Dead rat in my back yard

Monday, January 28, 2013

Finding the dead rat in the back yard wasn’t the worst part of the week, although it said something about omens, I suppose.

Driving out of Bayonne only to rip my tire on a sewer drain grate is high up on my list of bad things since it occurred relatively late at night on Wednesday, and on one of the coldest days of the year so far.

I was in a hurry, and had sped up the highway the back way through graveyard, avoiding all the usual tie ups I get into when coming up Avenue E onto Broadway.  The light was red when I got to Garfield Avenue, but I could turn on red and did, only to see the pickup truck barreling towards me so I took the turn sharper and faster than I had intended.

I’d had trouble at that corner before, but this time, I knew something bad had happened, but didn’t know what and considering the neighborhood, I didn’t stop until a mile or so later when I got to the top of the hill near Summit and Fairmount and heard the rumble of a flat.

This was my first flat in this car, but I figured I could handle it, leaping out only to remember I had a trunk full of crap that I now had to put in the back seat so I could get to the spare and the tool, and when I did, I couldn’t find the jack.

I keep the car manual in the back seat for times like this, at least ever since that first time when I drove to work and realized I didn’t know how to open the gas tank and I was below E, and went on line to find the switch.

The temperatures outside this time was below freezing, and I had all the junk from the trunk on top of the manual, so after more digging, I eventually found the book, my frozen fingers turning page after page until finally, I found the page which informed me the jack was located under the front driver’s seat.

More fumbling and scraped fingers, I got the jack out, fitted it under the car, and managed somehow to raise the thing only to discover that the lugs were so cold they wouldn’t come off.

Somewhere in all this, I had dropped my cell phone, and sorting through the junk in the back seat I eventually found this, battery nearly expired, so I had to plug it in, call home for a number to our friendly local tow truck operator only to find the number went to some very irritated guy who told me never to call back or he would find me, and so I called the dealer instead, and to my surprise someone answered and gave me roadside assistance – in Nashville.

After a 40 minute frigid wait, a guy in a car showed up with a real jack and a real lug wrench and helped change my tire.

The next morning I drove on the donut tire to the dealer only to find out, they didn’t have the tire in stock and sent me to Sears, which had it only because they service Zip cars. By the time I got to work, I was exhausted and facing a long night at the Board of Education, and I was in no mood for the drive home when a couple of idiots doubled parked near where I had to turn and I had to speed up to get around a car making a left so as not to hit them, beeping my horn and giving the figure to the idiots seated in the front seat – who turned out to be undercover cops on a coffee break, who after pulling me over, made the usual request for paper work while asking, “Do you have any points?”

“I guess I will after this?” I replied

“What was that?” the cop asked.

For once in my life, I shut my mouth and shrugged, taking the tickets and driving off thankful I wasn’t hauled off in handcuffs.

It snowed that night, and the next morning, I found yet another poisonous spider in my shower, and this time, vowing not to kill it like I had the last, I found a way to put it outside, only to watch it die in the cold.

The spider didn’t kill the rat, I’m sure.

I didn’t know it was a rat until my wife said there’s a dead squirrel in the yard and I went out to take a look at it, and found it was a fat rat with a long tail and pointed front teeth.

I felt sorry for it, and for myself, thinking how fragile life is, and how lucky some of us are – escaping the worst impacts of our stupidity, while innocents like the spider and rat could not.

Omens, did I say? Perhaps more a life lesson about behaving better, and trying to live a good life, and hoping for the best.

In search of what?

Saturday, January 19, 2013

I woke up from a cold night to find a rising temperature, a warmer wind blowing across the side porch as I put out food for the cats.

On the kitchen table I still have the left over food from the Chinese take out we had last night, as well as a pile of fortunes I’d collected over the last two weeks, unable to tell which fortune went with which week so they all sort of mingled together, stinging a little as reminders of the past and the wisdom I was smart enough to give, but never follow.

“Trust yourself,” one says, “You know more than you think.”

I suppose I do, instinct always outweighing every other option in my life, always telling me by some mysterious process when I am on the wrong path or what I should do next.

I keep thinking of the Indiana Jones movies where the hero keeps “making it up” as he goes along.

There are contradictions in these fortunes, such as when they tell me to “take time to relax especially when you don’t have time for it,” or how “sincerity is the finest point of communication,” or even “there are not stupid questions, just stupid answers.”

I still pondered these over breakfast at The Coach House, where I routinely spend Saturdays reading the latest editions of North Hudson newspapers, sorting out fact from fiction before I take a cup of coffee to go and wandered up the street into the lower part of Union City, taking glimpses of a fading piece of history, old garment district reminding me of the days when I grew up in the Silk City, similar ruins, similar people, similar memories – rusted fire escapes, street sides filled with crying babies, and people who speak tongues I barely understand.

I always come back down Summit, passed the old theater with posters for movies no longer playing, in fact, no movies are playing, just the echo of theater ghosts stirring in the back, aching to be set free now that the only occupants are them.

I like the other part of Union City, the section where Bergenline Avenue hits the viaduct, and a handful of old fashion banks surround the intersection straight out of my memories of Paterson when I waited for the bus to go home each night from a job in a theater than hadn’t yet turned to cobwebs, where we ushers went as far with girls in the balcony as the girls would let us, always coming out after our shifts aching for more.

I met my best friend in that old theater, and as I walk around this part of town, I think of him, and the adventures we had, and the immense sadness I felt at his passing, as if an age of the world had come to an end, an age of innocence I could no longer lay claim to.

I guess I’m always searching to get back that innocence, or at least, to look at it to see if it really ever was anything more than wishful thinking, and that the me of that time is as stained in heart as the one of this time, and most of us really spend our times struggling to find something we can never really attain, love, fame, fortune, glory, and in the end, have to settle for something much closer to truth than we ever thought – our version of truth, anyway, truth not found in tea leaves at the bottom of my paper cup, but in coffee grounds, just a bit bitter and hard to swallow.

A good wind

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

The fog lifts slowly from the harbor this dull morning, revealing bits of a landscape I thought I knew, each aspect unmasked by the shredding, a landscape sheathed in ice over night by persistent sleet bound and determined to keep secrete the deeper keeps I ache to discover with each walk here.

Everything I thought I knew I must learn again, finding new maps through this changed landscape trapped in ice, fog and the bayside rocks, whole lives caught in the endless eddies none of us can fully escape.

My grandfather, the boat building, told me once that sails are only as good as the wind that blows them, and we all must trust to luck or fate before new can manage to steer clear of narrow places and shallow water upon which boat bottoms scrape.

Across the bay, industry imitates nature as great steel cargo cranes take the shape of the gentle egrets common on this side, mirror images distorted in the funhouse of the modern world where we are constantly confronted by real and unreal and must decide which is which and which we want to follow.

I walk this asphalt path along this side because it is all I know, the only solid ground upon which my feet can travel with any certainly, thought as time as proved, I have sometimes stumbled over potholes hidden in the haze, leaving me injured but with no choice but to rise up and walk on, tightening my sails the way my grandfather told me, hoping a good wind will take up the slack and ease me out from the narrow water eddies in which the world traps us all.

Somewhere high up a sea gull cries, making me long for the sea.

The life

November 9, 1982

The first you learn is that you never give it away.

You use power to get power; any expenditure for any other reason is a waste.

But we live in wasteland of waste, especially when it comes to rock & roll, politics or charismatic leaders.

The other lesson you need to learn that in most cases, if you destroy yourself you rarely rise again.

That’s why my being the sound man of this band makes no sense, cast in with a pack of over-30 outcasts that couldn’t make it in the music biz and so have finally learned to settle for drugs and sex.

Some drink to excess, clinging to their guitars as if crutches, somehow managing these nights to hit the right strings, and to give off the impression that they still have what it takes, superstars in a pond filled with pond scum, clinging to the rapidly evaporating sense of power they once had, settling for partners after hours they would not have looked at twice in those days when they had better choices.

And me, I sit behind the board, pushing buttons, raising and lowering it, trying to make them sound better than they deserve, one more big fish wishing I was some place else, doing something better, with a whole new cast of characters, yet not quite able to give up “the life,” or the status, even when we’re only impressing ourselves.

Lights, camera -- inaction

November 5, 1981

I expected a dark room filled with angry men and cold ruthless women more befitting the name blue movies than the glass sided house in Hollywood Hills with a view of Los Angeles so spectacular I thought I had arrived in heaven. True, the rooms had beds and cameras, but the sunlight blinded me to nearly everything, even the dread I had carried up the hill in the car from the modeling studio.

The women attracted me in the same way that pretty science teacher in junior high school had and one of them kept saying, “Hold on, boy, you’ll poke your eye out with that thing,” and I only laughed.
But brightness could not hid the hardness in the men and women, especially the guy named Dayko, who gripped a cigarette holder and let smoke come out both sides of his mouth, telling me or no one how we couldn’t waste time and how the place was costing him a bundle to use, and urging everybody to get “in the mood” quick to shoot.

“The view is better at night,” he said. “But then we have to use lights and I like things natural – if you know what I mean. Besides, we don’t want neighbors seeing what we’re doing up here. They might call the cops.”

This shoot was for all the dirty old men in all the dirty 42nd Street theaters to gawk at, the camera man said to me, then went to shoot the first set in which I was only to play a prop.

“You’ll come into this later,” one of the other women said. “So put your gun down, boy, and watch.”

The other woman, with bright brown hair and large breasts, kept complaining about the lack of heat.

“No heat is good,” Dayko told her, and pinched her nipple. “Besides, don’t you know this is LA, it’s never cold here.”

My girlfriend looked nervously around, under dressed, but not like the other women were, looking at, but not complaining about the costume she was expected to put on.

One of the other girls did complain.

“When’s the last time you washed any of this shit, Dayko?” she asked.

“Don’t worry about it,” Dayko said around another puff of smoke. “You won’t have it on long.”

“You scared, honey?” a blonde woman asked, her lipstick so red I mistook it for blood.

I nodded. She touched my shoulder.

“You’re new?”

I nodded again.

“Well, don’t you worry about a thing, I’ll walk you through it. We have the next scene after she is through,” she said, nodding in the direction of my girlfriend, who Dayko was already telling to get dressed, and positioning her, and calling in the two men who were supposed to do the scene with her.

“Let’s go, let’s go,” Dayko shouted. “We’re losing light.”

And so it started, and I wanted to be remote, pretending like it wasn’t my girlfriend I was watching, and that she wasn’t doing it with two strange men, but the pain started the minute the filming did, rising up from somewhere deep inside of me.

I thought it would be easier to be on the set to somehow manage to stop this, but seeing it was worse than hearing about it, and I knew I could not stop it, trying to turn away, the woman beside me, squeezing my thigh telling me not to be nervous – and time ground on as they shot and reshot, and were finally done, and it came my time to take center stage, by which time, the girl’s had something else to complain about.

“Hey Dayko,” one complained. “He can’t do this like this.”

“Well,” Dayko said amid more smoke. “Encourage him. You know how to do that, don’t you.”

“Give me a kiss,” the blonde woman said.

I shook my head.

“Why not?”

I could not explain it, since I loved kissing almost as much as making love, and that sometimes that’s the only thing I had on my mind, even back in the theater as an usher when we all ached to go all the way with any girl who we could get into the balcony.

“Dayko!” the women yelled. “He’s not cooperating.”

I couldn’t get the previous scene out of my head, my girlfriend with the other men. It felt wrong, and though I thought I might shocked my girlfriend into quitting, if I did it, too, I just couldn’t do it, could not bring myself to take that step even when everything inside of me ached to do something.

Dayko replaced me with one of the other men, who was not too tired from his shoot with my girlfriend to earn a little extra.

Although I would try again on a number other shoots, the pain never left me, and though I managed to fake my way through some of the scenes, it was inconsistent. It all needed to mean something to me, and none of this meant anything to anybody, least of all my girlfriend, who laughed too much between sets, each making the pain worse, even if I never let on.

Years later, this pain would linger in me long after my girlfriend and I merely became friends, a twinge of regret, of sadness, of something lost each time I looked at her wall calendar and saw times inked in on some appointment I knew no longer involved a camera.

How I got into porno without really trying

(one of a series of essays written for a college feminism class)

November 11, 1981

She wanted to go; I didn’t want her to.

This was when I was still naïve to believe I could influence a woman to do anything but what she wanted to do and that I had no right to stop her, even if it hurt me.

Later, I learned (and am still learning) that regardless of how painful, the best thing to do is to step aside and let her do what she wants, and hope that she still wants me when it’s over.

We argued, but no matter what I said, the debate ended with her even more determined to go that before, and me even more helpless to do anything.

“They have my contract,” she kept saying. “I signed it”

She had gone before, aching to become a movie star or model like the sign said at the Hollywood Boulevard office, and for the first few times I didn’t ask what it was she did, until she told me – scalding words describing acts I mistakenly believed I had exclusive rights to (yet one more misconception on my part). The best you can do is accept it or leave, wisdom I had yet to learn as well.

So when she said she was going back for more, I said no, she said yes, and she went, and because I could do nothing else, I went  down to the office to see about getting her contract back, my imagination filling in the details of that acts I knew went on as I did.

In the office, I told the receptionist I wanted the contract; she said I could not have it, that it was between management and the client, and since I obviously wasn’t the client, I should get lost, implying naturally that there might be serious repercussion if I made a scene.

I wanted to beg her to understand – when I was the one who didn’t get it. This was business, nothing personal, and what my girlfriend did had nothing to do with me, only making money, and that I should go home and wait, and appreciate how hard she worked to get the money she got.

All these years later, I understand that, although it still hurts when something like this happens. I just learned not to interfere with something I can’t control.

But back then, at age 19, just how of a year in the army, hunted by the police and mobsters for some stupid crime I committed back east, I was scared and lonely, and clung to the illusion I had rights to things I had no right to. You either accept it or walk away, someone told me later.

Back then I could do neither. These days I swallow hard, still struggling with the basic concepts, but understand I have no real say in the matter and reluctantly, painfully sometimes, accept it.

Then I did beg, telling her that I needed to contract or I would go nuts.

She told me to leave even more coldly than the first time – or else.

Then, something stirred in the back of my cave man mind, some pathetic idea that soon grew into something of a curious plan, a way – if not to fight back, then to stand my ground.

I said: “Do you give contracts to men?”

The woman behind the desk eyed me very strangely, then a bit less coldly, looked me up and down. After a year in the Army, I was in good shape – although my folly would not reveal itself until later, the ups and downs, the embarrassing moments of inflation and then the even more embarrassing moments of deflation. She said, “Yes.”

“Then give me one,” I said.

It didn’t solve anything.

My girlfriend still did what she wanted to do, and when push came to shove, I refused to do some of the stuff they asked of me – clearly unwilling to share the same men my girlfriend did, but it was the deflation that did me in at the end – utter dread of public humiliation and the dread that I was helpless to fate or change any bit of destiny as I learned the one basic fact of life: everybody has the right to do pretty much what they want to do, regardless of what I think, and that in the end, it is a matter of not trying.

“If you can’t beat them, join them,” one of the other men told me. But he never had deflation issues and no problem being with other men.

A test of wills

January 8, 1973

I held the cup of coffee near the open window trying to get it to cool enough for me to drink, at the same time, trying to keep the driver from seeing it.

A test of wills: me sneaking the cup onto the bus each morning despite the sign posted saying no drinks allow and the wary eye of the bus driver looking for an excuse to toss me off.

He’d caught me twice already and made me dump the cup before I got on, so as to be extra wary of me when I came on, eyeing my heavy coat for suspicious lumps.

I hate losing these little mind games, beyond the fact that I might get fired from the job if I’m late too often.

I like getting over on the guy, especially knowing he knows I’m getting over on him, but is helpless to stop me.

Yes, it’s petty. But sometimes small victories are you can expect, especially when you work dead end jobs like I do at the card company where I pick, pack and load orders all day.

Outside, Montclair passes into Verona, a once wealthy world for an up and coming one, with a line of mansions along the boundary I’d pull teeth to live in, even though I’m not much for playing big shot.

I live in a rooming house in Montclair where I pay $100 a month for a room with a bathroom in the hall, and the landlord bitches when I stay up too late tapping out poetry on my portable typewriter. I tell him I’m going to be famous one day. He tells me he can’t wait so he can raise my rent.

Another test of wills.

He doesn’t hate me so much, and thinks I’m up to no good. He’s convinced I deal drugs – sometimes I do, but only pot, and only because it’s the only way I can afford to pay rent and still have enough to live on.

I sip my coffee, but it’s still too hot, and look at the baseball scores, cursing the fact that the store sold me an early edition so the late scores aren’t listed.

I ache to talk to the pretty girl seated a few seats up from mine, but I never do, aching a little over the breakup I don’t talk to anybody about, trying to stay loyal in case the girl I broke up with takes me back and I don’t have to feel guilty about anything, when all I do is ache and know she’ll never take me back.

I’m always being loyal to the wrong things, always trying to keep ties that have long come undone.

I sip my coffee and stare up at the driver, waiting for him to look up into the rear view mirror and catch me.

That’s part of the game, too, tempting fate, leaving just enough steam in the cool air so that he knows what I’m up to.

Maybe I’m a sucker for pain, needing to get caught, or worse, needing to get a fix on being naughty while pretending I’m nice.

A test of wills with myself, maybe.

I sip, then lower the cup just in time for the driver to miss me sipping, I smile at him, he scowls. I hope the coffee cools soon so I can gulp it in time to reach my stop.

Yet one more test wills.