Damaged Goods

"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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Merry Christmas

Her Giftshop In His Museum

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

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

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

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

Couple months back, across the continent:

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

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

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

I stole a couple pillows and slept on the floor.

Punchline

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