a girlfriend of 4 years came home and found a letter on my computer screen sent from a Puerto Rican pen-pal girl I'd never even met. Small potatoes. Cause there were about 200 more sent over the course of 5 years. So she read all those too. She opened pictures of the Puerto Rican girl. Nothing vulgar. No nudity. But the poses were poses I'd clearly asked for. Requested. And they'd been delivered with precision and pleasure.

How do you compete with a fantasy?

Why bother.

"I don't love you anymore."

This for a girl with profoundly embedded abandonment issues.

No denial-ability available. She knows the score in its entirety. See clearly, be seen clearly. There's your measure. Every word of a relationship conducted entirely on the page. The whole progression of a fantasy that takes over and dominates the alleys of your mind laid bare. She'd cheated on me fucking a stranger once before. "Now I know I *really* love you." Well, shucks. So on the scales of justice, that asshole's dick cheese in her mouth or my saying in a letter to this Puerto Rican: "I probably thought about you 1000 times today"---which is worse?

I was paying it some thought when her jury tendered its verdict:
"Fuck you, Brin! Yours is *far* worse! You cared about her!"
"You fucked a random! You were gonna throw away our relationship on a random! THAT'S WORSE!" And like a stinking fucking Hungarian I'm grinning.
"It's not funny."

Swimming Pool Girl heard all about it when I saw her at the pool and went over to talk to her. And I just treated the whole problem the way I drank the first time I touched alcohol at 16, swallow as much you can and chase it with something else. Magic how the one cancels out the other. Magic. Pretty soon they both spoil the other and you can't go near either. I haven't touched Coke or Tequila since... or that ex-girlfriend.

Polite Bondage

2009-02-02T13:56:00.000-08:00

It was nice out---nearly ice cream truck weather---and I finally got around to doing something I'd been putting off for a while. I went over to his house to pick up my bike in the middle of the afternoon. I walked across town to get there, down different streets, some alleys, through a couple of parks. I walked by the church where I had my first kiss and past where I'd walked that girl home after. A new family came out her old front door. I'd only ever gone inside twice. Once because I was badgered into meeting her psychotic, phone-sex-voiced Belgian mother in order that I receive a preemptive lecture on the parameters of dating her daughter and the second time, far more frightening, at the request of the daughter with her mother away, ordering more than requesting: "I want you to come over right now and fuck me on my mother's bed." "Actually, I'm not too crazy about this one, Suzy." "Just get over here." "This one reallllllly doesn't appeal to me." "Get over here. I left the door open." "Suzy..." Click.

I kept going along the sidewalks that girl used to take to meet me halfway, or at least until our specks could be identified. I remember how her walk would change a little after she saw me and that was always my cue to know the little speck was her. Mine must've changed too, I couldn't wait to set a collision course.

It only lasted a Spring on that street because she got a car. But we had cherry blossoms lining both sides of the street, first above our heads, then paving the sidewalk and streets like cherry frosting.

I kept going till I was past all that. Climbed a hill until I could see his place next to the hospital. Stopped a couple times to meet some neighborhood cats and tried to convince myself I was taking my time but I knew I wasn't. Found a curb and read a few pages of Mr. Richard Yates. Saw a sexy girl who looked a bit like Penelope Cruz smoking and I bummed a cigarette off her. She lit my cigarette while I tried to make her smile talking Spanish and struck out. "Unlucky" was teetering on the brink of "bad luck".

And then when I saw him I didn't have luck, of any variety, anymore.

"People who count on luck don't last long in the business of defusing bombs and disarming land mines, and that is what my business seems to be. It helps to know these things. Muhammad Ali was not lucky. He was fast, very fast."---Hunter S. Thompson

What's the smallest group of people you need to have it statistically probable that two people share the same birthday?

How many people would you need in there to make it feel spooky if you found out you blew out your birthday candles on the same day?

The answer's 23. 51% chance somebody there has dibs on your birthday.

Here's another one that I was considering standing there in his foyer:

"What's a safest hour to drop in on somebody who you haven't seen in a helluva long time without them being on their way to a drink, coming back from a drink, recovering from a drink, or in the act of drinking?

Answer: 2pm seemed a safe bet at the time.

Question: Are we taking bets?

Answer: On what?

Question: You know what.

Answer: That?

Question: Uh huh.

Answer: Whether he'll die before he gets around to doing anything about this?

Question: That's your crossword puzzle. But what I'm a little curious about here, with your brow like a broken windshield and all, is whether you're deepdown chalking this up to bad luck, or coincidence, or just an ugly set of stacked odds against you?

Answer: Or whether I'm getting off on it as material.

Question: I take that angle for granted, fucko.

Answer: Listen, if you've got all the answers why is he pretending *not* to be drunk?

Question: To fuck with you. Why are you pretending to humor him about it?

Answer: I don't know what else to do. This is Mexican TV movie material.

Question: You could be honest with him. You could leave.

Answer: That would hurt his feelings.

Question: Well then, Mr. Considerate Chickenshit 2004-2009, best of luck when he interrogates you about the book in your back pocket? You're well aware of the warm friendly tradition of happy hour literary discussions. He'll ask you if it's true Revolutionary Road is really Gatsby for the 50's.

Answer: Do you think he remembers when he told me about Gatsby for the first time?

Question: Now or in general?

Answer: I'm the one expected to keep a straight face here. Confronted with this Nixon-like egregious evasion of the demonstratively obvious subject matter only to point 10,000 fingers at the truth.

Question: Wasn't Yates going on about something along those lines in the book?

Answer: Yeah, but I can't remember the exact quote.

Question: Try remembering it from the movie.

Dad: Are you liking what's his name, you know, Reactionary Road? That guy. My writer friend Michael Leone's guy. Norman Bates. Richard Bates. Bill Gates. What's his name?

Brin: Richard Yates.

Sara: Leave. You don't need to see this. And you're gonna be bummed out for a week over this.

Question & Answer: She's right.

Dad: You were saying it, what's it called again, Reprobate Road, is a bit like Gatsby. High praise. Is it?

Sara: Take your bike and go.

Question & Answer: Enlighten him on the similarities. Go on. Enlighten *us*. Make us your groupies. We long for that throbbing thrust of the noble autodidact's uncontaminated insights into things. So pure...

Dad: "Oh yes---before I forget---and what's this your mother tells me about your harsh judgments concerning my alcoholism?"

Sara: 32 DD

Brin: ?

Sara: I'm trying to distract you.

Question & Answer: We'll try and help her too. We were wondering what it meant about you and her when she told you she wouldn't like to play on a cheap piano and you admitted to us, in strict confidence of course, that you wouldn't like to play on an expensive one.

Sara: Is that true?

Brin: Uhhh...

Dad: "Strong judgment, your mother said. Stronnnng judgement."

Question & Answer: He's in a playful mood.

Brin: ...

Question & Answer: Just wanted to posit that we're amused you've 3rd personed yourself. Taking this shit on first person getting a little much, is it?

Sara: Here's something for you to think about instead. It's my pie chart for moving there.

(Continued) Sara: 80% of it love. Only a sliver for Alanis Morsette, cute Olympic stuffed animal mascotts, wine at the Sylvia with you...

Question & Answer: Alanis?

Brin: I know.

Dad: Come to the living room and we can chat.

Brin: I'm gonna go. I just came to get my bike.

Dad: I knew there had to be another reason besides a visit. My ulterior motive driven son.

Sara: 32 DD. You weren't a breast guy before me.

Question & Answer: This is crass manipulation of a girl you're in love with.

Sara: And you love it, baby.

Dad: Come on, let's go to the living and sit for a moment than you flee.

Dan Starling: Don't worry, all my paintings are in that living room we'll have him out numbered.

Sara: When I move there can we find some way to have Dan Starling live next door to us?

Brin: Okay, just for a minute.

Now what was that quote. Fuck. Fuck. I can't remember. Something like, "That's the great thing about the truth, you always know what it is. No matter how long you've been without it. You never forget. You just get better at lying."

Or something close to that.

I think...

Hawaii Interstate Highway (redux)

2009-01-30T10:07:00.000-08:00

"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...

Long distance relationships open like pop-up books. Her pop-up book is in Manhattan.

I like stealing stuff---if I like you. 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 clicks 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 pack-rat for every letter an ex sent you and you're amused I burned everything I had with my first kiss, your sticker books and photo albums, that you kept a lock of your hair from when you were six and now your hair's a different color, how 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, that I thought my first girl was the one until we popped each others cherry and I knew she wasn't, that 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, you want me to pry you down from your ivory tower over the intercom, 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 have my breeze run through your hair, I want you to kiss the stretch marks and cellulite on my brain, 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 the church of your heart to have the choir on fire and neither of us willing to piss on them cause our sex life is a cookie jar, 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 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 Dan Starling as our neighbor, you want me to be fucked-up but lucid, you want our kid as the final jury on us, you want relativity here and there but stuff that comparison can't touch other places, you want love letters and suicide notes and me to pretend with a straight face like I know what the fucking difference is most of the time, you want your melody to feel like a symphony, I want my note to feel like a melody cause we're both wondering how many inches it takes to reach your heart, I want crop circles waking up next to you, your revolving door eyes that never get any my toothpaste back in the tube, you want to be my God and have me as your bible, I want you with telescopes and microscopes and a club and a cave and no viable heat source but me, 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 an Asian girlfriend for a guy whose never had an Asian girl look at him twice, you want to be my fire escape---more architecture than utility---my heart as your personal scrapbook, and Brinny you can still fall in love 10,000 times but it doesn't have to be with 10,000 different girls it can be with me, over and over, like some karma on spin cycle and no tag-backs, and we can be off-key, dirty utensil conversation trying to get at each other, and every soliloquy can be one long stutter, you want nobody keeping score and I want EVERYTHING TO COUNT and why the hell am I inventorying all this shit, oh yeah it's Thanksgiving and that's your dad across the room and is it supposed to be lost on me that he's sorta shy and bold in a fairly demonstratively obvious ode to picking me as your fella and if I get your headlines you can use my fine print as toilet paper cause since I was 19 I could swing a rejection letter with both hands behind my back which I don't mind so much when I'm holding your hand because being with you, long distance or coital, reminds me riding a bike with no hands, excited and cozy, and this whole fucking thing and all those other people stinking in our nostrils don't have to matter so much, nor my book of wet matches, I don't feel like such a pinned insect anymore, my garbage and maladjusted apparatus wasn't flammable until I met you, be my pyromaniac and I'll be your kleptomaniac, we'll get the hang of it, this is a piece of chipped paint off my Davega Bicycle, we can be cigarette butt train wrecks in each others ashtray, you can sign letters in lowercase so I'll imagine you on your knees and try to map out more ways to sweep you off your feet, now you're making me a little nervous for not having wiped this thing's nose, I only told you I could read palms as an excuse to hold your hand, everything else was drinking through a fucking bent straw as soon as I saw you... so do we have a deal?

Eat Him By His Own Light

2009-01-22T17:49:00.000-08:00

Some material you come at a little stuffy, so I'll apologize in advance for the seductive baritone and clumsy pauses to wipe my runny nose...

This foamy fog that won't lift, day after day, turns the whole town into a soggy bowl of cereal. At night it turns streetlights into penny flavored snow cones. Turns everybody halfway down the street into a ghost from some Gogol Russian night in Saint Petersburg. I like it at night. Have Chopin in your ears humming homesick about Poland into shivering cold while he's lost or abandoned on some ferry waiting for home to find him. Makes it easy to think about people who play the same notes on your own life. Pretty soon you're walking somewhere else with different versions of yourself and different versions of the people you knew. Maybe back when you fit as friends, even though now you can see and feel the places where you wouldn't fit not too far off, even if it took you a little longer to accept it at the time.

I was thinking about this kid the other day while I was walking alone by the beach late at night. He was someone I used to miss being apart from but don't now. The catch is, when I fall asleep he keeps showing up in my dreams as that version of himself I used to miss. He reminds me how to miss him. Which adds its own brand of fog to my situation. Or maybe he's the same and I'm a different version. He never used to show up in dreams while we were friends.

He's always sad when I see him. Dreams are funny because everybody and everything in them gets exactly what its about except you. By the time it makes sense you wake up.

By the beach I was thinking about when he had a cast over his shattered hand that nobody bothered to sign. I turn back a few pages in his story to where he shattered his hand. I never saw it happen, but I'd heard it. Lots of us did. A whole gym full of people.

He'd had the last shot in a basketball game when he was maybe 14. His father was in the stands watching with a clipboard keeping track of statistics because his son was small and bigger kids played more than him even though he probably had more skill. His father kept track of numbers in order to provide seething evidence of injustice in his boy not playing.

That night his boy was given the last shot with a couple seconds on the clock. I was only a few feet away from the team huddle where the decision was arrived at. I wasn't even good enough to ride the bench. I hadn't made the team at all that year (or any other). Probably not even close. But I saw a couple kids in the huddle protest who ended up gaining the final shot. Down by two points, they needed a three. He was the best pure shooter on the team. I watched his face after the coach told everybody who was getting the ball. I could feel it was one of those moments in his life that might change everything. I remember wondering deep down which one he was more drawn to. Could he *deal* with being a winner. That whole angle on his life. I wasn't sure.

They went into their formations on the court and I saw the ball passed to him. Everything slowed down. The crowd hushed. The guy defending him could feel who the ball was going to. But before he caught it he looked up at the hoop and mishandled receiving the ball. There was still time to get the shot off. In a panic he reached down for it but fumbled it again and the defender grabbed for it and they both fell over. Buzzer rang. Big moan from the crowd. Coach threw up his hands. Game over.

I remember him looking over up into the stands just as I did and seeing the frustration on his father's livid face.

I looked back at the kid, the trauma on his face. For some kind of hideously misplaced refuge, he grabbed his ankle, clutched it in agony just as another boy who had desperately wanted the final shot strutted by smirking, "Broke your ankle, huh?" This particular kid never saw a guy on the ground he didn't want to kick.

Then I think he was crying holding his ankle. Everyone left him alone and headed back to the locker room. The stands emptied. As he got to his feet he tested out the ankle and grimaced. The harder he tried not to cry the worse it got. I watched him limp over to the locker room and not two seconds after he was in there a metallic thud rang out. He'd punched the locker so hard he shattered his hand. Now he'd have a momento over his arm commemorating this awful day. Everybody could ask, "How'd you get *that*?"

I think that's when I started talking to him in the hopes of becoming his friend.

I wasn't a loser's advocate or anything; back then you were an underdog or a whore in my emotional scorecard. Lots of the people who don't become artists by profession do way better jobs of it with their own life. They can't help it. You *have* to be an artist to fuck things up colorfully. *Primary* colorfully. I knew an artist when I saw one. Now nobody could ever look at his life without this Mona Lisa-moment hanging on some wall of his eyes.

Damaged Goods

2009-01-14T15:31:00.001-08:00

"So do you love her?"

What throws me is how some of them smile as they frisk you with the question. Maybe because naive people like to pretend they're cynical a lot of the time. That they can peg pretty much every human being as either an underdog or a whore, as if those were the only categories anybody can fall into.

After I put my head down and tongue the inside of my cheek what I'm really doing is trying to work out if damaged-goods-hearts maybe have that same magic vending machine candy has. Candy tastes better when it falls. More flavor. Achieving maximum flavor potential; ask anybody whose tried it.

Thing is, if you fall for somebody sometimes the effect it produces actually deactivates everything the person you fell for feels for you. No tag-backs. Maybe the most rotten bit of luck out there is when the ugliest thing about you is what you look like loving somebody. Other times, it's best thing you got going on. Maybe she's the best thing people like about you.

"What the fuck, Brin? You have to think about it?"

I close my eyes and Union Square pops up on split-screen. I'm fishing out my own "linger yet a while, thou art so fair"-moment with her. Reinfecting myself with the same dread I had fumbling and scrambling around for a ticket I couldn't locate just to get on the subway. She's staring at me through the gate; she's on the other side waiting for me. She walks over to the fence and rattles the bars at me while I go through all my pockets again but I can't find the fucking ticket. She's late for work on Madison Avenue and I'm late for my first day on the job in Brooklyn. It's a mosh pit of morning commute cluster fuck. Please God, give me my fucking ticket. Why have you forsaken me with no damned change in my pocket. Don't you know the kind of fuse this girl has?

"C'mon!" She says. "I can't be late again."

I know that but some asshole bumps into me and nearly knocks me over and when I stand up straight everything slows down and I stop looking for my ticket and stare at her. She's dressed up to work in an office just below Central Park while I'm dressed up to smash reinforced concrete.

This voice, the one Steinbeck I think called the "low voice" starts talking in my head and it's the only thing I can hear:

"Sara, if you leave. If you leave me here---like *this*---this vulnerable, make sure you know we'll never see each other again."

Then I said to her, "Just go. I'll find it. I know you gotta go."

But that "low voice" confiscated Yankee Stadium's PA system and said,

"Look at my face right now, because if you *don't* go and you stay and you help me out of this right now, then I'm with you. And you could be gang raped by the Detroit Pistons in a hot air balloon over the Tour de France and it won't define you and I'll still be with you. Nothing bad you could ever do or anything bad that could befall you (even that colorful previous example I cited) will ever define you after THIS act of kindness right now. It might seem a trivial context or an insignificant gesture---it's not. This is a supreme kindness."

She didn't say or do anything for a few seconds.

Then she came around the gate and helped me find the ticket and then find the train and then kissed me before I headed down the stairs. I turned around and caught her turning around and ever since I've been a human-bullseye for this girl.

* * *

"Are you *in* love with her?"

So I smile and shrug like I always do.

Taxidermy Redeemable Coupons

2009-01-12T01:45:00.000-08:00

Lately, for the last few months at least, ten seconds after they---friends, family, strangers, ex's---ask me about her, they ask me the same question: "you in love with her?"

And every time they ask I clam up and put my face down. Even if I'm on the phone with that Cuban girl who had my number in a wrenching way (nasty grip) and she can't see me:

"Brinicio, you don't think I can hear you blush over the phone?"

Harpooned from across the continent.

Sometimes I'd give anything to be misunderstood. I could never understand the people who complain about being misunderstood. What's so bad about it? There've been times I woulda killed someone to have a few misunderstood get-out-of-jail-free cards. Standing on some street corner somewhere with broken glass in all my pockets and staring at a girl. You feel like your punctured little soul has a cast on it that nobody will even bother to vandalize let alone sign.

Any asshole gets me, understands me, knows the score. They always have. They always will. Nobodies ever asked me, "What are you thinking?" They don't have to.

But I'm not used to this role. One reason I liked getting girls to cheat with me was for the satisfaction of turning their partner into my number one, crackerjack publicity firm. Hurt people like to hurt people. Pretty basic concept. Especially when, aside from all the acting out insecure bullshit, there are so many girls out there who make it so tempting.

What are the things you're *not* supposed to do? One of the first is: You shouldn't talk about your ex's. Terrible idea. This is basic common sense. Accepted wisdom. Fairly intuitive to anyone.

Depends.

This is certainly true if your ex-stories are dull, or cliche, or a low-rent invitation for somebody to join a lousy, heartbreakingly predictable narrative. Most people don't appreciate trophy cases or the practice of taxidermy in general.

I went to this career thing the other day (after I dropped out of my own school of thought and decided, aw well, fuck it) and one of the questions they asked our huge group was, with a poster on the wall proclaiming, YOU'RE OFF DRUGS AND SOBER AND WANT TO ENTER THE JOB FORCE, "What is 'time' to you?" Even before the pause was impregnated a guy who put up his hand, he had that bloated, career-polygamist look about him, and he said, "Time is what everybody loses over and over for their entire lives."

Solemn nods of furtive appreciation and agreement.

I'm sure his future 19 wives could appreciate the logic of where he was coming from. Seemed mostly true to me, but not for EVERYBODY.

Artists don't lose time. The good ones get to redeem their garbage like coupons. That's why artists are so annoying.

That might be why I go after women using my ex's as my main weapon and douse it with the gasoline of their history.

When I was five and saw all the kids in kindergarten on the first day I sized everybody up the best I could about who was most powerful. Naturally my eyes gravitated to Amber Murphy, Prettiest Girl (not just in the classroom; in the WORLD). Winnie Cooper for every guy before we knew Winnie Cooper. Next. The biggest, strongest kid. The meanest kid. The funniest kid. The cutest, most charming kid. The future street kid with junk halo glare in his eyes. The sweetest girl. The best guy with put-downs. The richest kid. The smartest (this is a weird category because most really smart people secretly feel the dumbest, which means they're actually the easiest to manipulate emotionally and thus are fairly weak in the power ranking pecking order). The fastest running kid. The puzzling future lesbian girls. The sphinx-like queer boys already getting along with girls from the get-go. The most satisfying victim. The cheerer-ons. The joiners. The loners. The people stuck in roles they don't want to play.

After a week I had everybody lined up. But I'd missed one of them. A glaring omission.

He was a quiet kid, good looking, minded his own business---then it was paint class one day. And at the end of class the entire school STOPPED after he handed in his project. Everybody paid attention. That painting was commended by our principal and used to represent the school hallways along with the 7th grader artists' work, even though Dan Starling was five years old.

Somehow a pulled-out-of-his-ass portrait of an elephant had everybody eating out of the palm of his hands. And by the time it was taken down he didn't even want it. So it was auctioned off and fell into my greedy little hands and I gave it to my mom and she was ASTOUNDED by my artistic achievement and I never ever ever ever told her (there's a fair chance she still has it 24 years later).

* * *

"Do you love her?"

I used to go out of my way to sell this stuff. Because forgers understand authenticity a lot better than authenticity usually does. It's their job to. An honest guy doesn't have much need for understanding a dishonest guy. He can just hire one. Like casinos do hiring reformed crooks to catch active ones. Or banks hiring ex-bank robbers to catch new ones.

"Do you love her?"

Why do we pretend if I said yes or no or maybe you'd understand what I mean?

Or do you already know and asking me and my putting my head down bashfully is really the answer you were looking for the whole time?

"So do you, Brin?"

Out-Of-Tune Madrid Ragtime

2009-01-08T12:22:00.001-08:00

I haven't been home for the holidays in a while. Since about 18 I've gone out of my way to duck them as much as possible. Mainly to duck my family. If there aren't any jokes because the truth is always the best joke: I can't really handle the misguided expectation of warmth and it's more awkward than any motivation a white guy finds while he's on a dance floor trying to impress a black girl. Yeah, so borrow, max a credit card, wash and rinse some dinky-ass script in LA for a guy more interested in getting into your pants than making a movie, get on a vineyard for a few months---do whatever---and make enough dough to fuck off where nobody knows you... where after fifty tries they still can't pronounce your name right and wonder why you're so happy about it.

Don't tell anybody and get over to Madrid and stay out all night Christmas Eve until that strange hour when the Chinese step out into the copper street light haze and huddle on hundreds of street corners across town clutching dozens of shopping bags full of to-go food for cheap. Chance being stuck over a toilet for 10 hours and go sight-seeing through the nighttime streets that get started around 3am and the Romanian prostitutes lining the outside fence at the big parks with ponds you can take a girl to and rent a row-boat with. Walk until the Chinese have abandoned the street corners and get off the Gran Via and head down to Puerta del Sol along a path where all the North Africans are waiting for you peddling movies and music and scarves and sunglasses on blankets that if a whistle echoes down a corridor that Policia are approaching are packed up by the hundreds, swept up as quick as dominoes tip over, and two seconds later a thriving black market economy is a ghost echo of footsteps haunting 80 different directions weaved into all the other squeaky Windex scrubbed reflections on storefront windows of urgent men casting hectic glances at their fake designer watches.

Stick with that until a handful of kids break dancing in a troupe grabs your attention doing Michael back when Mike was single-handedly sinking the war on drugs with a moonwalk.

Nurse your hangover or buy something else and get down near that statue of a bear reaching up into the tree who looks just like you going for a first kiss, just as shy and deliberate and off-key pilfering some girl's museum gift shop while she's a little amused that you offered to read her palm because obviously you can't read palms and just wanted an excuse to touch her and give her the cracked-windshield-Brando-brow-action that only worked because its failure was kinda sweet. Spend Christmas morning on bench with a coffee and paper bagged cheap cognac and a few of those faintly sweet tasting Fortuna cigarettes and give Don Quixote another half-assed try in Spanish until a tourist bus rolls in and the Gypsies move in like a kicked over ant nest and set up their coordinated strikes. Discern which nationality and why affords the most pleasure in being robbed?

Continue this practice after having been rolled your first week over there by a smooth Arab pair. You shoulda seen the girl with him. I couldn't take my eyes off her while he's going on about my jeans. "Where in the fuck do you FIND a pair of jeans like that, man? You're Italian?" I just kept nodding to his girlfriend while the guy reached over and admired my belt, followed by my pockets. Was this how all Arabs demonstrated their admiration for the craftsmanship of Italian tailored jeans?

Possibly.

So you head over to the little casinos surrounded by the upper crust Romanian prostitutes, not so done-up but noticeably more blond because a lot of the older Middle Eastern businessmen like them that way. You've figured out a trick at the casinos with this standard machine they offer---a frightening one when you apply it's message to anybody who emotionally fits the bill---where a rake is pushing coins off a cliff and you have to throw in more coins hoping it knocks some off. That brings in about 20-25 Euros first thing in the morning since drunks don't play attention to odds at night and they don't recalibrate the machines.

And then Christmas night or New Years get back to Sol, ground zero of the city, and watch the drunken maniacs try to climb up onto Alphonso and grab the king's huge shnoz while everybody cheers.

I guess the main trouble with being at home around Christmas is that one of the saddest Christmas stories I know is about a couple little kids living in the projects in a thimble-sized apartment with their on-welfare-single-mom, who woke up Christmas morning only to find their apartment had been burglarized and all the presents under the tree stolen and their mom had to account for it. These little kids were my big brothers before I was born, before my dad met my mom and her kids and stepped in.

So whatever grievances one might have directed toward *this* particular holiday go well beyond small potatoes given the participants involved.

This was the first Christmas I didn't have that nagging itch to take off. Somebody swiped it from me and I'm inclined to believe the culprit left on a plane for Manhattan but is rumored to be returning in the near future. But even with the snow around, it wasn't a good idea to bring it up and engage in some sorta pissing contest with that Norman Rockwell from Hell scene.

The Regretful Unrequited Lovelife of Lesbian Trolls

2009-01-03T11:07:00.000-08:00

You see that corridor-looking gallery with little windows up there on the Art Deco arch? On the far side, 15 feet above the traffic, there's a ladder under it with a padlock on the hatch to get inside. Since 1934, when the Burrard Street Bridge was constructed, many rumors and legends have circulated over possible occupants living in this gallery.

When I was a little boy I had a crazy old woman of 60 for a babysitter named Rosie. She dressed like Mrs. Roper from Three's Company. During the interview for the babysitter job, she'd told my mother that she'd been in a car accident and lost all five of her children and her husband and to deal with the trauma had undergone a lobotomy procedure. Exactly why a woman like this sounded like a pleasant candidate to have around me for four hours a day I don't know. After my dad explained what a lobotomy entailed I was always fascinated trying to snoop around for enchanting indications of it during the time I spent with Rosie. No dice. I didn't know what she was like *before* so it was impossible to compare.

We played a lot of cards. She incessantly cheated. She went outside and smoked a lot of cigarettes while I watched her out my window. Occasionally she'd take me to the zoo or the aquarium. I always hated the zoo but I loved the aquarium, except for those terrifying Beluga whales swimming in Chemotherapy-blue lighting.

One time we walked over the Burrard Street Bridge and she pointed up at that gallery.

"Ooop! Didja see her? Look!"
"See what?"
"The troll in the window. There she is!"
"Trolls don't come in 'shes'."
"Where do they come from then?"
"I don't see anything."
"Ooop! There she was again. You missed her just so you could argue with me. You're gonna throw your life away and end up a lawyer just like your dad."
"Where? I don't see anything. Trolls live *under* bridges."
"Not this one."
"I don't see anything."
"She's camera shy."
"What kind of troll lives *above* a bridge?"
"A lesbian troll, Brinny."
"What???"

An embittered, folk-singer-fat, lesbian troll as it turned out, Rosie informed me. One who'd unfortunately fallen in love with a pretty heterosexual human girl.

"Rosie, are you serious?"
"Yes. This poor troll suffered from unrequited, inter-species love with a human girl."
"What's 'unrequited' mean?"
"It means loving somebody who doesn't love you."
"But she's a troll."
"So?"
"Okay. Maybe a troll can fall for a human but how can a girl fall for another girl?"
"How can a *boy* fall for a girl?"
"They just do."
"Maybe a girl can. For the same reasons."
"No they can't."
"Says who?"
"I dunno. Trolls don't fall in love with other trolls and start troll families."
"Oh no?"
"No."
"Then where do trolls come from, genius? Don't they need mommies and daddies?"
"I dunno."
"*This* troll didn't want a conventional family. She fell in love. You can't always control who you fall in love with."
"Rosie, I asked my dad about the operation you had."
"Did you now?"
"Yeah."
"And what did the lawyer who married the gypsy tarot-card-reading mother have to say about it?"
"Did they really take out a chunk of your brain?"
"Yes they did."
"Do you think the something they took out of your brain is what makes you think girls can fall for other girls?"
"Setting aside that a female troll could fall for a human female."
"That too, yeah."
"Maybe you can do me a favor and check. I'll lean over so you just dig around what's left of my hair till you find the flap and take a peek at my nuts and bolts."
"Ok, ok, ok. What happened to this troll."
"Well, she was so upset that she locked herself up in this gallery and took up gardening."
"Why gardening?"
"Because she wanted revenge and needed some exercise, that's why."
"How?"
"She wanted to convince the human girl that she loved her more than a human boy ever could."
"What does gardening on top of a bridge have to do with that?"
"Everything."
"I don't get it."
"While she was up there, the troll invented two magical species of dandelions. One black and one white."
"Why dandelions?"
"Why not?"
"What's magical about them?"
"One works with the ocean and the other with the sky."
"How?"
"You know how dandelion blossoms turn into spores at the end of summer and end up looking like old woman's hair? Like mine? Just when they're perfect to blow apart."
"Sure."
"This troll rigged these Magical Dandelions so that when the white-daytime ones hit the ocean and got carried off to the horizon by summer time they'd transform into sailboats by the hundreds."
"What about the black ones?"
"You know around dusk when all those thousands of crows fly east across the whole city to find a good spot to watch the sunset?"
"Yeah."
"That's where they come from."
"From a lesbian troll blowing apart a black dandelion that magically transforms when it touches the sky?"
"You betcha. If seeds can be planted in the ground why can't they be planted in the ocean or the sky?"
"I dunno."
"And now you do."
"But what about the girl she does all this for?"
"She got old."
"Does she know all this stuff about where crows and sailboats come from?"
"Yes."
"What happened to her?"
"She was so ashamed and sad over it she did hurtful things to herself. Then they put her in an institution. Then they gave her a lobotomy."
"Like you!"
"She is me."

Carefree Gum Presents: Mistletoe Moments

2008-12-24T10:23:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-13T23:52:00.001-08:00

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

2008-12-11T18:37:00.000-08:00

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

Her Moats and Subways

2008-11-30T11:14:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-24T08:43:00.001-08:00

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

2008-11-13T10:58:00.001-08:00

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

2008-11-03T20:12:00.001-08:00

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

2008-11-01T23:46:00.001-07:00

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

2008-10-30T22:42:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-28T07:38:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-19T20:14:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-13T13:01:00.000-07:00

"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.

Sandcastles

2008-10-09T11:45:00.001-07:00

Strange week. I went to a shrink a couple days ago, first time in my life. My dad won't get any help for drinking so I figured *I* could probably use some. Here's the twist: 35 years ago this shrink was cheating on her husband with my dad. He was younger than me back then. Sorta goofy, huh? I'd never had a conversation with this woman in my life up until she met me in the hallway of her apartment. My dad was younger than me when she finally left her husband to be with him, but by then he'd met my mom. Now my parents split 22 years ago, but he never went with another girl. He found other things I guess.

I couldn't put my finger on what I was really looking for from this lady. "Yo, why don't I want to live forever anymore? Or even to a hundred." I kept that one to myself. It's a sorta lie, anyway. I still do half the time.

Other stuff is going on, but I don't have a beef with it. My best friend got on a plane. Which got me thinking:

In some ways 1993-2008 has been a single conversation with Dan lasting 15 years, with interruptions...

It's spooky when you've seen the little 5 year old version of somebody and they've seen yours. Long before you knew how to build up walls or motes around your castle. Before you set up the intercom to your ivory towers. Before you had dungeons and vaults. Before anything that mattered to you had an address that anyone understood. These people know the score on all your little social and personal triumphs and banana peels. They saw how you changed when somebody was there to hold your hand and what you looked like when everybody laughed. Maybe they even saw how you moved alone. You met some of these people halfway and they could identify your speck in a crowd of specks, even if a summer blurred it or a snow that shut down school was whiting out the whole world for a week. Some stuff happens. If they moved from THEIR childhood home yours might've become the surrogate. All the points of reference along the way, the whole emotional shorthand you're working off, that face delivering a whole wing of the Prado or the Louvre sometimes. They have some secret ingredient in them that exposes all the invisible ink of your personal history. Gosh, I never ate a thing my mom cooked aside from Hungarian crepes, but I never turned down anything Dan's mom offered. Hers is still the only dinner table I've ever sat at because I wanted to. It just looked right. And she made him. How couldn't I trust her?

Some moments never lose their wrapping paper. You just get to keep tearing that shit open every time you think about it. Funny how this stuff goes sometimes. This shrink cried 3 times, me zero. Here's a couple:

"I'm 67, Brin. I was married to a man for 23 years, had his children. But your dad was the closest I came to a husband."

I asked why it didn't work with my dad.

"One of the reasons was that I knew how much he wanted YOU. A family. I had two kids with my husband and after the second child there were complications and I couldn't have another child. I couldn't share that miracle with your father. I couldn't offer that and I knew how much he wanted that. I knew how important that was to his life. And I was scared of so much in those days."

I was scared for the last while even though in a bunch of ways I've never been more content. For the first time I had this sinking feeling my dad was waiting around to die.

My last name, Friesen, is Dutch. It means DIKE BUILDER. Which seems like a nice place for a bloodline to start if you're interested in building stories. Here's one:

Me and my dad, when I was a little kid, used to go the beach ever summer when the tide was out and build dams and sand castles. We'd flip a coin for who got to build which. And the game was, once the tide got close, defending the castle from the dam once you broke it. If the guy who released the dam couldn't demolish the castle he lost and the defender of the castle won.

I remember having this odd feeling shoveling the sand and picking up handfuls, shaping and taking care in building the castle. Especially spooky feeling making the castle beautiful, giving it a signature of some kind, putting up little ornate towers with wet sand. Because whether or not the dam's flood took me out, the tide WOULD only a few minutes later. So what was the point? You were fucked. It seemed like a very sad exercise.

I don't think I really got it until I heard about that orchestra on the Titanic after it was clear the unsinkable ship was going down. Not many options, fellas. Sorry. Enjoyed your music, but no life boats for you. So, you can run screaming or pray or try and steal a boat from a woman or a kid but I don't think that's gonna work out too well for you. Or you can do what you're here to do and play.

I wonder what they played.

I went for a walk with my dad yesterday. The leaves are all changing color and Queen Elizabeth park has a lot of places we've been over the years that we're fond of. There were still some ducks left over at the pond. The paths through the garden have squirrels hopping around stocking up for what's coming pretty soon.

I mentioned about that shrink to my dad near the end of the walk. He knew I'd gone to see her. He knew it wasn't about being all long-distance with my girlfriend but about him. Which caught him off guard initially. I told him about when the shrink cried because she couldn't have his child. His face went open for a second before he smiled a little and shook his head.

"I never knew that."

Rosetta Stone

2008-10-04T02:31:00.001-07:00

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.

Unsigned

2008-10-01T07:53:00.000-07:00

all these clouds outside my window made a nice bib for an especially sloppy pie eating contest sunrise, all kinds of berries smeared. now it's pigeon shit gray with the shopping carts clanking down the alleys. all the traffic lights winking like betty page.

you read that inscription that i felt a little queasy and naked writing in my chicken scratch two minutes before i saw you, but wrote it anyway so you could find it *later*. maybe when you felt like fishing for it. maybe stumbling on it drowsy before you went to sleep. maybe with stuff ahead of your day---hopefully something nice that you could arch your spine to when you thot about it, like the way your whole body sighed and curled a little when you talked about dancing all over the place.

*LATER* being the key fucking word, natalie.

you shouldn't say certain things to me, you know. when you told me you read that paragraph i sent you the other day out loud to yourself---to get the/my voice right!?---jesus fuck, i wanted to club you on the spot. toss you over a shoulder and find a nice hospitable cave with a cool breeze and a mattress with no sheets or blankets. me as the only alternative smirking heat source. you can't say things like that. not in that little unsure voice that changed when it came out.

especially since you turn me into a pack rat. just sorta wanting to keep a bunch of stuff that i didn't have the guts to try and steal even tho i love stealing. keep your face tucked inside that hood a little bit longer, just because i like the way it looks with only a little crinkled, rain-licked hair against your chin. figure out a way to keep that antenna inside you bent right so the reception stayed perfect between your lips and eyes smiling. just making that sneaky sound in your throat that seems to surprise and tickle-out certain expressions that i can mainline. maybe i just love looking at you. i get to say that without feeling guilty because it's true. if somebody pulled out a stop watch over at benny's way back when, i was there in under a second easy. you don't seem so much painted, as carved. and you have this effect on me.

i get tense sometimes, nervous, and this fucking billiard's triangle comes out of nowhere trying to cram all of me into its ugly shape---so am i allowed to tell you when i got to touch you the morning you left this crazy pool cue cracked every ball so hard inside me, in a thousand directions, all the numbers burned off?

in oliver there are lots of orchards handy, with cherries and apricots and peaches hanging out along the highway eager to be stolen if anyone should happen to be strolling by. there's a river that snakes thro the valley for a few miles and i'm told it's higher and faster than it's been in 40 years and i wonder how many bridges you've been flushed under because that's always been my favorite part. there's a lake, half a mile long, with a raft at one shore shaded by willow trees, big cozy old thing, that you can take out at night that drifts a couple hundred yards into absolute darkness with only the moon drooling on the water and buttering the sky. and there's a big ass mountain with the profile of an indian that takes a couple hours to climb through wild flowers and cactus and the occasional deer nosing around after you hop the fence of the farm beneath it and trespass...

this is a little too long, but then yesterday felt a little too short. your fault on both counts.

Dropped Like Glass Joe...

2008-09-25T17:14:00.001-07:00

There's something violently beautiful about those who can't get over something. Maybe more if it's for a *someone*. Almost everybody can and does. We're designed to. Even the stuff you don't walk away from, after a while it just feels like graffiti on your heart. You get used to it. Mostly our impact amounts to a minor crater or gentle speed bump in the lives we touch. Another rotten deal is how lots of us operate as unpaid publicity departments for the people coming down the pike towards those we care about. Our baggage and childhood files come off like the sucker punch to our whole lives. But suicide is special for one big fat reason that separates it from every other decision anyone ever makes. It's the biggest decision you can make that's impossible to regret. Provided it pans out, it's no tag-backs. Everybody whose left behind is, to various degrees of gray, IT. This David Foster Wallace suicide bummed me out. A lot less than Hunter S. Thompson's suicide a few years ago, but still. It sucks. Not because I liked him---I didn't---but because I had to go and cram a thousand pages of him over the week following his suicide on account of not having had my FILL of nursing my grudge just yet. Even worse, after five pages I liked him. A few more pages and it got much worse---I missed him. I guess I wasn't pissed off at him in the first place. Just what he represented. It gave me the willies. Mariah Careys in music, or with words, can nail every expensive note and octave they want and drive plastic extinct with all the records they sell---I'll still be pining for Billie Holiday and how her voice cracks sometimes and forgives me for everything wrong I've ever done to anybody or tucks me in at night when it goes a little off-key. Everybody gets more flowers when they're dead than when they're alive these days. When that happen? My best friend's leaving town pretty soon, probably for a couple years. Kinda leaves anything else I could say about it one long stutter. Art school in Germany is swiping my emotional nightlight. Why'dja have to tie me those tracks with that nasty train pawing its way toward me? Sorta funny, I was looking at this photo somebody else took of my girl. Few thousand miles between us, I spend an awful lot of my time thinking about that face of hers. It's my favorite face because its calling card is chipping off some new piece of me every time I see it. But here was that face in a photo, obviously taken by somebody who loved her. Who has dibs? I dunno. I know she's staring into the camera but I have no idea what she's looking at. Her expression doesn't give it away. Likewise with her beauty, it just sorta says, "Relax, this won't hurt..." And Brinny gets dropped in the first round like Glass Joe each and every time.

Untied Shoelaces

2008-09-21T12:14:00.000-07:00

Some girls just have a holiday in their eyes. At least, that's the best I can come up with to explain a nagging quality of this one girl that a lot of people, including me, got hung up on. Because there wasn't anything particularly special in the color, they had the same light blue as Connecticut Avenue on a Monopoly board. Other girls had Boardwalk or Park Place-blue, but pretty soon people started passing them over for cheaper real estate. Before we knew it we were hooked. She had us on a string.

What kind of impression did she make entering a room? Not much. Garden variety entrance. She never seemed interested in being the center of attention. She preferred being a member of the audience in welcoming somebody. From that setting she was a little more handy at distinguishing herself. She wasn't Don King in bringing her own one-woman-parade to welcome you, but she was sneaky about it. She perfected the art of sucker-punch compliments. It went a long way. You'd bump into her being in a lousy mood and she'd lick her suction cup dart compliment and fire it at you and it could stick for the whole week. She saw people and she let them know it with compliments. Everywhere else she was low-key. Anything about her was on the lam. She had four or five sisters homely as pack mules which only increased your curiosity about how she'd missed that bullet.

She exited a room differently than other girls and it stayed with you more and longer than even the really expensive ones. It felt like she disappeared every time. Nobody else could do that. She's the only girl I ever saw leaving a room who didn't have some kind of bumpersticker on her fender about what it meant. A girl's ass usually gives a helluva lot away about her. Not much of what any girl has ever told me has plucked the heart of her mystery more than just how she walks. She had a great ass too, but no matter how hard you tried you couldn't focus on it when she turned a corner. Where was she going? You'd over heard that already. She was going to go FOR A WALK. What fifteen year old goes for walks? What did she do last weekend? She went to a movie---BY HERSELF. By CHOICE. Wait a minute. This was all wrong. Nobody should be able to get away with these antics!

Fortunately this was right around the time of a miracle of earth shattering, BIBLICAL proportions. Saved By the Bell, the balm on legions of teenagers wounded lives, suddenly and magically was transported from Indiana to Bayside, California. Zack Morris had now ALWAYS been a California kid complete with an entirely rewritten background and new, lifelong, better looking friends. AND a sniper opened fire on the school!!! Miss Bliss had been rubbed out. Mikey was 86'd. Another female friend of Zack's that I can't remember the name of (ugly, curly haired) was knocked off too. Lisa Turtle survived the hail of bullets taking refuge in an obsession with beyond belief hideous fashion!

BUT WAIT!

What was the explanation provided for us to account for this incomprehensible bloodbath and seismic geographical and temporal shift in Zack Morris' high school universe?!

None. No explanation necessary. FUCK YOU, it's better this way. Here's a Kelly. Here's a Jesse Spanno. And fresh from wrestling practice, sipping from his water bottle apparently the fountain of youth, I GIVE TO THEE THE AGELESS, AC SLATER. We got a handle on this situation now. You're in good hands. We'll stick to this story line, no tag backs.

Which, albeit in a bit of a stretch, seemed to coincide with the girl I was talking about earlier and her trick: we were still under house arrest in the same classroom---which we could never leave---but everything outside had improved a million fold. And it was left to our imagination. And why? Just because...

We needed stuff like this. It was a tough time after we lost Hulk Hogan. Childhood was a breeze for me and a lot of people I knew for the very simple reason that we believed more in Hulk Hogan being REAL than any Christian we'd ever met believed in Jesus being real. The man's hair was spun from the fucking Golden Fleece! Hulk Hogan was on our watch provided we guzzled down vitamins, said prayers (I prayed to Hogan himself), and I forget the third thing he required but I know I blindly did it with zeal. Think about it, if Jesus showed up all of a sudden, parting the clouds or something, do you think HE could do a pose down routine for 30 minutes and have all of us crying and cheering him on to stay on stage for more? No. There'd be boos. Maybe some cracks about Jesus Christ Superstar or some Aramaic taunts and whistles. 20 minutes cheering for JC tops unless he deals from the bottom of the deck some 1st rate miracles to compete with body slamming the 8th Wonder of the World. Good luck, daddy.

New York and the Wagon

2008-09-04T09:53:00.000-07:00

What a peculiar jungle New York is now. Maybe King Kong scared off all the lions. You can still find the claw marks---they're clearly marked and roped off---but whatever made them are extinct. The pecking order is off, unnatural, fucked-up, hopelessly illiterate to the story it desperately wants to tell. Whatever joke is going on here has an audience that's desperately willing to clap on cue for it, but they don't know how to laugh. The comedian seems bitter about it. Flags hanging off the hotels don't shiver from any local roars. I just can't bring myself to accept that these timid creatures strutting along the avenues turned this place into such a trophy case. Can't wrap my head around it quite yet. THIS culture, whatever it is/means, tearing off the manes of lions for their toilet seats.

But my heart is as complicated as mini-golf. Ask anybody. Stop giving me that dirty look and look up at that Puerto Rican kid in the wife-beater smoking on the fire escape above us, or that pebbly path of taxi tail lights paving North up Broadway, or those paper airplanes inseminating the gray clouds over the brownstones, or the subway rumbling that grate under our sneakers, or the jammed ambulance in traffic reminding me it's hard to move without a path.

Maybe Van Gogh painted this number left-handed. Beats me. This is her hometown. Is my job to help burn it down? I start chewing on a match on my way to see the Statue of Liberty. Peek down a street and see what's left of the towers. Every block or so somebody's hauling a camera wiping their brow. Tourists loitering near the site, sipping Starbucks, leaning over some stairs. Why is everybody just standing around? No camera flashes. Conversation's still popping. But they just seem like they wanna be NEAR this place. And it makes everything more fuzzy for me on the one hand, and this strangeness more vivid.

So I'm here to meet her parents. Well, we all have in common we're crazy about the same girl. That's a beginning. That's a production right there, she lives on Broadway after all.

Some pleasant intros:

"Hey, your daughter's my private petting-zoo. Appreciate it."

"Hey, nice to meet you. If we get married I'll take her name. Seriously. Mine sucks."

"Hey, we've toured all the sewers of each other's parents lives and swapped plenty of photos and souvenirs about why their relationships didn't pan out and basically decided we were sufficiently fucked up to qualify as a couple. So, gee, thanks."

"Hi, despite the fact I resemble a caveman I'm angelic."

Brass tacks: Both our dads had either been on or dragged by the wagon of an addiction for their adult lives and remained high-functioning enough that their wagon was invisible to most. We admired and cherished the cloaking device they possessed and simultaneously feared it. Both of us loved our dads in an odd way, we never had the power to forgive that which they craved to be forgiven for. We could never hold it against them in the first place. We got it, pretty early. Reducing them to their dirty headlines wasn't ever gonna happen. We loved the whole story and reread it over and over. Besides, we couldn't understand how these other wackos were hacking their lives WITHOUT mainlining junk. Far more terrifying to grapple with. By comparison, booze seemed pretty tame. Which gave us that curious badge of gray. We were witnesses and kindling for their addictions. She got the phone calls, I went to secure the goods from the store.

He walked into her mother's apartment, where she and I were staying, and shook my hand. He was blinking a lot. He was taller than me. His daughter was watching us. His shirt was tucked in. He didn't shake hands like an asshole. I saw her in his face. Did he know she had my favorite face? Did he know that I owed him for it? Did he pick up that we were both shy and maybe his daughter dug this about us? Was this all right to admit?

"I've heard a lot about you. Do I look like you imagined I'd look?"

He hadn't let go of my hand yet and I smiled. It was more a question that would run through your head than one you'd ask. Which I liked immediately.

"I'd imagined you looked like David Letterman. That's what I was, uh, forewarned."

Why did you say FOREWARNED, Brin? WHY? When is the last time you have EVER used that fucking word?

"So?" he asked, equal measure amused and impatient.

"You DO look like David Letterman."

"Hmmm."

And we both looked over at the girl and then back at each other and let our hands return to our sides. Eye contact felt like air-hockey with him...

NYC September 1st, 2008 (Meeting Parents)

2008-09-02T09:17:00.000-07:00

I spook easy: spiders, flying, yelling, bus stations, seafood, white women, soup, Tijuana, make-up, imagination-less smart people, skinny-jeans, Stevie Wonder songs, and, most of all, MEETING PARENTS.

On the flight over to New York City, shoehorned into my seat, I was being gang-raped by five phobias. For starters, I was in the air. I'm not meant to be there. Then there was the melting candle woman next to me, oozing over the armrest, eating an especially pungent, sorry-looking 4th-world Tuna sandwich. Stevie Wonder was Continental Airlines background music to the flight crew instructions. Bollywood James Bond and his minty fresh Bond-girl smiling about potential emergencies and calamities. White women were EVERYWHERE up and down the aisle, insecure as the luggage being stuffed into the compartments over their heads. A hideous cross-section of these insidious Harpees: bickering ancient white women, lobotomized-eyed white girls plugging into white corded ipods, white wives stuck in their seats like decaying teeth to diseased gums, venomous white mistresses, folksinger-sized white lesbians---the whole kit and caboodle of never discriminated against moisturized pale flesh. Me as one-man mob of intolerance, Rosie Parks of the struggle, glaring wrath upon all. Most dire of all, I was on my way to meet my girl's folks.

Let's be honest---I'm a strange, challenging case to sell at the best of times. Favorable conditions these were not. We wanted to move in together. But not where she was from. Not in New York. She wanted to move out to Vancouver to be with me. We seemed to get along pretty well when she came to visit in Vancouver. Better the second time. By the third time it seemed pretty obvious it was worth giving a try. She felt like summer camp and a mermaid rolled up into one.

Now try selling that to her parents...

Possible future slogans Canadian tourism might use to sell Vancouver to the world employing stereotypical Canadian aplomb and politeness:

"CANADA, we don't mean to inconvenience or bother you in suggesting, have you ever considered the possibility?"

"CANADA, why not?"

"CANADA, c'mon it won't be so bad!"

"CANADA, forget peace, give US a chance?"

"CANADA, as the USA's retarded little-brother, we have a much sweeter disposition than most places that we're pretty sure, if you don't mind us presuming, you'll enjoy."

"CANADA, wonderful drinking water and, possibly, MORE!"

"CANADA, don't forget about us, we haven't forgotten about you!"

"CANADA, we didn't mean to frustrate Ryan Adams with being confused for OUR guy. Sorry. Really. Check us out."

"CANADA, stop by sometime."

"CANADA, it's quite the place."

"CANADA, if suicide is the biggest decision of your life you can't ever regret, we'll do everything in our power to minimize regretting visiting us!"

On the way through customs the same fucking question:

"Where you going?"
"New York."
"What's there?"
"Girlfriend."
"Whose she?"
"My girlfriend."
"How'd you meet her?"
"Uhhh."
"How do you know her?"
I imagine the response her parents registered as I utter, "I met her on the internet."

Part II forthcoming...

January 25, 2008 VANCOUVER

2008-08-22T07:31:00.000-07:00

I was watching a girl's reflection try on a winter coat in front of a mirror the other night. What made her interesting was how interested she was in what she was doing. She was inside a bright, hygienically lit department store with puddles of squeaky light gleaming off the ground beside her feet. The cosmetics section and a large window divided us. I was outside in the cold watching my white breath fog up the view against the window and frantically wiping it off while a street light hung over me on Howe Street, drooling its sad creamsical glow into a puddle in the gutter that'd be frozen before I'd get into my front door that night. The girl's reflection swiveled her hips a helluva lot of degrees in one direction then swung the other way just as far, both times looking over her shoulder with a downward glance that didn't betray a result. I felt less cold when she took another crack at it and bit her lip. She stood on her tippy-toes and tucked a strand of hair behind an ear. She arched her back a little, leaned over; kept tabs of the results but never tipped her hand to me by the expression on her face. Without even once shoving her hands into the pockets of the big puffy coat she discarded it, returned it to the rack, and abandoned the whole mission for a few squirts of free perfume over in the cosmetics department and started talking up some cosmetics female atrocity of a salesperson and I went on my way.

Even a winter coat is all about a girl's ass looking okay. Don't get me wrong, the concern has plenty of merit. My theory on fidelity is firmly planted in the conviction that a man needs a face he can marry and an ass roughly 36 inches beneath it that makes it an enticing idea and practice to cheat on it with enduring satisfaction. Lingerie has a similar cheating element built into fidelity thing, too. It's still YOU under there all right, but it's covered in PINK for the 3.4 seconds it takes me to see it and tear the motherfucker off. Next time BLUE! Shucks...

But the girl's reflection kinda got to me. Mostly because I've never tried the pockets of a coat in my life when I was looking around for a coat to keep me warm when it's cold outside. And I've never bought a coat other than when it was, that day, that hour, that minute, WAY too fucking cold to not impulse buy, in cold blood, a coat.

I've gone for plenty of girls that were like coats without pockets. No comfy place. But it takes me a while to even realize it. Which is pretty fucking dumb.

That girl's reflection kinda reminded me a bit of this girl I used to watch at night through a telescope when I had an apartment in the Westend. When I moved in I didn't have a TV so I borrowed a telescope off a crazy neighbor of my mom's whose dad was shot in the face with a 357 magnum and for the last thirty years he collects shit off ebay. One of those things was a really impressive, expensive telescope complete with a laser scope thingamabob. To make the telescope into my evening entertainment I needed dependable story lines. Over a few evenings I cased about 400 windows for activity and bought some different colored pieces of scotch tape and made a constellation of all the interesting rooms on MY window so that I could easily point the telescope to the tape and, in turn, the room, and tune in. I never once caught anybody fucking. Which at first was VERY irritating. Until after some examination I discovered that I barely caught any couples even TALKING to each other. Even LOOKING at each other. It was frightening. Not too many people live alone, but everybody just ignores each other. She watches TV, you go on the computer; after a while, SWITCH, shower separately, phone call, leaf through US magazine, go to bed.

I'd kinda hoped there'd be SOMETHING perverse out there in the world of apartment life, but nothing prepared me for how perverse the reality actually was.

Then it got way more creepy: this one girl became the star of everything. A Japanese girl of 20 or so who arrived home to her apartment around 1130pm and went about trying on 20 dresses or so from her closet in front of a tall mirror. One after another just working herself up and tearing herself down until a big fat breakdown against her bed, fists plunging into the mattress, bawling her eyes out. And all of it like clock work every weeknight (weekends I have no idea where she went). She always tried on the same red dress last every time.

But that was over a year ago. Maybe in another 15 minutes or so she's somewhere or other near that red dress working her way up to it. Or maybe she's wearing it right now with somebody she loves who doesn't even suspect there's any particular significance to what lies in her closet. Who knows. The stars were out tonight---and maybe hers' were too---and I always feel okay being in this cozy place walking over a bridge to get home with the water calm and checkered like a dance floor, the moon fat as Orson Welles' cheek buttering the sky and the clouds clumpy bits of chalk.

Christmas, 2007

2008-08-22T07:28:00.002-07:00

I'm double-parked in this shit but whatever...

I was 3 the first time I saw fireworks. I remember it cause I was on my dad's shoulders nodding off beside the noise of a couple hundred thousand people crowded around English Bay. Everybody tense and waiting for it to kick off and start. It was a warm summer night, sticky, and my parents weren't old. The sky looked like a huge fat man of blue lying beside the slim purple silhouette of the mountains. My knees were jerked suddenly and I opened my eyes and those greens and blues and yellows torched up the sky, spidering off in clusters and fountains and I could feel the ahhhhhs and ohhhhhs as much as I could hear them from all the people around me. Then one really lit up and ignited the sky like an angel on a Christmas tree and involuntarily I joined the chorus. We were all wooed by some magic finger finger-painting sky just for the fuck of it. Cause it's easy to forget how important green and blue and yellow are most of the time maybe...

Every other set of fireworks I've seen sucked. No magic, no pull, no dice.

Today I was walking around the beach with a friend and after when we were heading back for home we slipped off and passed a parking lot where I saw the hugeass car I'm pretty sure my first girl is driving these days. I've seen her in it before. A few times actually. And in that neighborhood too. But I never got a license plate or anything like that. And Cadilac Escalades aren't all that uncommon a fish. Siouxie's color was black. She loved tinted windows. Secrets in general. And big, scary things. When she drives you can hear that stereo for a good mile. And that's how she likes it. Always has. Everything about her this narcotic revolving door feeling about it. Sucked me up every motherfucking time.

I took a look around hoping I'd catch sight of her. Nothing. So we headed up the hill for home and decided to take a coffee before we made the last couple miles of the stretch. There was that same car parked directly in front of the coffee shop. I checked the meter and it had 2hrs left. I asked my friend if he thought it was her. He said he had a feeling it was. Okay, fuck it. You up for this shit? Does it make any difference, Brin? Not really. So we tracked down a book store for reading material and a notebook, stole the pen I used to sign the credit card statement and started back for the coffee shop to wait to see her. Just a glimpse of my first fireworks again.

I was gone 5 minutes to that book store but by the time I got back she was gone...

It's a weird thing to admit to anybody, even to yourself, that you'll never care as much about anyone as you did for your first. Mine was basically a psychotic maniac who specialized in stringing out a relationship for 4.5 years on a steady diet of revenge fucking. It's not the most romantic form, but it might be the most urgent. There's the cliche bullshit about what you're trying the hardest to conceal is what you're dying the most to reveal... but I was all the way there after 5 minutes and when I mentioned anything by way of confession all she said was, "what took you so long?" And that was perfect. I like violently beautiful things. Scars get chicks. I never danced with her at prom but I've never seen her drive by since without following in that direction for a while... she had the same color of green eyes that I was sure Gatsby was staring at out over the water from Daisy's dock. Gatsby Green, man. No matter what light was on them, no matter how dim, they shone. Bermuda Triangle action every time.

Even with the breast implants I heard she's got, along with baby boy, I just couldn't keep smiling to myself that maybe I'll get a crack at seeing her again. I don't even know if that was her car or not. But I felt it was. Maybe she was with the dad of that kid. Maybe the guy who encouraged the fake tits. Paid for them even. Paid for them through construction work! Good fuck, best to leave that side alone.

There's that first mainline when you see that person who stole your heart before you knew you had one---it's pretty for a second cause all you can feel is this little rejoice inside that at some point she was yours, and whoever enjoys her never knew what it was like to get that I SAW YOU FIRST feeling and risk everything on it and get lucky and wake up next to it and have it a little better than going to sleep with it.

A very small part of me gets why dragon chasers, once they're off junk, say the most depressing thing is they know they've already had their best day. Which is bullshit kinda---cause I've had others who could top or ace most of what she had. But I never can get back to what I had going in with her. And that's sorta weird. Cause you know you can get over stuff. You won't break or get undone or unraveled. You can over it. And it's funny and a bit tragic that maybe nobody in the whole world could really push you over that edge. But maybe there is.... but not Her, not like you thought she might.

But fireworks are another bunch of months off, so no reason to mope.

December 10th, 2007 (Hotel Ingleterra)

2008-08-22T07:28:00.001-07:00

Few hours before the flight. Didn´t quite duck the whole winter but spring´s around the corner and Vancouver wears it like a dress. All the highrises across the bridge just lego---after-dinner-mint pastels of green and blue until the sun sets and and paints their windows molten. On a clear afternoon maybe the sail boats blowing off out to sea like dandilion confetti gonged to the horizon. Empty
tankers stewing in the habor like a herd of Eeyors beside the blue mountains changing blues with distance in some paint by number childish portrait of them but it just happens to be
real.

No news reports indictaing Fidel croaked. I was thinking about him on the walk at 5am over here. What a strange melody that guy has with these people---maybe the catchiest one I can think of. Like George Washington molested by Napoleon or something---but really it´s his own deal. Like he took over this place on the craziest fucking dare anybody ever came up with.

It gets you thinking tho, what´s your melody with people? When you leave a room or enter it. Is it nicer if somebody knows you or better if they don´t?

Fidel just reminds too much of Orpheus. All Orpheus had to get his girl back from Hades was a melody. Ever wonder what it would sound like? What he played to make Sysephus take a break from pushing that
rock so he could strain to listen?

Was it sad or happy? Powerful or soft? About the past or the future? A girl he was with, or being away from her. Something he saw as a kid or something he made up?

They sent something into space, a capsule of sorts, called the Voyager Probe in the late 70´s. Partly it was a picnic basket for aliens to find about us, and partly it was meant as a defense of us. Here's what we've done. Here's the best we can do. Here's the best reason we're worth something. Here's the best reason not to rub us out. Beethoven´s the first thing on there on a gold record. Of all the things to protect us if something hostile latches onto that probe, it´s just a melody.

Yeah, so. I´ve been asked about 2000 times whether or not I need girls over here---always GIRLS, never the singular---and god knows I DO need a girl but I always have to say no. I´ve never verfied it, but I´ve been pretty sure they can´t supply the one I want. So I arranged halfway along this trip to go back and see her.

And last night I couldn´t sleep and walked up an alley and saw some little kids playing, faces like they had the world on a string, and I didn´t feel so nervous about this girl having my number. People come swing by where you live here all the time offering stuff. Bread, fruit---biscotti for fucksake. Door to door stuff. And sometimes the frustrating shit about here makes me really confused how nobody goes Grand Theft Auto. And I can leave. But at night all the stars come out, all over the place---not just the sky but with the sounds, faces, even the smells from homes cooking for people they look forward to seeing.

Fidel was penciled in to bat cleanup for this place in the baseball game of people´s lives. They risked getting tortured or murdered to see him do it. But they´ve mainlined that rush of playing long odds when you get that first tingle that you might´ve pulled it off. Like all of them double-dared Fidel to walk up to the country as if it were a girl he´d never met in his life and make her fall in love with him, and he´d be the last kiss she ever had... and with so many people they don´t regret it. I had a grandpa who lived 96 years with one woman he kissed his whole life. There was something a little cocky about the way he grinned mentioning it, maybe the way he did when he first came up with the idea in his head. I dunno.

But it´s done. And tonight all over Havana you´d hear groups of friends together pulling up chairs in the darkness, just a little street light gleam glazing their faces. Bite off an opening of a juicebox full of rum and they´d set up for dominoes and start talking and laughing and throw down some pieces and smoke and their women might come over and hastle everybody or do their own things, kids might race by in the street chasing something, the zombie dogs will go on limping and scratch in conspicuous obscurity---and the more I try to duck the things I miss about this place the more I feel like every evasion is a confession. What the hell´s the difference between a suicide note and love letter anyway in terms of the content? Sum some kinda bullshit up. Same notes really. Trying for them, anyway. So what´s anything you have to say about here? You never get to dance but you can watch them do it.

It´s their last song. Not mine. Even tho it just keeps playing and playing...

December 7th, 2007 (Hotel Ingleterra)

2008-08-22T07:24:00.000-07:00

My last night in Havana was yesterday. In a few hours gonna take a bus out to Trinidad for the weekend with a twice black-eyed Dutchman from the boxing gym, come back, catch the plane to snowy homeland.

The Latino film festival is on right now. Boxing's done. Some girl was at the gym yesterday, I couldn't tell from where, photographing everybody training. All the kids who hang around raced up and down the bleechers to catch her eye. It's an outdoor gym, so usually some apartment nearby has music going, the roof across the alley had construction workers toiling away with cheesy techno blaring so the kids went ape-shit shaking their asses 50 feet above us, grownup-moves, then kid-giggles after they broke down when she stopped taking their pictures.

The girl went over to one of the coaches who she found out was a 2x world champion and 2x olympic gold medalist. Click-click. He's a sullen guy of 35 who smokes while he lies sprawled out on the canvass. He's the only Cuban at the gym who doesn't make any effort to shake my hand when I arrive. So I watch with interest when girls perk up his spirits. It's the only time he ever smiles. He coulda defected and made a few million maybe. But no more family. He made his choice. But he certainly doesn't have much to say about it---not with me, anyway.

Last night a few drinks with this Dutch guy hatching a plan for today's trip. Late night after a movie at a theater next to Kid Chocolate in Old Havana. It was the wrong street to be on because all the hookers were out. "Coo joo buy me waan dreek?" one girl said through the wooden bars separating us from the street. I find hooker's eyes very slippery. I get shy in a hurry. "Jass waan?"

We started home. It was dark enough that I couldn't see my friend's black eyes. They annoyed him a fair bit and amused me. Both were cheap shots he'd got sparring. We're both leaving very soon. Him in a few days after me. He's been traveling for a great deal longer, several months in South America. Job to find back home. Sort shit out. Make sense of this trip. Girl stuff. Where will life settle...

We hadn't said anything to each other for a block. It was quiet. Traffic was dead. Street lights were dim. Stray dogs were roaming.

"Dat wass deezgusstin'."
"What's that?" I asked him. My favorite quality of his is how he registers disgust.
"Dat ol' man weeth dat prossdeedute. He shud be ashamed."
"She was pretty. Maybe he's gotten over his shame."
"Haav heez age, man! Motherfuck."
"Yeah well."
"I cood nevah do dat."

I looked over at one mangy dog chasing another in the middle of the street, then he caught her finally, hopped on top and went to town. Nothing spooks me in this town like the strays. So I looked up at the moon and on a rooftop some guy was perched like a gargoyle over the edge, gazing up at the stars. Such a strange melody to the nights here. Like the real business-end of it is fucking with your dreams more than your mind.

This place punishes you with it's beauty. It gives more than it takes, but it wants to fiddle with your values just to see the look on your face. You can't put your finger on anything. Any sight that takes your breath away---the moment it comes back you get a stink from something that gives you a migrane. Everybody pools and slums their dirty stuff with everybody else's. Soupy kinda deal. But real. Always real. Like how you feel swimming naked.

Kinda makes you wonder about the poetry of why somebody with Van Gogh's eye always had a weakness for diseased whores. And he never recovered from that kinda taste of domestic family life with one of them. Ah well... goofier shit abounds.

I hate goodbyes. Hate'em. The whole time I was here I was secretly hoping Fidel might die. I don't want him dead. But I wanted to see what would happen. No dice. Have to catch it on CNN. "The most trusted name in news". Note not "The most TRUST WORTHY name in news"---but as long as a bunch of suckers buy it, good enough for me. Consensus usually adds up to truth anyway. Yep.

What a lame note to end on. I saw that girl up on her balcony last night tho. Leaning into her hands over the railing. That was an okay goodbye-thing. It was so dark I couldn't even make out the color of her dress. No accidents in this place...

December 1st, 2007 (Hotel Ingleterra)

2008-08-22T07:21:00.000-07:00

I was trying to figure out the allure of raggaetone when a street light cut out and I couldn´t even see my hands, anything, and I got scared when I heard yelling off in the distance. I was in a bad neighbourhood at night. The street felt like it was in a vice, and it wasn´t really a street, just dirt and potholes and stench. One light down the street jolted on for a second and I saw a band of kids chasing after a street animal. Just smudged and smeared shadows really, violent shapes, giggling. Most of them had their arms cocked back while another one reached down to pick up a rock. They were tucked behind the corner when I heard the stoning of that poor beast and it´s cry silenced to an echo that bounced around with one well placed thump. Then the light cut out again and there was nothing. Just ink outlined by the moon. Everything eliminated. So I jogged out of the slum for a busy street and got there okay.

And so I went on thinking about reggaeton. An ex of mine, one that I kinda got engaged to and last April went to Vegas to marry but didn´t---actually we basically spent nights falling off opposite sides of that hotel bed---was a hired dancer for the biggest raggaeton band in the world right now, Calle 13. I have a hunch she´s banging their lead singer even though he´s marred to Mrs Puerto Rico. But I could be wrong.

As my Spanish has come along I can actually disipher 45% of the lyrics of this stuff. And the general theme seems to be this...

A guy is trying to get a girl by confessing that he´d like to give it to her DURO. Meaning HARD.

And she replies, ¨But can you give it to me REALLY duro?

He says, sure he can. You like it duro?

Then SHE says, I have a boyfriend. But he doesn´t give it to me duro. Are you sure you can ALWAYS give it to me duro?

Then chorus kicks in and 500 crazy Puerto Ricans scream DURO DURO DURO.

The ex was a Puerto Rican herself and she danced for these fellas in PR and NYC and LA and I was just tossing it around in my brain for the helluvit just to get the taste out of my mouth and sound out of my ears of that poor dog.

It´s such a drive-in experience over here at night. It´s a city you need to arrive at night rather than the day. It blossoms at night. Most cities I´ve been to are reaching for that fun-park bullshit, ferris wheels and merry-go-rounds. But here it´s always a drive-in. Cause you can get caught at a drive-in. And there´s an expectation that really important stuff could be going on in your car while some sedative movie is up on the screen. Which is fucking cool. And sneaky. Even tho, like in a dream, everybody´s in on your scam.

So the stars were all clanged that night, the sky line of Havana rooftops was a wet painting, I got to the big strip near the Habana Libre hotel and the movie marquee had people lined up for an American feature and plenty of people were holding hands and across the street massive snakes of communist lineups for communist-affordable icecream were set up in the park at Coppelia´s icecream stands. Warm, palmy air you can kiss blowing girls hair into their guy´s faces. Buses roar by. Hitchhikers lean into old car´s windows and grin. Itchy hobos collecting bottles, smoking butts.

You look up the skirt of this city and somehow don´t feel that guilty. Maybe cause like any girl that´s worth a damn, the more time you spend and the more you find out about this one the less you know. It´s easy to find the kyptonite to most city´s or people´s bullshit. Under bruisey skys and wash lines full of whole family´s clothes it´s not as easy here. Trap door and trampolines everywhere you look, with the right kind of eyes. And little girls chasing around trying to find every last one like an easter egg hunt. And the harder I look the more tight the whipping post I get tied to. Cause if I have a little girl and she opts for videogames over this kid´s serenade of a life---eeek, that´s a rotten expectation. Every night feels like an Indian Summer back home. Smuggled, stolen season just given away to everybody. Why not? And some guy´s stroking his girl´s hair in the soft light and I can´t see their expressions and I´m glad I can´t. Another hobo starts fishing in his pockets for a lighter, finds it---scar face t-shirt on another kid... right.

I could get married to a girl over here for busfare.

A friend of mine says it´s a jail. But isn´t jail where people are supposed to make promises to themselves to have to the right to live when they get out? Rehabilitation or something?

Ah... I give up. Chop Suey. No arguments. Go to fucking Miami. Get a big car, house, listen to fucking Calle 13 even if my ex is banging him.

Nobody looks like movie extras here. I think I know why. It´s already real. Even though nobody makes any sense. Ali said there are no jokes, the truth is always the best joke.

And then there are these guys where every step is over a plank insteada what´s really there. At the end of the world there´s always a tourist and a whore fucking in a cheap hotel room. But here the whore´s mom made the bed and had coffee ready for after.

It doesn´t feel like a place imagined so much as created off a double-dare. And I don´t have one fucking photo to show anybody, not even my kids. No snapshots. I wonder if they´ll have any sympathy for me and my wagging tail reasons. I doubt it.

This place isn´t even a poem. Just a rumor. A big lie that can´t be stretched. Walking around like Orpheus trying his best not to turn around cause he´ll lose that prize if he does.

My strange friend who really gave me the key to this place wanted to be in the ground, soil, earth here. Now he is. Where some people live without seeming pinned to their lives. Kids throw up dust in the afternoons with a soccer ball rolling around between them. And laugh and laugh.

The pretty thing about sandcastles is when all that work gets washed away. And the more work put in the better it feels to see something bigger take it and flatten it. Nothing personal. Unless you let it be personal. Scratch and sniff the meaning of that fucker, sand castles of all stripes, and I´m no closer now than I was the first time I built one with my dad at 4 and didn´t get why he smiled the whole time the tide ripped open and melted those beautiful baroque towers of his he spent so much time and energy creating. It was just kinda sweet beyond words.

A shame about that dog, tho.

November 30th, 2007 (Hotel Ingleterra)

2008-08-22T07:19:00.000-07:00

I keep thinking I oughta balance the stuff over here that picks me up with the other deal. But I don´t really feel like it. I nearly always have to stop and check to see that the dogs and cats sleeping in the gutters aren´t dead. And 10% of the time they ARE dead. The idea that vets are gainfully employed here is still one of the great mysteries of my life.

This´ll have to be brief and I don´t think it´s worth much. But last night I was dog tired and walked a long ways to get home---and I kept wondering what it is about this culture, that every person you have a THING with when you make eye contact, looks BACK. It stings. Not as bad as the goodbyes you´ve had to make here and there with certain people or relationships---but it counts. There was one time about 6 years ago I spotted a girl a block down the street in Madrid. It was cold as shit that December and we were a block or two from the prado. She was a blond. And I coulda sworn she had my eyes zeroed in from her gaze even though we had a football field between us. And she did. But I didn´t have the guts to do anything but look back. After ten paces or something of her having passed.

Love is a duel.

But that´s Kerouac´s line. Still.

I always think about that girl, once a month or something. I´ll never see her again in my life. And she´ll always be walking along just that little stretch of sidewalk. And no matter how many times I went back to the Prado just to find her, she was never there. But she was, too. Haunting that block.

Here you get a crack at those. They stop. And insteada having your insides dragged through mud on acct of cowardice you gotta buck up. Or smile. I opt for the latter.

Havana´s okay to say goodbye to once you have a bridge to or from it. That´s the difference with this place. There are bridges and tunnels everywhere with these people. Millions. Everything´s conspiratorial. After 2 days on my block I had people from a mile off at, say, an icecream stand, who knew where I lived. It´s a strange feeling.

I just get a kick coming home at night seeing all the girls leaning on balconies. I thought it was just the one across the street from me. Nope. There´s plenty. I keep waiting for one to get pushed off in a fit of rage by a jealous husband so I´ll be marked by the site of it for life... but fortunately it never happens. I might have to use it though in a story. It seems a fitting number one cause of murder over here. Or something.

November 29th, 2007 (Hotel Ingleterra)

2008-08-22T07:18:00.001-07:00

There's a beauty that certain people find in failed journeys. Some people object to bullfighting because it's an unfair sport. It's not a sport. It's a tragedy. And anybody who's pulling for Romeo and Juliet to make it and have dull kids with physiques like slave traders on acct of all the pasta they guzzle down---nah. I'll pass.

The boxing championships are done. And I'm glad. Six hours a day of it was too much. But I've only got another 10 days over here. And I don't like that it's on my mind when I'm bumming around.

This town has a magical ability to get you away from yourself. It doesn't blow you away into somebody else exactly. But there's no self-consciousness here. People move differently. You know how you walk when somebody you love holds your hand, or how you sing when you don't think anybody can hear---even though you'd never dare sing like that even with somebody you were in love with---that's every day with these people. And even though I know I'll never get that---not by a mile---it pleases me alot to know humanbeings still do that. And it's everywhere. And sometimes it's like the whole island, which is shaped like a crocodile anyway, got carried up like a kite in a sky so blue it hurts to look at it and somehow a helluva lot of people have smiles like they've got a hold of the string back down here. It breaks your heart a little.

Ernesto Lecuona was the name of that composer I heard while I was put on hold. I called back twice more and listened to it some more. First time in my life I called somebody I knew wasn't there just to be put on hold. Even there ON HOLD music has charm. Mother fucking Cubans.

I guess disoriented people... and I'm certainly one... admire so much ANYTHING specific. Even quite brutal things like bullfights, or boxing, or Cuba. Even to back a dumb thing feels safer to me than riding a fence on anything. I think Enya and the Enya-crowd should, for the good of humanity, be exterminated. And very very slowly. Some bars play it over here and if ANYTHING makes me subscribe to capital punishment...

But it's time to go. Very quick. Time to go from Cuba to my favorite Cuban. Cubana. And see how that plays out. She knew that composer just from how I described his music. And everything else down here that gets to me. And it scares the fuck out of me. The joke is to reiterate as many times as possible... NO CHEMISTRY, NO CHEMISTRY, NO CHEMISTRY. But then it wasn't a joke when I asked if we'd be okay if I came here. You'll forget me. No I won't. Yes you will. But I didn't. I didn't even really mope, either. And the slippery bit about it, when I get over there to see her... even if it goes to shit or she gets scared or I do or whatever calamity---I can't regret for a second meeting a girl who made trying to find one down here ridiculous.

Which is a wee bit strange. There is something kinda special and pretty about a shipwreck. How else does anybody really describe the feeling of getting to know this place? All 2nd hand info. But then it just feels like home at some point... I wish I knew why.

10-4.

November 28th, 2007 (Hotel Ingleterra)

2008-08-22T07:14:00.000-07:00

I think if Vancouver is your mom, you're gonna have a tricky time making another city your wife. Maybe everybody wants to fuck their hometown some place new. I've been kinda fucked up ever since I had my best kiss 7 years ago with a girl who turned out to be a hooker. But I didn't know that going in. She worked at a cafe, went to UBC, her dad was a dentist. Lucky for me several drug stores didn't have to be swallowed on acct I didn't fuck her---but still, she left her mark. And it eats at me that the one and only thing she'd deprive a john is what stained and made me dismiss a bunch of girls who were otherwise pretty good for me. She had that Natalie Portman viciousness thing going from Closer, too---and she bore a pretty pleasing resemblance to Portman. Anyway...

A story I wrote about this girl nearly got in with Dave Eggers magazine while I've been over here in Havana. Just about. And they've asked for some more. And I've been working on "girl stories" lately. Henry Millerish tales of conquest with a dash of Kierkegard's Diary of a Seducer... even tho I've yet to be able to spell Kierkegard yet alone read that story. But I've heard the bastard surmised quite nicely and name dropping gets chicks. You have no idea the quanity of ethnic nude photography these notes generate. Actually none. But I know they're just holding back. I'm talking to YOU, Panama women.

All these girl stories take place at home (most of them, a few times I've flown other places, usually disasterously, sometimes otherwise), which is weird scenery to describe. I always feel a little shy writing anything about Vancouver even though it's a town that feels like the one you'd really wanna spend time with if you skipped class compared to other cities. People leave you alone, give you some room, are generally pretty nice. But then drugs kinda reduce me to a shy Tom Sawyer keen to eavesdrop and spy pretty things... so who knows.

There are three stories I'm gonna try with Eggers. One is about a weird fling at 11 with my cousin where I know she was gonna try something. And it nearly went through as a kinda real wet dream---but it didn't pan out. Her mom swiped her before anything untoward could happen. Obviously I'm counting on a little innocent incest sexually programming a young author being compelling subject matter for a SF based magazine's readership.

Another is about a pen pal I had last time I was down here 2 years ago. But the catch was she was permanently injured, quite savagely, while she was working on a cruiseship and a piece of the ship broke off and fell on her and crushed her spine. This relationship, from the get go, really felt an awful lot like joy riding on the Titanic, hanging off the rails. But I always wanted to see for myself that if things got really catistrophic, could you be like the orchestra on that ship when all the life boats were doled off for women and children and none for you so you just take how fucked up it all is and play until you get dunked under for keeps.

I can't make up my mind about the 3rd one. There was a drunk girl I found at 2am tossed out of a bar. Two American tourists were trying to pick her up so I walked her home and she was so drunk she was convinced I was a guardian angel. This made arriving at her door and her pushing really hard to get laid very very strange and unsettling. I went back the next day to where she worked to see if she was okay and she had no idea who I was. She was pretty indignant about the whole thing. Which pissed me off enough to remind her where she got the pack of cigarettes in her pocket when we both knew she had no money from the night before and they were my brand and not hers. 12 hour blackout carved a very strange expression on her face indeed.

Anyhow, no Cuban stuff today. Boohoo.

November 27th, 2007 (Hotel Ingleterra)

2008-08-22T07:12:00.000-07:00

The other day I was sitting front row with Habana´s 2nd coach and a kid from the gym I train at over here pulled up a chair. ¨Hola Gringo Tyson¨. So I nod and slap his hand. ¨Joo know I saw Mike Tyson een Habana. Doo years beefoo¨ ¨Yeah?¨ ¨He berry strong but fat. Muy triste tambien.¨

I know he´s sad. But it´s weird when anybody drops his name around me. I only picked up a book because of him. Fifteen in a house full of books, both my parents live more in books than in their homes, seemed a pretty good way to fuck'em over. Fuck myself over. Tyson was interviewed in jail back in 95 and a french interviewer asked him what he was doing with his time. He said reading. Especially in solitary confinement. What are you reading, Mike? Voltaire, Hemingway, Tolstoy, Dostoyevski, Dumas. Why, Mike? Out of boredom more than anything. I´m not on a quest for knowledge.

I wanted to know what a convicted rapist was doing reading that sorta thing. What use did a living nightmare have with good books?

Tyson´s a strange one. Havana has a nightmarish quality. A poetry about it that´s spooky in its purity. Like some little girl looking at you in a sexual way. You can´t stop thinking about how this place is one man´s struggle for 50 years, his life´s work, a very poetic one against a country that no matter what you say about it has some truth. One guy, who went up into a mountain with a handful of othere guys after his boat crashed into the shore here, and he came down 2 years later and has been the Man for 50 years.

Tyson was the most picked on kid in his neighborhood in the Bedsty in Brooklyn. "Faggot Mike" was his name until he puffed up to 190 pounds when he was 12 and became "Big Head Mike" when he rolled with a gang called the "Jolly Stompers". He lisped, he had no friends, he spoke in a high girlish-voice, his parents where drunks. He had nobody and nothing and knew he´d end up dead before he was 17. The only thing he had was pigeons on the roof of an abandoned tenement that he liked to fly because of the colors they made against the sky and that they were free.

One day a kid followed him up there and saw that this was what Mike cared about and he went over, opened the cage and Mike begged him not to hurt the bird and the kid laughed and literally ripped the pigeons head off and laughed. And for the first time in Tyson´s life, he stood up to a bully and pummeled him. And I think that´s what always interested me about Tyson. One time somebody asked him why everybody cares so much about a train wreck happening over and over in Tyson´s life. Tyson said it was simple, ¨I´m angelic.¨ And I looked at him very closely after he said it and realized he was the only one who GOT IT. Only somebody as innocent as Tyson obviously is---he looks like a baby all the time, he can´t hide a single emotion and they hit you like a baby´s-- could become something, twisted, into such evil and rage. Which is why it kinda makes sense the US is so fascinated by him. Nobody gets the purest virgins becoming the purest whores---if you apply a little rape into the equation---like they do.

One time somebody asked Tyson what fighting really was to him. ¨What are notes to Beethoven, or words to Hemingway, or theory to Einstein... It´s aggression.¨

I told my dad that after I heard it and it took him 30 seconds before he could even reply, ¨Tyson said that?¨

But boxing gets you down here. I mean, back in the US when they first introduced gassing a convinct as a means of humane execution---gee whiz who woulda thought that a black guy was the first one they tested on it---they recorded what was said in the chamber. ¨Save me Joe Louis. Save me Joe Louis....¨ I see the looks in their eyes down here watching champions stroll out to the ring and it´s that same quality of devotion. It hurts to see it a little. Because a guy selling gum on the street is making the same as a world champion. And they both know and respect it.

We´ll catch up with some boxing in a sec.

Two cycles here... Dawn with Hitchcock birds by the 1000´s in the trees yelling as loud as a highschool caferteria. Coffee thermoses poured by old women huddled in doorways into shot glasses then flipped into plastic cups. Geezers peddling newspapers. The free birthday cakes being biked around to kids (when I found out that it´s by law that kids 16 and under get cake... I was sold on this place). The fisherman dot the Malecon and smoke while they watch to see one point bobbing in the ocean drop. It´s a good town to write in.

Then night time. I tried calling a girl back home---that feels funny to say considering she´s in my country and I´m in her hometown over here---but when they put me on hold this classical number started and I was sure it was Chopin even though I´d never heard it before. They told me her number was restricted but I kept badgering the operator, WHO IS THIS COMPOSER? QUIENES ESTO! QUIENES ESTO! ¨I danno, sir.¨ ¨Find out, woman!¨ ¨What composer?¨ So I called back and get put on hold and dragged the doctor who owns the house I´m living in downstairs and jammed the phone against his ear. ¨AHHHHhhhhh...¨ ¨Chopin?¨ ¨No... Cuban. From the 30´s.¨ He tried to put it on the stereo but he had no batteries. I ran out and bought some and he played the same song in it´s entirety.

Then boxing. Fuck I was humming on-hold-song all the way down here to Old Havana for the 2nd to last day of the nationals of boxing. It´s capped off on wedsneday but the night fights are the hometown kids. They fight Gitmo tonight. And Felix Savon coaches them, the 3X olympic champ with meathooks the size of cantalopes. All he does is walk around shaking hands. And what impresses me more than anything is how he has this immensely bright say-cheese smile for every photo he gives. The best boxer in Cuban history, Teofillo Stevenson, was offered a million bucks in the 70´s to defect and turn pro and have his first fight against Ali. All he said was, ¨What´s a million dollars against the love of eight million Cubans?¨ Five hundred of them make more noise in Kid Chocolate than a Canucks game during the playoffs.

The final fight a man from the crowd rushed down the stands with a towel in his hands, dashed across the gym floor and hurled his town into the ring in protest of the beating the hometown champ was giving to a kid from the countryside. The crowd roared approval and roared louder when the cops hauled him off but the fight WAS stopped. And the tossed guy raised his hands in triumph just before he was dragged out of view and everybody applauded...

But after, when it sinks in, is the musicans in the forest at night. Always alone. Sillouttes with a trumpet extending playing Miles or Bird or their own thing. I like their own thing better. Cause when they play Miles or John Coltrane, it just reminds you that some artists hunt feelings as if they were butterflies and all they use is their finger tips. Copycats use a net. And it has holes. But when they go off on their own thing I get to go off on my own thing... and it´s a little less lonely under the stars.

And along the Malecon it´s better still. The kids glaze the cement, sticky in embrace, with waves just over the edge. And I heard one trumpet, lodged between two fisherman playing and it reminded me of my favorite animal, the bullfrog. The bullfrog´s love call plays out over the swamp and it´s such a sweet song that despite it garnering 1000´s of female bullfrogs who pile in for groupie privledges... the bullfrog keeps singing. Because he forgets in the beauty of his song that it´s intended as a mating call... and he just wants to keep listening to himself. The trumpeter I was listening to had some tourists gathered for him but he never paid the least bit of attention. People came out to their windows to see him but you couldn´t see him. Just hear. And turning a corner to head back down a narrow shit-smelling street he was still there, the song winding along with me for company in the dark...

November 25th, 2007 (Hotel Ingleterra)

2008-08-22T07:11:00.001-07:00

There's a mangy mural of Kid Chocolate, a 30's Havana boxer, out front of his gym where the national boxing championships have been taking place the last 3 days. It's across the street from the Capitolio, the bizzaro Cuban replica of washington's most famous building. There's plenty of bizzaro take-offs. A friend of mine over here asked me to meet her the other day. "Where?" "I dunno, what about at 42nd and 5th avenue?" What the fuck is that? To get over there you have to walk by a tower straight out of Star Trek with black cuban vulture-eagles circling in the grapey sky. I waited on the corner while a couple whores approached me and asked if I liked mangos. The shy one asked me if she was strong. Which seemed an even more interesting approach than the other one. "Tu fuerte?" She was 5'1 and 100 pounds. "NO. Jew." Oh yeah, me. "Yep. I lift trucks."

But you get caught. I bought one of these goofy juice boxes of rum for the last of the fights on friday night. It was late, I was tired, I miss the movies. After the final heavyweight tussle ended without much excitement a fight broke out in the crowd. I was on the floor next to the Havana team's 2nd coach, the guy who takes a huge towel and whips and flaps as much wind as he can in his boxer's face between rounds, and we both were watching the cops race into the crowd and haul people out of the gym until we saw one girl in the crowd with this grin on her face. Ellen Barkenish face, only spiked and molested by latin curves and this Betty Page wink she kept giving to people looking at her. Innocence dipped in sleeze. Everything about her was provocative as an exposed tan line. Slaying us. Especially me all punch drunk on juice box rum.

Outside the fight was over, the icecream stand was dead, the girl got taken home by a tourist with a cane (a GARISH cane, mind you)---and there wasn't much to do but by a pack of smokes and make the 4 mile hike home throught the scenic route, along the Malecon sea wall. But I couldn't find cigarettes until some scumbag hustler pointed me in the direction of a bar. I get scammed twice the price on the cigarettes and accosted by 5 hookers all asking about my girlfriend---my girlfriend being an extremely popular topic over here despite her non-existence---they try and scam this and that but all I want is my cancer for the lonely stroll home.

Which I get, with all the kids folded into each other like oragami sillouttes. Strange shapes writhing until they spot you and freeze up---or not, tip over the edge of the cement and go a little further on the rocks...maybe all the way with the risk of a wave slapping you. So many kids out there and adults too... but my mind was way too g-rated and embarressed so I watched the fisherman cast into the black ocean, smoking along with them, hearing the pitter patter of what they caught tapping the cement beside their feet until the fish petered out and went limp.

I've been here nearly a month now. And it's weird on acct of it's the easiest place on earth to find a girl and every motherfucking time I get here I'm stuck in that shitty but very fine in other way position of knowing if I snag one here it'll only make me miss a different one, 1000's of miles away, more. The whole cure thirst with seawater phenomenon. But assholes like me are given a dimple for a reason. So the joke isn't entirely lost.

I got back late that night. I had my last cigarette of the night on my quiet little residential street. Right on the curb. It was a warm night. And across the street and up 2 floors was a girl on a balcony I'd never seen before just leaning against the edge of the cement rail. She cupped her face in two hands, and the street light had her in copper glow, and she kept leaning and longing for something I didn't know what it was, but she looked so pretty up there. Maybe it was the whole Romeo and Juliet angle. But this Juliet never spoke so I couldn't even THINK "she speaks!". But I wondered all the same what her deal was. Who the guy was. What he'd done to her to make her so poetic that night. So poetic it was cascading down waterfallish onto me, no filter on her or the cuban cigarette I was a few drags from finishing, and the shitty taste in my mouth that Colgate would soon make clean with the added scope tossed into the whitening formula. Gee whiz.

People disappear... sometimes forever... some of them, all it takes is them leaving or going back to a room. That was what happened with Juilet on her perch. I looked down at my shoes for a second and back up and she was gone. I was all alone until some stray dogs and cats in a pack moseyed on by, two of them limping but trying to keep up.

I went to sleep sober.

November 21st, 2007 (Hotel Ingleterra)

2008-08-22T07:09:00.000-07:00

Nat King Cole's syrupy voice swooned out a barred window in the old part of the city, repeating that seductive little slippery word: "MAYBE MAYBE MAYBE..." And across the street somebody ordered a pizza and I heard the guy selling it yell up inside the building to his woman 3 floors up with the oven and a minute later she dropped a basket on string with the food steaming and he picked it up over a towel and handed it to a guy who got back on his bike and doubled and then tripled his girl and kid brother. If childhood had a hometown... shucks. Then it gets dark and the streets are caught under the glow of pennies from whatever lights bother to burn, and the stars poke out and gather rust... but a swamp of clouds swept over and I finally had a chance who owns the place I'm shacked up in way over just behind Castro used to give his speeches behind the stencil 8 stories high of Che.

I was talking my home owner about Nancy. Nancy was the prettiest girl I ever saw in Cuba bar none and STILL the prettiest girl I've seen in this place. And I saw her the first minute I got out of a cab when I got here initially, cherry popped, back in Feb 2000 right after Elian Gonzalez jumped up into his daddy's arms. Door opened and there she was, BREEEEN?. Blink Blink. "YOU'RE Nancy?" "Jes." She leans in for the cheek kissing thing. "Jes, I yam Nancy." "Wow." "Jes. But, jew are nhat stayang weez me." "Why not?" "Jew wheel stay weez, Jesus." "That's okay, I'll stay with you." "EEs not possibeel." The cruelty inflicted in this place, human rights attrocities right from the get-go. Long limbed, elegant, doe-eyed, pony-tail, full lips always threatening smile---all of this in JOGGING PANTS at 2 in the morning---and that librarian thing with invisible glasses perched on hair ready to be thrown off and crushed under stilleto spike... the walk 3 houses down still felt like a stroll down death row.

But she ditched Havana with her husband 6 months ago. And we're left on a rainy night and me and the doctor are under his roof smoking, me trying to finish off whisky without much luck, talking about what made her so pretty. She never had to try. Every breath she took was a provocation. And the more she tried to subdue it the more everybody felt like we had a Cuban Sofia Loren all to ourselves in the cage of the street, feathers far far far too bright for our own good. But it didn't matter how miniscule the sound back when she strolled around bringing home groceries or saying hello to neighbors---I was on Nancy-invasion watch whenever I got back to our street. And after it got out I was nuts about her the whole fucking neighborhood, kids to parents to grandparents would point off to one side of the street or the other, BREEN, NANCY! and it never failed and some unforseen person would catch me doing it and snort.

But everybody's ditched our street these days. Miami, various towns around Spain. Checked out for keeps. Kinda creepy.

November 18th, 2007 (Hotel Ingleterra)

2008-08-22T07:08:00.000-07:00

You know that feeling you get on a low sorta day or night when you overhear Billie Holiday purring from some speakers gently off some place... just this sorta balm over everything inside you. And if it's clear out looking up at the sky feels like making eye contact with a friend and if it's nightime little changes happen but they don't, the moon butters the sky in some nice way and all the stars out remind you of other people letting all their stars out at different times. People over here make good use of benchs and nighttime things at night. I don't like people praying in a church but I've seen hundreds of these kids blessing the night together in shadowy bunched up shapes that always cheer me up.

I guess I was just out late the other night and got to thinking about a friend who showed me around Havana a few years ago. I met him on the plane. A traveling salesman who was trying to get in shape for Havana by only drinking a case of beer a day. He said this with no humor. His liver was shot. And his liver got him about several months ago. But I didn't know till I got here and talked it over with the people he'd introduced me to. Where the hell was I in April 06? I don't remember.

But he came here. And he came here to die. And they buried him here. This goofy salesman of books who bought cheap and sold expensive back home and drank himself to death and always had several girls over here running at the same time and could never understand why I didn't (a girl back home---which he found a hilariously asinine excuse---"at yeer age breen...i 'ad bent-eh").

I just can't shake working on that level. The jigs up. Where do you wanna be when you have to pay the bill for the whole fucking meal you've been chewing on your whole life. I guess this is as good a place as any. Nobody makes a big deal of anybody chasing dragons over here no matter how big or fast or dangerous.

But I couldn't help thinking that maybe Havana is a girl in the mold of Billie Holiday. She looks after everybody and makes tough things a little easier. And she's always talking about herself but you at the same time. I dunno how that's done. But it is.

And the food still fucking sucks.

November 15th, 2007 (Hotel Ingleterra)

2008-08-22T07:04:00.000-07:00

a girl got bit the other day. i was resting tired feet under dusk haze
on stone bench. a variation on a golden retriever, smaller and more useless, snapped at a little girl´s hand trying to pet it. boy the face she made. erupted in horror. i remember in NYC seeing somebody die in a department store. fat mexican guy with a garish silly belt buckle and thick mustache spying prices at a tie rack, slam, on the ground, goner. some motion on the ground, just spasmic, and the paramedics rushed in pretty quick, this was just off broadway on 60th, there was a hoard of us taking this in---3 girls strolled by... one looked over nonchalantly. ¨is he dead?¨ ¨probably just looked at the pricetag...¨ hahaha. but this girl would never touch a dog again. ever. she´d probably end up bombing PETA clubhouses.

or maybe she WOULD pet a dog again.

what the hell makes some people flexible on that point and others fixed, for life, hardened against something forever.

no idea. i was hell bent on finding some icecream after a couple hours boxing across town with all these cubans staring at me in a 300 yearold gym, the olympic coach smirking at me, ¨leedle by leedle, breen. leedle by leedle.¨ i went over to the unversity and took a crack at what i wrote a while ago but it came out differently. it´s always different when a girl´s on your mind...

havana´s the usual back alley with the gasoline
rainbow trickling down sweetening the eyes of
everybody, valentines day everyday kisses blowing like
a danlion bashed to pieces slapping cheeks and ears
and it´s kinda like virgin snow at recess getting a
juice box poured on it and scooped up into your mouth.
and it´s fucked up. but fucked up in real ways. always
a movie. some real movie playing somewhere that got it
right where ours is just a mexican soap opera on
prozac. the only meal that´s worth a damn is soda crackers
and some of the people from last time are dead but
died here... and i don´t think that´s an accident...
and that´s a weird consideration to have in the
morning. like waking up on a monday but FEELING like
it was sunday and having to drag your ass somewhere
you don´t wanna go. and that makes me a little sad.
cept here people would take the news in stride. which
would make your little dance have some ok music i
guess. and the little kids are everywhere playing.
rolling in the dirt. next to chickens sometimes. and
the dogs are horrible. like knawed off erasers and
pencils. 47th-world nightmare goya beasts you´d be
afraid to piss or spit on. and the art deco blasts up
to the sky but not as sky scrapers, cause the sky
ain´t itchy over here. i don´t know why. day or night,
dawn or dusk, it´s just happy, like some mysterious
but tranquil expression on an old woman´s face. one
big jowel of popsical blue. and it gets sliced in the
morning into brilliant yellows and pinks, and the
cotton candy of the clouds sponges some up and it
greases the roofs and sillouttes the men lumbering to
work, and it even gets in the spokes of the bicycles
that two people share, one side saddle with the other
kicking at the pedals, wind worried tires... and
always eye contact. and there´s no prophylactic for
how it works on your insides. they´re done. and they
know it. and you aren´t the same. and you don´t want a
photo. and there´s always tile under your feet. and
the back alley has thimbles of coffee to keep you
sharp even tho everybody´s kinda bored. it´s one big
shipwreck community. nobody even remembers the siren
let alone her song. even if it was slavery. it seems
like it musta been a girl. same rules might apply. who
knows.

but all the girls back home know how to break your balls but they forgot how to break your heart. and if this is my garden a flower was stolen and lives about 3hrs north of here.

a rose festers where it smells sweetest first...

too early to quote shakespeare. no nicotine working in the brain. suns out. the boulevard looks like linen hung out waiting for somebody happy to come home.

November 11th, 2007 (Hotel Ingleterra)

2008-08-22T07:02:00.000-07:00

Raul Castro strolled into the Havana hotel I was staying in at three-thirty in the morning. I noticed him all right---along with the two body guards and three blonds---but I didn't know him by name. The bartender told me. And I gave him a harder look and recognized the puffy eyes and the Castro gestures---turning his finger into a hamster on a wheel with little points he was making here and there---while he made the rounds with security staff and maids cleaning up the lobby. It was the president's grandson. And he was a born flirt.

But then so's everybody. Everyday's Valentine's day. You can't walk anywhere at anytime without somebody blowing kisses or whistling to somebody. Nobody seems to mind. Cupid was supposed to be a screwed up kid settling scores with grownups anyway, makes sense to me he'd be a Cuban.

Havana's an alley. One huge alley or gutter with a gasoline rainbow tricking down. Art Deco ruins everywhere, crusty and mangey, but alive. The whole town rips your eyes out and stuffs a microscope in one eye and a telescope in the other. Every five blocks is the bust a poet who went to war to free with this place. Every face over here is a poem. This one great big community of a shipwrecked island made Home. It's kinda wonky coming from a town like mine where the central ambition is to live in a family that relates like strangers in a home that is joylessly yet hygenically unlived in, lives unlived---reduce the poem of your life into a riddle and grind it up into some cornball crossword and make art of your artless by fucking a whore now and again behind your wife's back while she pretends not to notice and blah blah blah---a fucking ghost town haunting souless everywhere but behind a wheel screaming at Chinese people.

But there's boredome here too. Monumental boredom. The expression of disillusionment that I can only imagine some guy set adrift has guzzling seawater by the gallon has trying to solve thirst.

And I kick around with a lousy wife-beater tan making taxodermy of some girls I know---KNEW, maybe---in my notebook. By girls over here are like tripped down an elevator shaft and finding mermaids waiting for you. The smiles and eye contact staining you like the dawn gets sponged up by clouds and rims the beizbol stadium and skims the houses and sillouttes the people hustling and dragging on foot for the morning commute.

And I'm one footnote trying to mainline them and it. And like any girl I've ever fallen for the longer I'm here, the more questions I ask, the more slips, the more Moments---I know less and less and less. And more trap doors open. And more anchors spash.

Somehow, as fucked up as it is, and IT IS, it just turns every other city you've ever seen into that endangered species airlifted over to some Vegas petting zoo.

I'm in the studio audience watching this girl of a city falling down the rabbit hole trying to make sense of the screwy pattern on the wall and for whatever reason I don't need the electric sign to know when to clap. Because what stinks stinks. And when the first dance recital innocence gets to everybody and your little girl starts dancing but doesn't want to smile because her teeth are rotten---it feels like home. Emotionally where you pick up your mail.

Even tho I can't get a motherfucking plate of food over here that doesn't change my fixed address to the bathroom for 24 hours over a toilet.

Habana Oct 29th, 2007

2008-08-22T07:01:00.000-07:00

Havana's pretty strange... around noon old men drag
80-pound stones tied to their ankles along the middle
of busy streets in Centro Habana. Nobody stares,
nobody even looks. At 5am while I'm running around
places ghostly sillouettes are dragged up hills on the
backs of trucks, their soldier uniforms flapping. Down the
street, beside a building with a huge chimney, a woman
crushes sugar cane for about 60 cents a liter. She
handles the cane like a porn star handles their cock,
just jams it into the hole. There's a transistor radio
beside the crude machine and when a song she likes
comes on she jiggles all over in a frenzy during the chorus. Over
at the boxing gym I have the Cuban National Team's
head coach drives 50 miles into town to work with me for 90 minutes.
Costs 10 bucks a session. No matter what the hell I do all I get back is: "Leedle by leedle, breen. Leedle by leedle. Tanquillo." Dicey weather means the ocean's wild and all the cars beside the Malecon have to hug the center
line 3 lanes in or else a big ass wave will heave over
and slap against their window. Or there's baseball at
night. Cactus green bleechers and olive army personal
rimming the crowd to keep everyone in order.
Tourquoise seashell texture scoreboard, some lights out, worn
billboards spouting the usual propoganda bullshit. Another morning entering a home with little black girls with amazingly intricate hair-dos
who chase after you so they can welcome you with a
kiss. Very neglected cats trickling over exposed roots
under massive trees shading people at a bus stop. Or
the ghettos, near that boxing gym mostly, where kids
stand almost naked hurling stones at nothing, eyes
peering out of barred windows while their bodies
shiver or twitch, eyes pointed at the action but not
catching much of it. Or my friend over here who showed
me his digital camera: "Deez eez ma girlfriend..." prefaces the first photo. I nodd. "Verry pretty." (not really) "Check dis out, man." He
shows me a 3 minute video of her on an operating table
having kidney stones removed. "THAT'S HER LIVER, MAN!
SHIT!" Later, when I can swallow/breath again, I ask him why
anyone would want footage of their GIRLFRIEND's liver
and bladder etc. "Because I wanna know EVERYTHING. I
love her." So I walk home with that in my pocket. Turn
it over in my head. I get to my quiet little street a
few blocks from where Castro gave a 4 hour speech to 50,000
people last week, and Pepe and Jesus Jr. are playing
catch with a tennis ball and Pepe hastles me to play
along and Jesusito laughs when I ask him how he's
doing because he thinks my Spanish is so pathetic and
funny. I make a fist at him. He makes one back and comes at me until everybody spots his dead coming home from work down the street, "HEEEEYYYYY ZZZEEEEEWWWWW!"

Unsent Letters In Central Park

2008-08-21T08:20:00.001-07:00

I don't think a breeze ever brushed against her cheek, only hurricanes...

It's worn me down. I have my go-to guys when it comes to the task of cheering me up. Richard Pryor bats cleanup. I bet he'd have batted cleanup on any all-star campfire lineup in caveman days. If you don't hunt with the hunters you'd better have something to say worth hearing by the time they get back otherwise you're toast.

If Louis Armstrong had the power to kill with his trumpet, Richard Pryor came as close as anybody at perfecting a vaccine for feeling low. It figures. He grew up in a brothel the son of a whore and a pimp. Maybe you sorta had a hunch about it without the facts anyway. Those eyes of his obviously saw more than anyone should. But it still puzzles me why some people swimming up stream against their hurt, fighting it with everything they've got, help us out with their struggle. Most don't. Hamlet may have been a self-obsessed prick, but he's the best we ever had at working out what's a stiff joint and what's arthritis in the human condition.

It's Central Park over here. Sheep's Meadow. Some guy dragging a sack of bottled water he's trying to sell nearly tripped over my foot. I looked over and saw his tattoo, FUCK THE WORLD. Tell me about it.

I find a path a little later with couples in row boats, sliding through this green film over the water. I dunno what it is. But it makes every girl look like Guinevere. Even when they're black. Old couples, kids, ones my age. All the colors are fucked up. Too bright. There's gold glinting off a girl's head that catches my eye. The guy she's with too.

Van Gogh has a painting with a field the same color. SIMILAR color. It's Van Gogh's more than the girl's, put it that way. I forget the name of the painting and I'm not gonna look it up when I get home (my girl's home back in the Village). There's this farmer who seems to have finished his day's work and is on his way home across his yellow field. It's the way he's moving across that field that comes to me right now. The movement is his as much as the color is Vincent's. His arms are swinging and he seems almost happier than anyone has a right to be. But there he is and that's what it looks like. Maybe his wife was a knockout and Van Gogh just tracked down her husband. I doubt it. Van Gogh's knockouts were diseased milf-whores where he could be step-dad in cracked-out domestic bliss.

Of course I have no way of knowing, but I don't think Vincent was out there snooping around and found this farmer, set up his easel, licked his brush, and went to town on this guy, teeing-off on the private moment. It doesn't feel peeping-Tomish to me. Even if he did, the farmer's been pushing up daisies for an awful long time by now. He probably had no idea he, along with that field, had been splashed against a museum wall. But that moment of his is jammed in history, freed more than captured on a canvass. This gorgeous, heart breaking love letter written and unsent that, in a way, we get to look over Vincent's shoulder while he wrote it. We can feel the pauses.

I don't remember ever walking like that. First day of school, first kiss, first A in class, any tail wagging knee jerk sorta thing---I remember those moments, but no dice on the arm -swinging. But I know that I did walk like that. I miss it. I miss it a lot. For some most likely sneaky reason, I'm not offended Vincent brought up a touchy subject with it. And brought it up so abruptly and unapologetically tacked against my eye-lids.

I was on the plane over here and the woman beside me wouldn't shut up and allow me to read my book. At the end of the flight she asked for my name so she could keep tabs on my writing. I gave her a name, but not mine.

I have my eyes glued to the pavement walking up and down Manhattan since I've arrived here. But I keep getting asked directions. I always want to lie (because I think, contrary to popular opinion, that's the greatest gift you could ever give a traveler) but I never do.

So to put this one to bed, I climbed up and perched on some rock under an elm and watched everybody sprawled out in this meadow. And I figured, the Dali Lama is bad because he doesn't know how to make people feel okay when they aren't happy. He just makes them feel guilty for NOT being happy. And I don't want marriage anymore or kids or a home or a car or yoga to lengthen my muscularity or meditation to meet the world with added grace or a soul mate or karmic credit of any kind or to develop---I used to walk like that farmer. I'd like to remember how to do that again. I lost it somewhere. Nobody swiped it.

Shucks... girls don't feel like summer camp no more. Foxholes don't do it for me. "All we are is but children growing older." Lewis Carrol said that. But then maybe he was explaining why he still liked kids.

Everybody's always making bets with me when all I want is a dare.

Didja know that nobody ever saw the greatest matador in the world? He let the horns come so close to him nobody could even peek through their fingers to watch. Nobody could measure why he was the best, but everybody knew he was.

Kinda like the way that farmer is for me what with this girl situation.

By the way, the Vincent painting I included with this piece is NOT the one I've been talking about. You'll have to dig it up for yourself.

Unsigned

2008-08-17T20:23:00.001-07:00

all these clouds outside my window made a nice bib for
an especially sloppy pie eating contest sunrise, all
kinds of berries smeared. now it's pigeon shit gray
with the shopping carts clanking down the alleys. all
the traffic lights winking like betty page.

you read that inscription that i felt a little queasy
and naked writing in my chicken scratch two minutes
before i saw you, but wrote it anyway so you could
find it *later*. maybe when you felt like fishing for
it. maybe stumbling on it drowsy before you went to
sleep. maybe with stuff ahead of your day---hopefully
something nice that you could arch your spine to when
you thot about it, like the way your whole body sighed
and curled a little when you talked about dancing all
over the place.

*LATER* being the key fucking word, natalie.

you shouldn't say certain things to me, you know. when
you told me you read that paragraph i sent you the
other day out loud to yourself---to get the/my voice
right!?---jesus fuck, i wanted to club you on the
spot. toss you over a shoulder and find a nice
hospitable cave with a cool breeze and a mattress with
no sheets or blankets. me as the only alternative
smirking heat source. you can't say things like that.
not in that little unsure voice that changed when it
came out.

especially since you turn me into a pack rat. just
sorta wanting to keep a bunch of stuff that i didn't
have the guts to try and steal even tho i love
stealing. keep your face tucked inside that hood a
little bit longer, just because i like the way it
looks with only a little crinkled, rain-licked hair
against your chin. figure out a way to keep that
antenna inside you bent right so the reception stayed
perfect between your lips and eyes smiling. just
making that sneaky sound in your throat that seems to
surprise and tickle-out certain expressions that i can
mainline. maybe i just love looking at you. i get to say that without feeling guilty because it's true. if somebody pulled out a stop watch over at benny's way back when, i was there in under a second
easy. you don't seem so much painted, as carved. and
you have this effect on me.

i get tense sometimes, nervous, and this fucking
billiard's triangle comes out of nowhere trying to
cram all of me into its ugly shape---so am i allowed
to tell you when i got to touch you the morning you
left this crazy pool cue cracked every ball so hard
inside me, in a thousand directions, all the numbers
burned off?

in oliver there are lots of orchards handy, with
cherries and apricots and peaches hanging out along
the highway eager to be stolen if anyone should happen
to be strolling by. there's a river that snakes thro
the valley for a few miles and i'm told it's higher
and faster than it's been in 40 years and i wonder how
many bridges you've been flushed under because that's
always been my favorite part. there's a lake, half a
mile long, with a raft at one shore shaded by willow
trees, big cozy old thing, that you can take out at
night that drifts a couple hundred yards into absolute
darkness with only the moon drooling on the water and
buttering the sky. and there's a big ass mountain with
the profile of an indian that takes a couple hours to
climb through wild flowers and cactus and the
occasional deer nosing around after you hop the fence
of the farm beneath it and trespass...

this is a little too long, but then yesterday felt a
little too short. your fault on both counts.

Davega Bicycles

2008-08-17T20:21:00.000-07:00

There's a shy meadow the size of a football field that slants away from a quiet road down towards a cliff. The road carries on climbing along a drowsy curve toward the university and Wreck Beach. If you drove along this road you'd have trouble seeing anyone lying on a blanket in the grass of that meadow. Without trying it's very easy to get tucked away from prying eyes. At one end the cliff has a steep narrow path of dried mud to take you down, under the shade of trees and beside berry bushes, to the rocks piled up against the sea. You can hear the drone of boats combing the shore but you can't see any of them. Most of the footprints left in the muddy path lead toward rather than away from this meadow. When the sun's out it has dibs on a paint-kit all its own. All the ingredients of this place add up to something like seeing a naked woman washing her hair for the first time. Clouds spread continents of lazy shadows over the long grass, freckled with buttercups and wild flowers. The breeze more often than not floats over you and makes noise in the leaves. Sometimes it dips down and combs the grass, weaves into the feel of the sun against your skin. If you're on your back staring up at the sky water-spiders infect the blue. It feels like a very special place to bury something you want somebody to find. If you're lucky enough to have a private petting zoo of a girl along with you time stands still.

I was there a little over a week ago with a girl who might fit that description. A big thing didn't happen while I was there that I was expecting. With every girl I've ever fallen for, from Murphy (c) on down, I get asked a question from someone I haven't met yet: "Why her?" And it fucks everything up. Because I never have a good answer.

Every couple years after I was sixteen and had my first girlfriend I've written to the somebody who asks me this question in my notebook. Before too long I gathered the somebody was my kid.

The catch of being in that meadow with this girl was that I never got that question. Apparently the conversation wasn't necessary. They already knew the score. I guess one look at my face, by way of explanation, and it was pretty obvious why it was her.

THE DOMINO DIARIES

New Article on Film in Vancouver Paper

Interview with Teofilo Stevenson on Muhammad Ali Fight That Never Was

New Boxing Articles

New Rigondeaux interview on Newstalk.ie

Tourist Information

Interview for Hero Traitor Madness: The Guillermo Rigondeaux Story on Boxing Scene

Hero Traitor Madness: The Guillermo Rigondeaux Story trailer...

The Domino Diaries: La Lucha

The Domino Diaries: I, II, III, IV

Clocks In A Casino

Zapruder Film

Gnossienne

Girl Peeled Off A Cigar Box

Valentine

Straight, No Chaser

Polite Bondage

Hawaii Interstate Highway (redux)

Eat Him By His Own Light

Damaged Goods

Taxidermy Redeemable Coupons

Out-Of-Tune Madrid Ragtime

The Regretful Unrequited Lovelife of Lesbian Trolls

*Carefree* Gum Presents: Mistletoe Moments

Her Giftshop In His Museum

Punchline

Her Moats and Subways

Ninth and Broadway

Sleepwalking

All Right Then, I'll Go To Hell

Bermuda Triangle

If She Snores

Laputa

Ferris Wheels vs Roller Coasters

Hawaii Interstate Highway

Sandcastles

Rosetta Stone

Unsigned

Dropped Like Glass Joe...

Untied Shoelaces

New York and the Wagon

NYC September 1st, 2008 (Meeting Parents)

January 25, 2008 VANCOUVER

Christmas, 2007

December 10th, 2007 (Hotel Ingleterra)

December 7th, 2007 (Hotel Ingleterra)

December 1st, 2007 (Hotel Ingleterra)

November 30th, 2007 (Hotel Ingleterra)

November 29th, 2007 (Hotel Ingleterra)

November 28th, 2007 (Hotel Ingleterra)

November 27th, 2007 (Hotel Ingleterra)

November 25th, 2007 (Hotel Ingleterra)

November 21st, 2007 (Hotel Ingleterra)

November 18th, 2007 (Hotel Ingleterra)

November 15th, 2007 (Hotel Ingleterra)

November 11th, 2007 (Hotel Ingleterra)

Habana Oct 29th, 2007

Unsent Letters In Central Park

Unsigned

Davega Bicycles

Carefree Gum Presents: Mistletoe Moments