Back when I was a teenager

“Hey, when you look at blue and I look at blue, how can we know if we’re seeing the same thing?”

“Well, because… um… yeah, wow. That’s cosmic.”

“Wait, how would you describe red, like, if you couldn’t call it red?”

“It’s hot. Blue’s cold. But still… you could be seeing what I’d call green or purple and still say that. To really know I’d have to be inside your head. Or you’d have to be inside mine.”

“Man, that’s cosmic.”

Or then there was the time that Kathy — after holding a long hit of Leroy St. Purple — exhaled and said, “Infinity is… Incredible.”

At which we all weed-giggled, then conceded it was, in fact, “Cosmic, Kathy. Cosmic.”

Or then there was her observation one summer day at The Reservoir when she declared that “the only way this could be better would be if it were spring time and we were cutting school.”

We laughed at Kathy a bit then, too, but had to accept that, to the very grain, her observation was “cosmically true.”

And, you know what? Those moments were cosmic. They were times, however hokey in memory, when the brain took a leap beyond where it was to where it could be, even if it occasionally crashed down into the shark tank like Fonzie with a bad carburetor. Those were the moments when the mind broke out of the linear nature school tried to inflict upon us. And while I feel a bit foolish to remember once being that Cosmic Kid, I have to admit that those experiences were far more central in creating my character than entire years of CliffsNotes, chemistry class or calculus.

But the one early cosmic realization that stands out above all others happened years before I had ever heard of Kathy or Craig or smoked any chronic.

In the summer of 1979 I went on a weeklong canoe trip with my brother, Jay, and his Boy Scout troop on the Saranac Lake Chain in the Adirondack Mountains of Upstate New York. We were four nights into the trip and our Scout Master, Paul LeBlanc, had just whipped together a dinner that I’ll always remember as one of the best of my life. He called it Wheat-a-Moo Stew and it had it all – both wheat and moo. It was spicy. It was filling. It was shared around a campfire with my closest friends, and most importantly for a 12-year-old boy, it possessed the essential attribute for culinary perfection: the prodigious production of late-night, tent-bound farts.

After dinner, and before the poison-gas wars were to commence, the Patrol Leaders told some of the younger kids under their charge to police the campsite for any garbage that had been dropped and others to search for fallen wood to fuel the fire for the night. I wasn’t officially in the troop as I was a year too young, so having no Patrol and being a bit of a turd, I decided to sneak away and avoid any unwanted chores.

Like an Iroquois of my imagination, I crept out of camp and stalked the 100 yards from our campsite down to the water’s edge, trying to avoid stepping on twigs that might snap or breaking branches on trees that could give away my position. At the edge of the island, I found a big, flat east-facing rock. It angled towards the shore and away from my troop. I settled in, out of sight from Mr. LeBlanc, my brother and everyone on the island. Feeling satisfied with my successful escape from work, I kicked out my legs, scraped up some moss for a pillow, laced my fingers behind my head and lay down.

And then it happened.

I saw, right there in front of my eyes, the moon rise for the first time. Of course I’d seen the moon before. I’d seen it risen. But never had I actually watched it climb. I had never seen anything like it. Never had I witnessed a beauty sing itself into existence. And from the first note, the first glimpse of its white crown, I was stunned, enthralled. It moved perceptibly, it didn’t hesitate a second. For an hour or more I watched it rise, arc-second by arc-second above the High Peaks, not daring to wiggle a finger for fear of unsettling its progress. There was something about the near perfect stillness around me — just the water washing the shore, just the crickets’ legs and bats’ wings — that further illuminated the magic inherent in the moment.

My grandmother died in late January of 2005, at 93 years of age.

About two weeks before that night my mother had sent news to Guatemala that Grandma was nearing the end and that they wanted me to come home. Grandma loved all her grandchildren limitlessly, but she and I had a special connection. My mother told me that Grandma had been asking about me every day and that she couldn’t remember why I wasn’t there. I booked a flight that afternoon and was home in Upstate New York the following evening. My mother warned me that Grandma had been growing increasingly confused in the previous month, and sure enough, when I saw her the following morning her first words were, “I’m a little mixed up. I don’t know where I am.”

I explained to her that we were in the Hilltop Manor Nursing Home, up near the mall. I explained to her where that was in relation to the house she’d lived in for the past 60 years. I told her it was just up the road a bit from Brozzetti’s Pizza – and something happened. She, somehow, got it. All of it. She was clear and conscious for most of the next week and a half. She told me she loved me and pulled me in for a kiss. She thanked me for coming and asked me about Guatemala. I told her about the volcanoes and the bars around Antigua, and she said she’d always wanted to see one. I presumed she meant the volcanoes. Over the coming days I was with her for most of her waking hours. One night I snuck a bottle of her favorite, Seagram’s 7, into her room and we shared a drink. I’d read her some of my stories (which we both knew she couldn’t give less of a damn about) but she loved the sound of my voice and I loved being with her, whatever the reason.

By that point, she hadn’t been eating for almost a month. The nurse told us that this was part of the dying process. Her body was shutting down its systems. Three days before she died, when we were given the option to introduce a feeding tube, we turned it down. She’d had an excellent contract with the universe, and if the end was to come, we were going to walk towards it with solemnity and grace.

The night before she died I asked if she was hungry. She said she wanted a slice of Brozzetti’s. I went down the hill and returned half an hour later with a pie. She had two slices and after finishing them she pulled her two daughters, my mom and Aunt Bev, both in their 60s, to her breast and said, “You’ve always been such beautiful girls.” In that room, that evening, four human beings sat together in love and the assurance that none had ever betrayed the others. Christ’s last supper had nothing on us. God, I love those women.

Nursing a well-earned headache the following day, I arrived around noon. In the night Grandma had slipped into a coma from which she’d not recover, and in the last hour her breathing grew more labored. Each inhalation was a gasp for air, each exhalation a release so passive it wouldn’t have moved a feather, followed by a pause of a minute or more before the next great twitch told us she was still not ready to go. That hour was the only pain I experienced in the whole process. The spirit was willing, the body was done. The hospice nurse, noting a change in her pallor that I couldn’t see, said to my mother, Bev and me that “it was time” and she left the room.

Earlier this morning, my mother sent me a note through the interwebs.

Charging around town like I’ve got a million things to do is the one part of my New York character that has been most resistant to change. But, intentionally, I slowed my stride and started talking again about the storm bearing down on New York and, for the first time in a long time, actually wishing I was up there. In general, I’ll take the 75 and sunny of Antigua six months a year. But there is something magical about a snowstorm, a storm so powerful, and so delicate, that it can take an entire city by the wrist and, without saying a word, convince it to slow down. And those days are important, because it’s tough to see the magic that’s everywhere around you if you’re constantly flying by at Mach 2.

Einstein said it better; at least he did according to the bulletin board Ms. Alvarez from the math department posted outside her classroom back when we were colleagues in Brooklyn. It read:

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”

Damn straight, Al, and anything that reminds us of that wisdom has a very special value. And snowstorms have a way of showing us the magic of it all.

After our meeting, as we were walking, more slowly, back across town, I found myself still lost in whited-out memories and I began telling Ingi about the last great snowstorm of the 20th century and how (as could only happen on such a day) I ended up sitting in a dark bar with a few old friends, listening to a leather-clad dominatrix sing a jazz improvisation off a 9th century Persian poem while sipping Irish Whiskey.

What can I tell ya? It was one hell of a storm.

In February of 1996 an enormous, cyclonic blizzard (a “crab-nebula of a storm,” wrote the New York Times) blew up the coast from the Caribbean where it met a wall of frozen air straight from the Arctic. The resulting cloud bank which stretched 1200 miles, from Maine to North Carolina, was 500 miles wide and, almost unheard of with winter storms, actually developed an eye, like a hurricane. By the time it had passed La Gran Manzana, 26.9 inches of snow had fallen in Central Park, the most since they started keeping records back in 1869. At the storm’s peak, over a foot of snow fell in under three hours and the skies lit up all night with silent flashes of high altitude lightning. If a band of ancient people were to have experienced it, virgins assuredly would have been sacrificed to appease the angered Gods of Winter. To the jaded romantics of The City nearing the end of the millennium, it seemed like a far more humanistic God maybe just wanted to remind his hipster children that he still had the keys to the magic store and the legerdemain to blow our minds with one of his simplest tricks, the ice crystal. Watch my hands.

When the snow started to fall, I was sitting at Flannery’s Pub on 14th and 7th with my friend, John Moynihan. The newsmen had said to expect some weather, but no one was talking about any meaningful accumulation, so we weren’t paying it much mind. As such, the storm slipped in stealthily. That, I’ve come to believe, is one of the first signs of a truly beautiful storm – it somehow arrives before it’s there. Before you know it, it’s slipped in your backdoor and is sitting at the table next to you. When you do finally see it, when you first notice the rate of accumulation and the strength of the storm itself, there’s a moment of hope – real, honest to Einstein hope. I’m sure it’s biological. The mind quiets down, the heart opens, and the possibility of a purpose in this life reasserts itself in even the bitterest amongst us. I’ve become more of a cynic in recent years, but still well remember the fervent prayers of an innocent childhood offered to the heavens from a frosted bedroom window on those nights when the snows began to fall.  In rapture and sincerity I prayed, as I’m sure you did, too, for once to a God we actually believed in, “Please, God, please…Let this one be real… Don’t stop snowing all night long. Please please please please please let the snows cover it all… and give us a snow day. Amen. Please.”

Instinctively, as he looked out the wall-high windows at the front of the bar and saw the storm’s force, Fergel the Barman’s jaw dropped. John and I saw his face and turned around to look out at the street scene, too. This one was real and it had us by the wrist. The city was wearing white.

When we pulled up stumps at the bar and headed home for the night there was half a foot on the ground and no sign yet of the plows. A few hours later I peeled my ears open just long enough to hear Howard Stern, himself, tell me that it was fine to go back to dreamland. There were 16 inches out there and the city was frozen to still-life.

I went to a Christmas piano recital

I had no sooner plopped down in a pew than the flashbacks started. Instantly, I’m stuck inside Mrs. Tiffin’s dark parlor with the two pianos and the clock that rings with the Westminster chimes. Tiny plaster busts of composers scowl at me from the mantel, accusing: “When we were your age, we’d written symphonies.” Mrs. Tiffin’s fingers are shiny, swollen with arthritis. Mr. Tiffin snuffles around the kitchen. I play as if to convince her I’d practiced my pieces every day – several times a day – but darn it, they’re just too hard. Unfazed, she hands me a brand-new piece – in five flats and three different time signatures usually reserved for her fifth-year students – and says, “The recital is Sunday; I think you can memorize this by then…”

Immediately it’s Sunday; I’m wearing a jacket, tie, and wool pants so scratchy they could scour saucepans; I’m quivering on the piano bench, sweat gushing from my fingers; I aim to hit one note and five clang down together; the kids behind me are rocking the pews with laughter; I’m nine years old and trembling like a small animal cornered by Dobermans.

Fortunately, at just that instant, the first little performer walked up front to Ms. Cheryl’s piano and began attempting one of the four The First Noels we would be treated to that evening. Others would add three Silent Nights, three Joy to the Worlds, and five Good King Wenceslases.

Most of Ms. Cheryl’s young recital participants were unfortunates who’ll use these two or three years of forced lessons only as examples to a spouse – decades hence – of just how little their parents understood who they were, really. They raced through their assigned carols with fingers uncontrollable as spiders. They played Away in a Manger and Jingle Bells like they were striking the keys with their heels. They stuttered and stumbled during Up on the Housetop and We Three Kings; if notes were words, we’d have heard “field and fountain, moor and moun..mou…mo-mo…mountain..tain…” I loved it enormously. My fingers did not sweat once.

Then, as the older kids came on with musical selections people could listen to without actually flinching, I had another flashback – kinder, goofier, altogether more spiritual. This time I’m singing in the high school choir at the Second Presbyterian Church. It’s Christmas Eve, midnight vespers. In ten minutes we’ll be outside in the new-fallen snow, exclaiming over the miracle of the season. For the past forty-five minutes, I’ve been entranced by the music, by the dim blue light throughout the sanctuary, by the lovely hair and necks of numerous sopranos and altos.

The recessional is Silent Night. The choir begins to exit the chancel, lit now only by candles bordering the center aisle. A baritone, I exit nearly last, and therefore have more time than most to fall spellbound by the conjury of music, candlelight, and beautiful teenage girls. Four steps lead down, out of the chancel; I have walked them probably two hundred times. Tonight, though, I am enraptured, and miscount the steps – three. I am singing the last chorus of Silent Night as my foot drops and extra eight inches and lands… “Silent night, … holy n-uhhhh!!!”… like I was hit by a linebacker. Heads whip up in the first seven pews; no one knows what happened, but most eyes fall on me as a likely candidate. Even so, I do not flinch; I am dauntless in body and spirit; by now my musical confidence has been tempered countless times in the unforgiving crucible of Mrs. Tiffin’s piano recitals. I do not betray my position, but continue resolutely up the aisle toward the dissolving knots of choir girls, toward the fresh snow, toward Christmas morning…

“All is calm, …all is bright…”

Michael Chrisman is the former Editor / Publisher of The Valley Comic News. He’s recently retired to Antigua where he plays music, writes, thinks and drinks.

For some of us back in the day

Once upon a time, 42nd Street between 7th & 8th Avenues was quite simply the greatest movie strip in the world. And back on any given day or night in the ‘70s and ‘80s, it resembled nothing less than Hell’s Midway. With its rows of elaborate neon marquees blazing on both sides of the avenue, ‘The Deuce’ offered a jaw-dropping selection of 30 different movies to choose from at more than a dozen different theaters. With a couple of bucks and a few hours to kill, the entertainment possibilities were limitless as heroes, psychos, slashers, muggers, bloodsuckers, shape-shifters, pimps, prostitutes, perverts, mad scientists, escaped mental patients and more all populated movies for audiences that were often comprised of the same. Depending on your point of view, it was either a revealing glimpse of life’s infinite possibilities or the sleaze-fiend’s equivalent of Discovery Channel.

History lesson: 42nd Street was, for better or worse, ‘America’s Entertainment Center’. From its golden age in the 1930s as home to Cole Porter, Helen Hayes and The Marx Brothers through its harrowing heyday as home to Bruce Lee, Seka, Charles Bronson and every degenerate in the Big Rotten Apple, The Deuce was King. Many of these theaters – complete with ornate marble lobbies, stunning frescoes and multiple balconies – had been built to house the nation’s leading musical, drama, vaudeville and burlesque acts. During the Depression, they were converted to huge-screen movie houses offering double and triple bills of second and third-run Hollywood features.

Throughout the ’50s and ’60s, the increasingly gaudy and bawdy 42nd Street became a central destination for the underclass to see movies at prices far cheaper than those of the nearby Broadway movie palaces. When obscenity standards relaxed in the late ’60s, The Deuce rose to the occasion as foreign ‘Adults Only’ features – often advertised as ‘Distinguished International Films’ – joined the shoot ‘em ups, horror flicks and B-movies. And by the ’70s, 42nd Street was a depraved feast of hooligans, hustlers, chicken-hawks and one-man pharmacies, while the theaters were filled with an astonishing array of kung fu epics, monster movies, shockumentaries, blaxploitation, ‘porno chic’ and cheap XXX filth, Hollywood blockbusters and throwaways, and hundreds of other movies of unknown origin and indescribable content. Every major American city had a downtown theater district that followed a similar pattern and suffered a similar fate, but nothing compared to the scene that was The Deuce.

As a boy, I’d caught tantalizing glimpses of the street on local television news from the safety of my suburban cocoon, or through the windows of a school bus on class trips to Manhattan. By the time I was 14, I’d regularly cut school to explore NYC. A culture-starved kid, I’d spend the days at art museums, repertory cinemas and bookstores, but as dusk fell always found myself drawn like a beacon back to 42nd Street and its blaring mosaic of grindhouse marquees, garish movie posters and mighty tides of twisted humanity. It was a magical land of unrepentant visceral stimulation, a scene that promised love, hate, sex, death, self-destruction and redemption in equally damaging and delicious doses. No, I hadn’t ‘found a home.’  But the unleashed young misanthrope in me knew that it was gonna be one hell of a treehouse.

Think about it: If you felt you had to see, say, E.T., would you rather pay top dollar to watch it with a bunch of stuffy assholes on the Upper East Side or spend $2.50 to experience it with every deranged felon in the five boroughs plus a second feature of Ilsa: Harem Keeper Of The Oil Sheiks? The Deuce offered literally tens of thousands of remarkable double or triple features during which you could smoke anything, drink everything, shoot-up, jerk-off, eat, sleep, shit, piss, fuck or kill, all from the comfort of your theater seat.

Jumping Between the Graves - Photograph by Nathan Golon

A few years ago the cemetery lost my grandfather.

He’d been buried almost a quarter century before and I’d be surprised if anyone had visited his grave in twenty of those years.  We all loved Grandpa Ray, it wasn’t that we were glad to be rid of him or cursed his memory.  Rather, it just isn’t the custom in my family to make manifest the connection between the living and the dead in the physical space of their repose.  Which, I suppose, is a fancypants way of saying “don’t expect visitors” once you’re in the ground.   We do mourn.  We do share stories and heal as best we can – knowing the wounds and the joys of the loss and the love are both terminal.  Then, as time passes, the reverie recedes into our hearts and our consciousness and we say goodbye alone.

Knowing that Grandma was nearing the end of her contract (at least for this go round) my mother made her way to Vestal Hills Cemetery, and asked the groundskeeper where, exactly, Ray Parker had been earthed.  A visit to the manager’s office yielded many papers, a few maps, nervous laughter, furrowed brows, scratched heads, and a final, “Ummm, sorry Mrs. Tallon, but… ah… um… he doesn’t seem to be here.”

Excuse me?

“Well, sure he’s here, of course he’s here.  I’m certain he’s here.  Do you remember where he was…?   No…?  Of course, Mrs. Tallon…  Look, I’ll,  I’ll call first thing tomorrow.”

Mom came home and with some nervous tension told the family that the cemetery had lost Grandpa.  Someone made a joke about him slipping out for a drink.  Same old Ray.  Ha ha ha.  And each of us quietly wondered if the cemetery management just figured we’d forgotten about Ray and resold the plot.

That’s not a very good feeling.

In the end, they found him.  There are no standing stones at Vestal Hills, only marble plaques flush to the ground.  Well, it seems that  some years before a drunken gravedigger had taken out the Parker marker with his backhoe by mistake.  Keeping the dead buried is a business.  The backhoe driver didn’t have the money to fix it.  The cemetery wasn’t going to fix it on their dime and figured that eventually we’d show up to foot the bill.  We did.

But in the end, Ray was there and he wasn’t complaining about the view.    A few years later, my grandmother joined him.  I love her as much as I’ve ever loved another human being, but I haven’t been to visit her, either.

Several months ago a friend of mine died here in Guatemala.  He was a young man of 25 years.  He’d been ill, and we all knew that.  But, still, when he went it was a terrible shock.

His family came to be with his friends in Antigua in the week following Chris’ death.  We raised a glass, shared some stories, and gave our weak condolences to one another.  His mother and father promised to return in early September to visit us again on what would have been his 26th birthday.

They took Chris’ body home for a cremation, and when they returned, they brought some of his ashes back for an internment in the Cementerio General in Antigua.  Chris’ girlfriend, Evelyn, and I went with them to the graveyard.   There were the standard screw-ups with the bureaucracy, and on his plaque the monument company had mis-inscribed the date of his death.  Because of this, we couldn’t place the plaque that day and his parents were scheduled to fly back to the States the following morning.  I promised his family that I would make sure that all was taken care of  within a week.  I assured them that I would return to take a photo to let them know that all was well.

For weeks I didn’t.

Life got in the way, and as I’ve learned since then, that’s a pretty shitty excuse for failing to remember those we’ve lost.

Finally, I did return to take some photos of Chris’ grave for his folks.  Although I’d been there a short time before, I didn’t remember the exact place of Chris’ grave.

I lost Chris.  Or someone had.  I was both ashamed for not having returned before this, but also pissed at the Cemetery for being so irresponsible.  “How dare they…?”  Was much easier on the soul than “How dare I…?”

The Vellas in Little Italy

The bowl of spaghetti with a red clam sauce would normally have been large enough to feed me for a week. But I was famished. It was July and hot, and this was the lunch special for $7.95. It came with a salad, bread and thick red wine served in a small water glass.

The spicy clam sauce was already passing through my system and resurfacing in the sweat on the back of my neck and upper lip. I imagined that before the meal was over my white T-shirt would be the color of the sauce and stink of garlic and the beach at low tide.

I was seated outdoors, eating at a restaurant in Little Italy, New York. The real Little Italy, in the late 1970s, the one that was still an ethnic neighborhood of mobsters, tough guys and wannabe tough guys. Of working class. Of the elderly staring out of windows watching life pass by on the streets below.

This was the old Little Italy where, in the summer, fat Italian mamas pulled lawn chairs into the street in front of their apartment buildings and watched the kids play in the water shooting from the fire hydrants, while the men strutted about in wife-beater T-shirts drinking beer from cans and showing off their new tattoos.

At the table next to me was a heavy-set bald man. He wore a black shirt. He must have been in his early fifties. The heat did not seem to bother him at all. His features were wide: a big flat face, thick lips, eyes set apart. The only thing that seemed out of place was his nose. It was almost petite, like a little girl’s nose. It was something you could not help but notice, but knew you probably shouldn’t mention.

The bald man wore a gold chain with a prominent crucifix around his broad neck. He sipped at an espresso and nibbled on an Italian pastry. His hands were like the big cured ham hocks hanging in the window of the butcher’s shop across the street.

He was as cliché as you could imagine.

I shoveled another fork full of pasta in my mouth.

When I looked up from my plate, I saw two thugs leading a third across the street. They held him by the arms. He was bleeding from the corner of his mouth and one of his eyes was swollen shut. They brought him to the bald man’s table. The bald man put down his espresso.

“Lou, come here.” The bleeding guy stepped closer to the bald man. “Now, Lou. You gonna make this right. Right, Lou?”

Lou mumbled something. The bald man said, “Lou, I can’t hear you. Whata you say?” Then the bald man grabbed Lou’s head in both his hands and slammed it to the table, nose first. Bam! The espresso cup fell to the street.

I must have jumped in my seat, because the bald man turned to me.

“What the fuck are you looking at, kid? Eat your fucking spaghetti and mind your own fucking business.”

I looked away and did as I was told. I ate my spaghetti. I felt small.

“Now, Lou, you gonna make this right. You don’t wanna let me down, Lou. Now get the fuck out of here. Get him the fuck outa here.”

From the corner of my eye I saw the three thugs leave.

The bald man got up and walked to my table. “Pasta’s good, ain’t it, kid.”

I nodded. “Yeah,” I said.

He laughed and clapped me on the shoulder. I felt smaller than small. I could have hidden in one of the tiny clam shells in my spaghetti sauce. I wanted to. The bald man walked off and turned south on Mott Street.

I put ten dollars underneath the salt and pepper shakers and got up. As I walked past the table where the bald man had sat, I saw a blood stain about the size of a saucer on the white tablecloth. There was also what looked like a big piece of a front tooth sitting at the edge of the red stain.

“I love Little Italy,” I thought.

Some fifteen years later, around 1995, Little Italy had shrunk. Most of the little neighborhood shops were gone. The Italian restaurants now occupied only a few diminishing blocks. China Town had somehow spilled up from the south, and trendy boutiques had encroached from the north and west. Little Italy was disappearing.

Back in the late 1990s, when I was teaching in Brooklyn, NY, I had a student named Uran Dragon Kolenovic. And, it seemed that the dragon lived inside Uran’s head.

Uran Kolenovic was a 14-year-old immigrant from Kosovo whose mother and father had sent him to America to live with his grandmother when he was 9. He hadn’t spoken with his parents since. He and grandma lived in a horror of an apartment in Brooklyn’s Little Albania, and by all reports, which he later shared with me, it was a miserable existence. His grandmother hated him. Or resented him. Or resented having to feed him. Or having to look at him.

To express her feelings she refused to touch him, ever. Most of the time when I heard kids talk about problems at home I imagined some level of exaggeration. But with Uran, I felt in my gut that he was telling the Devil’s honest truth.

Uran was a damaged kid if ever I knew one. And I loved him.

In the first few weeks of class I didn’t much notice Uran, though he sat in the middle seat of the middle row. He was quiet and didn’t do much work, nor care too deeply about ancient civilizations. He seemed, at the time, like a very normal boy on my roster of 170 students each day.

Then, once, about 6 weeks into the term, while I was lecturing, I noticed Uran was methodically pounding his fist onto his desk and muttering something. I kept talking to the class and walked closer to his seat. What he was saying, and what he began saying, just a bit louder, as I got close to him was, “Kill Mr. Tallon… Kill Mr. Tallon… Kill Mr. Tallon…”

I stopped by his desk, while continuing to prattle on about the ancient Mesopotamians. Uran kept muttering and pounding his fist. After a minute I held my hand beneath his fist. He hit it in the same rhythm for some time while continuing to mutter, “Kill Mr. Tallon… Kill Mr. Tallon… Kill Mr. Tallon…” Then, after a few more beats, the pounding began to slow and eventually stopped altogether. Uran set his fist in my hand, while continuing to make the slow, striking motion but softer, more gently. Sometime around the development of cuneiform writing, I closed my hand around his fist, and with the rest of the world and its history oblivious, an intimacy and a friendship took root.

Some months later, when we were hanging out after school in my classroom, Uran told me about his grandmother and his parents and his living conditions. It was then that I realized that the day of the fist pounding was likely the first time in years that Uran had been touched by another human being.

How awful that must be. Can you imagine not having physical contact with another human being for years?

Fall and skin your knee. Alone. Ace a test. Alone. Breathe the polluted air of Brooklyn. Alone. Be afraid. Alone. Be a child. Alone.

Uran was a bit nuts, and he continued to have problems after that first contact, of course, but from that day he seemed marginally better. Much of this, I think, was because I did manage to introduce him to a few other boys in that class who also felt ostracized by the unforgiving and hierarchical culture of an American high school. “Group work might be worth something after all,” I remember thinking. Uran started hanging out with this clique after school and, for a while, seemed to smile more and mutter less.

When we were near the end of the semester, Uran’s best friend, Tommy, approached me after class. Tommy said he needed to talk to me after school. I told him to meet me after 9th period and didn’t think much of it for the rest of the workday. When he came in, with their other two friends, I asked where Uran was.

Tommy said he’d gone home, but that’s “kinda what we need to talk about.”

Then, being rather elliptical, Tommy, speaking for the other boys and himself, thanked me.

“For what, Tommy?”

“For helping us to find friends,” he said.

And I’ll always remember what he said next.

“You see, we all feel kinda like misfits.”

To which I responded, “Fitting-in in this fucking world is overrated, Tommy.”

Whores, harlots, prostitutes.

Kind of like, “lions, tigers and bears, oh my.” But not exactly.

Yes, that is what has been on my mind: ladies of the night, tarts, trollops. And, besides the obvious reason, DEPRAVITY, I am not exactly sure why.

Perhaps it is because a friend of mine who will go unnamed (Michael) is buying a prostitute for another friend of mine, a woman, who will also go unnamed (Christel), who is doing field work in Guatemala for her anthropology thesis which deals with things of this tawdry nature. Interesting academic pursuit, this anthropology stuff…

As I understand the arrangement, Michael will procure a woman of talent for an entire evening and Christel will interview her about her line of work – turning tricks – after which Michael will spend the remainder of the evening enjoying the woman’s professional services.

I can already hear the more righteous and politically correct readers screaming that this is horrible.

PA LEASE!

STOP!

Enjoy the story. The time for moralizing is over. We are in an era of wicked laughter in the face of an end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it tragedy. GET WITH THE PROGRAM!

So, as I said, perhaps it is because of Michael and Christel that I have been pondering hookers, streetwalkers, brothels and such. I’ve know a few hookers in my day, not in the carnal sense, but as friendly acquaintances.

There was a brief while in 1979 when I lived on Forsythe Street which was fondly refereed to as Hooker Alley. Forsythe was a little street on New York’s Lower East Side that ran between Canal and Delancey, which in those days was the beginning of China Town, and what was left of Bowery bum territory. I was living there because I was 19 and I was broke. The apartment I rented cost $90 a month and was one long narrow tenement room with a claw-foot bathtub in the kitchen and thousands of oily cockroaches that treated me with disdainful omnipresence

All and all it was a lovely neighborhood that any mother would be proud to know her son was living in. It was across the street from a little park where heroin was sold around the clock. Junkies would openly shoot up on park benches while Chinese and Puerto Rican children played on rusty swings, smiling and laughing as their little bodies sailed over spent condoms and syringes.

On Sundays the street had a brief reprieve as an Hispanic rock-and-roll Evangelical Church took over the entire block and tried to save souls with electric guitars, tambourines, and empanadas.

The rest of the time the street was owned by pimps. When the sun went down they emerged, followed by the girls: mostly black, but also white, brown and yellow; beautiful and horrific; goddesses with skin like ebonite, or battered, haggard and pockmarked; fresh and youthful; or strung-out, gaunt and begging more than soliciting. Some were sheathed in leopard tights, electric blue spandex, black leggings. I remember one, who only lasted a few weeks; she was very pregnant, blonde and heartbreaking. They all wore high heels. The cackles of some terrified me when I heard their laughter bouncing up from the street into my bedroom on the second floor.

As night grew later and darker, the eighteen wheeled trucks pulled down this small street and hookers climbed up into the cabs. Men in business suits, construction workers, Hasidic Jews dressed in black with black beards: every form of man known to man would amble by looking for a girl to have either in the park or one of the hotels on Delancey.

Other cars would pass slowly and the girls would lean in the windows, showing themselves: Come on honey, you wanna go? I got something for you baby. All night long and into the early morning, for one year, I heard the hiss of air brakes as trucks slowed down, or the screams of girls fighting, or the whoop of police sirens and then the clicking of multiple high heels as the girls ran across the street into the park to hide. Whoop, whoop. Then taptaptaptaptaptap as they scurried out of site. This was the music I went to bed to night after night.

Eventually some of the girls and I became friends. They’d see me coming and going day after day, “Hey, white boy, you want some?”

“No thank you,” I’d say.

“You gay or getting too much of that free college pussy? Hey, you gonna eat all that Chinese food you got in that bag?”

We’d end up sharing Chinese food.

In the winter time I left the door to my building unlocked so the girls could turn quick tricks in the hallway instead of the freezing park. This did not endear me to the other tenants in the building.

On really hot summer nights, I’d sit on my door step and share a six pack of cheap beer with one or two. The pimps didn’t mind as long as they went back to work when a car passed down the road.

One night I headed back to my apartment from uptown. I was drunk. I had been mugged that afternoon across from Morningside Park. I got very drunk after the fact because I was so shaken up. I staggered, and fell again and again as I made my way down the street. Two of the girls came running over to me, took my keys from my pocket, and got me up to my apartment. They cleaned me up and put me in bed. The next afternoon, the buzzer rang and one of the girls was there to check on me. She had brought me a plate of eggs and sausage that she bought from the diner on Christie Street.

Thank you, Christel and Michael; your anthropological pursuits have me remembering a beautiful and special time in my life.