Stuck with two Chinese fortune cookies

Friday, September 07, 2012

I had to ask for the Chinese fortune cookies this week, which is why the lady dumped a handful in the bag as I left, sticking me with two fortunes and a choice of which one best suits me.

I’ve always been a lucky cur – growing up with almost no talent as opposed to my best friend who was artist, musician, writer, actor and such, and could never choose between them and so went from one to the other in an endless litany that made him resemble a pin ball bouncing off bumpers but almost no score.

I know someone today just like that – and have become addicted to songs, art and writing, only not to have the person leap off that kick leaving me hanging. I have read one piece of this person’s fiction so many times, I have it nearly memorized and can hum all the tunes.

I grew up imitating other people’s art, getting inside of it, learning how to do what the people I envy do.

I still do this with my reporting, reading what I like, especially reporters I work with, and trying to succeed the way they do. With one reporter I worked with in the early 1990s, I recorded his work so I could listen to it, as if his work was inside my head just as I’ve done for people like Tom Wolf and EB White, thinking that if I hear what they are writing, it gets into my head better, and with headphones, it is almost as if I am walking around inside their heads.

I still read many stories aloud from fellow reporters, drawing odd looks at the Coach House Diner when I do this over breakfast on Saturdays, forcing me to retreat to my car where passers’ by only see my lips moving and think I’m merely crazy.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, they say, with me it’s more like adoration. I don’t try to absorb anything unless I truly admire it and want it to become part of me.

But then, I’ve always been a sponge, drawing everything I can inside me, trying to mix it up to come out with some sense of my own.

Having little or no talent growing up, I was forced to work harder at this, often making a fool of myself with my imitations because they started out as crap and over time grew into something meaningful, sometimes even nearly as good as those I admired in the first place.

But giving people too much of a choice is frustrating to people like me, who wait with breathless anticipation for the next song or poem or piece of fiction, only to find the author or singer or poet has moved on.

Now, with two fortune cookies, I’m in a similar dilemma.

Do I follow the first and “Think highly off yourself, for the world takes you at your own estimate,” or do I follow the second’s words of wisdom: “to think is easy. To act is difficult. To act as one thinks is the most difficult of all?”

I tend to lean towards the second, and have most of my life, leaving the first for other more notable people, others who need the world to take their estimate, when I know what my worth is already.

Gray Day

Monday, September 03, 2012

I had planned a walk to the Hoboken or Weehawken waterfront, but the rain hovers over the landscape with its gray shroud, making the walk seem unlikely.

I can’t ever get enough of the New York Skyline, even though it has changed so drastically from when I was a kid, and could see it in the distance from my third floor bedroom on the highest hill of my home town.

During our trips to The Village, I used to insist on taking one bus over the other at a point in town where the two buses converged, a thing that puzzled my best friend, Frank, because the other bus always got us to the city first.

But the slower bus always came down along the Weehawken ridge over looking the river and the skyline, and like a child rather than the teen I was, I fought to get the window seat so I could gawk.

I still gawk even when I live this close, and take in the city in its various moods, knowing that how it felt I felt, knowing that if a shroud of cloud covered it, I felt that mood as well, making me ache to get there today for the same reason, as if after all this time, the city itself read my moods and clouds itself in the proper garb so as to reflect me when I arrive there.

There is a small park in Jersey City that overlooks the back side of Hoboken, and beyond it, the great Manhattan landscape, the towering manmade cliffs – although from that point the river itself is invisible so that Hoboken seems to run right into Manhattan.

If it rains, I may just go there and stare, and try to sort out which side of the river is which, and how I feel on this gray day.

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End of season

Sept. 2, 2012

I didn't wait to watch the cycle of the washing machines this morning, I just dumped the laundry in and ran, although last week, I got back after the cycle ended and found some indignant lady had complained to the manager that the machine was idle and he yanked my clothing out so she could use the machine.
Time ticks by so quickly it's hard to imagine September is here, and this weekend always marking some new beginning of some new adventure, I'll ill prepared to deal with.
I still listen to the music we recorded so many years ago in a now-long-defunct rock club in Cedar Grove, picturing all of the dance-sweated faces and the celebration of summer's end aglow in their eyes.
I need rituals of passage; and need to remember the faces of the past in order to know where I am now, even if it's only a weekly ritual of writing in my car as the laundry twists and turns, jeans and shirt in their own ritual of tangled limbs.
The Egyptian man at the paper store always greets me with "Coffee, cream, no sugar?" and then slides my copy of The New York Times into a bag and sends me on my way.
There is a kind of religiousness in this, and I would miss the ceremony if it didn't happen, the way I miss most rituals of my life, the way I miss most people who pass through it, regardless of for how long.
This being a longer weekend, I get to wander later, walking along the wide or narrow streets, recalling what it means to be there, often who I walked them with and why. It is a ritual, too, although full of strange spirits that are often troubling.
This is my end of the year -- between now and early October -- before the leaves change, when I reflect most of what the world means and what I can expect. I am always surprised by what happens, because I never expect what does.
I suppose that is a good thing.
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The unsaved

Saturday, August 25, 2012

I didn’t smell gun powder, just the usual traffic fumes.

Yet it felt more than a little strange walking through streets where gun violence is almost unheard of, and the greatest danger to life and limb is being trampled to death by rude foreign tourists seeking to take a picture in front The Empire State Building or Rockefeller Center.

I didn’t even see too many police – only the usual suspects, one Jewish guy with thick black rimmed glasses learning against the railing of some high powered office tower slightly uptown from where the shooting occurred. But the news reeled off over us and around us, spilling out the details of why this garment designer decided to shoot a fellow worker – almost a classic story of desperation, unemployed, and desperate for someone to blame, and so blaming some poor fool who still has a job.

All the newscasters kept going on about how unusual the shooting was for that part of the city, as if local government had zones for certain categories of crimes – pick pockets and hustlers allowed here, prostitutes and such there, and gun violence some place else.

I recalled a junkie once trying to mug me only a few blocks from where this shooting took place. I was a messenger then, and always on the streets, always a potential victim – although rarely actually one. My best friend seemed to dominate that market, once getting mugged in the Port Authority bathroom, once even in his own building, and another time going around the block from his apartment on East 5th Street to mine on East 6th. I mostly had trouble with the macho types, the bikers who liked to browbeat me – one hitting me with chains because I refused to be browbeaten and gave them the finger.

Junkies were no match for that, and this one was more pathetic than most, desperate for his fix, barely able to hold the knife so it was no problem taking it away from him. He nearly cried when I did.

And as I walked yesterday uptown to the museum, thinking of the poor fool with a gun desperately looking for someone to blame, I thought of that poor junkie, knowing that his life had likely ended not long after my encounter with him, and that my passing through his life had only humiliated him more, not helped him.

Others like him passed through my life, too, some I professed to love and tried to rescue, but could not. And walking that street, thinking of the gun man and his victim, I understood how hard it is to save someone, and how stupid it is to try, and yet, if people don’t bother, if all we have are packs of tourists running over people in the street, then there is nothing to live for.

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Vacation

Friday, August 24, 2012

Coney Island was a disappointment after such a long train ride to get there, although on Mondays many of its attractions were closed. I got the same feeling I had went I went back to Atlantic City in 1995 and found the wrecking ball leveling everything I thought of as valuable, and building mockery in its place. My visit to Coney Island came the same day Mayor Bloomberg suggested gambling might be allowed there as a way to boost the local economy – even though he fundamentally disapproved of the vice.

While there is beauty to be found even in the most desolate of places, such as with the fisherman who kissed the fish he caught before tossing it back into the waves, and the other black fishermen who insisted on keeping the pier free of trash, Coney Island seemed empty to me – especially after my April visit to Seaside Heights, which even at that early time, seemed filled with life. I went back Wednesday to take another look, and realized that it remained what it always had been, a haven for teens who needed to see and be seen, before they moved into the broader world, beach bum men with muscles and tans, striding along the boardwalk trying to impress people other than themselves, and pre-season high school football teams there to get united before they hit the grid iron.

Both places seemed remarkably lonely, as did the ruins of the East Village I visited in between, the gutted fish of what had once been the center of counter culture, now devoid of meaning as counter culture invaded every other town like the extended waves of a nuclear blast, leaving lives in ruins, and people confused as to what roles they need to play in a world that no longer had room for them.

This last was particularly evident when I visited Liberty State Park last night and saw the rich racing their sail boats near Ellis Island, while I dodged bicycles on the walkway – the old symbol of American immigration locked to pedestrian traffic so that people wishing to visit their glorious past had to pay for the privilege.

This tourist vision of the world I took this week made me realize that everything has become a tourist destination, specialized for people who aren’t like me at all. My visit to Woodstock in April was far different from those I took in the 1990s, when there was still life there among the natives, and the aging hippies were still respected, instead of looked on as a kind of aging beach bum going through the motions and seeking attention.

We walk in a limbo of time when changing generations means changing visions for the world – and for the first time I truly understand the frustration my father’s generation had with life, the survivors of the Good War forced to deal with the rising tide of the British Invasion, our bulk pushing them out of the places where they felt most comfortable, where they once belonged, just as we baby boomers are being pushed out.

Tonight, I return to New York, to a museum of art that is no longer modern, seeking images that I can relate to, cling to, finding immorality within their frames.

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Not a devious guy

Aug. 22, 2012

I'm always getting blamed for things I didn't do or accused of not doing what I was supposed to. When I try to make peace, people think I'm warmongering, when I wage war, they don't take me seriously.
Lately, I'm being accused of things I couldn't possibly have done, staring at people in the hall or trying to take something they struggled hard to get.
People tend to read in me what they want to see, thinking I think like they do, like I want something they have, or want to wreck their golden opportunities, when I really want to live and let live, and maybe get some laughs along the way.
I hate being lied to, or manipulated, although I'm perfectly willing to go along with folks as long as I'm not the butt end of the joke.
Yet, I haven't laughed in a long time over any of this, and feel really badly about being so misunderstood -- so misunderstood, people want to destroy me.\
Fortunately, I really haven't done anything worth being hated for.
Unfortunately, that doesn't stop people from hating me, it just frustrates me to think that even when I make myself scarce, I still get blamed for stuff I didn't do, or I'm not clever enough to have thought up in the first place.
I'm not a devious guy
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A learning experience

Friday, August 17, 2012

All summers pass too quickly. But it is difficult to believe 40 years have passed since that summer when my world changed, my ex-wife split for Pennsylvania, as did all the women in our lives all at once, me, Pauly, Hank, Garrick, suffering the same heart ache at the same time, forced to spend time in each other’s company – sharing each other’s misery, searching for land where we might build a new life in upstate New York.

That pain never goes away, but it fades, and other memories creep in, filling in the holes left in our lives so that after so much time that summer seemed magical, because we all did things we needed to do to survive.

I still have the tape of music we recorded for Pauly’s girl, who had gone to the West Coast, and we sat around singing sad songs with the hope he could get her back, I guess believing that if he succeeded maybe the rest of us could, when we all knew down deep we could not, and that somehow we were actually singing a dirge for a dying life, and a birthing song for a new life, as we came out of the cocoon of our illusions, and grew up a little.

After 40 years, you would think that it becomes easier to grow up, or older, or to understand the process better, so that we can get on with out lives without going through the same drama.

Oddly enough, it only took ten years for my ex-wife to accept me as her friend, and for me to understand the change in me that this required, learning that sometimes I can actually be on the right side of an issue and that someone can depend on me for something other than trouble.

I don’t know how the rest of my friends fared in this regard. Hank died in 1995, having never again seen the girl who had abandoned him in 1972, a horrible conclusion, something unresolved. Garrick saw his, but never resolved it either, bitter over it for decades, before something died inside of him. As for Pauly, I don’t think anything ever fazed him, even then. I never saw him cry, the way I saw the others do.

I’m the lucky one. Life came around to greet me, after I thought I could not resolve it.

And here, 40 years later, I can look back on the summer of 72 and think of it as a learning experience.

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