Talent show

Wednesday, August 19, 2015

I could see the hurt in her eyes behind her glasses.

Even though she walked away with a prize, it wasn’t the prize she deserved. I knew it down deep and so did most of the audience that had attended the talent show that night.

She is the reason I had being a judge in anything, especially with something so subjective as talent.

In the past, I always did journalism contests at a distance, able to read a story or examine a photograph without having to look the author or photographer in the eye afterwards.

Even in those cases that I later encountered the contestant, I could generally live with the result since I always felt that I had judged fairly.

This was not the case on this night in Bayonne. I had marked this girl high, but failed to argue enough with the other judges as to why she deserved first place instead of the third place award she ended up with.

I’m not sure why I agreed to become one of the judges. One or the organizers asked me during a conversation with someone else, and when a nod is as good as a wink, I said, “Why not.”

And suddenly, I was on the billboard along with a school board candidate, the one time lead guitarist for Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show, and actor, Tammy Blanchard.

After years of trying to wrangle an interview with Blanchard, I finally managed to get a story into our Bayonne magazine. But this was a phone interview. The only other time I had actually seen her in person was during a high school graduation when she gave out a scholarship to one of the students.

So I was a bit disappointed when she had to cancel to attend an audition in New York, though we did get a former director in her place.

Sitting next to George Cummings of Dr. Hook fame was a history lesson of local music, and a flash back to a time when pop music wasn’t so corporate controlled. He even sang me the dirty lyrics to his band’s biggest hit, “The Cover of the Rolling Stone,” and it was all I could do to keep from laughing when we were supposed to look serious and judge-like.

The acts varied widely, although nearly all of them involved singing. This is likely why the one dance act managed to stand out and get awarded.

The musical acts varied, not only in style, but in era, and this proved somewhat of a problem since all of the judges were of a particular era, and some of the contestants – such as this girl – were two and a half generations later.

She performed one of Adele’s more difficult songs, and struggled through the beginning slightly, only to finally pull it together at the end.

Other acts included Frank Sinatra songs, Elvis songs, Motown songs, and perhaps because the judges were of an age that related best to these many of these acts scored higher over all.

Some of the scheduled acts did not show, and so apparently to give the audience their money’s worth, organizers allowed some acts to go on again.

This only confused the judging, especially in regards to this particular girl – who came back with a rendition of “Over the Rainbow” so powerful, it nearly made me cry.

But some of the judges felt the second performance should not figure in the final judgment and so discounted it – although in one or two other cases, previous performers came back as solo acts and got credit anyway.

The other problem with the younger performers is that they sang along with the professionally released recording, and so some judges could not tell which voice was which, and assumed that the quality they heard best came form the recording and not the performer.

This was not the case with the girl who sang Adele and later Judy Garland songs.

Judging became a confusion of what to include and not, and how to determine tie scores. I just handed in my numbers and went off to find the men’s room while the others figured out who got what.

And I tried desperately not to look around to see that girl for fear I would have to look her in the eye.

But I did see her later and how hurt she looked when the organizers announced that she had won third prize.

It is one of those moments you remember forever because you know she will feel the sting of it long after the event has become insignificant, a sting that may someday derail a potential career, although I hope (mostly for my own sake) it will inspire her to try harder, to spite us.

Ah, Carol

February 12, 1974

She sits on my leg, her thighs tight against me as if I was a horse.

She talks to Pauly as she moves forward and then back, then forward again.

She doesn’t let on that she feels me react, as the seam of her genes presses against my manhood.

I am almost ready to explode.

This is not fair, nor is it supposed to be.

She doesn’t even talk to me, just moves forward and back, speaking only to Pauly who seems not to see what is going on.

I want to rip her jeans off and plunge deep into her. But I’m scared she might stop.

I am the lantern she rubs until the genie appears, and I would grant her any wish if only she would grant one wish for me.

I die inside each time I see her and with every touch she gives, yet I have never kissed her, except only in my mind.

And a times like this, between the movement forward and back, I want more than a kiss,

But she keeps on moving, back and forward, back and forward, until I release, and then, I hear her sigh.

Sam, the seasick sailor

Friday, July 24, 2015

I had to put Sam, the cat, down last week.

I don’t know exactly how old he was became he came into the house as an adult in 2008.

But he occupied my front porch for years prior to that, a more or less permanent resident who wandered off only to seek a meal from one of our more generous neighbors.

From the start, he was the sickliest cat anyone could imagine. He drooled constantly, and had a constant crust around his mouth and eyes.

This made his friendliness somewhat uncomfortable since he loved sitting in my lap, and would often stick that stinking face into my face, the stench of which nearly made me ill.

When he got too bad, we would take a moist rag and wipe away the crust and drool, a cleanup that lasted almost a whole day before he reverted to his usual form.

Other cats loved Sam, especially wild kittens, who often took refuge with him during cold days in order to keep warm.

He became their godfather, and had no real enemies in the world. Opossums, raccoons, skunks, even most dogs generally passed him by, and he made no hostile advances at them.

He had the vacant stare of an innocent right to the moment the vet injected him in the end, something that made him feel very human to me.

For a time, he shared our porch with a cat we called “Crazy,” who got his name for acts that seemed odd such as sleeping on top of cars and such. Crazy was scared of thunder and lightning, and so I often sat with him and Sam on the front porch to comfort them during summer squalls.

In the spring of 2008, Crazy took ill, and we brought him into the house for a time, but we could not save him. This made me fear for Sam and so we brought him in as well, took him to the vet and got a regiment of medicine to help deal with the drooling and nearly constant upper respiratory diseases he suffered.

In those says, he refused to leave the kitchen, living his life day and night on the kitchen table. When I brought in a soft chair, he took up residences on that. Later, he discovered the bedroom and adopted that as his new abode.

This is not to say that he didn’t have quirks. He tended to sleep beside me at night, waking me up with his combination of purrs and snorkeling. In the morning, he let out a wail to wake me up so I could feed him, and generally knew when he ought to get fed at night, wailing until I put a dish down in front of him.

In 2010, he started to stagger. He could not keep his balance. We thought he’d had a stroke. But when we took him to the vet, we learned that he had suffered a severe inner ear infection that affected his perception. He was perpetually sea sick, and apparently saw everything in duplicate. Medicine eventually cleared this up, but left him with the nick name of Seasick Sam.

A few weeks ago, he came down with the same condition, and we got him to the vet who repeated the regiment of medicine. Still he struggled to get off the bed and to feed, but bravely did both. Then one morning, something happened and he suffered a real stroke. The progress he had made over the previous few days vanished, he could not even stand up, although still purred when petted.

But he wasn’t going to recover easily or soon, and would need to be carried everywhere if he wanted to eat or pee, and we realized this was not quality life, and keeping him alive largely left him to suffer, even though technically he wasn’t in pain.

Sam was a special cat because he was indeed innocent, and had made no enemies in life, and so mercifully, we put him to sleep, hoping we might meet again in some other world where there is no pain.

Carpetbaggers strike again

Thursday, July 09, 2015

The rain comes in waves, first heavy, then light, and then for a moment, it only trickles on the awning like impatient fingers waiting for the next wave.

The stock market in China crashed yesterday, and mysteriously, during a downturn in our own, computers failed in New York forcing the market to halt for three and a half hours – allowing people to catch their breath before taking the next plunge.

Someone on the radio compared China’s fall to New York 1929. But that person must have had to eat his words when China recovered (the government leaping in to buy stocks to keep everything stable.)

We live in precarious times, drenched with a new wave of political correctness as busybodies (mostly liberals) bask in recent victories, and thus leap to create even more social change, unaware that like the rain or the sea, change comes in waves, and there is always a backlash.

Some comedians refuse to perform on college campuses because the political correctness has become so pervasive, a batch of do-good self-righteous liberal types that think they own the moral high ground and have a right to tell other people how to live their lives.

On top of this has been the discussion about the Confederate Flag and the outrage through the nation over its use in a recent murder of people in a black church in South Carolina.

Like the carpetbaggers that descended on The South after the Civil War, morally pumped up left wing bigots attack a whole culture, determined to once and for all stamp out the revolution that the Civil War failed to accomplish.

As with all tyranny, this move to “educate” The South is doomed to create even more bad feelings because it is being imported from the very places the South has come to hate.

The old saying about winners being the ones that write history has never been truer than it is in regards to what brought about the Civil War. But supposedly college educated morons pump up the rhetoric to say the war was entirely about slavery, when it was really about economics. Northern robber barons, who had already made their money off supplying the slaves to the south, hopped on the anti-slavery bandwagon when it became profitable for them to do so, and so fueled the war. The north had built a new economy based on manufacturing (much of which eventually led to polluting our waterways and creating climate change) and found the south’s cheap labor (slave labor) standing in the way of making their profits.

There was moral justification for doing away with slavery, but it was money that created the war as the north demanded the south dismantle its economy – in other words, get rid of the slaves. This move would have destroyed the south nearly as much as the war did, creating a significant economic disadvantage the north was well aware of.

The south refused – partly because it had no choice but refuse. The entire economy would collapse if they freed the slaves. With new Free states entering the union, the north was poised to outvote the south on every economic issue as well. Rather than be bullied by well-funded industrialists in the north, the south chose to fight.

Lincoln – well known for his position on slavery – did not enter the war to free the slaves, but preserve the union.  Freeing the slaves in the middle of the war was hardly a humanitarian gesture. Lincoln wanted to break the spirit of the South at a critical time and it worked.

For many, the Confederate Flag became a symbol of continued resistance to King George-like tyranny imposed upon the south by a victorious North. In some ways, the righteous liberals in the north are repeating the rape of the South that started with northern carpetbaggers after the conclusion of the Civil War. In other words, we’re just finishing up when we started.

A week after the Stonewall riot

Thursday, July 02, 2015

I can walk this walk from the Heights to Hoboken with my eyes closed, I have done it for so long.

The world changes so completely that I can’t keep track of it, as I could not when I was a kid.

In many ways, I have walked back in time to when the righteous rose up and protested the ill deeds of a racist and homophobic world.

Church burnings, and gay pride mingling into a madness that comes out the other end as something hardly recognizable.

Gay pride week in Manhattan took on new meaning with the Supreme Court ruling against bans on gay marriage.  The celebration that normally took place at the Stone Wall Inn grew into monumental proportions.

This was a moment everybody needed to remember.

This made me think of Maxwell – a gay kid I met for the first time in the summer of 1968 when I spent nearly every waking moment in the Village.

Hank and I were doing our usual singing routine on the streets, pretending like we had somehow transitioned back to 1950s Greenwich Village when Peter, Paul and Mary, Bob Dylan and others did their thing here. Suddenly, this relatively short kid starts singing at us – not folk songs, but show tunes. I remember him singing “Button up your overcoat” as he pranced pixie-like in front of us.

Hank, who moved into the East Village a short time later, because close to Max. But Max always fancied me, and flirted all the time whenever I was around.

He was often at Hank’s apartment the summer of 1969 when I got passes from the Army. He wanted to show me off, and so convinced me more than once to go out drinking with him. He said he knew great places where we could have a lot of fun. By this, he meant all the gay bars along Christopher Street and near Sheridan Square – among which was the Stonewall Inn.

He took me there about a week before the now infamous riot, and pretended like he was my date. I wasn’t completely aware of the game he played with other gay men and didn’t realize that he was showing me off to them to make them jealous. But I do remember the catcalls and other remarks that generally came our way during that walk of fame. Max was more than a little amused. I was not.

Although I vowed not to make the same mistake twice, I agreed to accompany Max again a few weeks later. Everything had changed. The innocence of the first experience had evaporated and there was a sense of militancy among the gay expatriates, and the feeling I got when we wandered back into these bars was similar to one I got a few times when I managed to wander into the Black Panthers headquarters – or even the clubhouse of the Hell’s Angels on the other side of town.

Although there was still a sense of play in the back and forth between Max and those he sought to make jealous, there was also something stronger, a bond that bound them together in a way that I rarely experienced before except in the hospital at Fort Dix where I met wounded veterans returning home from Vietnam.

Max and the others had gone through some common experience that no petty jealousy could overcome, and were part of something much larger than what had existed before – and my default during that visit, I became a member of their society.

Max and I later worked together uptown and had plenty of strange adventures, but I never again felt what I felt on that night, a week or so after the Stonewall Riot.

I’m pretty sure Max did not survive the holocaust of the 1980s AIDS epidemic. But I think of him often, and his face was the first face that came to mind when I heard the Supreme Court decision, and in my head, I heard his voice rising up from the first time I met him, singing “button up your overcoat.”

Darkness at the edge of Hoboken

Tuesday, June 02, 2015

The cold mist swirls around me this first night in June, stirring up a chill inside me as I stroll these dark back streets of Hoboken on my way to a car that will take me home.

I have not felt like this in year, this lingering tingle that spreads across my skin from the moist air, recalling those days when I often walked in the dark and cold, searching for something in my home town of Paterson I have yet to find there or anywhere else.

This place changes in reality if not in memory, as I stumble through newly constructed canyons passed still unoccupied store fronts and upscale urban mansions out of character with a place I first set foot on in the mid-1970s.

I keep thinking of how I talked of change and how each wave migrating to this place wants to preserve it as they find it when they first arrive, but manage only to cling to pieces of what they found. Nearly all the pieces I found when I first came are gone, but not the mood on such nights as these, this overwhelming sense of isolation I feel with each footfall, the unseasonable chill working down into my bones, stirring up old passions, and an ache as persistent as a toothache, no aspirin can cure.

I am haunted by the ghosts of change because I change so little, and stirred by other people’s passions that raise hopes I have not felt for years.

Sometimes, out of the mists, a light emerges that you don’t expect, glowing against the dim backdrop so as to appear angel-like, although not saintly.

In my head, I keep hearing the old Rolling Stones song, about sympathy for the devil, and wonder if heads is tails and whether bad is good, and on which side do I end up.

And then, I climb into my car, immune again to the midst, turn on the stereo, listening to Springsteen sing about the darkness at the edge of town and understand exactly what he means.

Love story on Park Avenue -- Asbury Park

April 11, 2015

It was a love story with an unhappy ending we didn't learn about until the second time we stumbled upon the house just south of Deal Lake.

We fell over it during our trip to the area the weekend after Christmas on a rather chilly stroll along the lake, and then back towards the center of town.

At the time, we were merely puzzled about the house and the front yard so overwhelmed with statuary, we struggled at first to make sense of it.

A corner house, the front yard had three gates, two of which seemed permanently closed, but guarded by matching stone lions at each -- faces worn smooth by weather and strewn over with the wintery remains of vines.

Peering over the gate from the Park Avenue side -- we glimpsed some of the statuary, many of which were various cupid characters, some with wings, some riding on the backs of beasts.

In winter, even the most normally lush yards seemed sad, and overgrown with the shredded remains of dying plants. But for some reason, this yard despite all of its pretensions seemed sad for other reasons we could not know.

By the time we came to the corner and the second gate, we could clearly see the front of the house where a pantheon of Christian saints stood in full glory on pedestals at intervals along the front fence. The corer gate had more lions, but we could see the yard better and that there were statues big and small of all sorts, sizes and shapes, most reflecting some sense of innocence and yet sensuality that seemed contradicted by the religions artifacts.

The front porch had a line of cupid statues, as provocative and innocent as the religious statues were defiant, raising many questions that trip would not answer.

We had, of course, run into similar -- if not quite as overwhelming -- properties in other places, including some in Cape May. But this differed in several important ways, a sense of purpose lay behind this collection, and it seemed to reflect a theme even if we could not desern what it was.

We move on -- driven from the place by the chill and a sense of extreme sadness.

We returned on Easter weekend, and were on the boardwalk along the north side of the Convention Hall when we ran into a couple of women walking their dogs.

We made friends with the dogs, and then moved on, taking the long walk we had taken on Christmas weekend, up to Deal Lake and back to that house on our way back.

The women from the boardwalk were there.

They said the house belonged to a gay man, a long time resident of Asbury Park, who had lived with another man for many years. When the other man died, the gay man started building this tribute to his memory, and even though many years had passed, the tribute continued, new pieces popping on the property from time to time, but always with this odd mixture of faith, innocence and sexuality.

The man never connected with anyone else, and apparently lived in the house along, morning the loss of the lover that had once shared this dream of living in peace.

It's a sad story, reflected on the faces and images of the yard, not one that we would have gotten in detail, but clearly one conveyed by the vast array, as if by sheer volume, the survivor continued to profess the quality and quantity of love.

As I said, it is a sad love story.