Gefilte Fish Blues

Spilled Milk

2009-04-19T01:46:00.004-04:00

Growing up, my family didn't get along very well with our neighbors. I'm not sure if they didn't like us, or we didn't like them. It was probably a little of both.

"That bitch next door is waving at us again," my mom said, under her breath, while a rather pleasant-looking woman who lived across the street gave us a rather pleasant wave. "Don't look at her."

Inevitably I looked at her and offered a half-hearted wave when my mother's back was turned.

"She always seemed nice to me," I replied. I didn't actually have a basis for thinking the next-door neighbor was nice, except that she had lots of those ceramic gnomes on her lawn, which I thought made her yard appear warm and inviting. We didn't have ceramic gnomes on our lawn, and as far I as I was concerned, our yard was all the poorer for it.

"Don't be so naive, Jonah. She thinks who she is."

According to my mother, everyone in our neighborhood thought who they were, which was my mother's way of saying they were snobs. Even the elderly couple who lived across the street thought who they were. I didn't think that people who drove Yugos could be snobs, but I guess I was wrong.

"Never become like them, Jonah," my mom said, in her best second-grade teacher tone. "You're nothing special. Don't forget that."

For the most part, though, we didn't fight with our neighbors. We just went our way, and they went theirs. When they had block parties or yard sales, they carefully cordoned off our house from the festivities, for everyone's protection. And though we did put out a pumpkin at Halloween and even bought some bags of candy, trick-or-treaters rarely knocked on our door; in fact, our house never even got egged, it was just perpetually ignored, as if we were a bunch of serial killers and not just a harmless mess. I would have rather gotten egged, at least then we would have been part of the community. Instead we were just outsiders, the flotsam and jetsam of Lincoln Park Road.

But generally, the arrangement worked well for everyone concerned. Even if I didn't agree with my mother's assessment of the neighborhood, I at least appreciated her honesty. The only thing I found more uncomfortable than open hostility was superficial pleasantries. Fortunately, my family was highly proficient at the former and spectacularly inept at the latter, even when it came to our own internal communication.

"Good morning? What's so fucking good about it?" my father replied once when I made the mistake of saying good morning on a not particularly good morning. "No, really, I'm asking. What's fucking good about today?"

I didn't know what to say, so I asked if I could have one of the donuts he was jamming behind the radiator in his office/bedroom/secret lair. He passed me one under his jacket and instructed me not to tell my mother, while he stuffed four more in his briefcase. To this day, instead of saying good morning to my co-workers, I just shove a box of Munchkins in their faces and shut my door.

Eventually, I grew accustomed to being the neighborhood lepers. No one liked the Addams Family or the Munsters in their respective neighborhoods either, but they got along just fine. In fact, they seemed to be the happiest family on the block; while the other cookie-cutters were attending school plays and having church picnics, the Addamses and the Munsters were partying like it was 1999. I'd rather be a Munster than a Cleaver any day.

Unfortunately, we were not quite as self-sufficient as the Munsters, who appeared to have endless financial resources even though none of them actually worked. When I graduated from elementary school, we quickly realized that the junior high school that I was about to attend was far enough from our house to make walking impractical (especially as it called for walking through the "bad" part of town, i.e., the only block in our town with an apartment building), but not far enough to qualify for free busing. And while this did not cause much of a problem for the other kids in the neighborhood, whose families quickly formed that great stalwart of suburban America -- the "car pool" -- given that my parents had alienated most families within a 10-block radius, it left me without an available mode of transportation.

"I can just quit school," I suggested to my parents. "I think I've gotten everything I'm going to get out of it."

"You think I'm going to let you make a mess of the house while we're at work?" my mother replied, expressing more concern for the cleanliness of the bathroom than my future education. "We'll figure something out."

Their first solution was to drop me off at a friend's house who lived close to the school, where we could hang out and then walk to school together. My friend Scott Feinbush lived right behind the school, so he was the ideal choice. The arrangement worked out well for a few weeks; I would sit quietly in the basement while Scott got ready for school, and eventually he would join me downstairs and we would play Nintendo until it was time for school. In fact, given Scott's seemingly normal family -- they actually said good morning to each other, and no one secretly stuffed donuts in their briefcases -- it was the first time I ever actually enjoyed my mornings. Until one morning, when Scott's father found me staring out of the living room window, steadily glaring at the ninth-grade football players doing stomach crunches in the field behind the school.

"So, Jonah, do you have a girlfriend?" He was fishing for something, but I was too young to understand what. All I knew was that there was something interesting going on outside, and something inside was telling me to keep an eye on it.

"No, girls are totally gross," I replied, not taking my eyes off of the football players. It was an innocent answer, considering I was only twelve years old, but an incriminating one nonetheless. Of course, had it been a dozen fourteen-year-old cheerleaders doing stomach crunches, Scott's father probably would have chuckled, and maybe even pulled up a chair. Instead, the next day, he informed my father that they couldn't drop me off at Scott's house anymore.

"It's just too hectic here in the morning." His tone was polite, but his eyes were locked on mine, sending me a subtle message -- we don't want no sissies here. Sissies have no place in a normal home. Go back to your serial killer parents and gnome-free lawn. "Have you thought about a taxi?"

My mother used to make me walk seven blocks to the closest pay phone when we needed to call 411 ("quarters don't grow on trees, Jonah"); there wasn't a chance in hell she was going to spring for a cab twice a day for the next three years. Even if we had somehow hit the lottery, I doubt she would have gone in for such reckless spending.

"That money is for your college education," she would have said. "Million dollar bills don't grow on trees, Jonah."

So for a few days after being banished from Scott's happy, homophobic home, my parents actually drove me to school themselves.

"I hope you appreciate this, Jonah," my father said, as if getting his twelve-year-old son to school was a generous favor and not a legal responsibility. "Your mother isn't the most pleasant person in the mornings." Or afternoons, evenings, nights, weekdays, weekends, federal and state holidays, birthdays, anniversaries, or basically any day that ended in "day."

Still, his warning was enough to give me pause, so the next morning I offered to jog to school.

"Look, I've got my sweatpants on already!" I noted enthusiastically while stretching my legs in the driveway. It was pouring rain outside, but it felt invigorating, especially considering the alternative. "I really could use the exercise, I'm feeling somewhat flabby these days."

My enthusiasm was not contagious.

"Get in the fucking car!"

Fortunately, over the years I had trained myself to leave my body whenever necessary, so while my parents bickered on Sunrise Highway about an overly expensive electric bill, I was enjoying a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice with my grandparents in Fort Lauderdale. By the time I got to school, I was half-way to the beach.

"We'll pick you up at four-thirty," my father said while I generously applied SPF-45 in my mind. "Don't be late."

I pointed out, as politely as possible, that school ends at three.

"Well, Jonah, the world doesn't revolve around you, you know," my mother replied. "Your father and I have jobs and can't get here until then. Unless you want us to lose our jobs. Is that what you want? Is it? You want us to move into a shack?"

Considering that my mother often referred to our current house as a "tenement," "shack" actually sounded like an improvement. Unfortunately, I never got the chance to find out how much of an improvement it would have been.

"The bus is going to pick you up at 7:45 tomorrow, Jonah," my father said, nonchalantly, later that evening at the dinner table. I was too busy hiding what I believed to be criminally undercooked chicken in my napkin to fully register his comment.

"Did you say the bus?" I asked, wrestling with one particularly pesky piece of half-chewed chicken that did not want to stay in my napkin. For a moment I thought that maybe my parents had successfully blackmailed some school administrator into bending the rules for them. I was sure that I'd recently seen Mr. D'Amato, my happily married vice-principal, sharing a Reese's peanut butter cup sundae at Friendly's with someone who looked a lot like Mrs. Crespo, my happily married homeroom teacher. Maybe my parents had put that information to good use. For a moment, I was actually proud of them.

"Yeah," he replied. "It's some kind of special bus for kids with...special needs."

There are some, technically legal, but ultimately cruel and debilitating, decisions that parents can make which affect their children's lives forever. Naming a boy "Jeeves" or a girl "Chastity." Choosing to raise your boy as a girl, or vice versa. Forcing an unwilling pre-pubescent boy to play team sports. But more so than any of those nightmare scenarios, there is one choice that no parent should ever make, not even if it means the difference between life and death for their kid. And my parents made that choice without a moment's hesitation.

They had put me on the short bus.

Apparently, they had convinced my pediatrician to write a letter to the school board, explaining that I had such severe asthma that I could not possibly walk to school. Since asthma is technically a physical handicap, his letter bought me a one-way ticket to junior high school hell. To this day I'm not sure where he came up with that diagnosis, especially considering only the day before I was fully prepared to jog to school in the pouring rain.

"You can't!" I cried out, arms flailing, in a rare moment of spontaneous emotion. In my shock, I had completely forgotten about the half-eaten chicken that currently occupied my napkin. A piece of dark meat landed on my mother's plate.

"Oh, I forgot, Jerry," my mother replied, putting the chicken back on my plate clearly intending for me to eat it. "We're supposed to run every decision we make by Jonah. Hey Jonah, your father is having a hernia operation next week, is that ok with you?"

After politely excusing myself from the table ("I hate you both! I hope I die in my sleep! I'm going to jump off the roof!"), I locked myself in my room to ponder how I could get out of this mess. I was already pretty much the lowest man on the seventh-grade totem pole; this new revelation would shove me off the pole altogether, only to land in that abyss occupied by the mentally and/or physically handicapped, pre-pubescent petty criminals, and kids who eat paste. Personally, I didn't judge any of them (except maybe the kids who eat paste, and only for gastrointestinal reasons), but I knew that I'd surely be judged along with them. Amazingly enough, I had managed to get through the first few weeks of junior high without any lasting scars, and I was beginning to hope that maybe I'd be lucky and fade into the background for the next three years. My parents had just killed that hope with their callous nature and a fraudulent doctor's note.

By bedtime, I had completely convinced myself that there were only two ways out -- death, or kidnapping. I wasn't quite unstable enough to consider the former, though the latter held interesting possibilities. Surely no kidnappers in the world were evil enough to put me through what my parents had in store for me. And what if forcing me to ride the short bus was only the first step? What if they next planned to dress me in short skirts and feather boas as some kind of political statement, or just for their own selfish amusement? What if they decided to distribute baby pictures of me on the toilet to my classmates? Or, worst of all, what if they both got jobs in my school, and I could never escape them again? With kidnapping sounding more and more like a viable option, I drifted in and out of sleep, dreaming alternatively of carnivorous school buses and carnivorous parents.

The night was endless, and ended too soon. Before I knew it, it was 7:45, and I was sitting on the stairs, waiting for my big yellow hearse.

"I won't go," I said to myself while I paced around the house. Since my parents had already left for work and my sister for school, I had free reign to throw a complete and total hissy fit in every room in the house. "I won't go, dammit! And you can't make me!" I screamed at their picture on the mantle. In a spastic, partially involuntary move, I swung my arms across the mantle and knocked their picture half-way across the living room where it shattered on the floor.

"Shit!"

I rushed the broken frame over to the kitchen and swept the broken pieces of glass into the garbage can, cutting my finger in the interim. I hastily wrapped the finger in a paper towel. My mother didn't take kindly to broken things in her house, and she definitely didn't take kindly to blood, or any other foreign substance, on her floor. In my house it was perfectly appropriate to cry over spilled milk.

Just as the blood started to clot, I heard a soft honk in the driveway. My chariot had arrived.

I always assumed that it was called the "short bus" because the kids who rode on it were "short" on something -- intelligence, physical ability, social standing -- but I now realized that "short bus" was actually a descriptive title. Willy Wonka could have used it to transport the oompa-loompas from oompa-loompa land. The passengers seated inside were eye-level with my kitchen window, in all of their paste-eating glory. They stared inside at me, while I stared out at them; one of us was in a cage, but I wasn't sure which one.

Suddenly I realized that I was not at all ready to go. After replacing the picture on the mantle, sans glass frame (I hoped my mother wouldn't notice until she dusted the picture again, which bought me approximately 12 hours), I motioned to the bus driver to wait, all the while knowing that he would not wait for me. The elementary school bus driver never waited more than five seconds. In fact, if I wasn't outside my house at exactly 7:05AM, the driver wouldn't even stop, even if he saw me running outside and attempting to chase him down with my underdeveloped chicken legs. One time I swear he gave me the finger as I ran after the bus; I considered filing a complaint, but decided against it when I realized that he was purposefully aiming for squirrels in the road. I wasn't much bigger than a squirrel, and probably an easier target.

Of course, missing the short bus would have bought me one more day on the totem-pole, but the costs of missing the bus -- primarily, my mother's inevitably hostile reaction -- outweighed the benefits. So I hastily choked down my waffles, while mouthing the words "hold on" to the bus driver, who I expected to mouth back "up yours." To my surprise, though, the bus didn't honk repeatedly or pull away, nor did the bus driver make improper hand gestures at me. He just sat there, patiently waiting, as the bus idled away happily in our driveway.

Finally, I managed to adequately organize myself, cleverly shifting the living room couch an inch to cover up the glaring red spot in the carpet, and made my way out to the bus, where I expected, at best, a surly cold shoulder and circus-like environment full of budding serial killers and social outcasts.

"Jonah! We're so glad to have you!"

A short, middle-aged woman with curly hair and a huge smile greeted me at the bottom of the stairs. She was wearing a bright yellow, "Don't Worry, Be Happy" t-shirt, a phrase that always lost its meaning on me, and a name-tag that said, "Hi! My name is Doreen! How are you today?"

I stopped dead in my tracks, as I often do when confronted with blatant enthusiasm.

"Can I get a hug?"

I moved forward very slowly, as if approaching a rabid doberman. She didn't seem to notice my reluctance, or if she did, she chose to ignore it. Within moments she was pressing her large Happy bosom into my face, and I was choking for air.

"Now, do you have everything you need? Have you forgotten anything? We can wait, don't worry!"

I shook my head no, suddenly feeling very conspicuous standing in the driveway with Doreen and the short bus, especially since Doreen's bosom was still only a few inches from my forehead.

"Well, then, let's be off!" Every word out of Doreen's mouth was like a wonderful announcement. She could have been a television news reporter, if she had been more attractive.

I stepped onto the bus, with Doreen right behind me, carefully following each of my steps. Her hands were directly under my arms, apparently ready to catch me if I fell backwards. Maybe they hadn't told her the reason I was on the short bus -- maybe she thought I was a some sort of quasi-paraplegic. It seemed unlikely that Doreen wasn't fully informed about the nature of her charges before the year began, though. Otherwise, she could have been in for some unpleasant surprises.

"Guess what's wrong with this one, Doreen!" a malicious school administrator might have said, pointing at her list of passengers. "I'll give you a hint. He's missing an organ, but it's not the one you think!"

I shuffled past the driver, looking at my feet the whole time, but a hand reached out and grabbed my jacket.

"Hey man!" a rough voice called out.

Here we go, I thought. The school compensated for Doreen's enthusiasm by hiring a former prison guard -- or inmate -- as the bus driver. Doreen would sing us lullabies while the driver hacked us into mulch with the pick axe.

When I looked up, though, I saw, not a hardened, ex-convict, but a man that could have been Mr. Rogers' stunt double, had Mr. Rogers' show involved any stunts more dangerous than the occasional trip to the foyer closet.

"I'm Ernie," he said, with a smile that rivaled Doreen's in substance and sincerity. "Welcome to our little family."

Family? I was still in the dark. Was Doreen about to chastise Ernie about his weight, while Ernie embezzled Doreen's life savings? I already had one family, and I wasn't sure I could handle another.

"Everyone, this is Jonah!" I quickly took a seat behind Ernie, which was the closest to the door. I always tried to sit as close to a door as possible, in case of emergency. Of course, I defined "emergency" rather broadly, to include terrorist attack, anaphylaxis, and random, unidentifiable insects buzzing around my head.

"So Jonah, we have a tradition on our little bus," Doreen continued, while munching on a carrot stick and temporarily piquing my curiosity. The only "traditions" on my last bus consisted of making spitballs, and shielding oneself from incoming spitballs. "On your first day, you tell everyone one thing that makes you special, and the name of your favorite pet."

It seemed like an odd combination of questions to me -- give us a glimpse into your secret innermost life, oh, and do you have a dog? But more importantly, I currently did not, nor had ever, had a pet. But I didn't want to ruin Doreen's Happy day.

"I've never sneezed in my life," I said -- truthfully -- "and um . . . my favorite pet's name is . . . Barney." There are two kinds of lies -- ones you tell to make yourself happy, and ones you tell to make other people happy. The latter is really just a form of verbal charity.

"Never sneezed before, eh?" Doreen said.

"Nope," I replied, prepared for an argument. People often expressed skepticism about my sneeze-free existence. Even my own grandparents didn't believe it, and if you can't sell something to your grandparents, you generally can't sell it at all.

"Well that's just wonderful!" Doreen exclaimed, as if I had just told her I won the lottery. "Imagine! Not having to sneeze! The money you'd save on Kleenex alone!"

I settled back in my seat, glad to have pleased Doreen, and judging from the rear-view mirror, Ernie as well. For the first time, I surveyed my fellow passengers. Except for one boy who kept banging his head on the back of his seat in a steady, rhythmic motion, I didn't see any difference between the kids on this bus and the kids on the last one. There was an even amount of boys and girls, no one was acting out or consuming anything unappetizing, and no one seemed to be missing any limbs -- at least, none that I could see. I could have been riding on any big yellow school bus on Main Street, U.S.A., even if this particular bus was four feet smaller.

And then I realized, there was one significant difference between this bus and the last one. The kids on this bus didn't appear to be in a constant state of war. Apparently the good-will Doreen and Ernie fostered was infectious -- I even spotted a smile or two. No one seemed out of place, there were no spitballs flying, and squirrels moved in front of the bus's path with impunity. Even the head-banger was bouncing in such a steady manner, he could have been dancing along to his favorite song, even if he wasn't actually listening to music.

I was apparently the last pick-up for the bus, because we were already lumbering towards the school. Ernie didn't appear to be in much of a hurry; if there was even a glimmer of a possibility that a traffic light was about to turn red, he would slow down to a crawl, the result of which was that we basically stopped at every traffic light between my house and the school. At one point, some kids on bikes passed us, shouting some offensive epitaphs at the bus, but no one seemed to notice. Everyone just went on smiling and bouncing. It seemed that nothing could possibly disturb the Short Bus Family.

All the while, Doreen -- who I decided would have made a better flight attendant than television reporter -- made the rounds up and down the aisles, munching on carrot sticks and occasionally offering one to the kids. Most of them declined, though the head bouncer had already had three. All that bouncing must have worked up an appetite.

"Oh dear," Doreen said, approaching my seat. "What happened to your finger, Jonah?"

During the course of my short bus initiation, I had forgotten all about my bloody finger, which was still wrapped in a paper towel.

"I cut myself."

"On what?" Doreen reached out to examine the cut, which was deeper than I had thought.

"A picture frame."

"Oh dear," she repeated. "That doesn't look good at all." Doreen reached under her seat and pulled out a large first-aid kit. She began gently dabbing the cut with an alcohol swab.

"You know, I have a son about your age," she said, trying to take my mind off of the burning sensation that was now running up my hand. "He cuts himself on things all the time."

But when your son cuts himself, I doubt your first concern is whether he bled on the rug,

"Oh."

"He never took care of his cuts either," she said, already unwrapping a bandage. "But then I bought a box of Bart Simpson band-aids, and now I think he cuts himself on purpose just to get one!"

Suddenly, I was jealous of Doreen's son, even if he was mutilating himself just to paste a cartoon image to his body.

"Maybe I'll bring some of those band-aids on the bus tomorrow," she said, apparently picking up on my growing envy. "Just in case." She winked at me, as if I was about to join her son in self-mutilation for personal gain. But still, the offer was sweet, sweet enough to make me wonder what it would be like to have a mother who didn't fly off the handle because of spilled milk and broken picture frames. Doreen offered me another carrot. This time around, I took one.

We approached the school at our customary snail's pace. A bunch of kids were congregated outside the main entrance. It seemed like they were just waiting for us, waiting to pounce on the fresh, tender, socially unaccepted meat that the Short Bus always provided. And even though nothing about my physical appearance screamed "Short Bus" -- except perhaps for my non-matching red sweatsuit that my mother had laid out for me that morning -- I knew it didn't matter to them whether I looked like I belonged on the Short Bus; the fact was, I was on the Short Bus, and that was enough for them. Gimpiness is in the eye of the beholder.

I watched as each of my fellow passengers disembarked the bus, fearing for their, and my own, safety. But despite the throngs of juvenile delinquents anxiously anticipating their arrival, they didn't seem phased at all. They walked off the bus with their heads held high (well, except for the kid whose head was still bouncing up and down), oblivious to their impending doom. They were either totally courageous, or totally stupid -- or perhaps an unhealthy mix of both. And sure enough, one by one they were quickly surrounded by the future of the American penal system, and as far as I could tell, swallowed whole.

Suddenly I tasted remnants of burnt waffle make their way back up to my mouth. Maybe I could stay on the bus all day. Maybe we could set up a makeshift classroom in between the seats. I was sure I could learn more from Ernie and Doreen in one day than I would learn from my bitter, frumpy math teacher all year.

"Doreen..." There was wisdom in those eyes, for sure. I was about to propose my plan to her -- perhaps selling her with an offer to cut myself with her cuticle scissors -- when she kneeled down next to my seat and whispered:

"You want us to drop you off at the back entrance, don't you?"

I nodded, almost imperceptibly. I didn't want Doreen to think I was looking down on her, or on the Short Bus family; and in fact, I wasn't. I just didn't want to get stuffed in my locker. I was getting too tall to fit, and another afternoon in there could have stunted my growth.

"Sure," she said, ruffling my hair. "Ernie, shake a tail feather."

Thirty seconds later, Ernie let me off at the school's back entrance.

"We'll pick you up here after school, too," Doreen said, anticipating my next question. As the bus pulled away, I gave an enthusiastic wave, and Doreen waved back, with both hands.

"Have a great day, Jonah!" A great day. An adult hadn't told me to have a great day since my last visit to the dental hygienist.

Another thirty seconds later, I joined Scott in the main foyer.

"Hey, sorry you can't come over in the mornings anymore," Scott said. I had wondered what excuse Scott's parents had given him for banishing me from their home -- I figured it must have included a lot of subtle innuendo and Liberace references -- but I didn't care anymore. I had my own family now. The Short Bus family. And any fears I had that my first morning was merely an anomaly were immediately put to rest that afternoon, when Ernie and Doreen led the bus in a spirited game of I Spy.

"I spy a mailbox!"

"I spy a fire hydrant!"

I spy a satisfied customer.

That night after dinner, my mother noticed an appreciable spring my step as I swept the floor with unprecedented enthusiasm.

"You're doing that too fast, Jonah," she said, eyeing me curiously. "You're going to scrape the enamel."

But I didn't care. If she kicked me out of the house, I would just go live with Doreen and Ernie. I doubted that they were married -- they got along too well for that -- but they could share custody. Because really, it wasn't such a big leap between shuttling me to and from school and being a full-time parent. In fact, it was a step further than my parents were ever willing to go.

The next few weeks flew by. I spent my nights looking forward to the mornings, and my days looking forward to the afternoons. Riding on the short bus became the highlight of my day. But curiously, the other passengers didn't seem to appreciate their unique, enviable transportation situation; in fact, none of them seemed particularly interested in getting to know Doreen or Ernie at all, except for the occasional sharing of a carrot and I Spy game.

No matter. That just left more of their attention for me.

"So my parents had the biggest fight last night," I told Doreen one morning -- probably lots of mornings -- while munching on a carrot stick. "I had to go to my special hiding place in the basement to get away. Luckily, I left cookies there from the last fight, so I had a snack waiting for me."

"My mother told me that I have to play a sport this year," I told Ernie, ignoring a brewing argument between the paraplegics in the back seats that Doreen had gone to referee. "I told her I'd rather eat a dung beetle. She said that could be arranged. I don't think she was joking, either."

"I saw my dad packing a bunch of boxes in his office yesterday," I told them both, admiring Ernie's #1 Dad coffee mug on the dashboard. "He didn't see me, though. I don't know why he's packing. Maybe he's giving stuff to the homeless, but I don't think the homeless need a fax machine."

Doreen and Ernie didn't usually say much in response, nor did I expect or need them to. They just sat and listened to the problem of the day, as loved ones do for each other, because they are loved ones, and that's enough for them. Occasionally, after I relayed some traumatic event that had occurred the evening or weekend before, Ernie had to pull the bus over while I caught my breath outside the bus. But no one seemed to mind. Families understand.

It wasn't all complaints, though. Sometimes I just sought some much-needed parental advice.

"Do these sweatpants match this sweatshirt?"

"What gets chocolate milk out of suede?"

"Will I go blind if I sit too close to the television?"

Not that I spent all my time talking about me. I was also very interested in Doreen and Ernie's lives.

"Wow, so your daughter is a lawyer?" I asked Ernie, who had just shared that proud fact with me. "I want to be a lawyer, too. Actually, my mom wants me to be a lawyer. I'd rather be an actor, or a statistician, or maybe a telemarketer. Then I'd get to work from home. Except I'd want my own home, with my own telephone line. I asked my dad for a telephone line, but he said no, and he got really mad when I called him at work to rehearse my telemarketing technique. Hey, can I practice on you? What are your phone numbers, by the way?"

"Um, we don't share our phone numbers with students, Jonah," Ernie replied, with a sidelong glance to Doreen. "School policy."

"Oh, of course," I replied, nodding knowingly. "Well, I also thought about being a tree doctor. What are your home addresses? Do you have any sick ficuses?"

As I grew closer to my short bus family, the already tenuous relationships I had with my actual family became even more strained. I simply had no need for them anymore, except for shelter and the occasional meal (and even Doreen's carrots were starting to fill that void). It was only logical; they never seemed to have much need for me, either. They were too busy stuffing donuts in their briefcases and cleaning blood out of the rug and shouting about who forgot to vacuum the carpet and tearing each other's hair out to notice.

"I saw my dad packing more boxes today," I said to Doreen one morning. The boxes were really piling up in his office, and he didn't even seem to be hiding them anymore. "What do you think it means?"

"Jonah, I'm tired today." So I turned to Ernie, who shifted uncomfortably in his seat. "Ernie's tired today, too," Doreen continued.

"Oh, ok." I settled back into my seat, determined to keep quiet for the rest of the ride. Everyone can be tired once in a while. Even good parents like Doreen and Ernie. Still, I thought that they might benefit from a little distraction, so after a few minutes I found myself describing my family's latest trip to Niagara Falls, an excursion that almost saw my father go over the falls without a barrel. Half-way through the story, Doreen closed her eyes and laid her head against the window.

Doreen and Ernie only seemed to get more and more tired as the days went by. The I Spy games and afternoon snacks quickly dwindled, as did their traditional morning greetings. In fact, the whole short bus atmosphere changed. The head-banger, who so often had provided a calm rhythmic undertone to our rides, began sitting motionless. The paraplegics neither fought nor talked, and the autistic kids talked even less than they already did. Doreen even stopped wearing her Don't Worry, Be Happy t-shirt. Which, to me, meant that she was either worried, or unhappy. I grew concerned at Doreen and Ernie's apparently deteriorating physical state. I decided to be proactive, and siphoned some of my parents' coffee one morning into a styrofoam cup in an attempt to reenergize them.

"Oh, thanks," Doreen said, as I handed her a lukewarm cup of black coffee. "I don't drink coffee though," she said, tossing the cup into the trash bag at the front of the bus. Ernie's cup followed soon thereafter.

"But you need coffee to start your day right," I protested. "At least, that's what my mom says, although my dad says she's crazy, he always says she's crazy, sometimes he yells it really loud and I'm sure the neighbors can hear, last month one of them called the police . . ."

"Jonah, I have a horrible headache today," Doreen almost shouted. "Can we just sit in peace, please? In fact, I think we need to be quieter from here on out. I just can't . . . we can't . . . It's too much . . ." Doreen placed her head in her hands, and the carrot sticks in her lap fell to the floor. Ernie and I stooped to help Doreen pick up them up.

"I'll pick them up," she snapped at us.

"I'm sorry," Ernie replied, sheepishly.

"I'm sorry, too," I added. It seemed, though, that it was too late for apologies. Somewhere along the way, I had single-handedly transformed the short bus family into my real family. I had always thought that my parents were the cause of all my problems, but maybe I was the cause of theirs.

Determined to undo whatever harm I had already done, I begged Scott to ask his parents if I could come over in the mornings again. A few days later, Scott's mother called mine, and said I was welcome back in their house. My mother was hesitant to send me back to Scott's house again -- "I think those Feinbushes might think who they are" -- but she eventually relented.

"I didn't like you riding that bus anyways," she said. "It's full of retards."

I never said good-bye to Doreen or Ernie, or any of the other short bus passengers. It seemed better that way. I missed the carrot sticks and I Spy games for a while, but then I rediscovered the varsity soccer team practicing outside of Scott's house, and those memories quickly took a backseat to repeated abdominal exercises and mesh shorts. Still, when my parents fought, or my sister cried herself to sleep, or the cops swung by on a Saturday night for coffee and a restraining order, I noticed an absence where I had never noticed one before.

And by the time my father moved out the following summer, I knew, finally, that both of my families had been just an illusion.

Chapter Two

2009-01-31T23:49:00.008-05:00

Hi everyone,

Here is chapter two of the novel (if you haven't read chapter one, I posted that a few weeks ago), which I have tentatively titled, "Blind Justice". I know I've lost some readers in my attempts to branch out, perhaps because people read this blog for the autobiographical entries, or perhaps because I haven't proactively marketed the recent entries out of the awareness that (1) they are unlike my previous stuff, (2) they are frackin' long, and (3) they could probably use some significant editing (these are all fresh out of my brain, for what that's worth). But I will keep posting chapters, as long as I feel comfortable doing so.

Also this goes without saying (then why say it?), but the "Jonah" character is fictional :) (though for those of you repeat customers, you may see some similarities). And also it goes without saying that the "opinions" of the characters are not necessarily those of the author :)

Anyway I hope you enjoy it. I've tried to work in some humor among the intense subject-matter too, both for all of you and for my own sanity.

-JKH

PS My next story will be a return to old form. I need a break from the novel format, which I find significantly more taxing than the personal stories...maybe because I'm just so much more comfortable talking about myself than other (fictional) people...

************

“Hey Jonah, I gotta go, I’m running really late!”

Jonah learned quickly after they first met that Peter always ran at least thirty minutes late, and that was on a good day. For Jonah, cleanliness was next to godliness was next to punctuality, and so this relatively small flaw almost ended their relationship in the beginning.

“You embarrassed me tonight,” Jonah scolded Peter, after he showed up an hour late to a law school function, their fourth date. “You showed no respect for me whatsoever.” Having just begun law school, Jonah of course used the biggest words possible at all times. If a word had less than three syllables, it wasn’t worth saying.

Jonah’s tone would have been enough to make any reasonable homosexual run for the door – and indeed, it had made many a reasonable homosexual do so in the past. But instead of running, Peter simply reminded Jonah that he had just spent three hours listening to a lecture on habeas corpus (which he repeatedly pronounced “corpses”), while he tried to wash the red wine out of his shirt. During dinner, an overly eager professor, all brains and all thumbs, had spilled his drink all over Peter’s favorite shirt.

“Oh, don’t worry about it,” Peter said, smiling graciously. “It’s just an old shirt.”

Slowly, Jonah and Peter came to an understanding, as couples do when they have no other choice. Jonah learned that, indeed, the world would not stop if he missed the opening credits of a movie, while Peter learned that time existed independently of his schedule. And when they moved in together, Jonah pushed all the clocks in the apartment forward a half-hour, which often resulted in Jonah being half an hour early for work. It was a small price to pay, though, for a man who would donate his favorite shirt for habeas corpses.

Peter ran down the stairs, past their new beagle Daisy (who he gave a quick kiss), past Jonah (who he gave a quick kiss), and out the front door, into the darkling Washington, D.C. evening. Realizing that Peter was already gone before he could say good-bye, Jonah shot up instantly from behind his laptop. Before he met Peter, Jonah never shot up instantly for anyone, anything, ever. It was rare enough for him to come out from behind his laptop at all. But that was before.

“Peter!” Jonah shouted after him, as he ran down the front stairs. Peter stopped and looked up towards Jonah, shivering under the thin cloth of his waiter’s uniform.

“Don’t go to work tonight,” Jonah said, picking up Daisy and shoving her face in his, floppy ears and all. “Daisy misses you.”

“I miss you too, Daisy,” he said, flicking Daisy’s floppy ears, then flicking Jonah’s. “I won’t be late. It’s a Senate function, they never last long. Now, put a bunch of House members in a room together, and you might as well call the paddy wagon right now.”

Peter loved using words like “paddy wagon,” “bee’s knees,” and “gasser” in everyday language.

“Oldies but goodies,” he’d say to Jonah, with a silly grin. “Just like you.”

“I’ll be back around eleven.” And then he kissed Jonah, and he kissed Daisy, and he bounced down the stairs, happy to be going out, happy to be coming home.

Of course, he never came home. Twenty minutes later, the world was on fire. And by eleven that night, that long, eternal night that ended only by necessity and not by demand, Jonah and Daisy were standing in line at the morgue, behind dozens of others, in front of dozens more, waiting to identify the body of the man who finally got Jonah out from behind his laptop.

****************

Jonah woke up to the sounds of Monday morning in New York City, which were essentially the sounds of New Year’s Eve anywhere else.

“Yo dude, I’m so fuckin’ wasted!” shouted one joyful reveler from the street below, who was coming out of the aptly named Ship of Fools Bar and Tavern, conveniently located on the first floor of Jonah's building.

Unable to trek to the city on less than a week’s notice to find an apartment before moving there, Jonah relied on his sister to search for him, a favor that he would have to repay for years to come. She found a comparatively expensive, relatively nice, completely liveable space five floors above Second Avenue, with high ceilings, lovely loft space, and a kitchen apparently built for dwarves.

“I know the kitchen is small,” Laura said, when Jonah got his first look at the apartment. “But check out the exposed brick walls! You’re so lucky!”

Jonah figured that he was paying about eighty bucks per brick for his wonderful luck. But he kept that little observation to himself; he was grateful for Laura’s help, as he had always been since the day their father had threatened to drive them up a tree on the way to Cape Cod, and Laura had shielded him from the onslaught in the backseat. Growing up in a constant state of war, Laura acted as a human shield, even when she was not personally in the crossfire. And now that Laura had devoted her life to social work – a noble cause, but an uneconomical one – Jonah was constantly vigilant to make sure that he did not flaunt his choice of career – potentially ignoble, but not necessarily in a financial sense.

“It’s great, Laur,” Jonah said, somewhat sincerely, though simultaneously terrified at the price tag, which would have been eminently manageable in his previous job but now came perilously close to extravagance. After graduating law school, Jonah stuck around DC for a few years, having decided to take the road most traveled and joining a prominent, once white-shoe, now raging liberal law firm steps from the White House. He spent three years in document review hell, stuffing his checking account full of cash as fast as he could, only pausing every once in a while to walk Daisy, or visit the cemetery (usually with Daisy in tow). But he wasn’t there only for the money. After eighteen hours reviewing random e-mails and business prospectus, he rarely had the time or energy to devote to mourning. He might not be able to stop the dreams, but conscious memories were no match for a corporate merger.

A few months earlier, though, Jonah’s dreams started creeping back into his waking life, and suddenly, the eighteen-hour days were replaced by eighteen-hour nightmares. Eventually, Jonah couldn’t separate the reality from the fantasy, and his priorities shifted, until the camel’s back had no choice but to break.

“Jonah, we need you to fly to Cleveland this weekend,” a partner instructed him during their weekly, here’s-how-we’re-going-to-screw-you-over-this-week meeting. Apparently a large pharmaceutical manufacturer was purchasing a small cereal manufacturer. But it was Jonah’s four-year anniversary that weekend – Jonah had planned something special this time, and Peter would be upset if he missed it. So he told the powers-that-be that he could not go to Cleveland that weekend, that the client would have to find someone else to write a memo about the legality of lacing frosted flakes with anti-depressants.

Because law firms are the passive aggressive sharks of the corporate world, Jonah was not fired. Instead, his reviews steadily declined over the next few months, until he was told, in completely uncertain terms, that his reclining office chair would look much better in his next-door neighbor’s office.

Jonah thought briefly about bringing in a folding chair and just sticking it out until they changed the locks on his office door, but it never came to that. A few days later, he received a call from an unexpected prospective employer.

“Hello, may I speak to Jonah Haslap, please? This is Judge Campbell P. Mentrose.” Fortunately, the voice was deep and gruff and unfamiliar – otherwise, Jonah might have thought it was one of his friends playing a prank. They weren’t above crank phone calls, either. Jonah once spent ten minutes searching the firm’s internal directory for I.P. Freely before slamming the phone down to hysterical laughter on the other end of the line.

“Yes, this is Jonah Haslap.” A million questions ran through his head at the same time. Should he have said, “Yes, Your Honor?” Or “Yes, Judge”? Would the judge be offended by his answer?

Maybe he should have followed up with, “what can I do for you?” Or would that be presumptuous, as if little Jonah Haslap could do anything for such a big important person as Judge Campbell P. Mentrose?

And most importantly – why the hell was he calling?

“Mr. Haslap, I’m looking for a fourth clerk for my chambers here in Manhattan,” he replied, clearing his throat for the third time during their thirty-second conversation. Jonah had the sense that Judge Mentrose had seen his share of battle, courtroom and otherwise. “Would you be interested?”

At that moment, Jonah’s next-door neighbor passed by slowly in front of his door, looking seductively at Jonah’s office chair.

“Definitely.”

“Excellent.” There was some rustling in the background. “You live in DC now, right? Well, the federal government is not as generous as law firms, so you’ll have to pay your own moving expenses, but I promise to take you out for a drink at Forlini’s when you get here.”
Forlini’s? Drink? Moving expenses??

“Um, Your Honor,” Jonah stammered, glad he didn’t forget his judicial etiquette this time.

“Don’t you want to interview me first?”

“You come highly recommended,” the judge replied, unphased but clearly unwilling to pursue the issue any further. “And please none of that Your Honor crap. My wife heard someone call me Your Honor outside of the courtroom once and basically slapped me back to the Stone Age. She keeps me in line.” Jonah knew what it was like to have someone around to keep you in line, and how easy it was to fall out of line when they were gone.

“So, Mr. Haslap, will I see you Monday?” Also known as, six days from now.
Jonah looked around at his office. There was nothing in it, except useless documents from useless mergers between useless corporations. He didn’t even have a picture of Peter anywhere. He didn’t want anyone at work to ask him about Peter, or any facet of his personal life for that matter, and moreover, he didn’t want Peter to see what had become of his life – pushing papers around a desk eighteen hours a day so that someone in a Park Avenue penthouse could move to a larger penthouse on a higher floor.

Not that working eighteen hours a day made much of a dent in his social life. Most of Jonah’s friends moved away after graduation, while a fresh crop of eager idealists flooded into the city for the ritual sacrifice that measured life in terms of dollar signs. When Jonah was not at work – a rare occasion – his days generally revolved around walking the dog, cleaning the apartment, and when he was feeling especially adventurous, venturing out to the Mall to watch happy couples and patriotic children try to guess the height of the Washington Monument.

Washington, DC was a life once well lived, but now outlived.

“Yes, Your Hon…I mean, sir. You will.”

Jonah was already composing his farewell email to the firm in his head, a tradition that each departing associate engaged in before leaving for greener pastures. Most of the emails consisted of empty gratitude and emptier platitudes, with an occasional undercurrent of recrimination. Jonah was planning to thank his assistant, while working in polite words for “crapfest” and “fascist death trap.”

“Judge,” Jonah paused, uncertain whether he should continue to question this odd and amazing bit of good fortune. But his inquisitiveness got the better of him. “How did you get my resume?”

“Jonah,” the Judge replied, clearing his throat one last time. “The legal world is small. At least, the one that everyone wants to be a part of. Just be happy that you, dear boy, are a part of it.”

It was a complete evasion, but there wasn’t much Jonah could do about it. When God closes a door, he opens a ventilating shaft.

And that was that. It had to be the easiest clerkship application process in the history of time. Most people spend weeks preparing their applications, agonizing over whether their resume looked better in eleven or eleven-point-five size font. Jonah didn’t even have to pay for the cost of a stamp.

After a quick meeting with his supervising partner, Jonah went back to his office, poured a large cup of hot coffee on his treasured office chair, thereby ruining it for eternity, and took the rest of the day off. He’d have to spend most of the next few days packing up his office and his life – there was a good deal of overlap between the two – but this afternoon was for the past, not the future.

************

“I have some news,” Jonah said, softly, picking at some grass under his feet. He was still wearing his suit. Sitting on the grass would probably leave some stains on his pants, but he didn’t care. It was the kind of thing he used to care about, but not anymore.

“It’s a great opportunity.” Jonah felt like he was letting him down, even though he knew that was impossible. He could never let him down. Not then, and especially not now.

“I think Daisy will love it too.” He cleared a little brush off of the front of the stone, frustrated that the caretakers were so lax in their duties lately. Although Jonah imagined that the job was relatively thankless – the residents were notoriously tightlipped – someone had to do it, and if you decided that person should be you, then you should do the job well. The residents might not know the difference, but the visitors do.

After the attacks, the responsibility fell to Jonah to make all the necessary “arrangements,” as if organizing a funeral was a simple business transaction. Of course, Peter had not made any arrangements himself – even if he had lived till an age when arrangements were the norm and not the exception, Peter wouldn’t have done so – and Peter’s parents were too distraught to be much help. So for several days after the attacks, while the rest of the world was glued to their television sets, consoling themselves with empty words of ignorant politicians, Jonah was scoping out cemeteries in the DC-metropolitan area. He finally settled on one a few miles outside of DC in Northern Virginia, within walking distance to the Metro (Peter would not have wanted to be very far from the city, nor would he have wanted to spend eternity in Maryland), but remote enough so that neighborhood vandals wouldn’t be tempted to declare their love for each other on the tombstones.

The casket and stone decision was slightly more difficult. Peter was both simple and extravagant at the same time, the only difference being his attention span for a certain type of product. He would buy an inordinately expensive talking garbage can, but at the same time he only owned two pairs of shoes, because, for some reason Jonah was never able to get out of him, he hated having his feet measured at shoe stores. Jonah finally settled on a mid-level casket and top-of-the-line tombstone. It made sense, really. Only a handful of people would ever see the casket, but the stone was a long-term investment.

Peter’s parents flew in for a few days, and made life as difficult for Jonah as they possibly could. They didn’t intend to, of course; they had always liked Jonah, and Jonah had liked them. But they had just lost their only son, and even when they were fully functional they were barely able to keep themselves together. Jonah wondered how they had managed to raise three children without a plan, a steady paycheck, or a clue. Somehow, though, it worked, even if it meant that they could barely afford the plane tickets to their son’s funeral.

But in any event, Jonah didn’t mind handling – and paying for – everything himself. When all the arrangements were done, there was nothing let to do but mourn, and there would be plenty of time for that in the days and years to come. Some people procrastinate on projects and deadlines, but the smart ones procrastinate on pain.

“Your mother called me last week.” She called at least once a week, just to check in. And unlike Jonah’s own mother – for whom “checking in” meant more questions like, “have you paid back your law school loans yet” and “when are you getting married? Yes, I know you’re gay, but gay people get married too, in some countries at least” – Peter’s mother really was just checking in. They wouldn’t talk about anything too serious, the weather, movies they had recently seen, how home-made vodka was actually superior to store-bought – but the subtext was always there. Peter was always there. Jonah suspected that if Peter’s mother didn’t check in once in a while, she might check out altogether.

As usual, though, Peter didn’t want to talk about his parents. It was too hard, and there was too much silence to fill. So Jonah moved on.

“My father threw his back out.” That happened at least twice a month. “And my mother’s colitis is acting up again.” That happened at least three times a month. “Oh, you should have seen the birthday gift she sent to Daisy, I swear, it had to be more expensive than the one she bought for me last year. I think she might be giving up on grandkids at this point, so I guess all that extra money has to go somewhere.”

An elderly woman walked by, dressed in black, leaning on a wooden cane. She nodded in Jonah’s direction, and hobbled on. Jonah wondered for a moment who she was mourning, or considering her advanced age, who she wasn’t mourning.

“I know Peter wasn’t a particularly religious person,” the minister had said during the graveside eulogy. Of course, the minister didn’t know anything of the kind – he had asked Jonah some questions before the ceremony a few minutes before the ceremony, to “get a fuller picture of who Peter was,” while he sipped a steaming coffee and surveyed the crowd.

“Did he believe in Jesus?”

“No,” Jonah replied, but quickly corrected himself. “At least, I don’t think he did.”

“I see,” the minister replied, blowing his nose into a used napkin. “But he believed in God?”

“I don’t know.” It was true. Peter didn’t like to talk about those kinds of things. Too serious, too uncertain, too irrelevant.

The tenor of the conversation with the minister (who was chosen simply on account of his availability) left Jonah uncomfortable. Would the minister make inappropriate comments, or would he refuse to deliver a proper eulogy, because Peter did not accept the body and blood of Jesus Christ? Jonah had simply trusted in the professionalism of clergymen, but blind faith is often undermined by cold reality.

“But whatever he believed, it doesn’t matter anymore.” Why, Jonah wondered. Because he’s in hell right now? Because he was a soulless, godless, homosexual sinner? Because half of his body is still fifty feet under the Potomac, where it belongs?

“Because he is at peace.”

Jonah would have given the minister an extra tip, if he thought that kind of thing was proper.

A tree next to Peter’s tombstone was beginning to sprout a few leaves. It was only late February, but the past week had been unseasonably warm, so the tree was fooled into thinking it was already Spring. Soon enough, the weather would turn back, and the tree would suffer for its optimism. But for a brief moment, it would flourish, and be reborn.

Jonah glanced at the stones next to Peter’s, both of which were marked by large marble crosses. The woman to Peter’s left had lived until seventy-eight. The man to Peter’s right had lived till ninety-three. Peter brought the median age of the neighborhood down considerably. Jonah pictured the three of them sharing a cocktail and a cigarette, six feet under. If anyone could make decomposition fun, it was Peter.

“I’ll visit as often as I can.” Jonah had spoiled Peter with attention over the previous four years. He spent all major holidays, and most minor ones, sitting in that spot, along with at least two or three Sundays a month. In the beginning, he would bring a friend or two to help pass the time, but Jonah quickly realized that he didn’t need, or want, anyone else there. Except sometimes he brought Daisy, which Peter really enjoyed, even though he had only known her for a few days while he was alive. Jonah would have brought her to visit more often, but dogs aren’t allowed on the Metro, and he was certain one of these times the Metro police would realize that Daisy was not actually a guide dog for the blind.

And anyway, even having Daisy around got in the way of his visits. Most of the time, Jonah spent the visit recounting his day, picking a weed or two that had grown over the stone, always cognizant of the fact that he was, in reality, talking to the emptiness between the blades of grass. But once in a while, Jonah lost himself there among the blades, and he briefly occupied a world that was more than just sore backs and colitis, eighteen-hour days and jealous colleagues. It was a world he had only known for a moment, at least in the grand scheme of things, but in that moment he had lived with both eyes open, instead of one always on the clock.

Jonah’s cell phone rang, jostling him back into the present tense. It was his supervising partner, probably wondering where he ran off to after their meeting. Jonah stood up and brushed some dirt off his pants, ready once again to keep one eye on the clock. Before leaving, he placed a few rocks on the tombstone, adding to the pile that he had left during previous visits. He was the only one who ever added to the pile. They never seemed to blow away, even in a storm, even the pebbles.

Jonah leaned down, and ran his finger up and down Peter’s name. Beloved son, grandson, brother, and friend. Beloved protector. How many people had Peter tried to save on his subway car, before the smoke became too thick to breathe?

“I just think it’s something I should do.”

I love you.

“It’s something I need to do.”

But I’m not ready to join you.

*******

And so, six days later – six conflicted, “am I making the right choice?” and “what if X, what if Y” days later – Jonah found himself lying in his fifth-floor walk-up with exposed brick walls looming above him, and drunk frat boys looming below. The dream left him unnerved, as usual. Just one time he wanted Peter to stay home that December evening. Just once he didn’t want to be helpless. Then he could give up the dream. Then he’d never need to dream again.
Jonah got out of bed and opened his shades. He looked into the street, onto an increasingly familiar dialogue.

“Hey bro, wanna hit an after-hours party?”

“I can’t dude, I got work in an hour.” The diligent working frat boy then promptly puked into a well-placed pile of trash in front of Jonah’s building.

Jonah pulled the shades closed again, determined not to allow the inebriated, yet vaguely attractive, frat boys distract him from following his new morning routine. In fact, his new morning routine wasn’t much different from his old morning routine, except he didn’t spend twenty minutes standing in front of a mirror, trying to screw up enough courage to face another day of meaningless responsibilities. For now, at least, dread had been replaced by something else. Not excitement, exactly – a true lawyer is rarely excited about work, thought they often lie and say they are – but nervous anticipation.

After dressing, shaving, and combing his hair for the sixteenth time, Jonah realized he was running thirty minutes early. It was a habit he had never quite kicked, and one he didn’t particularly want to lose. So by the time Laura arrived at his apartment – they decided to institute a morning coffee tradition – Jonah was already on his third cup.

“You look so professional.” It was quite possible that Jonah’s sister had never actually seen him in a formal suit before. Or at least, not since his Bar Mitzvah fifteen years earlier, and Jonah imagined he didn’t look very professional in that. Cute, maybe, but not professional.

In the two hours since he woke up, the drunk frat boys and winos had handed Second Avenue over to the suit and tie set (though there was some overlap between the groups). The local Starbucks – as in, the closest Starbucks in a two-block radius – was filled with men and women rushing to work, none of whom had time to hold the door open, say excuse me, or indeed, obey any laws of etiquette. Jonah had to throw a few elbows just to get a Mochafrappucino. Only the first in many elbows that must be thrown on a typical Manhattan day.

“Did you talk to mom yesterday?”

“Four times,” Jonah replied, in between sips of his excessively hot beverage. Everything in New York has to be excessively something. “Eleven, two, six-thirty, and ten o’clock.” Ever since Jonah’s mom had gotten a cell phone the calls had increased exponentially. Apparently, there was a downside to unlimited nights and weekends.

“Yeah, she’s been hounding me too. She basically threatened to commit suicide unless we go out there for dinner this weekend.”

“Is that a threat or a promise?”

Jonah watched the customers hurry into the store and back out to the street at a dizzying pace, as if their lives depended on making the 8:32AM subway, instead of the 8:33. He noticed a stray string hanging from his jacket sleeve. He pulled on it, which of course only made it worse. The more he pulled at it, the longer it grew.

“Do you have any scissors?”

Laura handed him a pair of cuticle scissors, which he immediately put to good use, and deposited the extraneous string in his empty coffee cup.

“Hey, what was the name of that judge you’re working for again?”

“Mentrose. Campbell Mentrose.”

Jonah noticed more than a few attractive yuppie types rushing by outside the window. He hadn’t dated since Peter died, and didn’t have any plans to start now. But the brain and the body often receive conflicting signals, and occasionally the latter wins out.

“I thought so,” Laura said, taking a newspaper out of her bag. “Your judge has been assigned to the Salaam case.”

Laura handed Jonah a copy of the Daily News. The front page of the paper featured a large split-frame picture; on the left side was a notorious basketball coach who had driven the beloved Knicks into the ground, and on the right side was Salaam. Under the split-frame was the caption, “Who Do You Hate More? New Yorkers React To Pure Evil.”

The story, continued on the following page, recounted the procedural history of the case (in layperson’s terms, of course – this was the Daily News), including a brief recap of Judge Glassman’s murder the previous week (still unsolved, but widely attributed to Salaam’s followers), and the salacious facts surrounding the previous judge’s recusal.

“Is the Salaam case cursed?” the article wondered aloud. “New Yorkers – and, indeed, the world – now waits with baited breath to see whether a similar fate befalls Judge Mentrose.” As if Jonah’s new employer was already a marked man.

There was also a short editorial bemoaning the selection of Judge Mentrose as the presiding judge in the case.

“Of course, the selection of federal judges is done by a lottery system, but the terrorists couldn’t have asked for a better outcome in this case,” the editor wrote, spittle almost jumping off the page. “Judge Mentrose, a Clinton appointee, is a notorious proponent of criminal rights,” hard-liners often use the words “criminal” and “defendant” interchangeably, “and you can almost hear the wheels of justice grinding to a halt at the court today, only inches from where so many lives ground to a halt six years ago.”

In the flurry of activity, Jonah had completely missed the news. It was a rare lapse, and Jonah was now paying for it through an intense tightening of his bowels.

“Wow,” Laura said, putting the paper back in her bag and gathering her things. “That’s great. Though a little scary, you know? After what happened to the last guy?”

Needless worrying, Jonah thought. But he didn’t say it. Maybe he didn’t believe it himself.

“Honey, do you want to lose that finger?”

Jonah looked down at his hand, and realized that he had been tying the piece of string that he come off his jacket around his finger for the past several minutes. The finger was beginning to show signs of trauma. Jonah immediately unraveled the string and put it back in his coffee cup.

Laura and Jonah parted ways at the 86th Street subway station. She was going further uptown, to help people who had recently been released from prison, while Jonah was going downtown, to help put them there.

Jonah squeezed himself onto the next excessively crowded subway, inhaling deeply and contorting his body in circus-freak like positions so that his face came within half an inch of the metal bar hanging down over his head. The woman sitting in front of him gave an annoyed grunt when he inadvertently but necessarily jammed his bag into her chest, and a baby carriage behind him was violently jostled when the man next to Jonah realized he almost missed his stop and bolted for the closing doors. It’s every man, woman, and infant for himself in the urban jungle, Jonah thought. No one forces you to live here. There’s plenty of room to breathe in West Virginia.

It seemed that everyone around Jonah had a copy of the Daily News, with Salaam’s face (and the face of the disgruntled basketball star) staring through him as they hurtled downtown at a seemingly dangerous speed. His bowels still had not unclenched since the coffee shop, though it was unclear at this point whether the continued tightness was due to the news, or to the inhumane conditions of the subway car. Either way, he’d be glad when the trip was over. One down, only several hundred to go.

About half the subway exited at Grand Central Station, along with half of the staring Salaams. Jonah relaxed a bit, and was even able to find a few inches of space to sit toward the end of the car. But then he noticed a man sitting across from him, and the anxiety flooded back. The man was dressed in a baggy sweatshirt and jeans, and he was carrying a small backpack. He sat quietly staring into space, no different from the dozens of other passengers surrounding him. There was nothing threatening about the man, except the color of his skin. Not dark enough to be black, not light enough to be white. And he wasn’t Latino, or Asian, or a Pacific Islander. No, Jonah knew well enough where this man was from, because men who looked just like him had been captured on Afghani battlefields, or in Iraqi safehouses, or Miami condominiums. Men who looked just like him had been featured on cable news networks, in tabloids and during emergency announcements from the White House. Men who looked just like him had strapped bombs to their bodies and blasted themselves into pieces. Men who looked just like him had murdered Peter, on his way to a boring Senate function, minding his own business, not planning for the rest of his life and not knowing his life was about to end.

And now, the fate of one particular man who looked just like him was, at least partially, in Jonah’s hands.

Of course, the man sitting across from Jonah did not look just like Salaam, any more than Jonah looked just like any other white guy on the number four train. Even as Jonah silently indicted an innocent man for an imaginable crime, his ACLU membership card burned in his pocket. And for a moment, he tried to look at the man without preconceptions, without the past, with fresh eyes. But the eyes looking back at him were only Salaam's.

Jonah moved nervously in his seat, while the man fidgeted with something inside his backpack. Probably on his way to work, Jonah thought. Maybe his family was still back home, and he was sending them weekly checks to ensure his children’s future. Or maybe he grew up in this country, and could trace his roots back far further than Jonah could trace his own. And maybe this man, like Peter, would have struggled to his last breath to save as many people as he could.

Or maybe the bag had a bomb, and any second this man would press a button strategically located underneath his sweatshirt, and Jonah and all his fellow passengers would be buried in half a casket.

Jonah got off at the next stop, for reasons no one would ever know but him. Besides, the next subway would be along soon enough, and better safe than sorry.

PS I Love You

2009-01-02T18:03:00.003-05:00

Remember, this is just the first chapter of a novel -- it's not meant to be a stand alone piece. I have a vision, don't worry. In fact, I'm having one now. I'm seeing you, sitting by the fire with a nice cup of cocoa, beginning a journey with me, a wonderful, engaging journey from which you will return a better person than you left.

Or, I'm seeing you sitting by your computer Monday morning, picking your nose and trying to endure the monotony.

Either way is fine with me.

Chapter One

2009-01-02T01:42:00.007-05:00

Happy New Year all! Before you get too excited, the following post is not a traditional "Jonah K. Haslap" tome. It is, instead, the first chapter of a novel -- a legal "thriller", if you will -- that I've been working on. I debated whether to share it, considering that you probably read this site more for my shameless self-introspection than anything else, and don't worry, I haven't lost the desire to shame myself more in the near future. But I'd also like to write a novel as well, something that I can publish without fear of my mother suing me for libel. So I hope you enjoy this first chapter of an as-of-yet untitled novel, at least, for what it's worth at the moment.

-JKH

******************************

The boxes arrived in Judge Steven P. Glassman’s chambers on Friday afternoon, just before 5PM. There were at least a dozen of them, labeled with various legal terms that marked several years of investigation. Autopsy 12/28/04. Grand jury minutes 10/4/05. Deposition 2/12/06. Witness interview 4/27/07. They were sealed tight with several layers of tape; it took a clerk twenty minutes just to open one box. The judge was surprised that the boxes didn’t come with a Masterlock.

“Leave them,” Judge Glassman instructed, as the clerk started removing briefs from the first box. “They can wait until Monday.”

But the judge knew that the case that had just arrived at his doorstep could not wait until Monday. The last judge on the case had resigned on the eve of trial, after the New York Times uncovered photographs of his dalliances with several underage escorts. Judge Glassman knew the previous judge well, and was not surprised by the revelation – the man had a curious fascination with Blaire from the Facts of Life – though he was shocked by how quickly the judge had resigned. Federal judges are appointed for life, so it usually takes more than a few scandalous photographs to get them out. Recently CNN had run an expose on a judge in Las Vegas who had been issuing rulings based on advice he received through the Psychic Friends Network, behavior which might befit a president and his wife, but which was most unbecoming in a jurist. The judge vowed to remain on the bench until the stars were in their correct alignment.

Judge Glassman went back to his office, and left his clerks to debate over who would be responsible for the case.

“Wow, I can’t believe we got the case,” the judge heard one of the clerks say excitedly from the other room. It must have been the Columbia clerk, who was the designated emotional basketcase of the group. After considering standard qualifications like grades and recommendations, the judge looked for diversity in his clerks. Not in terms of law school, of course – there were only a handful of (top) law schools from which Judge Glassman selected his clerks. Other law schools might contain diamonds in the rough, but the judge lacked both the patience and the energy to find them. And the judge didn’t care much about ordinary indicators of diversity like sexual orientation and race; what mattered most to the judge was personality. An African-American Muslim lesbian from Pakistan could be just as pleasant, or just as objectionable, as a heterosexual white male from Alabama. Good breeding isn’t in the blood; it’s in the behavior.

Despite the immense amount of work the next few months would entail, each one of the four were jockeying for the assignment. Personally, Judge Glassman preferred anyone but the Yale graduate, who would spend too many hours needlessly intellectualizing the simplest issue, and require constant monitoring as a result. The Yale clerk was best-suited for the complex and non-time-sensitive cases; she was an academic powerhouse, but a practical nightmare.

But even though he had his own preference, he thought it best to leave the decision to the clerks themselves. This was, after all, the case of the year – maybe even of the decade, or the century. If he chose one of them over the others, he would be playing favorites, and even if he wasn’t always even-keeled, Judge Glassman was always fair-minded. In his opinion, there weren’t enough fair-minded judges on the bench. Despite the lifetime tenure, politics and personality too often got in the way. Of course, the most biased judges were often the most brilliant, and they used their brilliance to mask their agendas, both on the right and on the left.

Judge Glassman saw through the pretense of many on his colleagues, though, and he had little patience for dishonesty in any form. The lawyers who appeared before him knew that, and also knew his penchant for scathing criticism.

“Counsel, next time you appear before me, I’d like you to bring your law school diploma, because I’m not entirely sure you actually graduated,” he reprimanded a government attorney, after the attorney had missed a filing deadline. “Did you graduate, counselor?”

“Yes, Your Honor. I graduated,” the attorney replied, meekly. “From Harvard.”

“Oh, from Harvard,” Judge Glassman said, sneering at the attorney’s name-dropping, which annoyed the judge even more than tardiness. “I wouldn’t share that with too many people, Mr. Prosecutor. Harvard has enough troubles these days.”

A few years back, someone had posted a sign in front of Judge Glassman’s courtroom, saying “Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here.” His deputy was about to throw it out, but the judge rescued it just in time and hung it over his desk. It wasn’t an insult; it was a badge of honor.

The judge sat at his desk, listening to the clerks’ bickering in the other room. Besides the sign, his office was a cluttered with memorabilia from various important moments in his life. A souvenir from his trip to the Galapagos. A Mickey Mouse hat one of his clerk’s had brought him from Disneyworld. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of non-fiction books on multiple topics, all of which had piqued the judge’s interest at some time or another, usually in connection with a pending lawsuit. There was even a bag of sexual lubricants in one corner, from a trademark infringement case in which the makers of a certain dairy product sued the lubricants’ manufacturer, claiming that consumers might confuse the products due to their similar slogans, labels, and consistency. The judge found in favor of the manufacturer, concluding that it was unlikely that a reasonable consumer would spread a sexual lubricant on a piece of toast.

But the most noticeable feature of his office was the dozens of pictures that lined the walls, most of them of himself with all of his past clerks and every president since Johnson. Most judges only had pictures of themselves with the president who appointed them; you could almost predict their rulings by the pictures they had in their chambers. But Judge Glassman smiled next to Reagan and Carter, Nixon and Clinton, Johnson and Bush (both father and son). His favorite was the one with Nixon. Shortly before that picture was taken, Nixon had been subpoenaed in the Watergate scandal.

“Can’t you do something about that?” Nixon asked the judge, just before the flash went off. He wasn’t smiling.

From his desk, the judge could see the boxes sitting in the foyer. Hundreds of little pieces of paper, thousands – maybe millions – of words like “heretofore” and “forthwith,” all holding the fate of the most reviled man in America. Of course, in the public’s mind, his fate had been sealed years ago, the moment the bombs went off. Judge Glassman could still smell that moment. It’s the smell that sticks with you, years later. Eventually the debris is cleared, the bodies are buried, and the buildings are replaced with bigger and better ones, symbols that a bomb can destroy our homes but not our spirits. But in fact, the judge thought, our spirits do break, just a little, every time a body is buried. And all the uplifting songs and primetime specials and burnings in effigy can’t replace what can’t be replaced.

The judge realized he had been staring at the boxes for several minutes, and redirected his attention to his rapidly filling e-mail inbox. No time for thoughts of the past now. He – the entire country – had spent enough time in the past. Judge Glassman was determined not to oversee a trial haunted by ghosts and personal torment. They attacked us because our system works, he thought. It’ll work again. He would see to it.

The NYU clerk knocked. He was usually the spokesperson for the group. Probably because he had the biggest mouth, and the least shame.

“Judge, we decided that Allison would be the primary clerk on the case,” NYU said. The judge sighed, resigned to working closely with the Yale one over the next few months. He wasn’t surprised that Yale won. Her pleasing nature ended where her competitive nature began. Yale Law School had done away with grades years ago, ostensibly for purely academic reasons, but the judge suspected that the school had no choice – if Yale students had to compete for grades, the violent crime rate on Yale’s campus would skyrocket.

“We also decided that, considering the amount of work entailed in this litigation” – NYU always talked like a legal brief with legs – “we would take turns helping Allison out with any overflow. We hope and trust that this is an acceptable arrangement to your honor.”
Ah, of course. Everyone wants a piece of the pie. Yes, NYU, it is an acceptable arrangement to this honorable jurist. Also, an acceptable arrangement would include you not kissing my 76-year-old butt at every turn.

“That’s fine, John, thanks.”

NYU went back into the clerks’ office, and was likely already exaggerating his encounter with the judge.

“The judge seemed reluctant to consent to our proposal; however, I explicated the benefits of permitting each of us to contribute to this historic prosecution, and eventually, he relented.”
Still, even if NYU annoyed him at times, the judge appreciated his by-the-book approach to the profession. The judge longed for the days of bow-ties and procedure, wing-tips and rules. There were too many liberties being taken these days. Liberties were for politicians, not for judges. Judges are supposed to keep politicians in check, and not the other way around.

An unopened New York Times lay on the judge’s desk. The day had been so hectic, he had not had the opportunity to even glance at it. The call from the Court Executive had come early in the day.

“Steven, I thought I should let you know, your name came out of the wheel,” the Clerk of the Court informed him. The judge didn’t particularly appreciate being called “Steven” during working hours, but he had known the Clerk of the Court since their law school days, and asking an old friend to call him Your Honor seemed a little too harsh, even for the judge. Still, it would be nice if he did it voluntarily. It’s like receiving a compliment after you asked for it; it never feels the same when you have to ask for it.

“You’ve been assigned to the Saalam case.”

It wasn’t welcome news, at first. Judge Glassman had recently assumed senior status, and he was looking forward to slowing down a bit. Not retiring completely, of course. His wife would never consent to that. Judges (indeed, most lawyers) usually work until their final breath. Not necessarily because they like it, but because it’s all they – and their spouses, families, pets – know. After five or six decades of eating at the same dinner table once a week at most, it was best to keep it that way. Why spoil a successful marriage right before the finish line? There would be plenty of time to catch up, in the next life.

But even more than the late nights and missed box seats that the case would bring, the judge was uncomfortable with its notoriety. Ever since the government had arrested Salaam, not a day had gone by without his name appearing somewhere in the newspapers. Even before he was arrested, the name Salaam had become synonymous with pure evil, a development carefully cultivated by the prosecutors, even before a shred of evidence had been presented against him.

And everyone shared in the glory when Salaam was finally captured, not in a cave in Afghanistan or a safe house in an Iranian village, but in a modest, split-level house in Miami. The current president had not been elected so much on his own record as Salaam’s.

Yet though the notoriety was unwelcome, it was nothing new to the judge. A few years earlier, he had presided over the trial of a serial killer who had allegedly murdered a dozen small children in ways so horrendous that even the Daily News, a publication not known for its restraint, refused to report the details. After the trial was over, the judge was giving a lecture at Columbia Law School when he was asked how he remained objective in the face of gruesome testimony by the victims’ families, as they described the mangled remains of their children.

“When a defendant enters my courtroom, he is no longer a human being,” the judge answered.

“He is a hypothetical on a law school exam. The victims, too. They are only words on a piece of paper.”

“But, judge,” the student continued, noticeably uncomfortable with the judge’s response. “Isn’t compassion part of justice?”

“Compassion in the law, yes,” the judge replied, in a measured tone. “But personal compassion, like personal condemnation, has no place in the criminal justice system.”

And Judge Glassman honestly believed that. He believed it when the jury acquitted the defendant – who the judge was certain had committed the crimes. He believed it when his son-in-law was convicted of securities fraud, and he believed it when his own granddaughter was arrested for shoplifting.

And even when he watched the bodies fly through the air as explosions rocked the street beneath his chambers, even when his wife called him hysterical because she hadn’t heard from him in hours, even when there were lines down the block at the city morgue, filled with people who were hoping that somehow, their father had missed the train to work that day, or their daughter had been one of a handful of survivors on the number 6 train, or their husband was lying unconscious at St. Vincent’s and not dead on a slab, he believed it.

Judge Glassman could preside over this case, and he could preside over it fairly. He was perhaps the only person who could.

“You can decline the assignment, you know” the Clerk said, referring to a perk of the judge’s senior status. Before he assumed senior status, the judge wondered if there were numerous, secret perks to being a senior judge. Maybe a separate cafeteria that served filet mignon, or a special elevator with ornate chandeliers, or a secret handshake. But none of those hopes had come to fruition. Another sign that the judicial system, like the country, does not respect its elders.

“No, Daniel, thank you. I’ll take it.” The judge glanced at his calendar, and realized that taking the Salaam case would mean postponing his summer vacation, which was fine with him. The first time he visited the Grand Canyon, he was struck by its awesome beauty, by how an empty valley can be as magnificent as a majestic mountain. The eighteenth time he visited it, he was struck only by the cost of bottled water at their hotel.

“You know, they may have to give you a security detail, like they did for Michael,” the Clerk continued, referring to the secret service agents assigned to Judge Michael Mukasey during the World Trade Center trial, after Judge Mukasey had received numerous death threats. How many death threats would he have to receive before he received his own “security detail,” the judge wondered. Is there a chart somewhere that dictates how many death threats each judge must receive before they are entitled to protection? A slightly competitive part of Judge Glassman wondered whether he would have to receive more or less than Mukasey.

“As long as I don’t have to feed and clothe them,” the judge replied.

“I’m serious, Steven. This isn’t a typical trial.”

No shit, the judge wanted to say. Judge Glassman generally disliked using expletives, which he regarded as lazy argumentation, but sometimes one just fit the situation.

“You’ll be a target.”

“A target for who?” the judge asked, unconvinced that a group of international terrorists would expend the time and energy to take him out. Besides, if he kept eating the chicken marsala they served in the courthouse cafeteria, nature might do the job for them.

“Don’t worry about me,” the judge continued, signaling for his assistant to help him get this guy off the phone. His assistant was not the nicest person, but she was good at getting rid of people, and even the judge – who had told Nixon after their photo shoot that he should “fight his own battles” – was slightly scared of her. But then he remembered that he had given her the afternoon off, just because she asked for it, and he was too afraid to say no.

“I’m tough.” At least, in the courtroom. He had the sign hanging above his desk to prove it.

“But is Laura?” the Clerk asked, referring to the judge’s wife. The judge rarely considered his wife’s perspective on anything career-related, not because she wasn’t smart enough to weigh in, but because she wouldn’t stop weighing in if he let her. “Your decision affects her too, you know. And your kids, too, and grandkids. How old are they now?” His words were careful and measured, as if there was a warning hidden beneath the warning.

“I have to go, Daniel,” the judge said, suddenly becoming eager to end the conversation. It seemed like the Clerk was fishing for something, but the judge wasn’t sure what, and he didn’t want to find out. “Thanks for the heads up.”

The Clerk paused, and after a long silence, wished the judge good luck, and promised to keep the assignment secret until Monday so he could prepare his chambers for the onslaught. The judge hung up, still vaguely unsettled by the call. He supposed he should appreciate the concern, but he refused to condone paranoia, especially not in his courtroom. And after all, the terrorists had better targets than me, he thought. What benefit would they get from killing me? The case would just get transferred to another judge, and they certainly couldn’t kill all the judges in the federal judiciary. Especially not the ones in Texas, who it was rumored carry handguns underneath their robes.

The sun was already setting outside, and it felt like the first snowfall was right around the corner, a bit early in the season but not unheard of in mid-November in New York City. It was on an evening very much like this one, six years earlier, that the ground had shook. Not just the ground under the courthouse; the ground shook under every building in every major metropolitan area in the country. But the courthouse, which was built directly over a bustling subway station, bore the brunt of the impact in this little corner of the universe. The building was closed for five months following the attacks, as the universe reorganized itself into a brave new world. It was a world very similar to, and entirely different from, the one that came before.

“We’re going to catch the monsters who committed these heinous acts,” the President had promised on national television the following evening, even though the killers were also lying in little pieces across the ground, mixed together with little pieces of their victims. But the President didn’t mean the men who had strapped explosives to their bodies and boarded subways, cars, buses, and trains across the country. Those men had turned themselves into walking bombs, and were little more than the sum of the parts they left behind.

No, the President meant the planners. The brains. The so-called “masterminds,” as if great works of terror require something more than a common goal, and utter desperation. And eventually, the President meant just one man. The mastermind. Salaam.

When the judge was finally allowed back into his chambers after the attacks, he immediately went back to work, and demanded the same from his clerks, often working them through weekends and holidays, weddings and anniversaries, stomach bugs and, even in one unfortunate situation, chemotherapy (he let that clerk go home early once in a while). He didn’t want to make them miserable – well, most of the time, anyway – but he had no other choice. Maybe back in the days of wingtips and bow-ties, judges had time to manage their cases on their own.

But these days, when every judge has several hundred cases on their docket, when every Joe Six-Pack sued because they were fired from their job, or they broke a leg in front of Burger King, or their coffee was just too hot, dammit – these days, a judge is only as good, or bad, as the clerks who work for him.

The judge unrolled the newspaper and quickly skimmed the first five pages. Everything after those pages was fluff, anyway, and he rarely had time to read anything that didn’t appear above the fold. I need a break, he thought. The case could wait till Monday. It had already waited six years, three more days wouldn’t make a difference. When he came in on Monday though, everyone had better be prepared, on both sides. No one would get a free ride here. As far as the judge was concerned, Salaam was just another defendant, presumed innocent, afforded the same rights and privileges as every other man and woman who had appeared before him in his forty-two years on the bench. Justice is blind, even in the ashes.

And besides, no one could tell him what to do in his courtroom. He was the king of his kingdom, answerable to no one except his own conscience.

The judge stuffed a few briefs in his satchel – he might be taking it easy this weeknd, but he still needed something to read while his wife knitted, during their lovely, silent Sundays – and headed out of his chambers, passing the clerks as he went.

“Have a good weekend,” he said to shocked faces. The judge was leaving at 5:30pm? NYU almost asked him the reason, but even he had the sense to keep his mouth shut.

“And Allison – be here bright and early on Monday, please. I need you at the top of your game, from here on out.”

It was slightly cruel of the judge to leave with those parting words, which would surely cause the clerk to spend the next two days reading every scrap of paper in every one of those boxes. But in fact, he did need her to be fully prepared as soon as possible, because like it or not, Salaam’s fate hung not only in the hands of the judge and jurors, but in hers as well. These pseudo-adults, who only a few years ago were working at ice cream parlors and smoking pot in their parents’ basements, now largely controlled the judicial system. And there was nothing the judge – or anyone else – could do about it, except trust them to do the job he just didn’t have enough time to do himself.

The security guards politely smiled as the judge exited the main courthouse doors, and entered the frigid Chinatown air. Other judges preferred to use a special entrance designated only for them, choosing to avoid possible encounters with prosecutors or defense attorneys who appeared before them, but Judge Glassman welcomed the opportunity to catch people off-guard, and maybe overhear conversations about him between disgruntled attorneys. It’s not what people say to your face that really counts, but what they don’t say. Besides, he still hadn’t figured out who had hung the sign that now hung over his desk; what’s more, he wasn’t sure what he would do with the culprit if he did figure it out, whether he would buy him a drink or have him disbarred. It would be a spur of the moment decision.

The street was bustling with activity, and the judge instantly cursed his decision to travel during rush hour. But then again, it’s always rush hour in New York City, regardless of the time. The judge walked past his favorite lunch spot and waved to the owner inside, who waved back. He used to wave to the owner and his wife, but his wife was killed in the attacks, so now the owner waved alone.

If it hadn’t been physically impossible for a bullet to magically appear in a person’s chest, no one would have even noticed the shot. The pain itself was negligible; if a woman hadn’t screamed for a doctor, the judge might have just walked it off. But then he grew very tired very quickly, and the warm spot behind his shoulder became hot and then burned through his body, as he fell against the glass of his favorite lunch spot.

The owner of the restaurant rushed out, and propped the judge’s head up on his lap, shouting something in Chinese, or maybe English, it all sounded the same at this point. The urgency seemed excessive, though. This too shall pass. Everything does.

He saw his wife, kids, and grandkids, one at a time and all at once; he saw his chambers and his home, Disneyworld, the Galapagos and the Grand Canyon; and he thought of his assistant, who would probably retire now, since no one else would put up with her mood swings; of the Clerk of the Court, and his curious words of warning; of the bag of personal lubricants in his office, and the shock on the face of whoever found them; of underage escorts, and walking bombs, and the alignment of the stars.

And before he closed his eyes to rest, Judge Steven P. Glassman thought of the dozen or so boxes, still sitting in his office un-opened, and of the next judge – and clerk – who would be responsible for vindicating the living, and avenging the dead.

Necessary and Sufficient

2008-11-17T20:58:00.013-05:00

This one is for you.

************************

Ethan and I went to see a movie last weekend. Or, I went to a movie, while Ethan played with his cell phone and occasionally napped. His ability to fall asleep in any environment is one of the things I envy most about him, along with his strong cheekbones and steel-like digestive system. But that night, I wasn't envious, I was just annoyed.

"You couldn't stay awake for two hours?" I asked him, as we walked back to his apartment in the rain. He had brought an umbrella, but I forgot mine, as I usually do. I squatted under his umbrella on the way to the movies, but on the way home I refused to share his personal space, which I assumed was fine with him, given his general belief that two men should keep at least five feet apart at all times while in public. It took quite a bit of cajoling to get him to sit next to me in the movie theater, but I bribed him with a box of Junior Mints and a promise that I would not share his armrest.

"Sorry." We walked for a few minutes, while I waited for the rest of his answer, which I knew would follow shortly. It isn't quite like pulling teeth; it's more like waiting for them to fall out of your mouth.

"It was just not the kind of movie I like," he said, trying to shield me with his umbrella from the falling rain. I was having none of it, however, and ended up walking the rest of the way back in the ditch, just to send him a message. True passive-aggressives suffer for their art.

Of course it wasn't the kind of movie he liked. Ethan doesn't like most of the movies I like. In fact, we agree on almost nothing when it comes to movies, television, music, art, literature, politics, international relations, interior design, fashion, coffee talk, toilet paper, tomato-based products, and pretty much anything else that people do in their daily lives. I didn't really expect him to like the movie, but everyone else I knew had already seen it so I needed to go with him. The alternative -- going by myself -- was unthinkable. I hadn't gone to a movie by myself since I was 16, when I snuck into that movie where Rosie O'Donnell played an S&M hooker. Perhaps not so coincidentally, the following day I had phone sex with a man for the first time.

After a year, though, I had mostly grown accustomed to our differences. When I found a new television show, or song, or movie that I liked, I just assumed Ethan wouldn't like it. But instead of trying to change him -- my parents weren't great role models for healthy relationships, but at least they taught me how to avoid an unhealthy one -- I just resigned myself to a future of quiet, tomato-free, dinners.

That night, though, the sacrifice loomed larger than usual. I wasn't sure why, though I suspected it had something to do with the coffee I'd had earlier with my friend Mark and his fiancee Lauren. He had recently proposed to her, or she had recently proposed to him, I still wasn't sure who did the proposing. It didn't matter anyway. They were pretty much just extensions of one another, completely lacking in discernible boundaries. One of them should have donated their organs to medical science. It seemed selfish for one person to occupy two, healthy bodies.

The conversation naturally turned towards Ethan, as it always did with my friends lately, either out of morbid curiosity or judgmental concern.

"I knew this was going someplace bad from day one," Mark said. Or Lauren did. They moved their lips in unison, as they shared a banana nut muffin and a latte. Being both lawyers, they could have afforded two banana nut muffins and two lattes, but then they wouldn't get to share, and sharing is the most important part of a relationship.

"Sharing is the most important of a relationship," Lauren said. Or Mark did. I tried to move the conversation away from Ethan, onto more comfortable topics, like my recently diagnosed diverticulitis, and human migration. They both had a keen interest in migrating populations. Because the individual is always less important than the collective.

The conversation lagged, after we had sufficiently delved into the regularity of my bowel habits and the plight of the Yamama Indians. I sipped my orange juice, acutely aware of the vacant chair next to me. Ethan didn't want to come to coffee. There was some kind of sports game on television. There was always some kind of sports game on television. Jocks are as jocks do.

"So Ethan couldn't join us?" Lauren asked, or Mark did, fully aware of the answer. "Couldn't even meet your friends for coffee," they said, shaking their heads. I had a momentary impulse to punch one of them, but I couldn't choose which one, so I settled for the mental imagery.

"It's not so bad," I said, signaling for the check, while Mark indicated to Lauren that she had milk on her top lip. It felt vaguely pornographic to even sit there with them. They weren't being sexual at all, or even overly affectionate -- I'd hope my fiancee would tell me when I have milk on my top lip, too -- but somehow they were managing to have sex right in front of me.

"I know he's attractive, Jonah," Mark began, and I knew what was coming next. It wasn't anything I hadn't heard before. I concocted a relationship out of physical attraction. I was making up for my drama-geek adolescence by sleeping with the quarterback of the football team. I needed to work out these self-confidence issues in therapy. I wasn't a full human being. Not like Mark and Lauren, who could survive on one banana nut muffin.

"Ethan and I are going to the movies tonight," I said somewhat proudly. See, Ethan was going with me to the movies, it couldn't be all bad. It wasn't hopeless. But their four eyes bore into me, suspecting that there was more to the story. "Well, Ethan doesn't really want to go, but he said he'd go with me," I added, berating myself for my compulsive honesty. Contrary to popular belief, honesty is not always the best policy, especially when you're lying to yourself.

Mark asked me what we were going to see, or Lauren did, just as the obviously homosexual waiter brought us the check.

"Oh, I've been wanting to see that forever!" the waiter said, brightly, apparently fishing for more than just a tip. I hurried off, before Mark and Lauren could point out the obvious.

Ethan and I spent the remainder of the walk back to his studio apartment in silence. I stopped trying to avoid the puddles, figuring that the wetter I got, the more guilty he would feel for his behavior at the movies. It didn't work, or at least, he didn't express any further remorse. Of course, he could have been beating himself up inside, but that didn't do me much good.

I sat down in the living room/bedroom/kitchen, soaking his couch in the process. It wasn't part of his punishment -- I only take my anger out on personal electronics, not home furnishings -- but I didn't have any dry clothes to change into. Ethan never let me leave anything in his apartment.

"I just don't feel comfortable with it," he said, handing me a sealed Ziploc with my toothbrush in it, as if I had left a stack of kiddie porn in his bathroom. "What if someone comes over and sees two toothbrushes? They might start asking questions."

Sensing my displeasure, he promised to keep a full stock of new toothbrushes for me to use. Sure enough, the next time I came over, I found several rows of toothbrushes in his medicine cabinet, of varying colors and types. "I wasn't sure what kind you liked," he said, and I forgave him instantly.

But I only had so many instant pardons in me, and it felt lately like I was running low.

"I'm sorry I didn't like the movie," he said, handing me a towel. The towel smelled fresh and clean, like it had never been used. His whole apartment looked fresh and clean, and except for a Simpsons magnet that I had given him for Christmas, lacked any indication of my existence. He had permitted the Simpsons magnet to remain, since it was something he would buy himself, so it didn't invite any unnecessary questions.

Mark and Lauren's faces danced in front of me. What were they doing right now? Probably huddled under a hand-weaved Afghan, sipping out of the same Egyptian tea cup and watching a documentary about Sudanese refugees together. Or maybe even adopting a Sudanese refugee themselves. I wondered if they'd send seven cents a day, or double it, because technically there were two of them.

Ethan went to take a shower, and I scanned his magazines, which ranged from moderately offensive capitalistic fodder to moderately offensive mysoginistic fodder. He knew how I felt about the latter, but it didn't stop him from continuing to read them, or saving them under his television stand. Occasionally I would throw one away behind his back, but usually I just tried to cover them with the one issue of U.S. News and World Report that he owned, so I could effectively fool myself into forgetting their presence.

I wasn't in any of the pictures on his walls. My clothes weren't in his drawers. His friends and family didn't know I existed. I could disappear tomorrow, and nothing would change in his life, except a cell phone number that could be easily deleted, and a wet spot on his couch.

"Hey, I think your cell phone is ringing!" Ethan called from inside the bathroom. He had an excellent sense of hearing, probably honed while on high alert for potential FBI raids of his apartment, looking for strange men's toothbrushes.

It was my mother. After debating for a moment, I picked it up. It was usually better to speak to her when I was already in a bad mood, because I'd be in one by the end of the conversation anyway.

"Yeah, your grandmother is driving me crazy," she said, before I could even say hello. "I should never have moved so close to her!"

After my parents' divorce, my mother moved in next door to my grandmother and her second husband, Stan. The arrangement wasn't too unhealthy, as long as Stan was around -- my mother didn't care too much for Stan, so she avoided going over to their apartment too often, usually only stopping by when Stan was simonizing his car -- an activity which could take a full afternoon -- or when she ran out of food (somehow, after the divorce, my mother forgot how to operate a stove). But when Stan died a few years later, my mother and my grandmother were free to pick up where they had left off at the end of my mother's own dysfunctional childhood.

"She's getting nuts about your cousin Jason again."

"Ma, Jason is her grandson, and he's a drug addict, of course she gets upset about him," I replied, pointing out what would be obvious to anyone else. There was often a significant amount of grey area between what was obvious to anyone else, and what was obvious to my mother.

"But why does she have to get nuts!"

I stepped outside into the hallway, sensing that this was going to be a long and potentially voice-raising, hair-pulling conversation. Of course, the hair would be only my own, so once I got into the hall I cupped the phone between my ear and my shoulder, and sat on my hands. I was already treading the delicate line between a maturing hairline and male pattern baldness, and precautions needed to be taken.

While my mother ticked off a detailed list of the flaws of her mother (a pasttime with which I was intimately familiar), I felt Stan's absence more than ever. He was a natural boundary between them, inadvertently protecting them from the spiral of codependence, the bottom of which they still had not found after years of screaming matches and dueling insults. Unfortunately, his utility went unacknowledged while he was alive.

"He's such a cheap loser," my uncle complained about him repeatedly, as my mother vigorously agreed. My mother vigorously agreed with pretty much anything my uncle said, but especially when it came to Stan, who they both intensely disliked, though they usually had the good sense not to bring their distaste to my grandmother's attention. "I don't know what she sees in him."

"She's his slave," was my mother's usual reply. "It's a marriage of convenience, it's convenient for him."

And although I didn't dislike Stan myself -- save his occasional diatribe against my compulsive television viewing, and his odd competitiveness during shuffleboard -- even as a kid, I understood what they meant. My grandmother liked the opera, and reading classic literature, and debating about politics. Stan liked simonizing his car, and napping during the day. My grandmother was fashionable and glamorous (a trait she has not abandoned to this day -- she's probably the only 85 year old woman who doesn't wear reflective clothing). Stan wore his pants up to his chest, and refused to cut the little hair he had until my grandmother would bribe him with a lamb chop dinner. And even if she wasn't technically a slave -- Stan, like any other member of the family, would kowtow to her when the situation demanded -- their partnership did appear to be somewhat one-sided. My grandmother would cook the banana nut muffins, and Stan would eat them all himself.

When my uncle died, Stan didn't seem overly upset. Not that he was celebrating, either. He just seemed to observe the proceedings, like an outsider, not like a step-father or husband. I figured that the animosity between them had been less understated than I originally thought. But then again, maybe my uncle had been right. Maybe Stan and my grandmother were just too different for their marriage to be anything more than one of mostly convenience, occasional companionship, and frequent early-bird dinners.

I didn't see my grandmother much in the days immediately after my uncle died. We all stayed in his apartment for a week after he died, and we tried to console each other as best we could, but making each other feel better was not our forte. We were better at the opposite. The opposite doesn't require hugging, or touching, or closeness. It only requires a loud voice, and an intimate knowledge of profanities. So mostly we just stayed out of each other's way, because that was the most respectful thing we could do for one another at the time.

My grandmother and Stan slept in my uncle's bedroom, while the rest of us slept in the living room, making sure that there was at least four feet between each other. The night before the funeral, no one was saying anything at all. My mother sat by the window, painting and re-painting her nails, because none of the colors seemed just right. My sister talked on the phone in the kitchen with a friend from college, where she had found a family of her own, one that didn't need four feet of distance at all times. It seemed like a perfect time to catch up on a little television for me. When the television goes on, I go off.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find the remote control, and my uncle owned one of those televisions that are unoperable by human hands, the modern day version of the sword in the stone. So I went to my uncle's room to ask my grandmother where the remote was, since my grandmother usually had all the answers.

I knocked, and when no one answered, I opened the door. My grandmother laid on my uncle's bed, curled into a ball and sobbing quietly, while Stan laid next to her, stroking her hair. I had never seen my grandmother cry before. But while I was almost appalled by the scene -- how dare this woman, who just lost her only son, show such extreme emotion -- Stan's expression showed nothing except compassion. He didn't tell her to stop crying, or push her away, or pretend not to hear her. He didn't paint his nails, or talk on the phone with his friends, or mindlessly stare at the television. He just dabbed her eyes occasionally with a tissue, and laid next to her, pulling her closer with each sob. And she didn't protest. She just laid there, and let him take care of her, and her hand rested on his arm, like it was protecting her from something that was too big and too unimaginable to survive. But she survived it, and he survived it, because they survived it together.

I never told them what I had seen, and Stan passed away a few years later, leaving my grandmother to once again survive on her own. My mother still dropped occasional insults about him, whenever she ran out of other things to insult, but I stood up for him. I thought it was the least I could do, especially considering I had beaten him at our last-ever shuffleboard game.

And once again, I found myself outside Ethan's apartment, thinking about painted nails and strong arms and unacknowledged protectors in our lives.

"I just can't stand your grandmother when she's like this," my mother said, for the fifth time in the conversation. The conversation went on for a while longer, though it was more of a monologue from her side of the telephone with the occasional affirmation from my side of the telephone, which is all my mother really wanted anyway. After a cursory inquiry into my life -- "so you've been feeling ok?" "yes" -- my mother had to go, because she and my grandmother were going to a Mexican spa the next morning. I thought about alerting the Mexican authorities, but didn't want to be the inadvertent cause of more illegal immigration when the spa's employees fled toward the border.

By the time I came back inside the apartment, Ethan was already in bed. The lights were off, and he was laying with his back to the room, which was fine with me. Mark and Lauren were probably just beginning a post-coital walk down memory lane -- "remember when I proposed to you, honey?" "you proposed? I thought I did!" giggle giggle -- but I had had enough of the miserable, banana nut-filled day.

I stripped off my clothes, which were still wet, and quietly crawled into bed, trying not to wake Ethan in the process. I ran through the conversation with my mother in my mind again, trying to find the spots where I could have made everything better, if I had only said this, or I could have helped her, if only I had said that, or I could have brought my uncle back to life or cured my mother's manic depression or erased my entire childhood in one fell swoop, if only I had done the right thing. And as hard as I tried to remain still, I trembled slightly, as if my body was working overtime to expel a septic infection. To the casual observer, the trembling was almost imperceptible, perhaps the result of a slight chill in the room.

Ethan, though, knew better. His eyes opened slightly, and he tilted his head towards me. I turned to face the wall, unable to meet his gaze. The trembling worsened, so that the whole bed was shaking. I was ashamed at my own weakness, and my shame only made me tremble more.

"It'll be ok," he said softly, half-asleep, as he turned over and pulled himself close to me. His arm found its way across my chest, and in a moment, all the toothbrushes in his cabinet, and magazines in his television stand, and pictures on his walls, they all dropped away, so there was nothing else in the world except his arm, and my hand, and his breath on the back of my neck.

My trembling subsided, and I began to doze off, wondering whether Mark and Lauren had finally figured out who had proposed to who. And as I fell asleep, laying in his arms, I couldn't even remember the name of the movie we had seen that night.

We were on a break!!!

2008-09-11T23:38:00.006-04:00

Who can tell me the source of that quote? There's no prize if you can, except my respect, which really isn't worth much at all. In fact, you're probably better off without it.

Anyway, just wanted to tell all of you the same thing that I tell my mother during our monthly phone calls -- don't worry, I'm still alive. New job, new city, and 230 panic attacks later, I think I can start writing again. So I'll be back soon with a new story.

And like I tell my mother during our monthly calls, if you make me feel guilty for being MIA lately, I'll put you in a home.

XOXO,
Jonah

Golden Apples...and Teddy Bears

2008-08-18T14:45:00.002-04:00

Don't get your hopes up...this is not a full story, just a little anecdote I thought I'd share with you all...I just sent it around to the attorneys at my firm on my last day here (as you know, I don't write about work, but just to relieve some of the guilt you've been making me feel at not posting for a while, fyi I'm changing jobs and moving cities...tomorrow...so I've been somewhat of a decapitated chicken lately). Hope this holds you all over till the next one is done!

**************************

A few weeks ago I was having dinner with my friend Lisa, who is somewhat older than me (but don't tell her I said that, as I'm pretty sure her Pilates-trained arms could turn me into a pretzel) and very accomplished in her career. It's not important what her career is; suffice to say, getting to where she is today was a risky venture and her success was not at all assured. After a drink or two had loosened my tongue a bit -- it doesn't take much alcohol to do that these days, not that it usually takes any alcohol to make me ask vaguely inappropriate questions -- I asked her how she dealt with the fear of failure in pursuing her dreams (or, in my vaguely inappropriate way, "how the ____ did you get where you are today without freaking out everyday of your life?").

"When I was 28, my grandfather passed away," she said, in between bites of clams casino (apparently her career was not the only area in which Lisa preferred to take risks). "In his will, he left me a painting that had been in his basement for decades. When I took it to get appraised, the appraiser told me that it was an original Picasso, and worth several million dollars."

At the time, Lisa was working in a job she didn't like very much, living in a city she didn't care for, and looking forward to a life that, while not entirely unpleasant, was not what she really wanted.

"But when I found out that I owned a painting worth several million dollars, all that changed. I quit my job, moved to a new city, and started a new life," she said, now ordering two different types of cheesecake, both for her to eat alone as I had forgotten to take my Lactaid that morning. I worried a bit how the two pieces of cheesecake would sit with a large helping of clams casino, but she seemed to know what she was doing.

Lisa continued her story, telling me about how she struggled for several years before she broke through in her new career.

"It was tough, sure," she said, again in between bites of cheesecake, "but knowing that I had that painting under my bed made it possible. I never worried, because I knew that if worst came to worst, I'd be ok."

After several minutes of my berating her for keeping a multi-million dollar painting under her bed ("have you ever heard of burglars? fires? alien invasions?"), Lisa finished dessert and called for the check.

"Well, thank god for that painting," I said, marvelling at her apparent good health after the binge fest I had just witnessed. I also thought to myself how the story sounded somewhat smug -- anyone can take chances when they have something like a multi-million fortune to fall back on -- but luckily I had stopped drinking by that point, and so retained a modicum of tact and kept my mouth shut. Still, I found myself supremely jealous at Lisa's good luck, and had begun to settle into a kind of simmering discontent as we walked out of the restaurant.

"Yeah, but a few years ago I took the painting to another appraiser," she said, as we stopped for ice cream (or, she stopped for ice cream and I watched her eat it), "a world-famous, Antiques Roadshow-kind of bigwig -- and he said the painting was a forgery, and it was actually worth $50." She laughed, as chocolate ice cream dribbled down her shirt. "Imagine if I had known that years ago, who knows where I'd be right now?"

When I got home that night, after looking up the recipe for clams casino on the internet (she really seemed to enjoy it), I thought about Lisa's story, and the security she thought she had that never really existed, except in her own head. Except, that's really the only place security can exist, because at any moment you can find out that the original Picasso under your bed was really just a forgery.

I went into my bedroom and found my most prized possession, a teddy bear that my grandmother had bought for me when I was 2 years old.

"This teddy bear is worth $4 million," I repeated to myself several times. I said it so many times, I started to believe it. And now each morning I get up and say "this teddy bear is worth $4 million," and each morning I convince myself a little more that it's true.

May you all live like you have a teddy bear stuffed with gold on top of your bed, or an original Picasso under it. But if you do have an original Picasso, keep it in a safe deposit box. There's calculated risk, and then there's stupidity.

Good Things Come To Those Who Wait...

2008-08-05T23:23:00.004-04:00

and better things come to those who don't.

Unfortunately, you're all just going to have to, since I'm only about a quarter done with my latest foray into the disturbing depths of my subconscious. Eventually I expect my subconscious will rebel, and my roommate will come home from work one day and find me sprawled out on the kitchen floor naked and spooning a life-size Lucille Ball blow-up doll. Which is not much different from how he usually finds me.

Until then, though, I'll keep plugging away, and because nothing in life is free unless you're a kleptomaniac, each of you can tell ten friends about my website. I'm particularly partial to any friends with connections to the publishing world. And to answer your next question, no, I'm not ashamed to be so blatantly self-serving. If I was, you all wouldn't be here in the first place. "Because I have no shame" is not just a slogan -- it's a way of life.

Bare Bones

2008-07-23T00:21:00.007-04:00

This is a very short story, just a blip in my mind. If you haven't read it, the recent, longer one is below.

*************************************

"I don't want to see you anymore."

I quickly scanned the table for the steak knife, suspecting that someone had accidentally stuck it in my chest and was currently swirling it around my insides. But it was still there, sitting next to my half-eaten salmon. It was only offered as grilled on my menu, but they broiled it for me. And it was offered with mashed potatoes and string beans, but I got it with french fries and broccoli. But the broccoli was only offered sauteed, so I asked them to steam it, which they did. And the lemon wine sauce was on the side too. Of course. Always on the side.

"You're just...too much for me."

We had been dating for a few months. We met at an Oscar party, which is pretty much a Superbowl party for homosexuals. Except instead of heros and beer we have asparagus tips and white wine. Steamed asparagus tips, of course.

"It shouldn't be this hard."

I absentmindedly unfolded my napkin, forgetting that I had stuffed some fish bones into it. The bones fell across the table, mixing in with my food. I tried to nonchalantly sweep them back into the napkin, but the napkin was covered with ketchup which then stuck to my hands. In fact, my entire plate was covered with ketchup. Pointless, really, to force the kitchen to make me a special dinner when I just covered everything in ketchup. Sauteed and steamed broccoli both taste the same, smothered in ketchup. I read somewhere that ketchup is the most popular condiment because it contains all seven types of flavor, including the elusive umame. Some of us just like to have it all.

"I don't know, maybe it's me."

I nodded in agreement, not really agreeing. As far as I could tell, the common denominator in all my relationships was me, not him.

"My mother was very hard on me."

By this point, my stomach was starting to churn, and I felt vaguely like I was about to vomit. Not quite enough to make me excuse myself from the table, especially since he seemed to be in the middle of an important point. There was something he needed to get off of his chest, and I owed it to him to sit it out, and nod at the right moments, so he wouldn't feel so alone.

He spent several minutes talking about his mother, and how she handed him off to the nanny whenever he would cry. That didn't sound so horrible to me. Mary Poppins was a nanny, and she made cough syrup taste like candy and sang her kids to sleep. My mother never sang me to sleep. She didn't care much for music. She liked one song by Peter, Paul, and Mary, and that was it.

"And my father was never around."

He'd already told me all about his father, on our last date. He spent hours describing the pain of having an absentee father. Mostly I nodded, but I asked a few questions too, so he'd know I was interested. Later that night, while he was falling asleep, I told him how my own absentee father had left pornography behind in the basement after he moved out, which I considered a misguided attempt at sexual education.

"Oh, your parents were divorced too?"

I nodded, and he went back to sleep.

"My last boyfriend was abusive."

That wasn't a surprise. I had met his last boyfriend at a party once. We didn't talk much, but he just looked angry. I wondered whether he became an angry person because he looked angry, or whether he looked like an angry person because he was one.

"No one understands me."

He started crying. I gave him a tissue from my pocket to wipe his eyes. It was a used tissue, but I had only used it to spit out my tic-tac, so it was like new. It smelled like mint. I thought that would make him happy. He liked mint. He liked mint, and Liza Minnelli, and skyscrapers. His birthday was coming up soon, and I had already bought him his gift, a rare recording of Liza at Carnegie Hall. I'd give it to him anyway. It would make him happy. Like the mint tissue.

"Everyone wants me to be something I'm not."

Yes, I would definitely give him that Liza recording. I liked Liza too, but he liked her more.

"I don't know who I am."

My body relaxed a bit, or perhaps I had become accustomed to the pain. It didn't take too long anymore. He signaled for the waiter to bring the check. There was still half a piece of salmon on my plate, but it was covered in ketchup, so he probably couldn't see it, and I wasn't hungry anyway.

"And you seem kind of, well, like, vulnerable. I need someone strong."

He coughed slightly, and I worried for a moment he might pull some of his stitches. A few weeks before he had been in the hospital with appendicitis. He had been admitted on Friday night, but didn't call me until Saturday.

"Why didn't you call me last night," I asked him, already e-mailing my friends to cancel our plans for that night. We had tickets to The Lion King. The music is slightly cheesy, but you can't go wrong with dancing puppets, especially when those puppets are tall enough to crush a Winnebago.

"Because I knew you'd come last night, and I didn't want to see anyone last night" he replied, in between short, jagged breaths. Within twenty minutes I was standing outside the hospital, but he wouldn't let me come up. His family was visiting, and they didn't know about me, or about him, or about us. So I wandered around the city for four hours and bought him various items that I thought might make him feel better. He didn't know who he was, but I did.

"I need to focus on me right now."

The waiter brought the check. I reached for it, as usual. I made a lot more money than he did, it was only fair that I pay. Plus, we were at my favorite restaurant, which he didn't particularly care for, but agreed to because we had gone to his favorite restaurant the last four times. I didn't blame him for that either. The restaurant wasn't particularly good, but it was one of the few that had shoe-string french fries. My father made shoe-string french fries, before he left, while my mother played Peter, Paul, and Mary on the stereo.

"And I've kind of been seeing someone else."

The waiter started clearing the plates, giving me a funny look while he delicately placed the ketchup-soaked napkin on my plate. We talked a bit about the new guy. It felt good to ask him questions again, even about that. They had met at a bowling party. The attendant had switched their shoes. Prada, size 11, Gucci, size 10.5. Hilarity ensued. They hadn't been out yet, but he was optimistic. I was too. He sounded like a really nice guy.

"You know, I feel better," he said, smiling. I smiled back, because that's what I do.

He got up from the table, and I touched his hand lightly. He immediately pulled his hand away. He was clearly uncomfortable enough, without my neediness getting between him and the front door.

"I'm glad," I replied. He'd feel even better next week, when I gave him the Liza recording. He could listen to it with his new boyfriend. That's two people I could make happy, with just one gift. Really, a net positive.

I watched him get in his car through the restaurant window. He offered to wait for me, but he didn't really want to, so I didn't want him to. The waiter had missed a few stray bones. I gathered them up and deposited them in my water glass.

Another three months. Another ketchup-stained napkin. Another steak knife in my chest. But all in all, not a bad evening, as far as these things go.

I paid the check, wiped the ketchup off of my cheeks, and left.

A Hair's Breadth

2008-07-21T02:08:00.006-04:00

The devil does not exist. I am absolutely certain of that, as certain as I am that tube socks have more than one purpose. Over the past thirty years, I have repeatedly closed my eyes and offered the devil my soul for bargain basement prices that only an idiot would have passed up. If the devil existed, I would have been a member of the Partridge Family. If the devil existed, I would have had my first sexual experience with Tony Danza. But most of all, if the devil existed, I wouldn't be losing my hair.

Many people would benefit from a pact between myself and the devil to replace my lost hair follicles. My friends, for one, who I have often kept waiting at movie theaters, restaurants, and other locations while I spend hours manipulating my hair into unnatural shapes to mask the receding hairline. And then there's my employer, who financially suffers while I sit at my desk and stare in a plastic mirror that I ripped off of the Crest White Strips container. The list goes on from there -- drivers who I've sideswiped because I was checking out my hair in the rearview mirror; dates who I canceled on because I couldn't quite get the third hair from the left to curl appropriately; my mother, just because I blame her when I can't find someone else to blame.

But the person who stands to benefit most from the existence of the devil is my hair stylist. Or, I should say hair stylists. Over the previous several years I had left several of them in my wake, repeatedly disappointed by their failure to validate my existence.

"So what are we doing today?" Wayne was my newest victim. My last stylist, Blue (actually her real name) had completely misunderstood her mission, the result of which required me to wear a baseball cap for three weeks, even when I was alone in my apartment. The only time I took it off was when I slept, and even then I only took it off because my head got too hot in the middle of the night. Otherwise I would have sewn the hat directly to my scalp.

Wayne probably expected a short, "a little off the sides" answer. Unfortunately, I was several years past "a little off the sides." Since graduating from law school, my hairline had receded into a noticeable U-shape. It started off slowly enough, with a hair or two clinging to my comb each time I brushed, causing a slight bit of panic that was easily dismissed, at least after half a Xanax and some boxed wine.

Initially, I chalked up my hair concern to paranoia, which wasn't too difficult, seeing as about half of my thoughts can be chalked up to paranoia. But then the deluge began, and no amount of anti-anxiety pills could shield my eyes from the thin layer of dead hair that covered my apartment. At first I tried just putting them back on my head, figuring that maybe they would reabsorb into my scalp and be reborn as wholly new hairs. When that didn't work, I resorted to expensive shampoos made out of exotic ingredients like beetle juice and bull semen, and then to even more expensive medications, which to my dismay, were not covered by insurance. Every time I went to fill the prescription, I received odd looks from pharmacists, one of whom actually asked me if "this stuff really works."

"Well, if it doesn't, let's hope my insurance covers the anti-depressants," I replied.

Indeed, neither my pharmacist nor my friends were particularly concerned with the disaster area developing on my head. My friends made vaguely placating comments, like "that should be your biggest problem," and "Patrick Stewart makes it work." But I didn't buy it. Captain Picard piloted a Galaxy-class starship. I couldn't even operate a blender without adult supervision.

I walked Wayne through my carefully designed plan for masking this latest cruel trick of nature. His eyes glazed over several times during my instructions, cutting his tip in half each time.

"Now I want this clump of hairs to fall delicately across my face, while this clump should be combed backwards to ameliorate any comb-over effect." I motioned to various parts of my head, frustrated at Wayne's flip attitude towards this clearly grave situation. Maybe this is why the Bay of Pigs had failed. Uncommitted hair stylists.

"And this is very important -- you see this hair?" I said, pointing to a single hair laid across my forehead. "Under no circumstances should this hair be cut. This hair should remain exactly the same length. Otherwise the whole illusion will be ruined."

Nonplussed by the potential lawsuit sitting in front of him, Wayne began to cut, simultaneously filling me in on the sordid details of his life. He didn't seem to want my opinion on anything; he just wanted to talk. I indulged him by grunting unintelligible sounds at various points in his stories.

"So my boyfriend moved out last week, and I say, good riddance!"

"Mrble."

"My Schnauzer gave birth last week. And we thought she was a boy!"

"Rwndor."

"I got tickets to Cher's Farewell Tour. I know she says every tour is her farewell tour, but this time I think it's true!"

"Tuifrb."

Over the next half-hour, I tried to distract myself from the goings on behind me, afraid that if Wayne made a wrong move I might not be able to control my reaction. There were too many potentially dangerous objects around to take that risk. Everyone has their boiling point, and the combination of poor customer service and screwing up my hair was likely beyond mine. I could barely control myself when a waiter mistakenly refilled my Sprite with water.

"...I really think Aladdin is the sexiest Disney cartoon, don't you..."

"Breeu."

Haircuts weren't always an unpleasant experience. When I was six years old, my mother took me for my first official haircut. Previously my haircuts had been DIY affairs involving my mother, a pair of office scissors, and the bathroom mirror. It'd be charitable to attribute her entrepreneurial attitude to an overprotective nature, but more likely she was just trying to save a buck. In terms of childhood milestones, this one was shortly after my first tricycle, and shortly before my first enema. Most six-year-olds are not given enemas, but they certainly count as a milestone for the small number who are. I was the only kindergarten student who could spell suppository.

Eventually, either because my mother grew tired of our mother-son bonding time, or because my growing hair became increasingly unmanageable, she finally gave in and took me to her salon for a real haircut. Even though I was only six years old at the time, I have a phenomenal memory for the events of my childhood -- a blessing in some instances (the first time I met Miss Piggy, my first orgasm (not unrelated events)) and a curse in others (most family vacations, the aforementioned constipation debacle). Though I don't actually remember my birth, I'm still pretty sure I could find my way around a vaginal canal, if it ever became necessary.

My mother's salon was in a strip mall, sandwiched between a supermarket and a pet store. Though we lived in a predominantly gentile town, you wouldn't know it from the clientele in Ruth's Hair Plus. There wasn't a nail in the whole establishment shorter than a lion's claw. If an adult male had walked in, he would have been castrated on the spot. But given my tender age, curly blond locks, and large Bambi-like eyes, the ladies who nosh didn't just tolerate me; they adored me.

"Oh Sharon," one woman exclaimed. "You didn't tell me you had such a beautiful son!"

Though I don't remember my mother's exact response, it was likely something dismissive, as it did not fit neatly within her preconceived notions of my place in the universe. My sister was the pretty one, and I was the smart one, the two traits being mutually exclusive, at least in my house.

"He's gifted you know," my mother said, redirecting the conversation to a more comfortable topic. "Go on, Jonah. Show them how smart you are," she insisted, pushing me forward into a throng of blue-haired ladies. I wasn't sure how to go about honoring her request. I didn't see any chairs to stack, no one was playing hide-and-go-seek, and spelling suppository might have gotten more curious looks than admiration.

Fortunately, before my mother could force me to explain the Pythagorean theorem, the stylist whisked me up into a high chair and started cutting. Before I knew it, my wild curls had been chopped into something actually presentable, prompting oohs and aahs from the other customers, most of whom had gathered around to watch what appeared to be a monumental event. And no one seemed to mind that I hadn't said a word, or done anything remarkable, since I walked in the door. Just my very presence was enough to make them happy. My presence, and a cute pair of overalls.

"Jonah, you are so adorable!" one woman gushed, kissing me on the cheek with such passion I was scrubbing lipstick marks off my face for hours after. "And those overalls are just fabulous!"

And so I was passed along to at least a dozen women, each of whom bestowed a special gift on me -- a lollipop, a junior mint, a piece of bubble gum. One lady even had tootsie rolls in her pocketbook, which instantly made her my favorite person in the salon, my mother included. Even though I didn't reject their generous gifts, I didn't need candy to make that day any more special. After five years of being essentially invisible except when I'd bring home my report card, this dozen or so little old ladies gave me hope for the future. Maybe in my house I was the "smart" one, but to the rest of the world I was a great beauty. I had the lipstick-smeared cheeks to prove it.

Still, there was some truth to my mother's perspective. My sister was indeed quite pretty, which had been objectively confirmed by her winning second prize in a pre-teen modeling contest. The prize for semi-finalists consisted of a hair dryer, a short but potentially profitable shopping spree at the Limited, and the opportunity to participate in a runway show at the Massapequa mall.

Though I wasn't permitted to go with her on the shopping spree -- they didn't have little boy clothes, but I was curiously interested in the opportunity regardless -- I did attend the runway show. The whole event was so glamorous, I was certain my sister was headed for fame and fortune. While my parents and I sat in folding chairs in the mall foyer, I watched several adults prepare my sister for her big moment. One adult painted her nails; another combed her hair; another applied a gratuitous amount of blush to her cheeks, even by Long Island standards. Then they whisked her even further behind the glorious plastic screens that separated the beautiful from the ordinary. When I finally saw her again, she was dressed in an off-the-shoulder, lime green summer dress. The red light from the Radio Shack sign over her head gave her an exotic, sophisticated look, which, combined with her bare shoulders, outshone any of the professional models walking along side her. Instantly she went from being my sometime protector, sometime tormentor, to my hero. I clapped louder and longer for her than anyone else.

After the show, my parents looked prouder than I had ever seen them, even prouder than the day I spelled suppository.

"You looked beautiful," my mother gushed in a rare expression of praise. "Now, if we could just do something about that nose."

My father gave my sister a hug; not the half-assed, one pat on the back, type of hug he usually gave me, but a full bear hug. Years later he tearfully gave her the same hug when she left for college, shortly before he left for a new life, without giving me a hug, not even a half-assed one.

Later that night in my bedroom, I mimicked my sister's runway walk in my bedroom, figuring that I should practice for my eventual day in the sun -- after all, my sister and I both had the same cheekbones, the same doe eyes, and I didn't see much difference between our shoulders. Unfortunately, my mother caught me mid-swish, and charged into my room, half-enraged, half-disgusted.

"Boys don't need to be pretty," she proclaimed, yanking my hands from my hips. "You can have a pretty wife."

The next day she signed me up for peewee football. From then on, I spent half of my days faking various injuries and wondering exactly what my cup was supposed to protect, and the other half being subjected to a barrage of IQ tests to prove my supposed "advanced" intelligence. Apparently I did well on the tests, because when the results came back my mother was just as happy as she had been at my sister's runway show.

"See, you are gifted," she said, leaving me to wonder whether being "gifted" meant I would be wrapped in Christmas paper and given away to the neighbors with next year's fruitcakes. "Now stop picking your nose, smart boys don't pick their noses."

But she was wrong. Smart boys pick their noses. They pick their noses, and hide behind books, and are seldom heard, rarely seen, and never touched. Smart boys are kept at a distance, respected only in the shadows and only for what they can do for you. Fathers leave smart boys alone with their crazy mothers, to teach themselves how to shave and how to tie a tie and how to pick up the pieces. And mothers expect smart boys to fix the television set and become lawyers and save them from themselves.

The day at my mother's salon was a respite from unasked for intelligence tests and ill-fitting jock straps, however brief.

"Bring him back soon, Sharon!" one lady called after us as we left the salon. Oh, we'd be back soon, if I had any say in the matter, which of course I did not. The next month my mother found a cheaper establishment closer to our house, a barber shop whose clientele was curiously unimpressed by my overalls and winning smile. From that point on, whenever my mother would take me food shopping, I longed to escape from the shopping cart and run to the pet store, where I could pet the puppies, and the salon, where I could be the puppy, where I could be seen and heard and loved without being expected to give anything in return, except a smile.

But by the time I was old enough to choose my own hair salon, my puppy days were long gone. There were no "oohs" and "aahs" from the other customers today. Just the whirr of the cappuccino maker and the faint lisp of my stylist. It's quiet there, in the shadows, even after twenty-five years.

"And we're all done," Wayne declared proudly. I quickly removed the apron and stood up, avoiding all eye contact with myself, which was difficult given that I was in a hair salon with wall-to-wall mirrors. "Don't you want to look?" Wayne asked.

"No, thank you," I replied. "I trust you." But I didn't trust me, and the scissors were still within arm's length.

Wayne followed me to the register, pointing as we went at the entirely expensive and entirely unnecessary products lining the walls, each of which promised in no uncertain terms to replace my lost hair. Of course, I bought everything he showed me, regardless of its ridiculous purpose. That's what credit cards are for, after all. To replace hair, and cloud judgment.

As I walked out, a strikingly handsome man entered the salon. I didn't look directly at him at first, but I knew he was strikingly handsome. You just know when pretty people are there, even when you don't. I didn't want to give him the satisfaction of yet another salivating admirer, but my eyes wandered up towards his. Surprisingly, when I looked up at him, he was already looking at me.

"Don't I know you?" he asked, holding the door open for me. I doubted it. People like him didn't know me, even when they did. "You work upstairs, right?" He stuck his hand out, smiling. His teeth were bright white, and something told me they didn't come from something he had bought at CVS. His hair was well-coiffed, prompting me to wonder why exactly he was coming to the salon, unless he was there to be a hair model, or the salon was instituting a go-go boy night.

He held his gaze just a moment too long, thereby revealing his true intention. But it wasn't my intention.

"No, I don't," I lied, and pushed my way through the door without thanking him for holding it open. He didn't need my gratitude or my hand, or anything else that a balding attorney with three-year-old bags under his eyes could give him. His life had been full of handshakes and coy touches on his shoulder and bear hugs. His father had stayed, and his mother hadn't fallen apart, and he hadn't been shoved in lockers as a teenager or ignored at gay clubs as an adult. He didn't sleep alone every night with a teddy bear pressed against his back, just so he could feel some warmth under the covers. And most of all, he still had every hair on his head.

When I got back to my office, I took the plastic mirror out of my drawer and finally screwed up the courage to look at my reflection. I didn't instantly scream out in horror, which was a step up from the previous haircut. And I didn't race to the bathroom to examine each hair in minute detail, or decide to call in sick the next day while I shopped online for toupees. Perhaps I had found the right stylist. Or perhaps my hair was just as bad as it had always been, and my standards had lowered. Either way, I was satisfied enough not to march back to the salon and demand my tip back.

I took out my newly purchased hair products and began testing them. One particular hair spray made the grandiose claim that it could "turn the clock back" on the balding process, which I doubted, unless the spray was somehow linked to a flying Delorean. But I didn't entirely discount the possibility. Funny how anyone can fall for an empty promise, when it suits them.

Deciding to give the devil one last chance to buy my immortal soul, I closed my eyes and began spraying. Maybe, if I wished really hard, the spray would live up to its promise, and when I opened my eyes my hair would magically reappear. Maybe if I wished really hard, the bags under my eyes would disappear, my shoulders would broaden, and I would grow four inches. Maybe if I wished really hard, my father would have hugged me, and my mother wouldn't have fallen apart.

And maybe if I wished really really hard, I would have been the pretty one. It might cost me my soul, but no one ever said beauty was cheap.

Moment of Zen

2008-06-30T13:29:00.001-04:00

A piece of advice if you ever have a cavity:

Do not try to eat an empanada for lunch when you still have a little bit of Novocaine in your mouth because then you might think you have chewed up and swallowed all of your empanada when you really haven't and the empanada chunks will be just hanging out in your cheeks making you look like a squirrel.

--my friend Helen. Clearly the reason we are friends is obvious.

How I toiled!

2008-06-20T13:55:00.002-04:00

For three comments (besides my own)? Oh woe is me, woe is me.

I suspect this is payback for my not commenting on anyone else's blog in the past several weeks. Or else my therapist WAS right, and you all have better things to do than read my rambling non-sensical musings on air travel, virtual reality, and soup cans. Perhaps I should have appealed to the lowest common denominator in you, and written about sex instead. That would certainly keep my attention.

Now, if you will excuse me, I have to go make an emergency appointment with my therapist. I hope she works Sundays.

Hands Free

2008-06-19T01:30:00.015-04:00

Dearest reader,

You might recognize a few pieces of this from my previous piece, Lend Me A Hand. This wasn't my attempt to cut corners by publishing regurgitated prose. I liked pieces of that story, but it wasn't working as a whole. But don't be surprised if you find a few pieces of that story in future stories as well. But since I'm cannabalizing my own work already, and it's only a few more steps to pure plagiarism, enjoy the originality while you can.

-JKH

*******************************************************

A few weekends ago, I spent the day at Reagan International Airport (or National Airport, depending on your political inclinations). I wasn't going anywhere, and I wasn't meeting anyone there. When visitors fly into town, I graciously provide them with highly detailed public transportation directions. It's not like the trip will be faster if I'm there, and why should we both suffer when only one of us has to?

Alas, there wasn't going to be any great reunions with long-lost relatives that particular day at Reagan International, which was fine with me, as I'd rather any lost relatives remain lost. Instead, I trekked to the airport as part of a self-imposed mental health program. Granted, these days spending time at the airport causes more mental health problems than it cures, but the cause and the cure are one and the same when you have a flying phobia.

I haven’t flown in years. I hated flying before it was fashionable to hate flying, back in the days when stewardess was still a politically correct term, and a boarding pass didn't come with a cattle prod. I was, as usual, ahead of my time. These days, a fear of flying is one of those convenient personality quirks that you use to avoid family reunions, or trot out at dinner parties to fill the uncomfortable silences.

“I had the worst flight last week to Nashville,” you might say, to a sea of nodding heads. “I refused to buckle my seat belt, and the flight attendant actually slapped me!”

But for me, flying isn’t just a minor annoyance, like Kathie Lee Gifford, or those soup cans with the pull tab that always break off in your hand, thereby defeating their entire purpose. Of all my irrational fears -- spiders, heights, ear hair -- flying is the most intense. Just hearing the words “frequent flyer” or “Mile High Club” is enough to give me the shakes. Although joining the latter is a slight incentive to getting over my fear. Sex in a Greyhound bus bathroom isn't nearly as classy.

In the beginning I tried to attack my fear with therapy, the first line of defense for both Jews and gentiles in Alcoholics Anonymous. One therapist tried to induce panic attacks to help me desensitize to the feeling of anxiety.

“Breathe with me,” she instructed. “We’ll breathe slow at first, and then speed up, and after a minute or two you will hyperventilate and panic.”

It seemed to me we were drawing close to the boundaries of legitimate therapy here. I didn't fully grasp the purpose of instigating panic attacks in someone with a panic disorder. Do therapists routinely treat violent sociopaths by handing them a meat cleaver and a puppy?

Luckily, an hour's worth of hyperventilating failed to trigger a panic attack, which was unsurprising since I usually spent half my day hyperventilating anyway. The only consolation was that I got to watch the therapist turn blue. I refused to pay her for wasting my time with that nonsense. She referred me to a collection agency, which, ironically, gave me a panic attack.

Next I tried virtual reality therapy, which had the added benefit of making me feel technologically advanced. The words "virtual therapy" conjured up images in my head of automatic can openers and flying cars that fold into your briefcase. As a child, I felt a special kinship with the hippest of cartoon families, the Jetsons, who seemed to live in a world of fantastic possibilities. Not like those backwoods, dinosaur-riding Flinstones. Seriously, what kind of psychopath wears a bone in her hair?

Unfortunately, I was thoroughly disappointed with the experience. I expected a high-tech, 21st century system operated by animatronic robots. Instead, a frumpy middle-aged therapist fit me with a pair of goggles, cranked up a machine bigger than a Yugo, and strapped me to an old airplane chair. As the machine whirred to life, a dull, lifeless two dimensional image of an airplane flickered into and out of view. My first generation Atari presented a more realistic image.

“Do I get a bag of peanuts with this?” I asked, considering whether it was a good idea to mock someone who had tied you to a chair. I have a tendency to annoy therapists. I use humor as a defense mechanism, making it particularly difficult for therapists to learn anything about me, other than that I use humor as a defense mechanism.

“So your mother would chase you around the house with scissors. How did that make you feel?”

“Knock knock.”

Suddenly, the chair started rattling, apparently in an effort to simulate turbulence, but the feeling was closer to a vibrating washing machine (not altogether unpleasant, of course, but the goal was not to remind me of my last date). After a few minutes I got bored. The therapist came back in the room to check on me.

“So tell me, what’s your anxiety level at now?”

“Zero.”

“Zero? But you’re on an airplane!”

“No, I’m not. I’m sitting in your office. The graphics on this thing are horrible. I can hear your secretary talking about American Idol. This chair smells. And where are my peanuts?”

Fortunately insurance paid for these sessions. Otherwise I’d have another collection agency after me.

Over time, I've learned to work around my fear. It's not all that difficult, really, especially these days, when even sane people avoid flying as often as possible. If I need to go somewhere far away for an important occasion, like a wedding, or Cher's fourteenth farewell tour, I take trains. I usually just meet my fellow travelers at our destination, though occasionally I try to get them to take the train with me. They rarely agree. When my friend Brandon and I were planning a trip to the West Coast, I suggested that we take the train from New York.

"You want to go to Los Angeles by train?" he asked in an offended tone, like I had just suggested that he voluntarily contract gonorrhea. "Yeah, it might be fun!" I replied, poorly feigning excitement. Insincerity is not one of my talents, an especially problematic characteristic during my brief stint as a Baby Gap sales associate. If your baby looks fat in horizontal stripes, I'm not going to tell you otherwise.

I showed him the brochure, featuring a happy puppy perched atop an upper berth holding an Amtrak ticket. I figured no one can resist a happy puppy brochure, but Brandon wasn't convinced. He flew to Los Angeles without me, and I decided not to spend three days alone on a train, which might have driven me more insane than I already was. While he was gone, I watched that movie where Los Angeles is destroyed by a volcano. I didn't really want Brandon to be crushed by a lava flow, but I have a thing for poetic justice.

As a kid, I actually enjoyed flying, partly because of the in-flight peanuts -- we only had peanuts in butter form at home -- and partly because my usual destination was my grandparents' home in Florida, which meant Disneyworld, lox cream cheese, and a week away from my parents. It also meant a week with my cantankerous step-grandfather, who would probably force me to simonize his car and play shuffleboard, but that was a small price to pay for breakfast with Mickey.

But as my body aged, my mind became more anxious, as if baldness and bravery were inversely correlated. For every hair that I lost, a new fear emerged. Crowds, heights, eating at Olive Garden -- no activity was immune from obsession. I'm not sure if a receding hairline induces fear or vice versa, but the medical community should lace Propecia with Xanax. That pill would sell like hotcakes. Somewhere along the road, half-way between a Ceaser cut and a comb-over, flying went from exciting to unfathomable.

At first, the developing phobia was frustrating, like I was voluntarily placing a 200-mile leash around my neck. There was still so much of the world I hadn't seen, at least, outside of the Epcot World Pavilion, which is a pale comparator. You can't fool me, Disney Corporation. The real Eiffel Tower is not made of cardboard.

But over the years, my disappointment in not being able to travel to exotic lands (sorry Canada, maple syrup and Mounties do not an exotic destination make) was steadily replaced with more pressing concerns, like whether plucking a nose hair will result in two growing back in its place, and any residual disappointment has been consciously repressed. The mind has an amazing capacity for rationalization and self-denial, a lesson that I learned years ago when my father found a charge to a gay phone sex line on the monthly long-distance bill.

"Must have been a wrong number," he said, quickly whipping out his checkbook and conveniently ignoring the fact that the call lasted sixteen minutes.

But coming from a family in which an emotion didn't exist unless it was communicated -- most often in screaming bloody murder form -- I was never quite able to completely repress this feeling that my life was missing something. Unlike the other missing elements in my life (functional parents, a full head of hair, a digestive system that can process corn), this one was entirely self-made. I couldn't blame anyone else for the leash I had put around my own neck. I had the time, the wherewithal (after several years of working at a corporate law firm, I had wherewithal coming out my ears), and the desire to travel. Still, I couldn't bring myself to face that big tin can in the sky.

Occasionally, the issue comes up at my weekly therapy session with my social worker, Nancy, most often when I come across a beautiful travel destination that is only accessible by air, thereby triggering my self-flagellation anew. Nancy has a last name, but I never learned it, choosing instead to remember her simply as Nancy. Something about a woman with just one name makes her seem powerful and dynamic, like Madonna, or Jackee, either of whom could successfully plum the depths of my psyche. The same theory doesn't apply to men with just one name. I don’t want Fabio asking me about my overbearing mother.

"So why do you hate flying?" Somehow Nancy had managed to actually learn something about me apart from my affection for knock-knock jokes.

"The people," I replied, fiddling with the expired passport I still carried around in my backpack. It hadn't been stamped since 1999, when I travelled Europe with my friend Beverly, in an attempt to become more worldly and sophisticated. It didn’t take. I still prefer non-carbonated water and good hygiene. "Being trapped in a tiny space with hundreds of people freaks me out."

"Why are you afraid of being trapped with people?" she asked, dabbing her eyes with lubricant drops. She claimed that she needed to constantly rewet her eyes because of her allergies, but I noticed that she usually took out the drops when our conversations veered towards disturbing territory. The day I told her about my Miss Piggy obsession, I thought she was going to drown in saline solution.

"Embarrassing myself." I glanced at a picture of her son in his college graduation gown -- or, someone I assumed was her son -- on the desk behind her. He was very attractive. Staring at his picture was probably the reason I had stuck around long enough to get past the knock-knock jokes. "Or worse. What if I freak out on the plane, and they think I'm a terrorist or something?"

Drop, drop.

"You don't look like a terrorist."

"That's very narrow-minded, isn't it?"

Drop, drop.

"So what would make you feel better about flying?"

"Well, maybe if I could fly by myself, in a small private room, so I couldn't panic and embarrass myself in front of people," I replied, simultaneously wondering if she would notice if I took her son's picture home. "Like a flying closet."

"A closet." Drop, drop. "You want to fly in a closet?"

"Yeah,” I said, planning my escape with picture in hand. “ Can I do that?"

Nancy had to cut our session short that day, having run out of eyedrops. But it's not as if we were getting anywhere anyway. I needed to try something other than just talking about it, something a little more proactive, something that stopped just short of actually getting on a plane. So I cleared my schedule for the following Saturday afternoon, packed a lunch, and made my way to the closest flying tin can death trap. Of course, I planned to eat the lunch before I actually arrived at the airport. I don't trust the security people who say those x-ray machines don't contaminate food that passes through them, and I want my cancer to come from cell phones, not tomatoes.

I arrived at the airport in the late afternoon, which fortunately was easily accessible by subway. I had already spent thousands of dollars as a test monkey for experimental therapeutic techniques, and was not keen on spending much more. Before I left, I thoroughly researched everything about the airport; most convenient restrooms, duty-free shopping possibilities, where I could get my hand on one of those wonderful Toblerone bars that they seem to only sell at airports, and of course, potential emergency exits. Most people find the airplane emergency exit speech an unnecessary irritation. Personally, I don't think it's long enough. I'd prefer much more detail. Optimally the flight crew would perform a lengthy demonstration of how the seat cushions actually transform into floatation devices, because frankly, I just don't see it.

"The flames were 30 feet high, and the smoke was so thick I couldn't see my own hand. I thought it was the end. Then I remembered my ass -- which was on fire at the time -- was conveniently placed on one of those wonderful seat cushions. Thank you floating seat cushion!"

I quickly scarfed down my hastily-made tuna fish sandwich, which had grown warm in my bag, thereby adding suspicion to some already questionable mayonnaise. Fortunately I knew the precise location of all of the restrooms in the terminal. When I finally mustered up the courage to actually walk through the sliding glass doors, my stomach was already rumbling, either because I ate too much, or I hadn't eaten enough. My digestive system is never content. The colon doesn't fall far from the tree.

The terminal was busy, but eerily quiet. Though perhaps it wasn't so much eerily quiet as unexpectedly calm. Over the previous several years, I had concocted my own vision of a modern day, post-9/11 airport, which included, in no particular order, terrorists threatening to blow up the Washington Monument, business travelers shooting each other in the shins over the last first-class seat to Toledo, and elderly women being strip searched by security guards with a granny fetish. Add to that the very real threat of being molested by a horny politician in the next toilet stall, and even Charles Manson would find the scene disturbing.

But to my surprise, the airport was calm, efficient, and peaceful. Light streamed in through the high glass ceilings, and the immaculately clean floors -- cleaner than mine, even -- were covered with bright orange-yellow tiles. Passengers strolled slowly through the halls, stopping at various stores and eating establishments, several of which featured "patio" seating complete with faux palm trees and beach umbrellas. The terminal seem more like a fancy resort than a torture chamber, and I wondered if the whole flying is a nightmare these days rumor was just invented by airport maintenance crews in an attempt to reduce their workload.

And most surprisingly, people were actually smiling. They were smiling on the security line, they were smiling while waiting for their pre-flight margarita, they were smiling while being herded onto the New York shuttle. Where was all the angst that I had read about? Where were the people beating each other with exploding shoes? Why was I the only one shaking uncontrollably? I wasn't relieved. I was angry at having been misled by the media, which was apparently in the pocket of the airport maintenance crew union. All those years spent dragging myself on the train to DisneyWorld, I could have just spent the weekend at Delta Terminal B.

Then, through one of the 50 foot windows, I caught a glimpse of an airplane. It was just idling on the tarmac, waiting for clearance of some kind, no more threatening than a stalled Greyhound bus. I could see passengers sitting inside, waiting patiently, eating their in-flight pretzels (which, to my disappointment, had apparently replaced the in-flight peanuts). It was the closest I'd been to an actual airplane in almost a decade.

Suddenly the idyllic world that I had entered minutes before transformed into a claustrophobic freak show. Every movement, every noise, every churn of the insta-daiquiri machine made my head swirl. Even the orange-yellow tiles mocked me with their institutional sterility. At any moment, killer clowns would invade the terminal and take us all hostage. And I would have been happy to go anywhere with them, as long as they didn't make me get on a plane.

The complacency surrounding me was astounding. Couldn't these people see that they were voluntarily placing themselves in extreme danger? Is a honeymoon in Bora-Bora really worth a funeral at sea? If I had been faced with a choice between bungee jumping off of the Empire State Building and getting on one of those metal-plastic amalgam contraptions, I would have strapped on a helmet and took the dive. At least a bungee jumper is supported by something other than air. It seemed entirely impossible that air could hold up a 100-ton behemoth like that. I knew there was some kind of scientific principle at work here, but I didn't trust science. Science couldn't even make hair grow back in my temples, how was it going to save me from hurtling to my death in an Idaho cornfield?

I found a quiet seat facing away from the windows, and tried to catch my breath and resolve the tingling sensation that had invaded every corner of my body. Unfortunately, I hadn't realized that I had wandered into a corner of the terminal from which airplanes were visible on every side. The tingling was not subsiding, and I wondered if this was finally one panic attack too many. The human heart only has so many beats in it, and after my parents' divorce, three years of law school, and the time my mother caught me masturbating, mine couldn't have too many left.

In an attempt to distract myself from my impending doom, I began observing some of the goings-on around me. The only thing that can take my mind off of my own misery when I'm miserable is other people's misery. Most of the people sitting around me were painfully dull, at least to the naked eye. A businessman reading Newseek, an elderly woman knitting, a teenager playing with his iPod. They might all be interesting behind closed doors, but I didn't know one way or the other. I wished that the businessman would have an acid flashback from his hippie days, or the elderly woman would stab the teenager with her knitting needle. Anything to take my mind off of the panic that had gripped me.

Finally, like a gift from heaven, an intensely dysfunctional family of five or six -- two or three of the kids were running around in circles so quickly that they seemed to blend into one -- sat down next to me. The mother and father were arguing, but I couldn't hear most of what they were saying over the screams of their children, who clearly had terrorized several elementary school teachers in their day.

"Don't blame me! I didn't want to go to fucking Colonial Williamsburg," the father shouted, a small amount of spittle landing smack dab in the center of his wife's face. "This was your fucking idea!"

"Where the fuck did you want to go?" the wife screamed back, matching him spittle with spittle. "The fucking Playboy mansion?"

Monster #1, who appeared to be some version of female, started punching Monster #2, who responded in kind with several kicks to Monster #1's shins and some expletives that I didn't know until I was 23. I watched the scene for several minutes, as the burgeoning criminals in front of me battled for the title of most likely to need a public defender one day. Grateful that unplanned pregnancies were only a heterosexual plague, I wondered whether eugenics was really that bad of an idea.

"Flight 117, non-stop to Williamsburg, now boarding Gate 13."

While the mother tried to round up her children, I watched the father sneak over to the newsstand and peak at the magazines wrapped in plastic on the top shelf. Obviously his wife was correct -- he'd rather be going to the Playboy mansion. Then again, he'd probably rather be going to a Turkish prison than to Williamsburg with his family.

"Jerry, get the fuck back here!" The husband dutifully replaced whatever fantasy rag he was perusing, and made his way back to his wayward family, leaving a piece of himself on the top shelf with the dirty magazines. He probably left pieces of himself scattered across newsstands on the Northeast Corridor.

The mother grabbed a hold of Monster #1 and Monster #2, who struggled to break free.

"Let's go you little maniacs!" Maniacs are as maniacs do.

The father gathered up the luggage, glancing occasionally back to the newsstand with a longing that his wife likely hadn't seen in years. I was sad that I'd soon have to go back to focusing on my own life.

"Jason, come on!"

Jason -- an offspring who I hadn't previously noticed -- lay huddled under the chair across from me. He was clealry the youngest of the three, and while his siblings were well-built -- probably from years of beating each other senseless -- Jason was small, even for his age. I couldn't tell what that age was, but I knew he was small for it.

"I don't want to go," he said, meekly, clutching a stuffed Elmo. To my dismay, Elmo had apparently replaced Kermit and other more intelligent Muppets in the hearts of young children.

"I can't deal with this shit right now," the mother said, waving her hand dismissively at her child. "Jerry, you better deal with this."

Jerry's method of "dealing with it" was to grab Jason by the arm and drag him out with more force than should reasonably be applied to tiny bodies. But Jason didn't cry or make a noise, or even seem to notice the noise around him. He just went along, stumbling the entire way as his father led him by the arm through security. Years of invisibility had left Jason deaf, dumb, and blind.

Watching Jason huddle under the airport chair brought back memories of the crawlspace under my childhood home, where I often hid during my parents’ arguments. My parents didn’t relegate themselves to one room to fight. They traveled from room to room, chasing each other out of one and into another, round and round until they tired themselves out, or one of them left the house, or someone called the police. But if I crammed myself into the furthest corner of the crawlspace and stuck my fingers in my ears, I could only barely hear them. I would leave the basement light on so I could see, and I put a stuffed animal in there to keep me company, a giraffe my grandmother had bought me during our last trip to DisneyWorld. I also put some chocolate chip cookies in the crawlspace for sustenance. Sometimes the fights were pretty long, and I got hungry.

During one particularly nasty fight – I think it was about the vacuum cleaner, something about which required my father to go to hell and my mother to save him a seat on the way – I fell asleep in the crawlspace. When I woke up, it was pitch black. Someone must have turned the basement light off while I was asleep, likely my mother, who regularly went around the house turning off lights to conserve electricity, even if you had only walked out of the room seconds before. In the dark, I couldn’t tell which way I was facing. I couldn’t see the opening to the crawlspace. I started to cry, but I didn’t call for help, because that would start another fight, which would necessitate my returning to the crawlspace. I muffled my crying with the stuffed giraffe so no one could hear.

And suddenly, it occurred to me that I might not ever leave that crawlspace. I could die in the crawlspace. No one would think to look for me in there. I didn’t think an adult could have even fit in there. Everyone would think I ran away, or was kidnapped. I’d be on the side of a milk carton within a month. There’d be a manhunt for my captor. People would see me at the supermarket, or in a clothing store, or riding Space Mountain with Elvis. Each new sighting would give my parents renewed hope.

But in a year or two, maybe less, depending on whether the tabloids picked up the story, everyone would just give up. I’m sorry, ma’am, the chances of us finding your son now are slim to nil. Just another missing child in America. My mom would grieve for a while, maybe forever. She’d rip out her hair and tear her clothes and blame my dad and my sister and God and everyone else she set her eyes on. My dad would grieve too. He’d buy himself lots of CD players and television sets and other gadgets to ease the pain. Everyone copes in their own way. But the world would continue to spin without me. It had to. I wasn’t that important.

And in a hundred years, when they bulldozed the house, they would find my corpse, still clutching the stuffed giraffe. By then my whole family would be gone, and no one would ever know who I was or why I had laid under a house for a hundred years holding a stuffed giraffe.

That was the last time I ever hid in the crawlspace. Before my mom sold the house, I ventured in one last time to retrieve the stuffed giraffe. It was still there. It still smelled like tears and chocolate chip cookies.

Jason et al made their way towards their gate, and I took a moment to say a prayer for the flight attendants on their plane. With their departure, I was left to resume my panicked state, which came back in full force and was made all the more intense by the memories that Jason and his family brought back.

I closed my eyes and clutched my hands together. When most people hold their hands together, they fold their fingers on top of each other, so that they are layered one above the other. When I do it, I hold my right hand in my left like I'm holding a stranger's hand. Somehow it feels more comforting, even though I've held my own hand far more times than anyone has held it for me. I always knew my hand would be there. I couldn't say the same about anyone else's.

Thinking about courageous little Jason boarding his flight, I questioned my own lack of will power. Here was this five year old boy, scared to death, clutching his Elmo (I still disapproved of his Muppet selection, but attributed this minor transgression to his tender age), being dragged onto the plane by his tremendously insensitive parents who would surely completely fail to comfort him when he needed comforting the most. But Jason had likely gotten accustomed to hiding under airport chairs. He felt safe under the chair, because there was no where else for him to hide.

And here I was, twenty-eight years old, still hiding. Sure, I hid on top of the chair instead of underneath it, but I was still hiding. There was no one to hide from anymore, but they were still chasing me. My father was still watching pornography behind my mother's back, and my mother was still shouting expletives at my father about the vacuum cleaner. The sound of the airplane engines couldn't drown out their voices. Their voices roared even louder than my fear. I had to get away from the fear and the voices, to save myself that very moment, or there would be nothing left to save.

I got up from the seat and made my way back to the exit, walking quickly but not too quickly, as I wasn't too keen on being stopped by some paranoid security guards who thought some malicious motive lay behind my brisk pace. As I left the terminal, I tried to forgive myself for not getting further along in my treatment that day. I realized that somewhere in the back of my head, I had hoped that once I went back to an airport, all my fears would suddenly dissipate, and I'd be on a plane to Hawaii by the end of the day. Clearly, that wasn't going to happen, at least, not today. But I was still a few subway stops closer than I had been the day before.

I boarded the train back to my home, breathing a sigh of relief as I sat myself down on the orange padded cushion. Subways usually trigger a slight panic reaction, but after facing my ultimate transportation demons, this subway was warm and welcoming. Better the enemy you know than the enemy you don't. Grateful that I had survived the trip, I settled into my seat with a little after-panic muzak courtesy of my "Relaxation Playlist," which was just enough to relax me but would put most people into a coma.

Then the subway came to a sudden stop in between Foggy Bottom and Farragut West.

"Ladies and gentlemen, sorry for the delay. We are experiencing some technical difficulties. Please stand by."

The announcement was not comforting. Usually when the subway comes to a sudden stop, the announcer says something like, there's a train in front of us, we'll be moving shortly. But apparently we were stopped due to "technical difficulties," with no estimate for the amount of time that we'd be stuck here, fifty feet below ground. And unless my body developed a liquid-like consistency by which I could pour myself out of the subway car through a crack in the doors -- a remote possibility, at best -- there was nowhere to go.

I felt the panic begin to rise again, and my hands instinctively grabbed hold of each other. My extremeties began shaking -- well, most of my extremeties -- transforming my fingers from useful tools into useless appendages. I thought about trying to read the National Enquirer magazine I had bought on impulse at the airport (ok, I was planning to buy it, but it sounds less pathetic when I claim otherwise), but figured it was pointless, as I couldn't hold anything in my hands. And besides, I couldn't concentrate on a magazine, not even one with Jacko on the cover. I couldn't concentrate on anything at all. Not over the roar of the voices.

I began searching again for someone more miserable than myself to take my mind off of my quickening heart rate. To my disappointment, the only other people in my car were an elderly couple sitting across the aisle. I figured they wouldn't provide much entertainment, as elderly people are generally not phased by trivialities like being trapped on a stalled subway. I found myself longing for the dysfunctional family circus, who would soon be met at their arrival gate by a throng of FBI agents and a tranquilizer gun.

But while the man was calmly reading a newspaper, the woman was clearly disturbed by our situation. She wasn't saying anything, and didn't move a muscle, but I could tell. It was in the squint of her eyes. They pleaded for freedom, even as her body remained completely still. Esperanto may be the language of love, but fear is the universal language.

Her husband -- at least I assumed he was her husband, though he could have been anything to her, a lover, a friend, a chauffeur with a Driving Miss Daisy obsession -- looked over at his quietly panicking companion. Without a word, he put down the paper, and took her hand and placed it in his. And almost instantly, her eyes widened slightly, her breathing became less shallow, and a slight smile appeared on her face. The freedom she sought was still fifty feet away, but that didn't matter. All because he offered his hand, and she took it.

I closed my eyes, and gripped my hands even tighter, which by now were slippery with cold sweat. I thought about little Jason, huddled under his airplane chair, still clutching his stuffed Elmo, separated from oblivion by a few inches of metal and plastic. How little it would take to bring him out from under the chair. Just a hand. Not gripped tightly around his arm, but lightly around his own, squeezing in just the right places, telling him that he didn't have to hold his own hand to survive. And even if that hand didn't come today, or for the foreseeable future, somewhere, someday, someone would offer it, and someday, he would take it. As long as he could let go of his own.

I took a deep breath, opened my eyes, and let go of my hands. For Jason, and for myself.

Remiss, me?

2008-06-07T13:58:00.003-04:00

I told my therapist the other day that I was feeling guilty that I hadn't posted to my blog in a month.

"Why do you feel guilty?" she asked. "I'm sure your readers have other things to do."

Needless to say, I was shocked and appalled by this bold and disappointing declaration. Other things to do? Other than obsess about the life of this odd, once-and-hopefully-not-future attorney with more emotional problems than Suri Cruise? Say it ain't so, readers!

But on the off-chance that my therapist is incorrect, here's the straight dope (side-note -- is there a gay dope? and if there is, can someone please send it to Jake Gyllenhall along with my address (that is, assuming he hasn't smoked it already)). I haven't stopped writing, I've just stopped writing so quickly. Reviewing some of my old stories, I saw a lot of room for improvement. Of course, as a die-hard perfectionist, I can find room for improvement in most anything I do. Wait a second, I think I can write that sentence better...

So don't despair, gentle reader. A new story will appear soon, and I promise it won't disappoint. And if it does, well, my therapist is accepting new patients.

It's Alright, Jonah

2008-05-11T15:24:00.007-04:00

My parents divorced on July 4th, 1993, while I was training for the American synchronized swim team at the community pool. Of course, they didn’t actually divorce on July 4th, 1993, which would have been supremely unpatriotic; they just decided to get a divorce that day. The actual divorce didn't happen until two years later, when they had both grown tired of slowly bleeding each other to death.

After shuffling me and my sister across several state lines and through a number of public school systems of varying quality (at least one of which was a breeding ground for Hitler Youth), my parents finally settled on a three bedroom, split-level, could-be-expensive-if-it-wasn’t-located-on-a-major-road compromise in suburban Long Island. Our new home was a step down from what my mother wanted, and a step up from what my father could afford, which meant no one was happy, least of all the two children who were now forced to attend school with pre-teens who measured a person's social value by the limit on their AmEx card. One year, a particularly wealthy classmate crashed his new red BMW convertible into a kosher Chinese food restaurant, killing two migrant workers in the process. But since the workers were illegal immigrants who barely spoke English, the classmate got off with a year’s probation and some community service, which he paid another migrant worker to do for him. Just like those immigrants, taking jobs away from hard-working Americans.

Eventually I found my niche in suburbia, among the freaks and geeks of my high school, of which there were more than the brochure would have you believe. Once I found friends, I started doing things that people with friends ordinarily do, like seeing movies, shoplifting insignificant trinkets from the neighborhood Hallmark store, and stalking Quentin, the hot waiter from the local diner whose name we didn’t actually know but who we thought looked like a Quentin, for no particular reason other than he vaguely resembled Quentin Tarantino if he had been sired by Brad Pitt. My clique might not have been popular or law-abiding, but we were creative.

Until my social blossoming, however, the community pool became my temporary escape for the summer months (during the winter months, my escape shifted between the local Blockbuster Video and a crawl space below my house). It was only a few blocks from our home, and it was free to local residents under 17, which meant I could spend the entire day there without having to ask my parents for anything, except permission to leave the house. They rarely denied my request, as it meant that I wouldn’t spend the day bugging them to turn up the air conditioning, which my mother routinely refused to do because of the expense.

“But I’m boiling in here!” I protested when she’d inevitably turn off the air conditioner on the hottest days of the summer. My mother grew up in what was, as far as I could tell, a tenement. I had only read about tenements in history textbooks, before the chapter on the war with the evil Germans and after the chapter on the other war with the evil Germans, but the descriptions of her childhood home seemed to have all the hallmarks of one – three people to every bed, a cast iron stove, crying babies who were routinely smothered by cockroaches. Thirty years later, my mother still made me walk four blocks to the nearest pay phone to call directory assistance, so we could save the twenty-five cents. You can take the girl out of the tenement.

“I just don’t understand why I need to suffer needlessly,” I continued, dramatically fanning myself with the living room curtain.

“That’s your problem, Jonah. You have it too easy,” she replied, dismissively. “Now go tell your fucking scumbag father that dinner is ready.”

My goal in those pre-divorce days was to go as long as possible without speaking to either parent. My personal best was eleven days, a streak only interrupted by a spider in my bedroom that required squashing. Poisonous insects trump uncomfortable conversation any day. My fucking scumbag father did it for me, without a fuss. I think it made him feel useful, like a real father, instead of just the resident scumbag. Somehow I doubted Mr. Brady needed to step on arachnids to demonstrate his utility to Carol and the Bunch, but I was happy that I could slightly increase the positive energy in the house, even if it meant the loss of innocent lives.

But any positive energy I felt from my father’s transformation into master bug squasher was far outweighed by the pure joy of the community pool. The attraction wasn’t necessarily the actual water, which was usually cold and uninviting, even if being completely immersed in liquid filled some neglected Freudian need. And it wasn’t the half-naked male lifeguards; I was old enough to know I was different, but I was too young to know how I was different.

For me, the attraction was in the “community” part of the community pool. For a few hours each day, I was part of a larger family, the pool family, whose hedonistic members were guided only by their desire for sun and, albeit placid, surf. Or sometimes, when I was feeling particularly social, I would pretend I was part of a real family at the pool, conveniently laying my towel close enough to a mother with a wide-brim hat reading Mademoiselle and lathering her children in SPF-45, so that outsiders might think that I was actually one of her fair-skinned brood (or, if the family was African-American, a child from her first marriage). Not that I ever actually spoke to any of my adopted families. I was only passively needy; I saved my aggression for violent video games.

Because I didn’t have many friends in those days, usually I spent the day alone at the pool, which aroused suspicion among the pool staff that I might be a homeless child, using the facilities to wash the track marks off my arms before rejoining a group of heroin-addled pre-adolescents. A few of them whispered to each other every time I passed through the turnstile entrance, grinning in my general direction, as if a forced smile from them would put me back on the path to the straight and narrow. My well-kept hair and ironed bathing suit should have tipped them off that I wasn't actually homeless, but some people just like being heroes, even when a hero isn't needed. An unnecessary hero is just a moron in tights.

A few weeks before my parents divorced, a woman approached me as I was toweling off from a four-hour swim, during which I had successfully completed a series of eight back flips in a row without coming up for air, another personal best. Her t-shirt proudly declared her to be the "Pool Manager." I thought that sounded like the coolest job in the world -- this woman spends everyday at the pool, bossing people around, and she gets paid for it, too -- except the shirt itself was a nauseating shade of green, and the "M" in Manager had faded, so she was really just the Pool anager, which didn't sound nearly as cool.

"Hi there," she said, bending down so that she was eye level with me. I hated when adults did that. It assumed that they were my superior just because they were taller than me. If she had tried tossling my hair I might have thrown her anager ass in the pool. "I'm Melanie. What's your name?"

"Jonah." I quickly put on my shirt. It's one thing to be half-naked when you're not socializing with anyone; it's quite another to speak to a stranger with your nipples exposed.

"Jonah, I see you here a lot," Melanie said. I could tell she was itching to tossle my hair. I instinctively took three steps backwards. "Is everything ok at home?"

"Yeah, everything's fine," I replied, marveling at her presumptuousness. Adults think they can say anything to kids without consequences. I doubted that she would ask the fifty-year old guy sitting behind us, guzzling beers and eyeing the 17-year old lifeguards, whether everything was ok at his home, even though everything clearly was not. But since she asked, and since I hadn’t yet learned the value of tact (a skill I’m still developing today), I gave her the complete answer. "I just can't stand my family."

Melanie stood up and shook her head.

"How sad," she said, picking the remnants of the "M" off of her shirt.

I nodded in agreement, and smiled to make her feel more comfortable with this apparently distressing news.

“I know.” But I didn't really understand her pity. What exactly was sad about it? I was enjoying a beautiful day at the pool, at least until Melanie had stuck her sunburned nose into my business. It was just warm enough so that I didn't get cold in the water, but not so warm that I baked when I was in the sun (I refused to use sunscreen, a small but palpable rebellion against my mother). I had my Walkman with me, and a new Gloria Estefan cassette geared up to play that inspirational song she wrote after she broke her spine in that terrible car accident. I had purchased a frozen Snickers bar with a dollar I stole out of my mother's wallet earlier that day, which was going to be my reward for my feats of aquatic strength. As far as I could tell, my glass was at least half-full, if not more.

Clearly, Melanie's baseline was far higher than my own.

And to top it all off, I felt I was getting closer to a spot on the American synchronized swim team. I was sure that being able to do eight back flips in a row without vomiting or passing out must be some kind of record. All I needed to do now was find out how to get in contact with the team's coach. I suspected that there was no listing for "American Synchronized Swim Team" in the Yellow Pages, but maybe Melanie knew someone. She was the Pool Manager after all. Hopefully I hadn't burned that bridge too quickly with my flip conversational style.

Unfortunately, my synchronized swim team dreams came to an end the same day as my parents' marriage, and just as abruptly. Not that most people wouldn't have seen it coming from miles away, like our next-door neighbors, who had become increasingly familiar with domestic disturbance laws since we moved in. Although they were lucky. They only had to call the police on us two times in as many years; our previous neighbors had called at least half a dozen times in the same time span. Still, it was probably two times more than they hoped for. People move to suburbia for peace, not war.

But it didn’t take familiarity with the New York State criminal code to predict my parents’ divorce. Just one look at their relationship was enough to see disaster ahead. They hadn’t slept in the same bedroom for the better part of a decade, originally because of my father’s snoring (which, granted, was disturbing in its intensity, as if my father was expressing all of his pent-up anger in between jagged breaths), but eventually because anxious discontent is easier to maintain with three floors between you. They even looked wrong together. For every pound he was overweight, she was a pound underweight. Personally, I found his girth reassuring – he would have made a great Santa Clause, if only my parents had seen fit to indulge my gentile proclivities – while her frailty was frightening, as if an overly slick driveway could leave me one step closer to the orphanage. Though now that I’m older, I’m glad I inherited her metabolism and not his. Santa Clause might be comforting, but he wouldn’t get much attention in a gay bar.

So anyone with two eyes and a rudimentary knowledge of the English language could tell that my parents weren't going to be celebrating these moments of their lives for much longer. But when anxious discontent is the constant mood of a household, it's difficult to predict just when a barely tolerable situation will cross the line into intolerable. For my mother, that line was crossed when my father revealed that he had clandestinely spent all of the money in our savings accounts, including the money I had received for my Bar Mitzvah, which was ostensibly a “gift” but which I considered payment for being forced to spend four hours with distant and unapproachable relatives. He claimed that he spent the money on necessities like food and flamingo nightlights for my sister, but his extensive pornography collection belied his claim (I received a slight return on my investment when my father left his pornography collection behind after the divorce, perhaps his absentee way of teaching me about the birds and the bees; for my taste, there were too many birds and not enough bees in his collection). It was the worst possible betrayal to my mother, and I doubt that any other indiscretion would inevitably have led to a divorce, which is precisely why he did it. If infidelity had been her Achilles' heel, she would have found escort services on his credit card bill. It doesn't matter what the straw is made of. The camel's back breaks either way.

Fortunately, my Olympic aspirations caused me to miss most of the fireworks that fateful July 4th. Though I imagine the conversation went something like this:

“Honey, I have something to tell you.”

“What is it darling?”

“I’ve stolen all of your money.”

“Oh, is that all? Well, I suppose we should get a divorce then.”

The actual conversation was probably much louder, and included more cursing and hair pulling (my parents come from the soap opera school of fighting, where nothing is out of bounds except healthy communication), but I suspect that was the general gist.

I left the pool a little early that day, in anticipation of our annual July 4th barbecue. It was one of the only "American" things we did, besides pay taxes and gossip about our neighbors. My father would operate the barbecue -- the only cooking responsibility my mother deemed "masculine" enough for her husband to do without shame -- and my sister and I would sit at the patio table, barking our meal requests to him. Of course, everything my father barbecued ended up being well-done (thus setting up my taste buds for future culinary limitations -- if it's not char-burned, it's inedible), but it didn't matter. If you squinted, we almost looked like a real family. I knew it was just a mirage, but it was nice to be on the inside looking out for a change.

I arrived home from the pool just in time to see my father load the last hastily packed cardboard box in the trunk. He spotted me walking down the street, and gave me a half-hearted wave before getting in the car and driving off. There wasn’t much he could say, at least not much that couldn’t be used against him in a court of law. At first I thought he was going to pick up some food for dinner, but when I entered the house and saw my mother crying at the kitchen table -- maybe the first time I ever saw her cry, at least without simultaneously foaming at the mouth -- I realized it would be hot dogs for two from now on.

Over the next few weeks, in between visits to an unscrupulous divorce attorney who I suspect spent his free time hanging puppies and producing Kathie Lee Gifford's Christmas album, my mother slipped further into a state of paranoid delusions – apparently my father had nothing else to do that summer except stalk her, and occasionally let the air out of her tires – while I began reorganizing my father’s record collection, in case he suddenly came home and wanted to locate a Barbra Streisand album with considerable ease (two types of men like Barbra Streisand -- Jews and gays, which perhaps explains why Babs felt compelled to take out a restraining order against me in 2002). Surprisingly, he had left all his records behind. This was an extensive collection, which had required a considerable amount of time and attention, so I wondered whether this was a sign that he might return. Then again, I also required a considerable amount of time and attention, and he had left me behind, too.

I didn't have too much time to devote to this task, however. With my father gone, my mother and I had to determine the new parameters of survival for our new household (my sister's temporary presence was nominal at best, as she would soon physically relocate to a dorm room 200 miles away, and in her mind, she was already there). Responsibilities that used to belong to my father had to be reassigned, and most of them were reassigned to me, as my mother didn't have much time between visits to the lawyer, locking herself in her bedroom, and crafting conspiracy theories that linked my father to Watergate.

I wish I could say I immediately rose to the occasion with good-natured aplomb -- viewing them as a challenge to meet and not a burden to overcome, much like the Pope must feel when he's forced to wear white after Labor Day -- but the new responsibilities weren't welcome. Only a few weeks earlier I had been practicing for the American synchronized swim team, and now I was picking weeds out of the front lawn and folding my mother's underwear. And since it was just me and my mother now, if I didn't take on the new responsibilities, no one else would, and then all hell would break loose; first an unrolled sock, then a dusty mantle, and eventually rats would be gnawing at my pajama bottoms. My Olympic hopes drove away with my father and a navy blue '89 Camry. I tried to keep up with my training, but it's tough to do a backflip in the bathtub.

Except for my mother’s sporadic fits of self-pity and rage, one of which found my sister fleeing the house amid a barrage of coat hangers (I'm not sure if my mother consciously borrowed this from Joan Crawford, or if coat hangers are the weapons of choice for overly wrought divorcees), the house was considerably quieter that summer than it had ever been before, especially after my sister left for college a month before the semester started. I didn't blame her, or if I did, I don't anymore; only a fool would stay in a prison cell without a lock. For me, the quiet was even worse than the shouting. At least when people are shouting they are engaging in some mode of communication. I was 23 before I realized there’s a middle ground between complete silence and screaming bloody murder.

The day my sister left, my mother had an appointment with her attorney, which was for the best since they hadn't spoken to each other since the wire hanger incident. I didn't know she was even leaving until I saw her bags at the door. Unlike my father's hastily packed boxes, my sister's bags looked like they had been ready for years. My sister began packing the day my mother suggested she get a nose job so she could "land herself a nice Jewish doctor." I think my sister was seven years old at the time.

"Bye Jonah," my sister said, inching her way out the door. She probably wanted a hug -- my sister not having developed this aversion to touching that permeates the Haslap clan -- but I only smiled at her, because that's what I did best, and went back to folding the bathroom towels. My father used to fold the towels in a square, but I preferred a rectangle. I considered this a minor act of rebellion, except I didn't really have anyone to rebel against anymore.

Once or twice a week, my grandmother would stop by and lend a modicum of normalcy to the house. She'd cook dinner, thereby replacing my regular menu of tuna fish sandwiches and cold pizza (since my father left there had been a substantial increase of junk food in the house, as food shopping was not high on my mother's list of priorities, especially when she began avoiding public places after she allegedly spotted my father following her at the Gap), and she'd show me how to properly fold underwear so as to prevent creases.

"Who cares if I have creases in my underwear?" I asked her.

"Emergency room doctors," she replied, in a thick Polish accent that always seemed to lend an air of respectability to otherwise irrational arguments. "They see creased underwear, they think you're poor. They think you're poor, they don't take care of you. They don't take care of you, you die."

It sounded illogical to me, but who was I to engage in a debate over survivalist techniques with a woman who had endured the Holocaust, lost two husbands, and lived through eight Republican administrations.

My grandmother and I didn't have many conversations during the summer. Most of the time she came over, did whatever needed to be done, sat with my mother for a few hours, and left. Sometimes I'd only realize that she had been there when I saw of a stack of tupperware containers in the refrigerator. I suppose my mother needed her more than I did. After all, she had lived with my father 22 years, and I had only lived with him 13 years. And my grandmother had known my mother way longer than she'd known me. It was just a matter of crunching the numbers, really.

Occasionally, I would run into my grandmother during one of her visits, and we'd make small talk, like we were both waiting for a bus in the upstairs hallway.

"How are you doing, Jonah?" I could tell that she didn't want the complete answer, and I didn't want to give it. Besides, I needed to save my spare time for reorganizing my father's record collection. He could walk through the door any minute, and Barbra was still mixed in with Bette (who also claims a significant gay/Jew/gay Jew fanbase) and the Beatles (more of a mixed following).

"Fine." I smiled at her, and she smiled back. It wasn't exactly a lie. I was fine. If you divided the world up into fine and not-fine, I was fine. But it still felt vaguely like a lie.

"Good," she said, patting my head. She was the only person who could pat my head with impunity, a concomitant benefit of being a grandmother, especially in a matriarchy. "Ok, your mother needs a glass of water to take her pill."

Pills, I wanted to correct her, but she was already gone.

A few days later, my mother and I found ourselves in the kitchen together at the same time, which was a rare event since my father left. We didn't exactly avoid each other as much as we just ran in different circles; I was busy with folding towels into rectangles, and my mother was preoccupied with creating new psychological disorders for future cataloguing in the DSM-IV. We lingered for a few minutes around the table, unsure of how to proceed. Just another stranger waiting for a bus.

My grandmother had left us Chinese food for dinner, which I didn't particularly care for but my mother liked, so I tolerated. Usually we would just take the food back to our respective rooms, but I had just vacuumed the floors and didn't want to make a mess, and I suspect my mother felt the same way (the obsessive compulsive apple doesn't fall far from the obsessive compulsive tree), so we sat down at the table together, for our first dinner together since my father left, and perhaps our first dinner alone together, ever.

"You haven't gone to the pool lately," she said, taking a spoonful of sweet and sour chicken. She looked even skinnier than usual. I wondered if I did too.

"No." I spit out half of my eggroll into a napkin and rolled it into my sleeve, a trick I had learned during the many years of being force fed various food items that I didn't particularly care for, like half-sour pickles (a half-sour pickle is a sour pickle that is denied its birthright), and anything with avocado, the most aggressive of the exotic fruits. Eventually my mother caught me hiding dinner in my sleeve. Of course, instead of taking responsibility for my somewhat unhealthy behavior by feeding me unsavory meals, she assumed I had an eating disorder (which begged the question of where the four boxes of Entenmann's chocolate chip cookies went each week). She became more convinced of this belief when she found a research paper I had written about anorexia for an introductory psychology class. It was a good thing I hadn't written about matricidal serial killers, I might have found myself on the receiving end of a pair of handcuffs and a revolver.

We ate (or, she ate and I rolled half-masticated food into my sleeve) in silence for several minutes. At this point during dinnertime, my parents were usually fighting about something of minimal importance to anyone but themselves, like my father's forgetting to fill the gas tank, or my mother's refusal to treat my father with a modicum of respect. Eventually my sister would storm away from the table to avail herself of the miniature liquor bottles she kept hidden in her closet (she thought my parents didn't know about them, but they did, they just didn't particularly care -- at least she was drinking at home), my father would retreat to his office/bedroom/hideout/pornography lair, and my mother would spend the next two hours yelling at all of us from various rooms in the house, even if we couldn't hear her. The yelling was an end in and of itself. If the American Family Council had caught a glimpse of what family dinners meant in my house, they might have thought twice before airing those advertisements about the benefits of family dinners.

But now there was just the silence, only occasionally broken by the sound of my mother's chewing or the howling of our next-door neighbor's cocker spaniel. It was a new dynamic, and one that I was not comfortable with. I missed my sister's covert alcoholism, and my father's not so covert isolationism. And if I didn't miss my mother's screaming, I at least missed her passion. The woman sitting across from me was defeated; no longer manic, only depressive. She could have spontaneously transformed into an African-American transgendered midget, and she still would have been more recognizable than the woman she had become.

"I thought you liked the pool," she said, reaching for the fortune cookies. I took some comfort in her desire for a fortune cookie. You don't want a fortune cookie unless you are interested in reading your fortune; the cookie is merely a cover for skeptics.

"It's ok." I pushed the food to the side of my plate, which made my plate look emptier, another trick I had learned over the years. Why couldn't my mother like McDonald's? I was pretty sure that if my mother liked McDonald's, my grandmother would start bringing us Big Macs instead of moo shoo pork. Maybe I could forge my mother's handwriting on a note to my grandmother asking for McDonald's. I had already perfected the art of forging my mother's signature on notes to get myself out of gym class. Though I suspected my grandmother was sharper than my gym teachers. She was definitely much more intimidating.

"You should go to the pool," my mother said, biting into her fortune cookie. "That's where you should be." She tossed the fortune in the trash, and disappeared into her bedroom. I removed the food from my sleeve, realizing that for the first time, I didn’t need to hide it anymore. She wouldn’t have noticed either way.

Eventually my grandmother's visits tapered off, as her attention got diverted to her other child and other grandson, both of whom also needed her more than I did. I was fine, after all, and I did smile a lot, at least, a lot more than they did. He who smiles most needs grandmother least.

Towards the end of the summer, my father's attorney began lobbying for visitation rights, whereby my father would be permitted to spend four hours a week with me, which was four hours more than my mother wanted him to spend with me. I suggested that for at least those four hours each week, he wouldn’t be able to stalk her at the Gap or let the air out of her tires, but she was unconvinced.

“He’s probably installed cameras to watch the house,” she replied. “Probably with that night-vision thing that lets him see in the dark.” I hoped she was right. Batman would be an even cooler dad than Santa Clause. Though I wondered why anyone -- my father, Batman, or Santa Clause, for that matter -- would watch our house at night if they had access to such advanced technology. Personally, I would have used it to spy on someplace more interesting, like the large white mansion down the block whose owners were rumored to be part of the mafia. At least that was the rumor in my house, although I don't think it was based on anything other than the fact that they drove expensive cars and had an Italian last name, which, according to my mother, was more than enough to indict them for racketeering.

My mother held firm to her opposition to visitation rights, until opposing counsel made it clear that if she wanted to start receiving those child support checks, she'd have to grin and bear it, or at least refrain from calling the police and claiming I was kidnapped when my father came around. There might be thirty miles between them now, but my father still knew the precise location of her Achilles' heel, which was somewhere between three and four hundred dollars a week. I was proud that my father was willing to pay so much just to see me – a hundred dollars an hour was worth a lot in those days, even if today it’s standard pay for babysitters -- but I’m not sure if he paid for the pleasure of my company, or the pain it caused my mother.

And so, three days before high school began, I saw my father for the first time since the July 4th barbecue that never happened.

My mother refused to allow my father to come within 500 feet of the house (which seemed like a pointless dictate to me, considering he was apparently watching her shower with his night-vision cameras), so my father picked me up from the drug store down the block. I arrived at the drug store a few minutes early, and thought about getting a card for this occasion, but I wasn’t sure what kind of card would be appropriate. Somehow I doubted “Congratulations On Being A Deadbeat Dad” was a best-seller for Hallmark. It might not be a popular time to celebrate, but it’s all a matter of baselines. A deadbeat dad was still better than no dad at all.

A beige Nissan pulled up in front of the drug store and honked several times, apparently at me. I didn’t recognize the driver, so I didn’t come out of the store. My mother taught me better than that. Very few Jewish kids are ever kidnapped, perhaps the only benefit of being instilled with extreme neuroses before we can crawl.

The car honked again, but I ignored it. Then the driver got out of the car and waved to me

“Jonah, come on!” he said, motioning to his watch. “I need to get you back by 5!”

The mysterious driver, who I had thought might have been related to the disappearance of the Lindbergh baby, was actually my father. Or, a version of my father. His moustache was gone, as was the grey in his temples. He had lost at least fifty pounds, and it showed everywhere – including his face, which looked significantly younger. Over the course of a summer, he had lost ten years, and I had gained twenty.

“It’s great to see you.” He hugged me, which again might be normal for some families, but was odd behavior for mine. I wondered whether he was drunk. He had never really drank before, but apparently this was a new Martin Haslap. Maybe this Martin Haslap drank mint juleps and hung around the Playboy mansion.

“You too.” I smiled, because that’s what I do best, and got in the car.

“You like it?” he asked, patting the dashboard, like it was a '69 Corvette, and not a '92 used Nissan. It was nothing special, but I nodded. It was a rhetorical question. “I treated myself.”

I wondered what his definition of "treating yourself" entailed. I always figured you treat yourself to something when you want to reward yourself for a job well done, but I couldn't imagine what job he had done that merited a new (used) car. I thought about the Bar Mitzvah money, and all the Archie comics it would never buy. Maybe some of my relatives would give me the gifts again if I could convince them I was dying.

“How’s your summer been?” Another question that the person really didn’t want the answer to. I wondered if this was just something that adults did as a matter of course. Ask each other questions, without actually wanting the answers.

“Fine.” Lying to someone is easier when the other person wants you to lie.

Of the fifty pounds he had lost, twenty of them were in his face. After so many years of being overweight, the skin didn’t snap back to its original shape, which gave it a latex-like quality, as if you could use the excess skin around his neck to bungee off of the Grand Canyon. But he still looked younger and healthier – and happier – than he had since I’d known him, though it was happiness with a curiously self-satisfied edge. Suddenly, I wondered what my mother was going to have for lunch. I hoped there was something she could eat in the refrigerator. She couldn’t lose much more weight, without fading into the bedroom walls.

“So where do you want to go?” I had forgotten that we were actually going to go somewhere during our visit, and I realized how little time I ever spent actually doing something with either of my parents. We lived together, sure. And occasionally we would all find ourselves watching television at the same time, especially when Married…with Children would come in, which we all appreciated for making our lives seem only slightly less dysfunctional. At least my mother had normal hair, and my father didn’t spend eight hours a day in the bathroom. But as far as actually doing things, I could count on a few fingers the amount of days we spent our free time together. Perhaps because free time is supposed to make you feel free, and time together had the opposite effect.

“How about the mall?” he asked, the skin under his neck gyrating while he shifted into gear. “I saw some things there I wanted to get for you.”

It was my first taste of divorced father guilt, and it wasn't altogether unwanted, or unwarranted. While some guilt-laden conspicuous consumption was appealing, I worried that we might run into some kids from my high school at the mall. Kids hanging out with other kids, doing kid things. Kids who reminded me that having fun is not synonymous with ironing boards.

“And we can go to McDonald’s for lunch,” he said.

I was sold.

So off we went, an old Jonah and a new Martin, in a used Nissan Sentra, to the busy mall, to buy me expensive items, so that I would be satisfied, and he could sleep tonight. Of course, my satisfaction would only last as long as the batteries in my new Walkman. Forgiveness bought with a credit card is worth the price you paid for it.

On the way to the mall, I fiddled with the car radio, which had a CD player in it, a definite step up from the basic AM/FM radio in the old Camry. In fact, though I hadn’t noticed it before, the entire car, with its automatic doors and windows, and car seats that adjusted on several different planes, was a step up from the Camry, which was bare bones in every possible respect. Maybe my mother was right about the night-vision cameras. The new Martin Haslap was obviously a technologically advanced individual, turkey neck and all. I made a mental note to bring CDs for our next visit, which could help fill the uncomfortable silences, even though there weren’t many of those. My father talked the whole way there, without saying much at all.

"It's been hot this summer, huh."

"I haven't heard from your sister in a while."

"I joined a gym, I'm benching 165 now!"

He looked at me for approval after each of these non-sequiturs. I smiled, which apparently gave him the approval he was looking for, because he didn't ask any follow-up questions.

I noticed that we had been driving on side-streets for a while, even though the highway led directly to the mall. All highways in Long Island lead to the mall.

"Why are you taking the long way?" I asked him, wondering whether we were driving through safe neighborhoods. We were passing apartment buildings now, which I always associated with high-crime rates. I wasn't sure if that was because the people who lived in them were necessarily criminals, or whether they were driven to crime because they had to put up with each other everyday, especially if everyone butted into everyone else's business constantly, as I fully expected they would. Walls are no replacements for boundaries.

"I thought it would be fun to do something different." I wondered what he'd think about my rectangular towels.

We finally arrived at the mall, with its glass roof and metal spires, rising high above any of the surrounding buildings. This was a feat of modern engineering, and modern capitalism. Busloads of Japanese tourists were unloading at the front entrance, excited about their highly anticipated trip to an American shopping mall. The Egyptians gave posterity the Pyramids. The Romans gave posterity the Coliseum. We would give posterity JC Penney's. And Disneyworld, of course.

The trip took twenty-three minutes longer than usual, twenty-three minutes that I could have spent cleaning the microwave, which sorely needed the extra attention after a disastrous culinary experiment earlier that morning. No one ever taught me that you can't cook french toast in a microwave, especially not wrapped in aluminum foil. I suppose some lessons you just need to learn on your own.

"So where do you want to go first?" he asked, again with a self-satisfied air, as if getting me to the mall had anything to do with him and it wasn't the credit cards in his wallet that really won the victory today. I turned away, and scanned the mall directory for my favorite stores, which ranged from the typical clothing establishments (apparently my father was already intimately familiar with the Gap, and I was already drawn to Abercrombie & Fitch, though again, I was too young to know exactly why), to offbeat stores that no one ever seems to step foot in but that somehow manage to stay in business, like those places where they can engrave your name on personalized toilet seats. I was a shopping dilettante.

We went to dozens of stores that day, at which I liberally filled both hands with merchandise that I neither needed or even wanted, but that somehow found its way into a shopping bag. We even went to the Sharper Image, a store that I had previously thought of as a place that only Madonna and Bill Gates could afford to shop. But nothing was too good for the new Martin Haslap's son.

"I really want that," I said, pointing to an entirely unnecessary talking glow-in-the-dark alarm clock that told time in eight different languages. I was prepared for an argument, to which I wasn't sure how I would respond, unless I claimed I had been taking Chinese lessons that summer and wanted to keep up with my studies.

"Then let's get it."

At Banana Republic, my father decided to "treat" himself again, and bought a bunch of clothes for his newly svelte figure.

"Jonah, how does this look?" he asked, trying on a new jacket. More questions without answers.

"Great." Just for asking me how he looked, I would get five pairs of pants instead of four.

At the register, the cashier asked to see my father's photo identification, which he handed to her, proudly.

"You've lost a lot of weight, Mr. Haslap," she said to him, smiling, while ringing up the fifth pair of pants. I wondered whether she was flirting with him, which made me profoundly uncomfortable. The man's not even single two months, and Cashier McRegisterlady already had her claws in him. In fact, he wasn't even technically single yet, which would mean she's committing adultery, and I was pretty sure that was still illegal, at least in the Bible belt. I briefly considered calling the police to get this she-devil hauled away, but this was in the days before cell phones. Good thing, too. She was pretty, and wouldn't have lasted a day in an all-female lockdown.

After two hours of this shopping spree, we retired to the McDonald's, where I ordered more food than I could possibly eat. My father didn't argue, though, just like he hadn't argued the whole afternoon. He just took out his wallet, which was considerably thinner now than it had been two hours earlier.

We sat down in a booth near the window overlooking the mall's foyer. People swarmed in and out with arms full of junk that would eventually find its way to the bottom of a closet, like squirrels burying nuts for the winter, except at least the squirrels could eat the nuts. I couldn't eat the glow-in-the-dark talking alarm clock. The neon was probably poisonous, or at least, unappetizing.

My father munched on a garden salad -- a stark contrast to his usual order of three Big Macs, four large onion rings, and a milkshake or two -- while I smothered my McNuggets with ketchup (I found the special sauce typically provided with an order of McNuggets to be too exotic for my tastes). My many purchases sat on the booth next to me, video games waiting to be played, CDs waiting to be listened to, flood pants waiting to be worn. I wasn't sure whether my closet was big enough to fit everything, but then I could always use my father's closet now. It was big and empty.

The mall filled up while we were eating, mostly with back-to-school shoppers. I saw a mother chasing her children into a Toys 'R Us, with the father following obediently behind, for the time being at least. He didn't want to be there, but he had no choice. Choices are only for the lucky; most of us have to play the hand we're dealt.

"This wasn't your fault, you know," my father said, offering me the last french fry. This was the part of the visit where he was supposed to recite divorced father cliches, and I was supposed to nod in agreement. Although the Bundys themselves never divorced, I watched enough dysfunctional family sitcoms to know the script cold.

"Yeah."

"Your mother and I just drifted apart, you know."

"Yeah."

"Things will get better, you know."

"Yeah."

"Everyone will be much happier this way, you know."

"Yeah."

My tray was still half-full of food, but I'd had enough. I felt vaguely guilty throwing out the rest, but I didn't want to take it home -- fast food doesn't microwave well, another lesson no one taught me but I learned on my own -- and there were no homeless people in my neighborhood, as I imagine the neighborhood watch had them carted off to towns with apartment buildings. I could send it to the starving children in Ethiopia, as my mother had repeatedly threatened when I didn't finish my dinner (which to me was less a threat and more a viable option), but I didn't think Chicken McNuggets would keep on the three-day flight. So my half-full tray found its way to the bottom of the garbage can, where it would surely feed some mall rats later in the evening.

I gathered up my comic books, video games, clothes, and other paternal replacement goods, and we headed out. The father that I had watched entering Toys 'R Us was now lingering outside of a Victoria's Secret, perhaps lamenting lost opportunities, or perhaps considering possible gifts for his wife. I hoped for the sake of his wife and children it was the latter.

My father put his hand on my shoulder, and bent down so he was eye level with me, like Melanie had a few months before. Maybe if the whole divorce thing goes through, I could set them up. At least then I'd be a real member of the pool family.

"I love you, you know."

Even though I doubted the motivation for the question -- which was intended to make him feel better, not me -- I didn't doubt its sincerity.

"Yeah."

Suddenly the bags in my hands got very heavy, and I wondered how I would walk the two blocks home from the drug store when my father dropped me off.

"So where to next?"

"I'm kind of tired," I replied, wondering again whether my mother had found something to eat for lunch while I was scarfing down McNuggets. "Do you mind if we go home now?" Of course, we weren't going home. I was going home, and he was going home, but they were two separate homes now, for two separate families, with two separate lives, and I was two separate people.

"Ok." He looked disappointed, but perked up quickly. "I can get to the gym a little early today, I guess. I told you I'm benching 185, right?"

My father took the long way home again, though I didn't mind as much this time. The apartment buildings we passed looked less frightening this time around, and I slipped one of my newly purchased CDs into the player to listen to on the way back. Everything looks less frightening with Rodgers and Hammerstein playing in the background.

When he dropped me off, we still had thirty-two minutes to go in our court-ordered bonding time. He took the last forty dollars he had out of his wallet and handed it to me. If he had had four hundred dollars in his wallet, he probably would have given me that. I felt a twinge of shame, as if my attempt to bankrupt him somehow sent the message that he could actually buy my forgiveness, instead of the message I had intended to send, that he was getting what he deserved. But I was wrong. None of us were getting what we deserved.

"I'll see you next week," he said, still handing me the money. I took it, but now only because he wanted me to, not because I wanted it. And in the years that followed, I took a lot more, always for the same reason. "Say hi to your mother for me."

It took twice as long to get home from the drug store than usual, because I had to keep stopping to pick up items that had fallen out of the bags, or just to rest my arms. I wondered whether my father would take me to his gym one of these days. I'd probably get special treatment, being the son of the great new Martin Haslap, who could bench 205 pounds with one hand.

When I got home, my mother was sitting quietly on the couch, listening to some health-related call-in show on the radio that only attracts hypochondriacs who came away from the show convinced they had four more ailments than they had when the show began. To my mother, radio talk show hosts were the closest thing to God that could be found in the media. I had a similar relationship with Martha Stewart.

I quickly shuffled my bags into a closet, a practice I repeated every subsequent time I came home from a visit with my father. She probably couldn't afford to buy me all the things he could buy me, but she did pay for the storage space.

"Hi ma." I was prepared for a full onslaught of "what happened?," "how did he look?," and "did he do anything illegal?," but she just stared at the radio. I was especially happy that she didn't ask how he looked, because I'm a horrible liar, and the truth would have been horrible to her. I noticed that the air conditioning was turned on high in the living room. I turned it off, even though it was sweltering outside. Electricity is expensive.

"I'm making salmon for dinner," I called to her from the kitchen. The McNuggets had not been nearly as satisfying as I imagined they would be, and I thought we could both use a home-cooked meal, even if I was the cook. I wasn't sure exactly how to go about making salmon, but I'd figure it out. It couldn't be much more of a disaster than the aluminum foil/french toast fiasco that morning, and I had the fire department on speed dial.

As I cooked dinner -- only setting off the smoke alarm twice -- my mother sat silently in the living room, lifting weights with her mind, while my father lifted them with his body, and I carried them on my shoulders. The salmon came out pretty well, if a bit dry, and my mother and I sat together and had dinner, just as my father and I sat together earlier that day for lunch. The meals might not be together anymore, but I was the constant between them. And after a while, the weights either get lighter, or you get more used to them, and you eventually adjust. Especially if it means the occasional shopping spree.

I never did make the American synchronized swim team, maybe because of the divorce, maybe because the ability to do eight consecutive somersaults in a pool was not enough to turn me into an Olympic hopeful. But sometimes dreams are meant to remain dreams, and the real accomplishment is just surviving.

Negligent Blogging

2008-05-05T23:00:00.002-04:00

To my four fans, including the guy in jail who can't wait to get out and "meat me":

I finished Lend Me A Hand, but was unhappy with the conclusion, so I began rewriting it, but since I have serious ADD -- is that Patrick Dempsey on television? why hasn't he called me yet? --- wait, what was I saying? Oh yeah, since I have serious ADD, I started another story in the interim which I will probably post before I finish the last story. It will have all the elements of a great drama; passion, intrigue, and of course, a talking turtle. Ok, it has none of those things, but it's about my parents' divorce, so it's sure to be substantially disturbing. Even more so than a talking turtle. It will be arriving forthwith. (That's a lawyer word, like "henceforth" and "greedy son of a bitch.")

Oh, went home this weekend. Lots of new material. Apparently my mother "hates the mail." She really truly does. I'm still not sure why; the investigation is pending. And I went to another wedding, the highlight of which was the attendance of the groom's Aunt Linda, who bore a striking resemblance to Charo. I'm actually convinced it was Charo, considering her exotic dancing, spitfire personality, and substitution of the regular wine kaddish with "cuchi cuchi." I was only sad that the Chiquita banana lady didn't make it to the wedding as well. I like bananas. Frankly, if God hadn't intended for men to be obsessed with their own anatomy, he/she/it shouldn't have created so many phallic fruits.

And so I leave you with a snapshot of a conversation between myself and my mother about my desire to change professions, which she adamantly opposes for obvious reasons (1. money 2. bragging rights to her coffee clutch 3. money):

Mom: You're so obsessed with being happy. Who's happy? That's not the point of your life.

Me: So what's the point of my life?

Mom: Making your mother happy.

Lend Me A Hand, Part I

2008-04-23T17:38:00.006-04:00

So you thought I was gone for good, eh? It'll take more than apathy to get rid of me!

This is the first long part of a long story that I've been working on. Oh, did I mention it's long? Don't say I didn't warn you.

Enjoy your schadenfreude installment for the day!

****************************************************

I haven’t flown in six years. Of all my irrational fears -- spiders, heights, nose hair -- flying is the most intense. Just hearing the words “frequent flyer” or “Mile High Club” is enough to give me the shakes. Although joining the latter is a slight incentive to getting over my fear. Sex in a Greyhound bus bathroom isn't nearly as classy.

Given that my parents had convinced me that Ebola was lurking behind every Toys R' Us display, my fear of flying might not be surprising. But despite my pre-determined pessimism, it's not crashing that really scares me. I just can't bring myself to worry about dying in a plane when I'm so much more likely to die in a New York City cab. Of course, this means that I also have an intense fear of New York City cabs, but that's intertwined with my intense fear of New York City in general. Nothing good can come from 14 million people in a two mile radius.

No, my fear of flying predates even my earliest childhood memories. I’ve been claustrophobic since I was a baby. There wasn’t a crib built big enough to hold me. By my first birthday, my parents had added several levels of bars on the top of my crib to keep me from climbing out. Most babies don’t spend the first years of their lives in a crib that could have held Jimmy Hoffa. Actually, according to my mother, I was claustrophobic before I was even born. Apparently I was so unhappy being trapped in the womb, I almost killed her in my hurry to get out. I was only two weeks premature, but the way my mother tells it you’d think I was born brandishing a meat cleaver. Amazingly, my mother doesn't consider this a reproach on her hospitability. I hate when guests depart early from one of my parties, especially when their departure also results in an epidural and a blood transfusion.

I’ve spent thousands of dollars trying to get myself back on an airplane. Support groups, cognitive behavioral therapy, strapping myself to the nose of a 747 – nothing’s worked. One therapist had the brilliant idea of inducing panic attacks to help me desensitize to the feeling of anxiety.

“Breathe with me,” she instructed. “We’ll breathe slow at first, and then speed up, and after a minute or two you will hyperventilate and the attack will start.”

It seemed to me we were drawing close to the boundaries of legitimate therapy here. We spent the entire session trying to hyperventilate. It didn’t work. I didn’t have a panic attack, and the only consolation was that I got to watch the therapist turn blue. I refused to pay her for wasting my time with that nonsense. She referred me to a collection agency, which, ironically, gave me a panic attack.

But the biggest waste of time and money was the virtual reality therapy. The therapist fits you with a pair of goggles that are supposed to simulate flight and straps you to an airplane chair. The goal is to make you feel comfortable in an airplane-type setting. Tying a claustrophobic to a chair is a great way of making him comfortable.

“Do I get a bag of peanuts with this?” I asked the therapist. He wasn’t amused. I have a tendency to annoy therapists. I use humor as a defense mechanism, and most therapists have a horrible sense of humor. Especially when they’d ask about my traumatic childhood.

“So your mother would chase you around the house with scissors. How did that make you feel?”

“Knock knock.”

My sister says this is an unhealthy defense mechanism.

“It’s a form of detachment, Jonah. You refuse to deal with your legitimate emotions. It’s really self-destructive. Ok, we’ll have to talk about this later, I’m out of wine and the liquor store closes at midnight.”

After the therapist strapped me in the chair, he would switch on the virtual reality machine, the chair would start rattling, and I’d hear the garbled sounds of an airplane engine. I was supposed to feel like I was on an airplane, but the images looked more like a beta version of Super Mario Brothers. After a few minutes I got bored. The therapist would come back in the room periodically to check on me.

“So tell me, what’s your anxiety level at now?”

“Zero.”

“Zero? But you’re on an airplane!”

“No, I’m not. I’m sitting in your office. The graphics on this thing are horrible. I can hear your secretary talking about American Idol. This chair smells. And where are my peanuts?”
Fortunately insurance paid for these sessions. Otherwise I’d have another collection agency after me.

*******************

“You haven’t flown in six years? Why not?” Ethan and I were sitting in a corner at Starbucks. Ethan liked sitting in corners. He liked looking at people, but he didn’t like being looked at. Which was too bad, since he was very pretty. Pretty people have an obligation to the world to be as visible and scantily clad as possible at all times.

“I’m scared.” He took a sip of his coffee and checked out the couple across from us. I watched his eyes gaze from the man, to the woman, back to the man.

“What are you scared of? Dying?”

“No. I know that I’m not going to die on a plane. I’m not stupid.”

“No, you’re right. You’re not stupid. Just crazy.” There was truth in that. I looked over at the couple behind us.

“Which one is hotter?” I asked him. When we first met, Ethan told me he was bisexual. Of course, I didn’t believe him. I was bisexual once too – for about three minutes, until I realized that being bisexual meant more than just not instinctively vomiting at the sight of a vagina. So I took it upon myself to scrutinize his every glance; after four months of following his eyes while we were watching television, out at dinner, in a bar, at the gym, flipping through the Sears catalogue, I decided that he actually was attracted to both women and men. That’s ok, though; I was gay enough for both of us.

“The chick has nice breasts, but the dude is really cut. It’s a draw.” Ethan still used words like “chick,” “dude,” and “bro.” He was only a year out of college, where he was president of his fraternity, a member of the Crew team, and an Abercrombie & Fitch “brand rep model.” He was the kind of guy who would have beaten me up in high school. God was making up for my delayed pubescence.

I met Ethan on ManSlut, or HornDude, or one of those websites where no one has to pretend they’re looking for anything other than a quickie. For the first three months he was just a pleasant distraction. My hairline was just beginning to recede, so sleeping with a 22 year old frat boy was very appealing. He’d sneak in, we’d go to my room, and he’d sneak out anywhere from a few minutes or several hours later. My roommate, Jason, never saw him; it was less complicated that way. I didn’t really care if Jason knew that I had a fuck buddy. Jason was straight only in the sense that he enjoyed sex with women; in every other way, Jason was perhaps the gayest man I’ve ever known, so I doubt this would have disturbed him. Plus a few months earlier Jason had caught me shaving my pubic hair, and once someone sees you shaving your pubes, there’s really no where else to go but up.

As time went on, Ethan and I stopped just having sex and started to talk. At first I didn’t like the talking. He was as close as I had ever gotten to a boytoy, and I didn’t want to add unnecessary depth to the relationship. But I also knew that there was an expiration date to fuck buddies, and we were quickly approaching that time. So it was either get to know him as a person or end it, and I wasn't ready for that yet. Plus my subscription to ManSlut had expired, and I was too cheap to renew. The promise of sex was worth less than $19.95 a month.

Eventually Ethan began to spend the night, which added a whole new layer of complication. I have a very specific nighttime routine, and the presence of a third party interferes with this carefully orchestrated process. Shower twice. Comb hair four times. Make sure all labels in refrigerator face forward. Organize shoes by date of purchase. NASA has less detailed procedures for launching spacecrafts.

But the real challenge for overnight guests is my actual sleeping habits. First, I turn on a fan that sits under my bed for white noise. Then I tie a t-shirt around my head to block out all light. I know there are products specifically made for that purpose, but those are too gay, even for me. Plus they remind me of Joan Crawford, and it’s just a stone’s throw from wearing an eye mask to attacking your dry cleaner with a wire hanger, which I don't want to do. I like my dry cleaner. He's a wizard at ketchup stains.

After the shirt is properly tied, I layer one pillow under my head and one pillow over my head, lie down on my stomach, and stick one leg – just one – under the blanket. One hand rests on the television remote control, in case I have a nightmare and need to quickly turn on the television in the middle of the night, and the other hand rests on the teddy bear I’ve had since I was 2 (a priceless possession I also plan to be buried with). If any body party is the slightest bit out of position, I can’t sleep at all, and then I’m cranky the next day. Crankier than usual. Cranky enough to attack my dry cleaner with a wire hanger.

I also drool in my sleep. I’m not talking a little wet spot here or there – by the morning my pillow is more soaked than a priest’s pants at Chuck E’ Cheese. And I don’t only drool on my pillow – I bite it. Hard. You don’t want to get your fingers too close to my mouth while I sleep. Or other body parts. And to top it all off, I talk in my sleep, usually completely incoherent babble, though my freshman roommate told me that he once found me singing the Star-Spangled Banner while standing on my bed and saluting the television set, naked. I may think like a Democrat, but I dream like a Republican.

I quickly realized that I didn’t mind Ethan’s presence, though. He had this way of being around without intruding, or making me feel self-conscious about my lunacy. Being a self-aware lunatic is much more difficult than just being a plain old lunatic. Sometimes I’m jealous of people with little or no hold on reality. I wonder what it says about your emotional health when schizophrenia is appealing.

“Do you think it’s weird that I have to flush the toilet eight times before I go to bed?”

“Weird? I never thought it was weird. It’s just… one of your things.”

It was easy for Ethan to believe this, as his biggest visible quirk was a preference for crunchy peanut butter over smooth. It’s a little harder to avoid feeling judged when everyone on the subway watches you counting the number of fluorescent light bulbs in the ceiling.

Over time, my lunacy even seemed to become endearing.

“So what color t-shirt are you going to tie around your head tonight?”

“Well, it has to be a dark color," I said, moving the Kenneth Coles behind the Nikes and the Birkenstocks to the back of the line, where they belonged, both because I had bought them in the mid-90s and because they were an ill-advised impulse purchase at Lilith Fair, of which all I remember is being the only attendant with a penis. "Brighter colors let in too much light. But if it’s too dark, and I wake up in the middle of the night, I get scared that I might be going blind. So it needs to be the perfect shade of red, or dark blue. As long as it’s not ribbed. I don’t like the feeling of ribbed fabric against my ears.”

"You know, before I met you, I didn’t think people like you existed,” he said, flipping through the Sears catalogue and pausing at the woman's underwear ads. "You're very interesting."

“Interesting as in, there’s a guy I want to get to know better, or interesting as in, what a fabulous subject for psychiatric study?” I have a tendency to ask questions that I don’t really want the answer to, unless it’s the one I want to hear. Like, am I losing my hair?, or, is it the biggest one you’ve ever seen? My boyfriends learn this trick quickly. They only give the wrong answer once.

“Both.” It was an acceptable answer. He didn’t sleep on the couch that night, though I did rip the woman's underwear ads out of the catalogue. It was hard enough to compete with other men, but there was no way I could compete with a woman. I have a small frame, and my waist is small enough to cause some envy among my female friends, but with a five-o-clock shadow at 6 in the morning, my face is indistinguishably masculine. I wouldn't make a good woman. I wouldn't even make a good drag queen.

Back at our corner table, the couple across from us was holding hands and making smoochy faces at each other. The man was much more attractive than the woman, although of course I was biased.

“Do you ever miss sex with women?” I asked him, observing their pre-coital heteronormative rituals. I don't particularly like homophobics, but I also don't think that homosexuals should throw stones; if gays ever ruled the world, our first proclamation would likely be outlawing heterosexual sex, or at least, restricting it to certain hours of the day when the rest of us are getting manicures or attending Cher concerts.

“Sometimes. But sex with you is close enough,” he said with a grin. Ethan liked to think of himself as the big, strapping man, and me as the little helpless woman. I let him think that when it suited me, just as countless generations of women have before me. And just like those women, if he stepped over the line, I’d serve him his balls on a platter. Behind every great man there’s a gay man.

“It’s too bad about your flying fear. I was thinking we could go to the White Party next month.” The White Party was an annual event in Miami that was supposed to celebrate the culture and history of the gay people. In reality, it was just a glorified, city-wide orgy that would have made Caligula blush. I don’t think Rome ever actually fell. I think it just relocated to South Florida.

I had always been scared of massive gay events like the White Party. Actually, I was scared of any massive event. I was afraid I’d get lost in a sea of people and never find my way out. I’d just dissolve into the atmosphere. I suppose at the White Party I’d become part of a rainbow. I don’t want to dissolve, not even into a rainbow.

But having Ethan there would be an entirely different experience. He wouldn’t lose me to anyone, much less some faggy-assed rainbow.

“I want to go. Let’s go.” It was a big promise. Perhaps a promise I wasn’t capable of keeping. But I really wanted to go. And I didn’t want him going by himself. You don’t set a zebra loose in a herd of lions.

“Good, you’ll be ok," he said, watching the couple leave the store, probably headed for their bedroom to perform ungodly acts that would be outlawed in a gay-controlled society. "I’ll make sure you’re ok.”

This was one of those times his macho attitude suited me. Though I wished he was drinking something a bit more masculine than a Mochafrappacino when he said it.

***************************************

“It’s just not normal,” my mother said, as she cleaned the bathroom for the sixth time that day.
“Pass me the Windex.”

I had only recently come out to my mother. I didn’t think of myself as closeted when she didn’t know. I thought of myself as a totally out homosexual with a totally crazy mother. But when my grandmother told me that my mother had been calling radio psychiatrists to ask if they thought I might be gay (“My son likes show tunes and hasn’t had a girlfriend since the sixth grade – do you think he’s a fag?”), I figured it was time to come clean, before members of the ex-gay movement showed up at my door with a wooden cross and cleansing fire.

“It’s just not natural," she said, eliminating any trace of nature from her toilet. "It’s not what God intended.”

“There’s gay penguins,” I replied, handing her the Windex. Actually, it was store-brand Windex. The Haslaps are morally opposed to brand name products.

“You’re not a penguin.”

At the ripe old age of 56, my mother had already undergone knee and hip replacement surgery, but that didn’t stop her from cleaning every nook and cranny in the house. I once found her trying to move the leather couch when she noticed a dustbunny by the wall. If I hadn’t been there, that would have spelled doom for hip #2. There was no risk not worth taking for the sake of cleanliness. She had long since scrubbed away the rough spots on the bottom of the tub that keep you from slipping. A smart idea for a woman with more bionic parts than Robocop.

“It’s your fucking father’s fault, you know.” The word “fucking” had preceded my father’s name ever since their divorce. “He never played sports with you. A boy needs to play sports.”

“I played video games.”

“Video games aren’t sports. Sports have balls. You never played with balls.” I let that obvious opening slide, as she was already agitated enough. “And how about AIDS? How do you know you won’t get AIDS? Do you ask your partners to see their paperwork before you have sex?”

"Yes, mother," I replied. I called her mother whenever I was annoyed with her, which is to say, quite often. After seeing Psycho, though, I tried to cut back. Given my neatness and thin frame, the comparison was just too close for comfort. "Right before I ask for a copy of their tax returns."

My mother was an elementary school health teacher for 22 years. She was also a raging hypochondriac. Someone really had their finger on the button when they hired her for that job. There must be a whole generation of kids in New York City who disinfect doorknobs every time they enter a room.

“Why don’t you ask Lily these questions?” My sister was 33 and single, but I was pretty sure she wasn’t a virgin. I guess there must be 33 year old virgins -- like nuns, or Daughters of the Confederacy -- but Lily was too attractive to be one of them.

“Don’t bring your sister into this. It’s different for straight people. And for all I know she could be a lesbian.”

“Her life would probably be much easier if she was.”

“God forbid," she said, being unintentionally offensive as usual. After I came out, my grandmother pleaded with me not to take my mother's comments personally, because they "come from a good place." I'm not sure where that place was, but it seemed halfway between homophobia and ignorance, which wasn't such a good place to me.

“You know, there are other things you can do that won't put you at risk" she said, scrubbing the backside of the toilet bowl. I wondered what exactly she was doing at night that could get the backside of the toilet dirty. "Have you considered mutual masturbation?” she asked, nonchalantly, like a Jehovah's Witness might ask whether you've considered the Kingdom of Heaven. I had a flashback to when I was 14 and my mother caught me masturbating to one of my dad’s porn videos, which he had presumably left as a sort of makeshift mentoring program for my adolescence. I promised myself there and then never to masturbate again. That lasted about three hours, until I saw the Slevack brothers playing basketball outside shirtless.

“I really don’t feel comfortable talking about this with you.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t know anything about this stuff. You have to enlighten me. People didn’t do these things in my day.”

“Sure they did, they just went home to their wives after they did them.”

To my mother’s credit, her attitude had significantly improved over time. She even started attending PFLAG meetings, where she met some parents who had sent their son to an “ex-gay re-education school.” Apparently, somewhere between the Coping With Cunnilingus Seminar and Finding Your Way Around A Vagina 101, their son tried to commit suicide with a Lady Bic razor. Eventually they realized that maybe his problem wasn’t being gay; maybe his problem was having intolerant bastards for parents. But I don’t think my mother got the right message out of it.

“This school sounded like such a nice place,” she told me after her first PFLAG meeting. “They had lots of fun activities and interesting programs. If I had known about you years ago, I could have done something about it. But now,” she sighed, “I guess it’s a lost cause.”

It had been a lost cause since my best friend and I had decided to experiment with some athletic socks and a tube of Vaseline.

“Oh well,” she said with her arm elbow-deep in the toilet bowl yet again. Our bathroom was so antiseptic it could double for an operating room. “At least you’re not a transvestite.” It was true – I never once questioned my gender, and I considered my manhood to be one of my better physical attributes. I should wear my pants on my head instead. Always put your best foot forward.

My mother finished cleaning the toilet. She threw out the rubber gloves and put on a new, high-tech pair. The new gloves were necessary for Stage 2 of the cleaning process, which involved a mysterious combination of bleach, vinegar, and rubbing alcohol. It was a toxic mix that could be banned by the EPA if they ever got wind of it.

“So what else is going on?” Ah. Good. Moving on. Though my therapist probably would have rather we stuck to the mutual masturbation discussion. Not for the benefit of my mental health, but for the benefit of her college-aged daughter, whose first semester at Swarthmore had been fully funded by my traumatic childhood.

“Nothing, I’m just getting over a cold,” I said, immediately regretting any mention of my physical health. Within twenty minutes my mother would convince me that what I thought was a lingering cold was actually the first signs of some rare and deadly form of cancer that only 28-year-old homosexual Jews get.

“You don’t dress well. You should be wearing a sweatshirt.” No matter what I wore, it wasn’t enough. My mother wouldn’t be satisfied if I wore a parka in the Sahara.

“It’s 92 degrees outside.”

“It’s a dry heat.”

The fumes from the cleaning supplies were starting to get to me. I had flashbacks of high school, when I would spend hours laying face down on the kitchen floor. That is, until Michael Sloane introduced me to the wonders of marijuana in his parents’ basement.

“Are you going in and out of the air conditioning at work? That’s not good for you.”

“So what am I supposed to do? Call in sick until September?” It wasn't such a bad idea, except I wasn't sure who would fund my intense chocolate chip cookie addiction if I did.

“At least keep a jacket at the office. It can get cold in those big buildings.”

“I do.”

“Don’t lie to your mother.” She was right. I was lying. And she was also right about it being cold in the office. But bringing a jacket to the office would mean admitting that she was right, and then my whole world would start unraveling.

I followed her into the living room, which competed with Hitler's bunker for most uninviting space in the universe. One whole wall consisted of a large mirror, which seemed more suited for a porn studio than an apartment. Against the opposite wall there were two black leather couches facing a large black metal breakfront, inside of which sat various pictures of me and my sister from different stages of our childhood. We looked just as trapped in the breakfront as we felt in the pictures.

“How’s Ethan?” It was the first time she said his name without whispering it. Ever since I came out to her, our conversations were held in whispers, and the word “gay” was always italicized. “Are you sure you’re…gay?” “Have you tried not being…gay?” “When did you first realize you were…gay?” But she seemed to be getting past that. She was speaking in normal, 12-point font now. I felt like giving her a gold star. She needed some type of positive reinforcement. Maybe I’d buy her a new pair of rubber gloves, or maybe I'd spring for her next artificial limb.

“He’s good. He says hi.” He didn’t actually say hi, but that felt like the right thing to say. At least it was non-controversial. When my mother first met Ethan I was prepared for the worst. I had the number for the local police, fire department, and poison control saved into my cell phone for the occasion, just in case. As it turned out, though, my mom actually liked Ethan. He was tall, athletic, masculine, and his eyebrows weren’t waxed. Everything a “man” should be, according to my mother and Newt Gingrich.

“I hope you’re not driving him crazy,” she said, as she began to dust a picture of me and my sister at the beach. My father used to be in the picture, but after the divorce, he mysteriously disappeared from all of the family photos. Apparently I became the product of a sexual union between my mother and a human-shaped photographic cut-out. “No one wants to be around a nervous person. If you’re too nervous all the time, he'll run away.”

She finished dusting the pictures and began the final stage in her cleaning regiment: nooks and crannies. She climbed a stepstool to reach the top of a windowpane, where no dirt could possibly get and no one would ever know if it did. The stepstool itself was precarious. It appeared to be the same stepstool she had owned when I was a kid, but since it hadn't yet disintegrated into a pile of woodchips, she saw no reason to replace it.

“Shit, I’m out of bleach." This represented a cleaning emergency, surpassed only by the dreaded crumb on the living room carpet, or eating on the leather couches without first covering them with sticky plastic. “Let’s go get some more.”

I immediately agreed, looking forward to getting outside and regrowing the brain cells I had lost while breathing in the cleaner. On our way to the car, we ran into the mother of a girl my mother had wanted to set me up with shortly before I came out to her.

"There's this girl upstairs I want you to meet." It was more of a demand than a request. "She's not so pretty, but you don't care about things like that." I'm not sure which offended me more, that my mother wanted to set me up with a girl or that she wanted to set me up with an ugly girl. Fortunately, I came out to her before I could determine just how unattractive a woman my mother thought I deserved.

“So is this Jonah?” the woman asked with eager eyes.

“This is him,” my mother said, licking her fingers and removing some shmutz from my cheek. Things that you think mothers only do in movies my mother actually does in real life.

“Well, what a nice-looking young man." Her eyes danced with imagined possibilities. I could see the chupa being constructed as we spoke. "And your mother tells me you’re an attorney!”

“That’s right,” I said, wanting to add, “Did she tell you I like to suck cock too?” The way she was looking at me though, she probably still would have given me her daughter even knowing I was gay. Hell, I could have told her I enjoyed chopping up small animals and worshipping Satan, and she still would have given me her daughter. Being a Jewish lawyer makes up for a lot of shortcomings.

But before she could suggest three sheep and a goat for her daughter’s dowry, my mother, probably sensing my growing displeasure and fearing that I’d open my big mouth any second, started hobbling towards the elevator. “Gloria, we have to run to the store. I’ll see you later, ok?”

We left Gloria to plan the engagement dinner and entered the elevator, which, like the hallways of my mother's building, smelled like cabbage and Preparation H. Except for Gloria's unattractive daughter, most of the building's residents qualified for Social Security benefits. Not that I have anything against senior citizens; quite the contrary, I find cantankerousness endearing. At least, when it's not directed at me specifically.

Perhaps to prepare the residents for the not-too-distant future, the elevator was about the size of a coffin. It was only three floors to the garage, but it might as well have been three hundred. My palms began sweating, signaling the upcoming panic attack. I thought about the therapist who had tried to make me panic by breathing fast. A sharper therapist would have just stuffed me in an elevator.

“I know you can’t change who you are,” my mother said, leaning against the elevator wall and coming perilously close to the "Alarm" button. I didn't pay much attention to what she said. I was too busy counting down in my head and practicing my yoga breath.

“It’s just, being gay makes life so hard…”

30-29-28…in, out, in, out.

“Life is hard enough as it is…”

22-21-20…

“And then it’s so lonely…”

13-12-11…

“You’ll spend your life alone…”

5-4-3…

The door opened onto the dark garage. I breathed a sign of relief, and made an empty promise to a higher power to do a good deed for someone as thanks for getting me out of that death trap. Fortunately, I defined good deed rather broadly. For example, not stealing someone's wallet out of an open backpack is a good deed in my book. If actually stealing it is a bad deed, shouldn't the converse be true? Sometimes it takes more self-control to do the right thing than it takes maliciousness to do the wrong thing.

An elderly woman was waiting for the elevator as we got off. She was pushing a cart of groceries. I spotted some petroleum jelly among her bags, which reminded me that I also needed to go shopping in the near future.

“Hello, Ruth,” my mother said.

“Oh, hi Sharon,” she said. “Is this your son?”

“This is him,” my mother replied. Ruth was at least 90, but still looked healthier than my mother. She also smelled like cabbage and Preparation H. Maybe it was a new, fashionable old lady perfume.

Ruth looked me up and down, like a sexual predator but without the sexual connotation. “You know, I have a granddaughter…”

Apparently you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting a yenta trying to marry off some family member in this building. I walked ahead while Ruth described her granddaughter to my mother in great and loving detail. I didn’t care to hear any more about the latest ugly Jewess who was to be the next Mrs. Haslap.

I arrived at her car, tucked away in the back of the garage. I wasn’t feeling much better than I had felt in the elevator. The elevator was small, but the garage was underground which made it just as bad as the elevator, or worse. In fact, I suspect my claustrophobia actually began with a fear of being underground. My childhood home had a crawlspace underneath the basement, which was the lowest point in the house, at least 10 feet below ground level. When I was little, I would hide in the crawlspace during my parents’ many arguments. They didn’t relegate themselves to one room to fight. They traveled from room to room, chasing each other out of one and into another, round and round until they tired themselves out, or one of them left the house, or someone called the police, usually our peace-loving next-door neighbors who surprisingly never petitioned to get us kicked out of the neighborhood. But if I crammed myself into the furthest corner of the crawlspace and stuck my fingers in my ears, I could only barely hear them. I would leave the basement light on so I could see, and I put a stuffed animal in there to keep me company, a giraffe my grandmother had bought me during our last trip to DisneyWorld. I also put some chocolate chip cookies in the crawlspace for sustenance. Sometimes the fights were pretty long, and I got hungry.

During one particularly nasty fight – I think it was about the vacuum cleaner, something about which required my father to go to hell and my mother to save him a seat on the way – I fell asleep in the crawlspace. When I woke up, it was pitch black. Someone must have turned the basement light off while I was asleep, likely my mother, who regularly went around the house turning off lights to conserve electricity, even if you had only walked out of the room seconds before. In the dark, I couldn’t tell which way I was facing. I couldn’t see the opening to the crawlspace. I started to cry, but I didn’t call for help, because that would start another fight, which would necessitate my returning to the crawlspace. I muffled my crying with the stuffed giraffe so no one could hear.

And suddenly, it occurred to me that I might not ever leave that crawlspace. I could die in the crawlspace. No one would think to look for me in there. I didn’t think an adult could have even fit in there. Everyone would think I ran away, or was kidnapped. I’d be on the side of a milk carton within a month. There’d be a manhunt for my captor. People would see me at the supermarket, or in a clothing store, or riding Space Mountain. Each new sighting would give my parents hope. But in a year or two, maybe less, depending on whether the tabloids picked up the story, everyone would just give up. I’m sorry, ma’am, the chances of us finding your son now are slim to nil. Just another missing child in America. My mom would grieve for a while, maybe forever. She’d rip out her hair and tear her clothes and blame my dad and my sister and God and everyone else she set her eyes on. My dad would grieve too. He’d buy himself lots of CD players and television sets and other gadgets to ease the pain. Everyone copes in their own way. But the world would continue to spin without me. It had to. I wasn’t that important.

And in a hundred years, when they bulldozed the house, they would find my corpse, still clutching the stuffed giraffe. By then my whole family would be gone, and no one would ever know who I was or why I had laid under a house for a hundred years holding a stuffed giraffe.

That was the last time I ever hid in the crawlspace. I didn’t go back in until six years later, when I figured out where my dad was hiding his porn collection. Before my mom sold the house, I ventured in one last time to retrieve the stuffed giraffe. It was still there. It still smelled like tears and chocolate chip cookies.

Back in the garage, I sat on the car, practicing my yoga breath. I had begun practicing yoga a few months before, around the time I came out to my mother. Mostly I did it to meet cute crunchy boys who didn't wear deodorant, but whose wholesome and earnest personalities made up for it. Unfortunately, I found that "lack of body odor" was actually on my list of necessarily qualities in a life partner. Amazingly, though, I also found the exercise to be mentally and physically beneficial. I had figured that the pallative benefits of yoga were an urban legend, like Big Foot and gay Republicans.

Twenty minutes later my mother caught up to me, presumably, after Ruth had decided that we should have a band instead of a DJ at the wedding.

“She’s such a yenta,” she said, out of breath from the long 75 foot walk to the car. “I met her granddaughter once. She’s very pretty.” Well, at least it was a step up. “If only I hadn’t married your fucking father.”

She stumbled on a crack in the floor. I grabbed her arm to steady her, concerned that the emergency room would be overflowing on a Sunday. She couldn’t have weighed more than 100 pounds. There was nothing to hold onto.

“If you hadn’t married my father, I wouldn’t be here at all,” I said, again confused about this "good place" that my grandmother spoke of.

“No, that’s not what I meant,” she replied, trying to steady herself on the edge of the car.

I helped her into the passenger side seat. I always drove when we went anywhere, even though I hated driving. The car still had stickers from all my alma maters stuck to the back window, expressing pride that my mother couldn't express in words. It also had the “WARNING—AIR BAG” stickers on the dashboard and paper over the floor mats, even though it was at least eight years old. The seat cushions were covered with old linen sheets, which smelled vaguely like coffee and dried urine from occasions when she couldn't make it out of the car in time.

My mother looked in the vanity mirror, checking her makeup. There was lipstick on her teeth, and one of her eyes looked significantly larger than the other, though that was partially the result of some inadequate plastic surgery she had undergone the previous year. She tried to reapply, but her hands were shaking, as they had for the better part of a decade.

“I should have been better prepared for kids." She tried to buckle her seatbelt, but it kept falling out of her hands. I buckled it for her and tried to tighten it. Even at its tightest it barely touched her waist. “No one teaches you how to be a mother."

Or a son.

We approached the garage door. The door opened, flooding the car with sunlight and warm air and life. I desperately wanted to change the subject.

“I’m trying to get back on a plane,” I said, as we pulled out of the garage. “Ethan said he’d fly with me.”

“The flying thing again? I just don’t understand why you’re so anxious,” she said, pressing the imaginary brake under her foot as I edged into traffic. “It must be your fucking father’s fault.”

*****************************

Stay tuned for Part II...

Love Is A Palindrome, Part V: The Porcelain Beauty

2008-04-13T23:29:00.004-04:00

A few days later, the annual Boston PotFest provided me with a sorely needed respite from the Animal House that had become my life, and provided all of my dormmates -- Mark included -- with an unneeded respite from sobriety.

"Dude, let's go!!! We're missing it!!!" Shawn yelled to Mark from down the hall. Our Resident Assistant, Joseph, had organized a field trip over to the Common for this seemingly momentous event, during which the Boston police looked the other way while a gaggle of college students blaze their ways into oblivion. Somehow I doubted that when Joseph interviewed for the position as our RA, he included his years of experience attending PotFest on his resume. Though just talking to him was probably enough to tip anyone off.

"I'm not condoning the actual consumption of narcotics," Joseph told us, as he cleaned his favorite bong in the bathroom sink, a green-purple number with a pair of breasts stenciled on the side. As a junior in college who could legally drink -- not that the converse situation stopped anyone -- Joseph was the envy of our entire floor, except me of course, who instead envied the girl down the hall whose gay dancer/half-brother had toured with Madonna.

"This is purely an observational outing. But if any of you should find yourselves actually partaking of this sociological phenomenon, well, fuckin' rock on!" I was glad he gave everyone permission to "rock on." Otherwise they might have felt hamstrung in their celebrations.

"I'm coming, just have to find Jen!" Jen was the name of Mark's favorite bong, and also coincidentally, the name of his girlfriend back home. If he had to give up one, I'd put my money on the girlfriend.

Mark grabbed Jen and stuffed her in his backpack, along with several shot-sized bottles of Absolut, a portable CD player, and a frozen pizza. I wasn't sure what he planned to do with the frozen pizza, but I hoped that there were no publicly available microwaves on the grounds of PotFest, which seemed to be about as dangerous an idea as free lube at a gay pride parade.

With Mark, Shawn, et al temporarily out of my hair, I breathed a sigh of relief, and maliciously hoped that the police would feel decidedly ungenerous this year and throw them all in jail for flagrantly violating federal law. Though that could result in Mark being expelled from school, and judging by my luck this year, replaced in the dorm room by someone even more distasteful (hard to imagine) and not nearly as attractive (much easier to imagine). So I settled for one evening of quiet, bookended by days of disquietude.

Given that I had sent almost all of my personal effects home, there wasn't much I could do with my free time. Ordinarily I might have used this time to hold a semi-annual stuffed Miss Piggy pageant, and top it off with repeated viewings of my Muppets Take Manhattan VHS, but since I lacked both Piggy and tape, that option was out. In fact, there was almost nothing in the room to play with except myself, and I had been feeling curiously un-masturbatory over the previous few weeks, which was particularly strange considering I was sleeping four feet from a perpetually semi-naked teenage boy.

Though "sleeping" was an overstatement. I spent most nights tossing and turning, vainly hoping that when I woke up, I would be safely back at home on Long Island, or as safe as I could be living in a house with a woman who had the mood swings of an alcoholic without the hangovers. Even in my desperation, I realized that there was something profoundly unhealthy about wanting to return to a home where any blunt object could be suddenly transformed into a weapon, but at least I could be myself there. My mother had long ago given up wanting me to be something I'm not. Mark had yet to learn that same lesson, and this time, I didn't have the energy to teach him. Being invisible is easier than being different.

But perhaps with Mark and the cannabis crew gone for the evening, I might be able to rediscover my love for unconscious mental states, and relegate the previous two weeks to some dark corner of my brain where I stuffed other unhappy events in my life, like the time I dressed up as Pugsly for Halloween in elementary school. Being a bit pugsly at the time myself, my choice of costume wasn't conducive to avoiding repeated eggings by the nasty Slevack brothers who lived across the street. They had their comeuppance, though, when their father was arrested for showing some teenage girls his Pugsly during a high school track meet.

I curled up in bed with my Cape Cod snow globe, which at least gave me something to clutch as I fell asleep. I always sleep better when my hands are grabbing something, usually body parts or stuffed animals, but anything will do in a pinch. I shook the globe and watched the fake snow fall on the kids playing in the water. It was curious that their parents would allow them to frolic in the water when it was snowing outside. My mother wouldn't let me swim after Labor Day, no matter what the temperature. She said there was always a chill in the air after Labor Day. I wondered what meteorological phenomenon caused this sudden and imperceivable drop in temperature, though I suspect even the world's greatest climatologists would be hard-pressed to come up with an answer. Meteorologists have no way of measuring maternal paranoia.

But even if the kids in the snow globe were twenty minutes from pneumonia, they looked happy. I wished I could trade places with them; they seemed to be of hearty stock, they'd do just fine in the real world. I, on the other hand, was as vulnerable as a piece of colored plastic. They belonged outside the bubble, and I belonged inside of it.

My eyes began closing, as I drifted into a world of snowy July days and two-dimensional lives, when there was a knock on my door. I figured it was a straggler from PotFest who had missed the PotBus, so I ignored the knock, because whoever was on the other side of that door didn't want to talk to me, and I didn't want to talk to them.

The knocking continued; potheads aren't usually this persistent, but I chalked it up to desperation. I was about to shove a map to the Common under the door, and perhaps the joint I had been saving for a rainy day, when my visitor spoke.

"Jonah? Are you home?" Damn. It wasn't a pothead jonesing for a doobie (I didn't smoke it, but after a few weeks living with potheads I had the lingo down cold). I threw on a t-shirt and opened the door.

Stacy stood in the hall holding a Tower Records bag. For the first time in recent history, Greg wasn't with her, which meant that either he had found sex or he was currently looking for it.

"Stacy, what are you doing here?"

"I brought the new Streisand CD," she said, barreling past me into the room, though I didn't stand in her way. Her breasts could have taken most men in a throw-down. Years later when she had them surgically reduced, I worried that her upper body strength would decrease proportional to their size, like a female Samson, but I suppose that risk was worth the benefit of being able to enter a room simultaneously with your chest.

"We're listening to it, now!" she unilaterally declared, searching for my nonexistent CD player, which I had also sent home with my father, since I had no music that I would feel comfortable playing in front of potheads.

"You know, I haven't been in your room since we got to college?" There was a reason for that, Ms. Clueless McBoobster. "Where are all the Miss Piggys??? Your room is so boring!"

Good. Mission accomplished.

Stacy found Mark's stereo and inserted the CD. I was surprised his stereo didn't automatically vomit the CD back out.

"Stacy, that's not mine," I objected. I could only imagine Mark's reaction if he found his stereo violated by easy listening. Although I couldn't picture him getting angry, an emotion that requires more energy than it takes to roll a joint, which was more than I ever saw him expend.

"So? My roommate and I share stuff all the time," she replied. I didn't doubt that. In fact, I didn't doubt that everyone else had a more functional relationship with their roommate than I had with mine. Just as I didn't doubt that others had more functional relationships with their parents, siblings, grandparents, friends, acquaintances, pediatricians, dentists, and goldfish.

But since the whole floor was out for the evening, I decided to allow this flagrant violation of my roommate's privacy, even though I suspected that when I was out of the room Mark never hesitated to violate mine. There was a strawberry-flavored condom wrapper lodged between the wall and my bed to prove it. That Jen was one lucky lady.

"So how's it been going?" Stacy asked, violently shaking the snow globe and watching the neglected kids become underaged Polar Bears, as Barbra's smooth silky voice filled the room.

"Ok." I hoped she wouldn't break the globe. I didn't know whether I could get glitter out of the industrial carpeting.

"Just ok?" Stacy began flipping through a Penthouse magazine. Great. Even straight large-chested women were better men than me. "You should come out with me and Greg sometime."

That was unlikely. Greg was surely not the first homosexual I had ever met, but he was the first uncloseted one. Not that he had much of a choice; there are gay men who are effeminate by nature, and there are those who are effeminate by association -- Greg was clearly the former. Which made him a direct threat to my sexual repression.

"Maybe," I answered, noncommittally. What if Greg tried to hit on me? I wasn't physically attracted to him, but maybe he knew some gay voodoo that could get me to undress involuntarily. Isn't that what homosexuals do? Seduce the unwilling? Like sexual vampires? It wasn't a risk I was willing to take. In fact, just allowing Stacy to come into my room and put Barbra Streisand on my roommate's stereo was an extreme risk. If anyone should come in I considered throwing Stacy down on the bed and pretending we were making out to the soft intonations of Send In The Clowns. The thought was only slightly more nauseating than Greg's lisp.

Just as Barbra was achieving inhuman vocal heights, the door opened. It was Mark and Shawn. I didn't have time to turn off the stereo. I didn't even have time to grab Stacy's breasts, and they were always within arm's length. This was it -- the final nail on my social coffin. I prepared myself for the barrage of crude remarks, which I assumed would have something to do with things stuffed up my ass, per usual.

But instead of commenting on my musical tastes or my anal flexibility, Mark staggered over to the bed, propped up by Shawn on one side and another, nondescript pothead friend on the other. Shawn deposited Mark on the bed.

"Hi, I'm Stacy," Stacy said, registering appropriate social cues as always. Mark moaned softly from his bed, while tracing the glow-in-the-dark stars he had pasted to the ceiling in the shape of Jen's name with his finger. Without a word, Shawn plus one exited the room, leaving the four of us -- Stacy, Mark, Barbra, and myself -- alone once again.

Mark closed his eyes, seemingly finding solace in Babs's search for people who need people, while Stacy and I watched him twitch painfully in place, like a muscular but very ill lab rat. The smells of marijuana, alcohol, and pepperoni pizza competed on his body for more nauseating odor (apparently he had either found a microwave, or had eaten the pizza frozen; neither scenario appeared unlikely). He didn't seem aware of his surroundings, much less the easy listening coming out of his stereo.

"Do you think we should do something?" Stacy asked.

"Like what?" I had no experience with drug-induced physical trauma, and I avoided all medical dramas on television where such things might be learned. I couldn't watch a medical show without convincing myself I had every disease on that episode. One time after a particularly distressing episode of ER, I came down with Ebola, Tourette's, and a nasty urinary tract infection all at once.

"I don't know, call someone," she replied, standing over his pseudo-corpse.

"He could get in trouble." The school had a strict no-tolerance policy for marijuana smoking, though apparently not for hiring potheads as resident assistants. I had a friend who was already kicked out of the dorm for smoking pot; she was now living off-campus, with three coke addicts and a budding prostitute. Obviously the school's policy was benefiting everyone, including local drug dealers.

Suddenly, Mark jerked up, turned over, and vomited all over the bed.

The next few moments were a blur. Mark ran out of the room, vomiting as he went. Stacy followed him. I also ran out of the room, but being a sympathetic puker, I ran the other way, gagging as I went. If I ever do have children, I'm going to have their gag reflex removed, or else install a permanent forward peristalsis machine in their digestive tracts to prevent this such occasion.

I ran into the stairwell and down four flights before the gagging stopped, at which point I realized that I had left Stacy alone to deal with my roommate's mess. Feeling slightly guilty, I slowly made my way back upstairs, only temporarily pausing at every landing to slightly gag at the memory of seeing Mark's dinner in reverse. When I got back to my floor, the lingering pizza-tinged air filled my nostrils and almost sent me running back down. But I powered forward, worried that I had left Stacy with more than she could handle, as it was clearly more than I could handle myself.

I followed the trail of half-digested junk food into the bathroom, where I found Mark on all fours, shaking and sweating, with his head falling into the toilet bowl. Stacy stood over him, patting his head with a wet paper towel and urging him not to pass out. Every minute or so he would violently convulse, and Stacy would hold his head to prevent it from knocking against the walls of the stall. The sound of his groans were interrupted only by the occasional warble from the stereo, which in our haste we had left playing before we left the room. At this moment, at least, Mark was indeed a person who needed people. And he was fortunate that one of those people was Stacy, who obviously had some dormant maternal instincts that were just waiting for this sort of opportunity to come out. My instincts were more paternal, which is to say, anxiously detached. I wanted to help, but didn't know how to, so I stood five feet away where I wouldn't get in the way. I wasn't going to save a life, but I wasn't going to take one either.

"Jonah, get me a towel," Stacy ordered. I immediately complied, as any obedient father would. When I came back, Mark had stopped convulsing, and was now quietly crying while Stacy rubbed his shoulders and made soothing noises that I doubted my mother even made when I was an infant. I watched his once masculine body crumple into a pile of weak flesh without even the force of will to wipe the vomit from his cheeks. Just a few hours ago I had envied and lusted after him, so much so that I had transformed myself over the previous two weeks into a repressed mute. Now the envy and lust were gone, and in their place were pity, compassion, and slight disgust.

I sat on the floor while Stacy wiped the sweat off of Mark's body. Every once in a while someone would come into the bathroom, notice the mess, and quickly leave, usually without saying anything. Mark was quiet for a while, and I wondered whether he had fallen asleep.

"I want to take a shower," Mark finally said, to no one in particular, as he staggered to his feet.

"Ok," Stacy replied, helping him up. "You're going to have to watch him, make sure he doesn't pass out in the shower."

"But, but," I stammered. Watch him shower? It felt like a violation of his privacy, like I was taking advantage of him at his most vulnerable.

"But what?" Stacy asked. "Would you rather clean up the bedroom?"

Faced with a choice between watching Mark shower and removing the pizza vomit from his bed sheets, I agreed. Mark began undressing, but it was all curiously mechanical. There was nothing sexual about it, nothing seductive. In my mind, he was still lying prostrate on the ground, quietly begging for help from friends who had abandoned him when he needed them most, only to be replaced by a roommate whose name he didn't know, and his roommate's fag hag, who he'd never met before tonight and probably wouldn't have liked if he had.

As Mark dried off, I remembered my first day in the dorm, only two weeks before. Had it really only been that long? Had it really only been two weeks since I waved goodbye to my mother through a thin layer of green construction paper, since my father had left me with a clammy handshake and forty bucks, since Jonah the rebellious sock roller had been replaced by Jonah the genuflecting shadow puppet? Maybe I wasn't who I was supposed to be, or who everyone wanted me to be, if there was even any space between the two. I certainly hadn't gotten any closer to that person over the past two weeks, though I had surely gotten further from who I was. And all because of a lacrosse stick, a hard stomach, and a field of daffodils. But underneath those washboard abs there was just a scared little boy who couldn't wipe the vomit off of his own face. That certainly wasn't worth bowing to. Not after years of bowing to no one, except the occasional felt farm animal who demanded nothing less.

The next day, Mark woke up early and, without saying a word to me -- not a thank you, not an apology, not even a recognizable grunt -- went straight to the nearest tattoo parlor, which, due to Massachusetts' arcane laws, was in Rhode Island. He wanted to commemorate his near-death experience with the Chinese character for "harmony." While he was gone, I called my father and asked him to bring up all the stuff I had sent home with him.

"You want me to cart a bunch of stuffed animals two hundred miles back up to Boston on my one day off?" he asked, increduously.

"Yes, please," I replied, gauging whether this was an appropriate occasion to whip out the divorced father guilt card. Overplay the card and it loses its potency; underplay it and it loses its relevancy. "Those stuffed animals are my best friends, you know, since the divorce."

The following week, my father arrived with my Muppets VHS collection, Barbra Streisand CDs, and of course, stuffed Miss Piggys in tow. I cleared a spot for one particular Miss Piggy just above our mini-fridge, where she could preside over the entire room with a ham-iron fist. I realized this might mean a battle with Mark, but I didn't mind. You don't want to get Miss Piggy angry. She doesn't care if you have washboard abs. She'll kick your ass just the same.

******************************************

Well, that's it. I hope you all enjoyed it, and if you didn't, well, you get what you pay for.

Love Is A Palindrome, Part IV: Empty Adjectives

2008-04-10T17:35:00.005-04:00

“Hey dude!”

Marcus Kramm was calling me from the hall. He hadn’t called me by my name once in the two weeks we had lived together. I think he’d forgotten it, which is to be expected when you spend your weeknights drinking 12-packs of Red Bull and doing Whippits, and your weekends perpetually stoned. Silly me, I only used cans of whipped cream on apple pie and hot cocoa. One man's topping is another man's upper.

“You seen my lacrosse stick?” Of course, I had not seen his lacrosse stick. You could barely see anything on his side of the room, which was covered with dirty laundry, junk food, and marijuana paraphernalia. The whole room smelled like a combination of pot, sweaty gym socks, and $3 cologne, giving it a vague aura of masculine desperation. It was strikingly different to the smell of my mother's house, which vascillated between potpurri and rubbing alcohol.

Marcus had revealed his massive pot addiction our first night in the room (though not every pot smoker is an "addict," when your lungs have more narcotics in them than oxygen, the label seems apt), when he took it upon himself to teach me how to roll the "perfect" joint.

"A good joint is like a good woman," he said, bestowing what I'm sure was years of knowledge on his unwilling protege. "Thin and tight." And here I thought a good woman was one who didn't berate you for leaving the toilet seat up.

The lesson went on for several hours, mostly because he got so stoned during it that he kept repeating himself. I would have interrupted him, but he conducted the lesson in his underwear, and who was I to argue with his beneficience. Later that night he tried to teach me how to construct a bathtub bong, even though our bathrooms did not have tubs. I tried to convince him it wouldn’t work in a stall shower, but he didn’t see the difference.

“I’ll just hang it upside down,” he said.

Marcus's pot addiction extended far beyond just smoking it. To Marcus, smoking pot wasn't just the easiest way of squandering the exorbitant weekly allowance his parents sent him (conversely, my father sent me a monthly allowance, which was about equal to Marcus's weekly one -- perhaps it was my father's preemptive attempt to keep me away from drugs, as if poverty and narcotics are mutually exclusive). To Marcus, smoking pot was a lifestyle.

"Did you know the Greek army smoked pot before a battle?" he asked me during our lesson. When I said I thought it might dull their motor skills, he objected, and proceeded to show me how his motor skills were in peak form by dunking the nerf ball by his bed in the hoop over the door, even though he was bombed. Again, I would have interrupted him, but he did the whole thing in his underwear.

In fact, Marcus was almost always in some state of undress during those first few weeks. At first I hoped it was a subtle indication that he might be interested in more than a Jack and Chrissy relationship, but then I realized that every other guy on the floor wore as little clothing as they could get away with without accidentally brushing their genitals against each other. This made little practical sense to me; with its cold cement walls and linoleum floors, the dorm was consistently well below room temperature, and apparently our $30,000 per year wasn't enough for the university management to crank the heat up a notch. After chattering through one particularly nasty Nor'easter, I called up the university to complain.

"I just measured the temperature of my room, it's 56 degrees," I told the operator.

"The university is legally required to keep your rooms above 55 degrees," a chilly voice told me on the other end.

"So, this room is one degree away from being a tenement?" I replied, channeling my mother. Apparently she had taught me more than I knew. "Do you really think that's a sufficient baseline for one of America's top universities?"

The operator thanked me for my call and hung up. I doubted the sincerity of her gratitude.

So while Marcus and the other boys were always in various states of undress, I was rarely in any. This need to be constantly clothed caused a semi-crisis early on, as I quickly realized that if I wanted to survive this year, I would have to dispose of any Muppet-laden accessories, including my Kermit the Frog socks. Within a week I had blown my first month's allowance at Sears and begrudgingly tossed Kermit in the trash. Sure, plain white socks might keep your feet just as warm as the Kermit ones, but a plain white sock never made anyone smile. At least, not while on someone's foot.

"Dude! My lacrosse stick! You seen it!"

I glanced around the room a bit, and then stuck my head out the door, where Mark was jogging in place next to his new best friend, Shawn. Shawn was the son of a prominent Republican leader in New England (I didn't know they grew Republicans in New England -- I figured they all moved to South Carolina as fetuses), and vaguely resembled the product of a sexual union between Jerry Seinfeld and a horse, without the former's sense of humor or the latter's shiny mane.

“No, I don’t see it, sorry,” I said, avoiding eye contact with both of them. Shawn slapped Mark on the back. His hand lingered on Mark’s back just a second longer than necessary, but Mark didn’t notice. Shawn couldn’t be a homosexual. He was the captain of his high school wrestling team. That would just make no sense whatsoever.

“Dude maybe he used it to give himself a ride, ya know?” Shawn replied to Mark as I went back in the room.

From inside the room, I imagined Shawn was miming just how that sort of a ride would play out, though I suspected he knew more about it than I did. But Shawn's internalized homophobia aside, I was never quite sure how to react to these kinds of comments, which were freely thrown around by the guys in the dorm, not only in my direction, but in each other’s as well. Apparently the best way to reinforce your heterosexuality was to call your friends homosexuals, which made it exceedingly difficult to determine whether they were actually impugning my sexuality or just making small-talk. And it didn't stop with verbal teasing -- there was so much physical assaulting and mock gyration going on in these halls, I wondered whether my dormmates were practicing for later romantic interludes with women, or whether those interludes themselves were practice for when they got back to the dorm. There is a thin latex line between gay porn and horseplay.

But since I wasn't actually friends with Shawn, something told me he was implying that I had actually stuck a large wooden pole up my butt (which as a practical matter sounded both painful and unnecessary, as Mark also owned smaller phallic-shaped sports equipment that would have done the job better). The heterosexual obsession with anal sex goes far beyond anything homosexuals actually engage in, just as heterosexuals tend to think that homosexuals have much more sex than they actually do. When I first came out to my friend Marsha, her fiancee Ian expressed his own extreme disappointment that he had not been born into this particular discrete and insular minority.

"Man, I wish I was gay!" he confided in me, after Marsha left the room. Ordinarily this kind of comment might have given me pause that perhaps Ian was actually gay, but I doubted that. Gay men just don't allow themselves to develop a unibrow that Bert would have envied, even closeted ones.

"Why would you say that?" I asked him, restraining myself from finding the nearest razor and doing the world and Ian a much-needed favor.

"The sex!" he said, excitedly. "You must have so much sex! I mean, it's two dudes, right? No one to say no!"

I didn't have the heart to tell him that, yes, indeed there was someone to say "no." The night before, that someone was me, when my 6'2" 190 pound shaggy-haired ex-college-athlete blind date turned out to be a 5'2" 250 pound no-haired ex-high school-dropout. But Ian was so convinced that I was the most sexually satisfied person since Caligula, I didn't want to rock the boat. Thanks to queer eyes and not-so-straight guys, gays were making millions convincing straights that our lives are so much more exciting than theirs; if I revealed the truth, Elton John could show up at my house and force-feed me Olestra-laced potato chips.

"Hey man, I hope you used protection!" Shawn shouted in my general direction, though I suspect he wasn't really concerned with my physical health. Still, I didn't object to his comments, as that would have only invited additional disparagement. Better to be silent and thought a homosexual than open your mouth and remove all doubt.

And silent was what I had typically been, since the day we moved in. Indeed, I had been so quiet for two weeks, I wondered whether I had developed some rare form of late-onset mutism; usually, I only spoke when spoken to, and since most days I wasn't spoken to at all (Mark and I appeared to have the same tolerance for small-talk, which is to say, none), most days I didn't speak at all. In fact, since our Philosophy of Marijuana class, Mark had not made any further efforts to shape my social education. He must have been disappointed by my decision to save my joint "for a rainy day." Pot addicts are not usually the plan-ahead types.

Unfortunately, my particular brand of mutism was not going to lead to a successful career in pantomime, or a dining room floor fracas with Anne Bancroft. My mutism was purely situational; the less I said, the less likely I would be singled out for ridicule by closeted Republican homosexuals and the frat boys who love them. Perhaps this is how Buddhist monks get started, I wondered. Maybe the Dalai Lama also had a run in with a palindromic jock from Nyack, New York. This could be the first step towards Nirvana. Though I suspected the closest I was going to come to Nirvana living in this dorm room was the CD Mark played on constant repeat.

Mark and Shawn came back in the room, thereby establishing, once again, that there is not a God. Mark started throwing his stuff off his bed onto my side of the room. I laid on my bed, pretending not to notice them enter, covering myself with my plaid K-Mart bedspread like an invisibility cloak.

"It's got to be here somewhere," Mark said, tossing things left and right, covering my side of the room with his junk. Not that it mattered. I didn't have any of my own decorations up, anyway. After meeting Mark, I sent all of my potentially objectionable personal items back home with my father, which is to say, everything that I owned. There were no stuffed animals, no Cher posters, no Broadway soundtracks or Cabbage Patch Kids in sight. I even sent home my "Got Cookies?" poster, which featured a number of dairy cows pondering the existence of their favorite dessert treat. My personal affects were now limited to a table lamp and a snow globe I had bought in Cape Cod the previous summer. I didn't think a snow globe would be objectionable or a source of ridicule; straight people like snow globes, and it was too big to fit up my ass.

The phone rang. It was on Mark's side of the room, as usual. I never answered the phone, because it was never for me. I specifically had not given out my number to any of my friends, which were mostly girls and boys with girlish voices and lisps. I wasn't building up a reputation as the dorm's resident Marcel Marceau, only to be ruined by my friend Scott asking for "Jonah Hathlap."

Mark dug the phone out from under a pile of beer cans, and answered it.

"Hello?" He tossed the phone on my side of the room. "Dude, it's Stacy."

Great. Someone had found me. Now I'd have to talk, with other people in the room. I might as well shove the snow globe up my ass.

"Hey Stacy," I said, careful not to modulate my voice too much, though an overly modulated voice could be a sign of Jewishness as much as homosexuality, thus the general confusion between middle-aged hen-pecked Jewish husbands and true homosexuals. "What's going on?"

Stacy and I had gone to school together since we were 11, and we had a long, Beaches-type history, except I'm pretty sure Bette Midler didn't ask Barbara Hershey to be her date to her Bat Mitzvah. Smartly, Stacy declined my invitation, subconsciously aware that I was only using her as a pre-pubescent beard. But once I'd recovered from the rejection -- which happened as soon as I realized I appreciated Stacy's full bosom more for its cushion potential than aesthetic beauty -- we developed a lifelong friendship based largely on our mutual misanthropy and matricidal fantasies.

"OHMYGOD!!!" she shouted, loud enough for Mark, Shawn, and all of the sixth floor to hear. "BARBRA STREISAND'S NEW ALBUM CAME OUT TODAY!!! LET'S GO GET IT!!!"

I quickly searched for the volume button on the headset, before Stacy could do any more damage to my already flailing reputation. In the background I heard Stacy's new best friend Greg singing along to Funny Girl. Greg lived down the hall from Stacy, but as far as I could tell he had actually moved into her room at this point. I think they were even sleeping in the same bed together. Not that I blamed him. She did have some nice cushions. Though I knew that eventually some man would see them as more than just homemade pillows, and Greg would be forced to lay his effeminate head elsewhere.

"I can't," I replied, as visions of Babs duetting with Neil Diamond danced in my head. "I have homework. Take Greg." I was slightly jealous of Greg; after all, he was stealing my hag. But I wasn't putting up much of a fight. Greg could give her so much more than I could. I wasn't much of a fag anymore, and he was a full-fledged queen.

I hung up the phone, and stared at the grey concrete wall where my "Got Cookies?" poster should have been hung with care. The emptiness mocked me. I did not have Barbra's new album. I did not have Miss Piggy. I did not have cookies. I had a plaid K-Mart comforter, a textbook about the Polypennisian War, and a snowglobe that might or might not fit up my butt. I suspected that this was not what college was supposed to be. It was much too lonely, and insincere. I wasn't going to find myself, covered in my roommate's dirty laundry.

Mark finally found his lacrosse stick behind a stack of Penthouse magazines. Shawn grabbed an issue off the floor and started flipping through it. It must have been a Springtime issue, because I spotted a woman posing in a field of brightly-colored daffodils and riding a small plastic windmill, while a man dressed as Don Quixote gave her a good tilt.

"Man, she's fuckin' hot," Mark said, grabbing his stick. He held up the magazine in my direction. "Don't you think, dude?"

"How would he know?" Shawn replied, tossing the magazine on the bed and chuckling his way out of the room with Mark, leaving me alone, just as I had been before they left.

How would I know indeed? Daffodils make my nose itch, and I didn't bring myself flowers anymore.

*************************************************************

Coming Soon: Love Is A Palindrome, Part V: The Porcelain Beauty

Impatient Patient

2008-04-06T12:38:00.003-04:00

Yes, it's been longer since my last post than Martha Stewart's last bowel movement. Yes, the longer I go without posting the more likely you will lose interest in my psychotic life and never return. Yes, I miss writing about my hot college roommate and reviving all of the dormant fantasies that this story brings up.

But I'm sick.

No, really. Actually sick. Not the usual mental disorder masquerading as a physical one. I had a 104 degree temperature for two days, which has now been replaced by a stomach ailment that I wouldn't wish on Ken Mehlman. I haven't seen or spoken to another human being since Thursday, including my roommate, who has revealed his hypochondriac colors by locking himself in his room ever since he heard me hacking up a lung the other night. He's Swedish, and they're notorious germophobes. Of course, he's the only Swedish person I ever met, but I need to base my offensive stereotyping on something.

I suppose the fact that I'm writing anything indicates that I'm recovering somewhat. Either that, or I'm delusional from the fever. I'm not sure how a doctor would tell the difference between my normal state and my delusional one. Again, six of one, half a dozen of the other.

Meanwhile, I will do the best I can to demand that my body recover quickly, and you all do the best you can to not forget that your old friend Jonah will god willing be back soon with more thrilling tales of alcoholic Jews from Nyack.

Ok I'm going back to watching Enchanted again. I've now watched it three times. Which has absolutely nothing to do with the scene where Patrick Dempsey is wearing a bathrobe.

Mea Culpa, You-a Culpa, We All-a Culpa

2008-03-31T13:00:00.002-04:00

A recent e-mail from an attorney friend of mine reads:

"i went to read part IV and nada---what gives?"

Aside from the obvious grammatical errors, and the possibility that I just breached the attorney work-product privilege by sharing that with you, her question was valid. It's been over a week since I promised you Part IV, and still, "nada." Por que?

Well, mi amigos, because I spent all of my free time last week panicking about this past weekend, which left me precious little time to entertain you. You know how I write about my crazy family all the time (I of course include myself in this description)? Sadly, unlike my marriage to Mario Lopez, it turns out they actually exist. And so I went home this weekend to visit them. I won't bore you with the details here (I know it wouldn't actually bore you, as you are all experts in schadenfraude, but I need to process with my therapist first), except to give you three highlights:

(1) When we went out to dinner Saturday night, my mother told me to park in front of the restaurant, while my grandmother objected, claiming that we would have to pay for the meter. A full-blown argument ensued, during which my grandmother declared that no one appreciated her and implored my mother to "take the dagger out of her heart," and my mother threatend to jump out of a moving car. In response, I calmly reminded them that it was just a parking space and there was no need for an argument. Of course, after ten minutes of fighting, my calm demeanor evaporated, and soon I was shouting along with them, "THIS IS NOT A FUCKING HEALTHY WAY OF DEALING WITH CONFLICT!!!"

(Dinner was good though. I had the salmon, if you were wondering.)

(2) After first telling my father that I couldn't see him this trip because of other commitments, I decided that was selfish and cancelled plans to attend my friends 30th birthday party so I could have dinner with him. At the last minute my father called and told me that he was "too busy" to see me. I wonder if we can get Congress to outlaw passive-aggressiveness along with other forms of torture. Personally I'd rather someone dump gallons of water on my head.

(3) My mother suggested to my sister that she sell her eggs, and I don't mean the dairy kind.

So mea culpa, readers. I am hard at work on the next installment of the story, so that you can take comfort in the fact that your life is not nearly as screwed up as mine. Ok, maybe "hard at work" is an overstatement. I'm never really "hard at work" on anything. Unless it's getting David Beckham's phone number. Those new underwear ads of his have gotten me through some tough times.

--JKH

(By the way, has anyone seen this Lifetime show, "Your Mama Don't Dance," a reality show competition where sons dance with their mothers? (One of my three television sets is always tuned to Lifetime, which was a requirement in my homosexuality contract, along with owning at least two pairs of capris pants and knowing the words to Vogue.) Is it just me, or is that show seriously disturbing? I just don't get the social mores in this country. Apparently it's totally immoral to say "fuck" on television, but it's just fine to watch a son dance the Lambada with his mother. I only hope there's an on-set therapist who knows the definition of "Freudian complex.")

Love Is A Palindrome, Part III: Great Expectorations

2008-03-23T17:47:00.009-04:00

The rest of the ride up was uneventful, except for the occasional sob and prayer to God, or god-like entity, that I was right about my future roommate's pre-ordained geekdom. As far as I was concerned, giving your child a palindrome for a name was akin to naming your son Jeeves, or your daughter Bambi; you've pretty much drawn up their life plan right there. I wanted to send his parents a thank you card.

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Kramm,

Thank you for naming your child Mark. Out of all the names in the world, frankly, I’m not sure why you chose that one. Perhaps you chose it because you have a wicked sense of humor, or because you had full mental health coverage for your family and you didn’t want it to go to waste. Or maybe you are both dyslexic, and you thought you were naming him something else. I am all for equal rights for dyslexics, by the way, who are no less intelligent than the rest of us. Theo Huxtable was one, you know, and he was really smart! Or at least his parents were. Actually, I think he went to a community college.

In any event, your name selection was very beneficial to me, which is really all that matters in the end.

Sincerely,
Jonah K. Haslap

But it also occurred to me, even with my head in the Hamburgler’s toilet, that I could be wrong about Mark Kramm. After all, there must be a CEO somewhere named Jeeves, or a Bambi who is not a complete slut. So somewhere between Providence and Pawtucket, I decided that whatever Mark Kramm was, I would live with it. Even if he enjoyed skinning rabbits. Even if he liked peanut butter and banana sandwiches. Even if he was a Republican.

As long as he wasn't attractive. Above all, I hoped Mark Kramm would not be attractive. An attractive roommate would kill me. Figuratively, when I tore myself up inside lusting after him, and literally, when he caught me.
Of course, the chances that I wouldn't be attracted to Mark Kramm on some level were slim. At 17, I could find something attractive in most anyone. If its shorts jiggled when it jogged, I wanted to see what was in them. It didn't help that most of the boys in my high school class were objectively unattractive (something in the Long Island drinking water, I suspect, turns all gentile boys into Joey Buttafuco, and all Jewish boys into Mel Brooks). That just lowered my standards. Drama freaks; geeks; hippies; delinquents; even spazzes. I wanted them all. Too bad Screech wasn't gay, he would have an easy sell with me.

But there was nothing more unattainable -- and therefore, more desirable -- than the highly prized and much sought-after jocks. In most respects, I was a social black sheep, except within my own little circle of other black sheep. The more people enjoyed something, the less interesting I found it. But when it came to my penis, I was just a sheep, white and woolly (at least until I discovered the magic of trimming), sighing and panting, and sometimes dribbling, along with the rest of the crowd, as the varsity football team swept across the gym floor during pep rallies, like the Greeks swept across a field of Trojans. And I was always hoping to use one of my Trojans on a nice, firm Greek. Sadly, I never got that opportunity, although fortunately Trojans double nicely as water balloons.

Years later, when I finally grew into my looks and out of my decade's-long pubescence (I had my last growth spurt when I was 24, while most other guys my age were already growing a bald spot), either because I had become more confident or because I had grown more complacent, I started actually sleeping with jocks. Only then did I realize that ounces for washboard pounds, sex with them was no better than sex with anyone else, and was often far worse, as they are frequently so self-obsessed that in bed, they resemble less an Abercrombie ad and more a can of no-salt tuna fish, lying motionless on a slab while you do all the work. I hate doing all the work. It leaves me no time to lie motionless myself.

At this stage in my hormonal blossoming, however, jocks were still that golden carrot. Nevermind that I had never actually eaten a carrot before in my life, golden or otherwise. I didn’t even know what I would do if the possibility of sex ever actually presented itself. I suppose it would have involved some clothing manipulation and lots of praising Jesus, at least on my part. Even though I was Jewish, Jesus seemed like the appropriate choice. No one praises Jehovah when they have an orgasm.
Contrary to what my mother believed, though, I did not live in a fantasy world. (According to her, if you’re not constantly looking for anthrax in your orange juice, you’re out of touch with reality.) I knew that neither Satan nor Jesus was putting a jock in my bed anytime soon. I knew that the closest I would come to an All-American lover was my All-American pornography. I knew that I would never sleep with the captain of the football team.

I just hoped the captain of the football team wouldn’t be sleeping anywhere near me.

When we finally arrived at the dormitory, I had exhausted all the possible computations for the inevitable meeting with my once and future roommate, and mentally dealt with them all. Let Adolph Hitler, Jr. walk through that door, I was ready. At least we’d have something to talk about. Your great-grandfather tortured my great-grandfather, and so on. Sounds like an excellent basis for a rewarding and long-lasting friendship.

While my dad went to get a cart to start hauling Her Royal Pigginesses up to their new thrones, I took my first hard look at the campus. Everyone around me was smiling from ear-to-ear; the parents, giving up their burdens, and the children, giving up theirs. Sometime during the trip, the sun had started shining (it must have been after the last rest stop, since I spent the remainder of the ride scraping mud off my sneakers and onto my father’s car, which he greatly appreciated), and it lit up the bright young faces of the new students, exceedingly hopeful, temporally sober. Even the dormitory, which I had remembered as cold and institutional during summer orientation (at which the most “orienting” the incoming class received was discovering the location of the nearest liquor store that didn’t card), looked happy to welcome a new group of freshmen, whose alcohol-induced vomit would soon line its halls.

It was an idyllic scene. Which is to say, I was completely uncomfortable in it. I don’t do well with idyllic. When something isn’t flawed, I just assume that the flaw is so big that it must be hiding. I swear there’s a massive alien spaceship in the Grand Canyon, parked there to lull us all into a sense of complacency, before it emerges and takes out Congress. (I haven’t warned anyone about my suspicions, though, considering the current state of Congress.)

I took a deep breath and made a B-line for the dorm, trying not to make any eye contact with passers-by. I wasn’t ready for friends, not yet. A hasty friend is a recipe for disaster. Maybe if Stalin had gotten to know Mussolini a little better he would have thought twice about teaming up. And I’m sure Balki would have ditched that dweeb cousin in a Chicago minute, had he ever stepped back from their insta-friendship and realized that he was the real life of the party in that relationship, and cousin Larry was just holding him back.

I got to my room, and found my father trying to wrestle my fourteen boxes of junk into a room that could have scared Al Capone straight. The walls were grayish-white concrete, and the linoleum floor was peeling under our feet. There was a small window on the far wall, with a gate that couldn’t be opened. The gate was instantly frightening. We were on the ninth floor – were Boston criminals so technologically adept that they could scale the walls up to our room? I was comforted to learn several weeks later that the school had installed the gates after a series of students had thrown themselves out the dormitory windows. Gates are cheaper than lawsuits.

Then I noticed the size of the room. The furniture was lined up in parallel lines against opposite walls – two identical beds, two identical dressers, and two identical desks (the aesthetic symmetry was appealing, at least). The beds were about four feet apart, and there was approximately eight cubic feet of free space in the entire room. Two of us were going to live in here? Did I accidentally request a room for midgets? How was I going to pass gas without him hearing it (a major concern, given my lactose intolerance and unquenchable love for cheese)? We might actually need to have sex, just to fit us both in the room at the same time.

If it hadn’t been a dormitory, it would have been a hellhole.

“Jonah, I don’t think you’re going to have enough room for all of these,” he said, motioning to the stuffed animals that he had carelessly deposited in the corner. “Maybe you should think about sending some home.”

“No, no, that won’t be necessary,” I replied, quickly lifting all of the Miss Piggys off the floor. She’s not pleasant when she feels rejected, and I had my own neuroses to worry about right now. “I’ll find a place for them.”

I opened my closet – which was set off from the room by a thin curtain – and placed the superfluous Piggys on the top shelf, overlooking the room, her favorite spot. Suddenly I noticed that Mark Kramm had already moved in. By “moved in,” I mean that he had hastily dumped his luggage on his bed, and scotch-taped a poster of Pamela Anderson Lee to the wall (who I had previously recognized only as the female lifeguard on the show with all those hot shirtless guys). Pamela Anderson Lee was not a good sign. Geeks don’t have posters of Pamela Anderson Lee. Even straight ones.

An even worse sign, though, was the various sports accoutrements scattered across his side of the room. I spotted a lacrosse stick, a catcher’s mitt, and a half-inflated basketball. This guy wasn’t just a sports enthusiast. He was a dilettante.

Still, I hoped that he would be one of the few unattractive jocks I saw around the halls in high school, the relatively non-threatening kind who had nothing going for them except an excess of testosterone and an ability to belch loudly. Don’t forget, his name is still a palindrome! How much of a jock could he possibly be?

But I didn’t have the opportunity to run through the ramifications of this new discovery. Just as I started working myself into a tizzy, the door began to open. Mark Kramm was coming home. My time was up. Even the Hamburgler couldn’t save me now.
Please don’t be hot. Please don’t be hot. Please don’t be hot.

Oh fuck.

In walked – jogged, actually – my new roommate, his tight t-shirt (declaring his large bosom predilection) and gym shorts clinging to his tanned, chiseled body. His arms and legs bulged with muscles bigger than my neck, and somehow he had escaped both the curse of the Jewish nose and the Jewish hair to develop a perfectly sculpted face. His dark skin was set off by crystal blue eyes that would have attracted my gaze immediately, if my eyes hadn’t spontaneously traveled south to what I quickly learned was not a sock-enhanced crotch. He had just the right amount of hair in all the right places, at least as far as I could tell at this point, and no hair in the wrong places. Mark Kramm was the after-picture in an episode of Extreme Makeover.

More than scared, I was angry at having been misled. Screw the thank you note to Mr. and Mrs. Kramm. Mark Kramm was not a geek. He wasn’t even a nerd. Mark Kramm was, by most objective standards, a hunk. That’s not a term I throw around loosely. I haven’t known or seen too many hunks in my life; one or two bartenders at The Cock, a few pornography actors, and maybe a handful of television celebrities. But Mark Kramm was one of them. He could have given the porno actors a run for their money. And it’s a good think he was Jewish. Otherwise, he might have gotten a bunch of priests into a shitload of trouble.

“Jonah, what do you want me to do with the stuffed Muppet Babies?” he asked, holding Fozzie in his right hand and Kermit in his left (which was wrong – Kermit always liked being on the right). My father always had perfect timing, ever since he left my mother on the same day that I found my first facial hair.

Fortunately, the hunk du jour was still listening to his Walkman, which was blasting something loud and rock and roll’ish, probably by a band that most kids my age worshipped but I’d never heard of.

“Hi, I’m Jonah,” I shouted to him, extending my hand. I knew enough about social etiquette to shake his hand, at least, though I was afraid I’d unconsciously reach out and shake something else instead. Mark Kramm took off his earphones, wiped his arm on his sleeve, and reached out his hand.

“Hi, I’m Mark, nice to meetchya,” he said, with the kind of carelessness of speech that only the very stupid and the very beautiful can use with impunity. I looked down when our hands touched – as I always did whenever I came into actual human contact -- and watched his shorts jiggle in sync with his arm as we shook hands. I quickly turned my attention back up to his piercing blue eyes, but since they too were unsafe, I rested my gaze on his pinky finger, the only part of his body that I felt ambivalent towards. I have no use for the inefficient appendages.

“You too,” I replied, trying to act calm and collected, which is extremely difficult for someone whose usual baseline is nervous and panicked. “This is my dad.”

My father nodded in Mark’s direction, uninterested in the first chapter of a potential tragedy unfolding before his eyes. He planned to make the trip up and back in one day, and nothing was going to stop him, not even my unscrewing the gate on the window and joining the ranks of flying freshmen before me.

“I’m going to get the rest of your crap,” my father said. “It’s getting late, and I only brought my sunglasses with me so I can’t drive in the dark.” He had a keen mind for the kind of lies that were so obviously lies, you couldn’t argue with them without losing your temper, so you let them go just to fight another day.

Left alone to our own devices, I wasn’t sure what to do next. The introductions were out of the way. I was Jonah; he was Mark. Check. We were roommates. Check. Somewhere in the back of mind I pictured him throwing me down on the bed and having his way with me, but then I remembered my mother looking for anthrax in her orange juice, and erased that fantasy from my mind.

The silence weighed heavily on me, though Mark Kramm didn’t seem to notice. One man’s heart attack is another man’s mild chest pain. He tossed his Walkman on the bed and opened one of his unorganized suitcases, which appeared to overflow with sports equipment and soft-core, straight male-directed magazines, neither of which appealed to me.

“That’s my girlfriend,” he said, ruffling through his bag and pointing to a picture he had taped to his desk. “She’s hot, huh?”

I couldn’t see the picture very well, which appeared to be a wallet-sized high school yearbook photo, but it didn’t really matter. It was more of a rhetorical question.

“Um, yeah, definitely. Hot.” I wondered where my father had packed the screwdriver, and how long it would take to get the gate off the window.

Mark Kramm found a towel in his bag and turned back towards me, for the first time noticing that his dorm room had turned into the toddler section of Toys R’ Us. His eyes narrowed on me, becoming less sexy and more suspicious. Mark Kramm finally realized that his new roommate might be less into playing with balls, and more into playing with balls.

“Ok bud,” he said, beginning to peel off his sweaty clothes, layer by layer, until he stood before me in his white boxer-briefs. I had never seen a pair of boxer-briefs before, but as far as I was concerned at that point, they ranked close to air conditioning and penicillin on the list of great human accomplishments. “I’m going to take a shower.”

He wrapped a towel around his waist and pulled his underwear off underneath it, which only heightened my attraction. There is less pleasure in the bang than in the anticipation of it.

“You know, your name is a palindrome,” I blurted out as he walked towards the door, hoping to form some common bond with my new roommate during our first encounter, as his “my girlfriend is hot” attempt didn’t go over too well. He paused at the door, tightening the towel around his waist and grabbing a bar of soap. It was the first time I truly understood the joke about dropping a bar of soap in a jail shower.

“A what?” So much for that.

“A palindrome,” I replied. “It’s a word that’s spelled the same backwards and forwards.” I wrote “Mark Kramm” on a piece of paper, hoping that a demonstrative exhibit would help.

“See?” I said, handing him the paper. “Mark Kramm, Mark Kramm.” I repeated his name a few times, until even I knew it was creepy.

“Oh,” he replied, crumpling the paper and tossing it in the trash basket next to his bed. “Actually, it’s Marcus.”

With that mystery solved, Marcus Kramm left, and I resumed searching the darkling sky for a time-traveling Delorean.

*************************************

Stay tuned for Love Is A Palindrome, Part IV: Empty Adjectives

Love Is A Palindrome -- Part II: "A New Hopelessness"

2008-03-16T23:39:00.003-04:00

Three weeks, eighteen panic attacks, and a few dozen Xanax later, my father and I set off for Boston. The drive to Boston was going to be the longest time I'd spent with my father since the divorce. Over the previous five years, I’d only seen him once a week, pursuant to a typical negotiated settlement agreement whereby children and chattel become synonymous. Each Saturday he took me to my piano lesson, and then out for lunch at Roy Rogers, home of the all-you-can-eat fixins’ bar. I enjoyed the fixins' more than the meal itself -- sometimes I wouldn’t even get a hamburger, I’d just get the bun and fill it with tomatos, lettuce, pickles, and enough ketchup to drown Gollum. But even if the fixins' bar had been removed due to health code violations (the sneeze glass didn't always live up to its name), I still would have insisted on eating at Roy Rogers. It made me feel like a cowboy, and I could use all the butch I could get.

"Jonah!" my mother shouted to me, as he pulled into the driveway. "Your fucking father is here!"

My father hadn't actually driven up to the house since the divorce; my mother always made him park a block away when he came around for our weekly visits.

"I don't want him to know my business," she'd say, as if we were running a drug cartel out of the living room.

But considering that we had to pack the car with all my stuff this time, which included eighteen boxes, forty-three stuffed animals, and several bags of canned tuna fish, my mother allowed him to park in the driveway, as long as I covered all the windows with construction paper so he couldn't see into the house.

"He gets an hour, no more," she said, peering out through the lime green paper, chewing her nails in anticipation of his arrival.

"But what if we're not done packing in an hour?"

"I don't give a shit, hire a fucking camel." She examined the construction paper closely, rearranging a few sheets for maximum coverage. "And couldn't you pick a darker color? He can see right through this."

Fortunately, the endorphins were pumping so fast and furious that we packed the car within twenty minutes. That, and I could carry several Miss Piggy dolls in one hand, which took up about half the car.

“Do you really need all of those Miss Piggys,” my dad asked. “Isn’t one sufficient?”

It was a reasonable question, and a question that showed exactly how little he knew me. Not that he was really to blame. There’s only so much you can learn about someone who has eighteen pickles stuffed in his mouth at once.

With the Piggys safely stowed in the backseat – and a few stuffed in the trunk, against my wishes, as no one puts Piggy in a corner -- we headed out. I took a last look at the house that had been both my prison and my haven for the past ten years. My mother was still peering out through the construction paper, half-seething, half-mourning, alone once more to fend for herself. I left three boxes of tampons in the bathroom cabinet, to give her a head start.

We hadn’t been on the road long before we made our first pit stop. I was doing fine until the Connecticut border, when the environment took on a surreal, Who-ville quality. There were towns I’d never visited. Malls I’d never been to. Supermarkets I’d never heard of. It might as well have been Zimbabwe. That’s when it all came together, in one perfect, horrible, intensely nauseating picture – everything I was leaving behind, and everything I was heading to. The Welcome to Connecticut sign might as well have been pointing to the nearest asylum.

My father was patient when I asked him to stop, at least the first three times. But by the time Mile Marker 45 rolled around – four and a half hours into a trip that was only supposed to take four hours total – his patience was wearing thin.

“Dad, pull over!!!” I shouted for the fourth time.

Either out of divorced father guilt or concern for his car, which had mysteriously preserved the new car smell even at six years old, he pulled over again, this time right in front of the biggest Hamburgler statue I’d ever seen. Alas, even the great Hamburgler in all his glory could not make me forget my troubles at that point, and I raced inside to the waiting toilets.

“Jonah, we’re never going to get to Boston at this rate,” he shouted after me as I ran past Ronald McDonald’s mortal enemy, my arms flailing. Vomiting rates somewhere between family vacations and prostate exams on things that I'd rather avoid in this lifetime. Contrary to popular belief, homosexuals do not enjoy prostate exams. What we do in bed does not involve a rubber glove, a doctor's coat, and a jumbo-sized tub of vaseline. At least, not usually. “What could possibly be left in there to puke up?”

But I wasn’t just vomiting Count Chocula out of my system. I was vomiting up lawns and polished rocks. I was vomiting up tampons and frozen lemon juice. I was vomiting up divorce and child support. I was vomiting up the past eighteen years of my life. And once all that was gone, I was afraid there’d be nothing left.

I charged passed the Connecticut welcome center, with its "welcome to our state, now why the hell are you here?" brochures, and into the restrooms, which had been labeled a "Clorox-Free" zone. I suspected the label meant that the restrooms were cleaned with Clorox products, but actually "Clorox-Free" means the opposite. I was going to report that glaring error to the proper authorities, but I was too busy with my head in the Clorox-Free toilet bowl.

I made another mental checklist of things to worry about, beginning, as usual, with "sharing a public restroom with 18 other teenage boys," and ending with "making more mental checklists of things to worry about." I repeated it in my head several times, hoping to find the logical fallacy in at least one of the 49 fears, but they all appeared eminently rational, at least in my frenzied state. Worst of all, I was now beginning to associate the Hamburgler with my anxiety. Yet another cartoon character I'd have to avoid in the future, along with Yosemite Sam and the evil Smurf.

I felt a paper sticking out of my coat during one particularly violent dry heave (my father was standing outside the stall door by this point, as several rush hour commuters had notified management that a "12 year-old kid was dying in the bathroom"). It was the letter, with my palindromic roommate's name and hometown. I took it out and ran my fingers up and down his name. I found strength there, in 12-point Times New Roman.

Mark Kramm was waiting for me, and I wasn't going to let him down, dammit. He had been let down enough in his life, first by his parents for giving him a palindrome for a name, then by every girl who had ever rejected him because of it, and every sports team that automatically cut him first. Mark Kramm just might be my soulmate, and I wasn't going to let that be ruined by a little reverse peristalsis.

I left the restroom with new resolve. I had a new purpose -- to fight for the rights of palindromic people everywhere. And Mark Kramm was going to be my first triumph, or victim, depending on your perspective. Why hadn't I thought of this before, I wondered. This must be what Jews feel like when they find Jesus.

I got into the car, Clorox- and Count Chocula-free, ready to battle the bigoted, non-palindromed members of society, and simultaneously shine a light of hope on Mark Kramm, college student, roommate, American Hero.

"Let's go," I demanded, buckling my seatbelt and slipping Cher's greatest hits -- her gender-neutral voice being an inspiration of antiestablishmentarianism -- into the CD player. "Step on it, pops!"

My father looked at me curiously, but didn't say anything. It was our first bonding moment in five years.

***************************************************

Coming Soon: Love Is A Palindrome -- Part III: "Great Expectorations"

Love Is A Palindrome -- Part I: "A Geek Grows In Nyack"

2008-03-11T00:49:00.002-04:00

Hello all, aka the four people who actually read this blog with any regularity, three of whom are my other personalities and one of whom I compensate with unsatisfying sexual favors,

I've decided to post this story in two parts, because there's no way I'm going to finish this thing in the next few days, and I don't want to keep my other personalities waiting.

Enjoy (or, at least, don't sue me).

-JKH

*************************************

There is a lovely rest stop on the northbound I-95, about an hour outside of New York City, just a few miles after the looming industrial spires of Bridgeport, and a few miles before the five-lane superhighway turns into a two-lane supernightmare. This particular rest stop boasts a Denny's and a McDonalds (complete with a McPlayground, home of the greatest fast-food villain of all time, the iconic and immensely corrupt Hamburgler), several pretzel/donut/ice cream/frogurt/yocream stands, and enough junk food vending machines to clog every artery in Dom Deluise's body. The grounds are kept in immaculate condition, most likely by a group of migrant workers who have a unique appreciation for the aesthetic potential of the American transportation network. And its toilets are cleaner than a nun's cache.

I should know. On the way to college my freshman year, I spent two hours with my head inside one of them. If I knew then what I know now, I would have spent longer.

Refusing to spend another day in Long Island after high school (I'd had my fill of kosher Chinese food and formica), I only applied to out-of-state colleges, thereby making it virtually impossible that my mother would guilt me into staying home for the next four years of my life. When my parents mercifully divorced, I became the man of the house, charged with all of the responsibilities that come with being an adult male -- mowing the lawn, lifting heavy objects, hanging picture frames -- without any of the attendant benefits -- sex, money, alcoholism. But, given my chicken legs, aversion to power tools, and intense pollen allergy, I didn't exactly cotton to my new chores.

"There's a spider on the lawn mower!" I yelled to my mother the first time she asked me to mow the lawn. Mowing the lawn was the worst chore out of all my testosterone-induced responsibilities. I had no patience for anything that required constant upkeep. I still don’t, which makes me question my suitability to be a parent. Kids are fun, but they require a lot of upkeep. Even more than a lawn.

“Why can’t we get astroturf, like the Jensens?” The Jensens were our fabulously forward-looking next-door neighbors. They marched to the beat of their own environmentally-friendly drummer, driving hybrids while the rest of us neanderthals were still cruising around in our gas-guzzling SUVs. Even though astroturf is not actually good for the environment, it does look pretty, and if reality television has taught us anything its that people care more about pretty things than ugly ones.

After successfully ignoring weeks of my complaining -- another quality parents need and I lack -- my mother finally broke down and decided to hire a gardener. I breathed an asthma-induced sigh of relief, until she replaced the lawn with a yard full of large white stones, which required constant washing to keep them at their “whitest,” lest the neighbors judge us by the color of our pebbles. Apparently the racial homogenity of our community extended to lawn decorations. Of course, that chore fell to me as well, but I didn’t mind it as much as mowing the lawn -- at least I could do it sitting down. Plus it gave me the chance to use the rock polishing kit my great aunt Ida had bought me for Hannukah. It would have been a horrible gift, had I not specifically put it on my Hannukah wish list.

When winter came, my mother inevitably turned to me to shovel the driveway -- another job that apparently requires testicles and an Adams apple -- even though I was obviously too small to lift the shovel, which was about two inches taller than me. After I almost lost my pinky to frostbite during a particularly nasty Nor'easter, she never asked me to shovel the driveway again. Good thing, too. I had Child Protection Services on speed dial, and I wasn't afraid to use it. But even though she didn't ask me to shovel, that didn't stop her from pointing out my failure every chance she got.

"See how that Turner boy lifts the snow, Jonah?" she said, enviously eyeing the neighborhood kid she hired to shovel the driveway. She paid him ten bucks to do it, which I considered a rip-off, but I chose not to get involved. He was cute, and I was still trying to figure out how to get him to shovel in his underwear. "Maybe if you pay attention, you can be as strong as him."

"Shhh, mom," I replied, turning on the television. "Bette's on Oprah today!"

Eventually my mother realized that I wasn’t going to be the man, or even the prepubescent boy, of the house, and decided to make the most of it. So she started piling on the “girl” chores, like folding laundry, cooking, and purchasing tampons at the supermarket (though she drew the line at vacuuming, which apparently requires a housedress and a vagina, and I only had the housedress). Putting tampons on the shopping list might have been her way of shaming me into mowing the lawn, but I didn’t mind, mainly because I didn’t know what tampons were. I’m still not so clear on that. All I know is that they have special wastebaskets, and they are usually white, which, as far as I can tell, seems counterintuitive to their purpose.

But to my mother’s dismay, I actually enjoyed my new chores, mostly because they provided me with some freedom in my otherwise stifled adolescence. In the beginning she micromanaged my daily routine, telling me how much detergent to put in the washing machine, what kind of frozen lemon juice to buy, how to spot a ripe cucumber (a skill which came in handy in later years). She'd inspect the bags every time I'd come home from the supermarket. Sometimes I'd try to sneak something by her, but she was too sharp for that.

"Was Count Chocula on the list, Jonah?" she asked, tapping the Count's cardboard face with her fingers.

"No," I replied, gazing longingly at the Count's chocolate-y goodness. Junk food was on the list of forbidden items in our house, along with cable television, rap music, and optimism. "It's the Count. He hypnotized me. Take him away, he'll get you too!"

After a while, though, she loosened her apron strings, and I tightened mine. I started stepping out of the narrow domestic box that she had created for me, trying out new recipes, new oven mitts, new dryer settings. Eventually I became so bold as to try my hand at interior design, rearranging the living room furniture in the morning when she’d leave for work. It was my own form of personal rebellion -- every time I rolled the socks into a ball instead of folding them in half, or moved the living room ottoman three inches to the right, I struck a small but palpable blow for trod-upon Jewish sons everywhere.

“Maybe you should get me a maid’s uniform,” I joked to her once as I was rebelliously rolling my dress socks. The jokes were for my benefit, not for hers, as she didn't find humor in the subtle jabs at my sexuality. While she eventually came to accept my sexual orientation as yet another cross to bear in her Sophie's Choice-inspired life (somehow she managed to turn my cross into hers), to this day she blames my genital preference on my father's failure to play sports with me as a kid. She underestimates the lasting impact of forcing a twelve-year-old boy to fold his mother's underwear.

As the years passed, though, the thrill of sock-rolling began to wear off, and by the time it came to apply for college, I was looking for new challenges. New experiences. New opportunities. New fabric softeners. Somehow, it escaped my attention that college wasn't all about clipping your own coupons, ironing your own jeans, and befriending professors who could fill those parental roles that your own parents had blithely abandoned when you were an infant. It was also about drinking and smoking, dating and sex, being completely responsible for yourself and simultaneously completely irresponsible. It was about all those things that most red-blooded American children look forward to for the first eighteen years of their lives, the very same things that I had dreaded for the first eighteen years of my life. Although I pretended to be independent, in reality, I only enjoyed the semblance of autonomy. The umbilical cord was cleverly hidden behind a stack of rolled up socks.

As the time for cutting the cord grew closer, I began dreaming up various ways to get out of this whole going away to college debacle. I investigated various short-term but potentially serious illnesses that I could develop without actually dying, but to no avail. It seems most deadly diseases entail some physical indicia of, well, death. Leprosy was a possibility, since it didn't kill most people, and I doubted any reputable private university would admit a leper, even if leprosy had a new fancy name. It doesn't really matter what you call a disease that causes you to ooze pus from every inch of your body. You could call it Spectacular Orgasm Disease, and people still wouldn't want it.

I also considered developing a mental disorder, but I couldn't think of one that I didn't already have.

Then again, maybe I didn't have to come up with an excuse. Maybe I'd be kicked out of college, without even developing one pus-filled nodule. Sure, I did relatively well in high school, but maybe I had fooled all of my high school teachers into thinking I was smart. It couldn't be that hard; they weren't that smart themselves. Or what if I wasn't cool in college? I wasn't cool in high school either, but I found a few people in high school who were less cool than me, so at least I was cool to them. Uncool kids don't graduate from college. Radio Shack needs to recruit from somewhere.

I was sure to fall far below the college standard for cool, though. I wasn't even comfortable ordering any drink that could possibly be mixed with alcohol. What if some alcohol accidentally made it into my glass? Or what if the bartender didn't hear the "virgin" part, and made a real margarita instead? Was the tasty lime treat worth a possible criminal indictment? I was only 18, after all. Laws are laws for a reason, and ignorance of a margarita's contents is no excuse.

A few weeks before my imminent departure, my friends and I -- a mix of nerds, drama freaks, and wanna-be nerds/aspiring drama freaks -- gathered at T.G.I. Fridays, the most sophisticated of our regular haunts (some dinner entrees actually exceeded twenty dollars!), to bid farewell to my friend Laura, who was going off to some prim southern college the next day, where Jews are a endangered species and people talk about coming out parties without a sense of irony. Laura was the first of us to leave, and while everyone else treated her exit as a ticket to freedom, to me, it was a death march.

"You're gonna get so wasted when you get there, Laura!" my friend Becky shouted, while downing her virgin Pina Colada like an unrecovered recovering alcoholic. Becky disappeared from our radars the day she got to college, and only reappeared seven years later on Facebook, with two kids and a Wall Street husband in tow.

"Yeah! Totally! Hey, dude, are you going to rush?" my friend Jake asked, while drinking his virgin Rum and Coke (which, as the waiter explained to him, is just a Coke with a mixing straw). Rush? Wasted? Dude? Who were these people? Just a few weeks earlier we had all attended a Star Trek convention together. Jake had gone as Geordi. You don't get any more nerdy than an engineer with a visor who has sex with holograms. I went as Data. At least he was fully functional in every sense, as he proved to one particularly enterprising crewmember in season four.

And where had they learned this new vocabulary? They sounded like they were straight out of The OC. I was still stuck in Saved By The Bell, with its sanitized adolescents who never seemed to get past first base (except Slater and Jesse, but she was a Showgirl, and he was just plain sexy). I was a freak without a posse, a geek without a home. Sure, they were still only poseurs, but at least they knew how to pose. They were on their way to actual post-adolescence. Condoms, mosh pits, and all.

While the rest of my friends went outside to pretend to smoke cigarettes, I curled up in a corner booth, praying for Doc to show up with a time machine and take me back to 1985, a simpler time, when my biggest worry was whether the evil-looking Garbage Pail Kid was hiding under my bed. I took a letter out of my coat pocket that I had received from the university earlier that day, listing my new roommate's name and address, reminding me that in just a few weeks I would be sharing my living space with another teenage boy. There was no way I was going to survive that rite of passage. I barely survived the other rites of passage I had endured so far, like puberty, my parents' divorce, and gym class. But living in the same room with another person -- another boy, and most likely a heterosexual one -- was just too much for my already over-stressed brain circuits to handle. Just thinking about sleeping within spitting distance of another human being sent me into a sort of catatonic state, sort of like the mental hibernation that Kathy Lee Gifford's husband must have entered when he put a ring on her finger. I wasn't sure if I was more afraid of my roommate spitting on me or vice versa, but both possibilities frightened me. I couldn't even keep a goldfish in my room at home. I always felt like it was watching me masturbate.

I hadn't opened the letter yet, in the hopes that it would be a belated rejection from the school.

Dear Mr. Haslap,

Our sincerest apologies, but we do not admit weird homosexual Jews to our school. We confused your application with someone who knows the proper use of the term "dude." We regret any inconvenience our error may have caused, and wish you the best of luck in your future career at Radio Shack.

Sincerely,

A Large Group Of Old White Men

But no such luck. There it was, plain as the pre-angioplasty nose on Baby's face. Mark Kramm, from Nyack, New York. Mark Kramm. Mark Kramm. The name screamed violent felon -- there were just too many consonants. He was probably a budding serial killer. Maybe he hadn't actually killed anyone yet, but everyone's got to start somewhere, even serial killers. There was probably a string of missing kittens in his hometown. Yet here I was, completely unprepared to defend myself. For a moment, I wished I hadn't quit Karate with just a yellow belt. I didn't even actually earn the yellow belt. The Karate instructor gave it to my parents in exchange for their promise never to return to the school again.

Laura came back for her fake matches, and noticed me sipping on my Sprite, fingering the offending letter, and searching the night sky for a flying Delorean.

"Hey dude, what's wrong?" Dear Mr. Haslap...

I handed her the letter from the university. I was afraid to say anything. She looked so cool, with an invisible cigarette in one hand and virgin Pina Colada in the other. She didn't resemble Beverly Krusher at all anymore. She was a full-fledged Deanna Troi.

"Mark Kramm, eh?" she said, adjusting the stuffing in her oversized bra. You can't be a real poseur without poseur breasts. "You know, that's a palindrome."

I grabbed the letter from her, and examined the name again. Indeed, it was a palindrome. I was too preoccupied with Mr. Kramm's hypothetical plans to knock over the campus convenience store to notice it before.

"Oh my god, you're right! It is! It's a palindrome!"

It was the first good news I'd had in months, ever since Buffy was renewed for a second season. No one with a palindrome for a name could be all bad. Even if he wasn't a complete nerd, he had to be at least somewhat intelligent. Stupid people don't have names that are spelled the same backwards and forwards. Mark Kramm and I just might be friends after all. It was a slight hope, but a hope nonetheless.

College was going to eat me alive.

********************************

Stay tuned for Love Is A Palindrome -- Part II: "A New Hopelessness"

Luke, I Am Your Lawyer

2008-03-05T10:36:00.007-05:00

There are two Jonah K. Haslaps (well, three, if you count my BDSM avatar). There's the Jonah you all know and tolerate, the laugh-a-minute fellow who keeps you entertained during those dark times. When things look their worst, you know you can always turn to Jonah. At a minimum, his life makes yours actually seem tolerable. That Jonah is a puppy dog.

Then there's the rotweiler. The suit-and-tie Jonah, representative of large, multinational corporations, depended on each day by powerful, Fortune 500 clients to make crucial, life-and-death decisions on their behalf, like what kind of pasta salad should be served during shareholders meetings, and if a tree falls in the woods, can we chop down the rest of them. And even though I don't blog about my job -- discretion is the better part of valor, as well as my paycheck -- it does keep me quite busy at times, distracting me from lavishing warm and sloppy kisses on your collective psyches.

I know what you're thinking. How dare they! Who do they think they are, taking over Jonah's life like this? Could they possibly pay him enough to make it worth this?

Unfortunately, yes, they do. They pay me enough. They pay me ass-buckets of enough. I have enough coming out my ears.

But all hope is not lost! No, hope is alive, and it is audacious. Here's what you can do to bring about audaciously hopeful change:

Pay me.

It's just that simple. Pay me to blog. Again, I know what you're thinking. Why pay him for something we can get for free? Aren't there other blogs on the internet that are of equal or better quality, whose authors do not ask for monetary reimbursement?

Yes. Yes, there are. Many. In fact, if I were you, I'd stop reading right now, out of protest for this outrageous request.

Still there? Man, there's a sucker born every minute. Which explains Log Cabin Republicans. Seriously, folks. How much is a smile worth? How about a giggle? A guffaw? A hearty chuckle? Let's have an open, honest discussion about this, and come to a mutually agreeable understanding of my monetary worth. No, this isn't a democracy, but I am a benevolent dictator. And once our mutually agreeable understanding is acceptable to me, let the money start flowing. I accept cash, credit cards, travelers checks, cashiers checks, money orders, moneygrams, Euros, Yen, Deutschemarks, and, depending on your gender and stats, possibly oral sex.

So whip out those checkbooks, fill up those quill pens, and say it with me -- Yes, we can!

But until those checks start arriving (four figures a week at least, please -- I have an expensive chocolate chip cookie addiction), I will be forced to continue to compromise my beliefs, my morals, and occassionally, my lower back flexibility. And until then, you will have to suffer in silence, gnashing your teeth (or, for one particularly unfortunate friend who recently bit into an overly-cooked cashew, dental implants), waiting impatiently for my next lengthy, inane, and mostly rambling story that you won't fully understand or, due to your MTV-induced ADD, actually finish. Because the best things in life require credit checks.

Still, I don't want to leave you totally in a lurch -- everyone needs a laugh, even cheap bastards like you -- so Jonah K. Haslap endorses Miss Piggy for President!!!