podgnosticast

[Poem] SATURDAY, MAY 16

ijcmartinez@gmail.com (J.C. Martinez-Sifre) — Fri, 29 May 2026 20:16:07 -0400

Morning begins again.

The rooster pattern on the sheer linen curtains

Is now distinct from the darkness.

Dawn lingers in a gray twilight.

The crackle of thunder and mild rain grumbling,

The storm receding back into the distance,

Without lightning,

Giving way to the drippling,

And the morning birds' chirping,

And an owl's hoot every other minute.

The church bell yonder strikes once:

Half past ten.

John Doe

ijcmartinez@gmail.com (J.C. Martinez-Sifre) — Sun, 8 Mar 2026 04:40:34 -0400

Click here for bespoke AI Slop song

My beloved, estranged daughter,

I was thinking tonight ... I've already come to terms that I'll likely die in solitude. And, I was thinking: I want to be forgotten. So I started going into my accounts' inactvity settings so I could have my profiles delete themselves automatically: Twitter, Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon. I'd already come to terms with that as my bow-out -- 15 months after my passing.

And, then I came to the part of granting someone permission to request my account deleted and who would submit notice of my passing. I couldn't think of anyone. My parents, maybe, but I hope they don't have to be the ones to outlive me.

I'd be missed. Who'd take care of my dog, Mister Pringles?

But, I couldn't think of anybody I could trust wouldn't mind or not think it inappropriate that they'd been elected. Even if you were still in my life, we're either blocked or not connected on in any of those, so there's nothing to type into that prompt.

I couldn't think of anybody, sweetie. I miss you so much. If you should happen to, on some level, grieve, then don't. I don't even think that this sorry state of of affairs is altogether sad, and at the moment, I presume you won't care or possibly even be notified that I died.

A Short List on the Nature of Friendship

ijcmartinez@gmail.com (J.C. Martinez-Sifre) — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 00:23:00 -0500

Infatuation w/o Longing
Caring w/o Possession
Love w/o Obsession
Imagination w/o Expectation
Togetherness w/o Obligation.

Was Plato there at Socrates’ death-bed?
Did Aristotle discuss the occasion with Alexander of Macedonia?
Was Joseph there when his son, Yeshua was condemned?
Was Saint Paul but a Roman spy?
How are both Good and Evil aspects of the sacred?
How does a child come into the world?

It is *not* through anything a man does to a woman, or what a woman does with her womb. Or, what they do with each other.
Everything that follows, though well-described and measured, remains a total mystery.
Neither knows how they would both manage to re-emerge and to carry on throughout history as one in another,
participating in a future they would not be a part of.

Passion w/o Lust
Nakedness w/o Defilement
Dignity w/o Undue Hardship
A Fullness w/o Remainder
Compromise w/o Loss
Authority w/o Power
Usefulness w/o Exploitation
Service w/o Slavery
Gain w/o Safeguarding
Success w/o Envy
Selfishness w/o Betrayal
Wealth w/o Avarice

There is still up and down and left and right and front and back and today and tomorrow.
Some things are unavoidable.

This is about noumenal things, not any obfuscated esoterics.

This is but a short list on the sublime nature of Friendship --
like the space between an exhale and an inhale. Liminal.
An involved escape.
Transcendent.
The bedrock of “Us” — me with you ...
And me with me, and you with you.

[Released] A History of Miami's Subculture from 1997-2000

ijcmartinez@gmail.com (J.C. Martinez-Sifre) — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 16:28:00 -0500

This was a concept for a book, but as with all things that emerged back then at the close of the analogue world -- stillborn.

Forward

The country was relatively quiet. The U.S.S.R. had fallen, and "The Bear" behind Castro had made the 90-mile buffer between Key West and Cuba an occasion for sentimentality. It was a time when the preoccupation was for the best cafesito amidst the thriving Cuban population in Miami rather than a concerted effort to redress their flight to the U.S. as refugees. To be sure, it still rang in the rhetoric, but if anything had been resolved through the Mariel boatlift it was that they had conquered Miami with a navy of rafts and without a single gunshot.

Bill Clinton had charmed Gen X-ers with his saxophone solo on The Arsenio Hall Show, and by 1997, his second term was charming the pants off their parents by the seemingly boundless prosperity of the Dot-coms.

Fortunes were being made with every mouse click, Enron had yet to fall, and the United States presided over its hegemony as the first and only state in history to enjoy unequivocal world dominance. Things were good, and if there was a war to be fought, it was the so-called "War on Drugs."

Miami at this time had made a breakthrough as it approached the millennium. At last, it had secured its position as a cosmopolitan, global city. During the late 1980's, South Beach had continued to fester as a desolate, run-down relic of the days when Jackie Gleason had made its beaches a playboy paradise. Its economy, built on Social Security checks, sweltered in the Coppertone atmosphere, underwritten by the memories of scores of elderly sitting quietly gazing into the vast beyond of the surf and sun.

By the mid-nineties, South Beach had made a great turn around. Art Deco was "in" as an institution. Gallon after gallon of pastel paint had been used to bring color and life back to the mold and rot – a place now befitting Sunny Crocket and Tubs. The polka and shuffle board lessons were replaced by loud speakers, liquor and neon, and by 1997, South Beach had resoundingly taken its place amidst other thriving nightlife and cultural districts such the French Quarter in New Orleans, Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, Greenwich Village in New York City, and OTR in Cincinnati.

The party was raging, and in South Beach, it was raging all the time.

In the midst of this domestic prosperity and tranquility, the Gen X-ers and creative-types were presented with a troublesome dilemma. It was one wrought, not from a lack of talent, training, or community but of geography. That is, while the city feverishly tried to establish its artistic identity with the likes of public works that propelled pop-artist, Romero Britto; and, while new "districts" emerged as if by proclamation – all tracing their etymological naming from something having to do with the fine arts, areas formerly considered the stuff of “Bonfire of the Vanities,” were re-branded as "The Design District," or the "Art Deco District."

With every vibrant flag affixed to light poles along Biscayne Boulevard, the city tried to inspire its citizenry to embrace Miami's identity in the arts. And it worked ... except for the unfortunate problem that Miami was the last stop on the Florida peninsula. There was but one road in and one road out, I-95. Alligator Alley had only recently been re-purposed into I-75 – a direct route to the western coast.

As such, once you arrived in Miami you were presented with a choice: to continue on to that string of islands, The Florida Keys; or, one could double back and trek endlessly through the swaps for the next oasis of something resembling a cosmopolitan arena: Orlando.

This geographical aspect of Miami had some significant consequences. First of them was that only well-established national acts – artists, musicians, theatre shows, et al – were the only culture to venture to its sandy shores. Those indie, up-and-coming acts that kept live music alive in college campuses across the heartland of America did not make a stop in Miami. It was a simple logistical problem to plan a tour going to or leaving out of South Florida. If there were live performances, it was more often than not at the Miami Arena, and the acts performing there were of the most established in their trade. Emerging acts like the Red Hot Chili Peppers were relegated to mid-sized venues like the Cameo Theatre on Washington Avenue. David Byrn, a titan of music, used the same venue in the late-90's. The Who used the newly built Joe Robbie Stadium. In short, from a local, home-grown perspective, Miami was artistically isolated from the rest of the country.

While the local brood of young musicians and artists made ample use of this lack of competition, their small, local following could not support the pubs and the truly local performance centers, especially in an environment where prosperity was dripping like sweat in every other sector. Before the millenium, Rose’s Bar and Lounge, 754 Washington Ave., South Beach, the equivalent of New York's CBGB's closed its doors, and the opportunity for local musicians to perform simply dried up.

Regardless, the native cultural creatives pressed on. Several troupes managed to organize into loose confederations, and there arose a small but vibrant scene of artist co-ops, most of them comprised of warehouse spaces that were also the dwellings of the artists. Of the most notable, a group had secured a large space along the Miami River and branded a series of bacchanals under the banner of “C-Roc.” Another group established what were dubbed “Agape parties” at a house in Lemon City, near Downtown, where the curtained windows featured Fellini-esque silhouettes of dancers costumed in angelic wings; several stages set up in the house’s patio ushered up a roster of music, dance and conceptual exhibitions. Rehearsal spaces in Hialeah became a locus for film screenings, and North Miami warehouses were opened up as venues as well.

Performance at C-Rock, Downtown Miami, c. 1999

Others made liaisons with out of the way lounges, establishing grass-roots, DJ-inspired gatherings such as Pop Life that spun British retro-pop vibrations rather than what had become the country-wide mainstream performing on stages during the Winter Music Conference. Others had tried to embrace the nation-wide hip-hop movement, but recasted it outside the Miami Hip Hop Weekend at a desolate, dockside pub in Aventura named Thunder Alley.

Perhaps the last and only bastion for a cross-pollination between local acts such as The Laundry Room Squelchers and emerging national acts was a dive called Churchill's Hideaway. It continued to be a stop for travelling acts while embracing local productions such as Sticky Stuff Wrestling – female lucha-libre-style wrestling in kiddie pools filed with things like Jell-O pudding. However, it was situated well off the beaten path of Miami's self-ascribed artistic districts – Downtown and South Beach. It was, instead, situated in Little Haiti, tucked away in what was still considered a marginalized community. Truly, that was the reality for those who had been raised and fed by the Florida sunshine with a penchant for expressing their experience in some form of artistic medium; marginalized despite the overt assertion by Miami that it had raised its bar of standard for the arts.

The local creatives, left to their own devices from the broader picture of art in America, had managed to galvanize into an intimate community that continued to put forward their humanistic vision for modernity. The scene oozed with the stuff of the Burrows and Kerouac of the 50s; their subterranean musings inspiring each other and waxing at every turn into philosophical dirges inked into ratty sketchbooks, simultaneously waxing with contemporary themes, but remaining well within the tropes and forms that had dominated art historicity.

Art was wherever and whenever it could be. The community ebbed and flowed by its own mechanism in loose confederations possessed of an uncommon unity in the closely knit scene. There was no one to compete against; there was only the small but vibrant places to convene and perform. Self constructed venues became the places to congregate, and the roster of artists constituted a broader cross-section of the local Miami scene as a whole. In-bred as it was, a cross-pollination of ideas, techniques and aesthetics did manage to occur if only at a local level and for a local audience.

And yet, while there was an air that something or someone would break through or spill over into the broader picture of the aesthetic discourse in America, the movement continued to grind on its own gears. The products of self-expression remained unpublished in the piles of sketchbooks, demo discs or tapes; a memory of a significant breakthrough the night before continued to be worked out at a Dunkin Donuts or at a Denny’s , through a thick cloud of cigarette smoke or a hangover, but never at the conference table where it might have proliferated to a broader audience.

But, if one is to define an artistic movement as a group of individuals dedicated to inspiring one another towards new avenues of expression, at that time and in that place – in Miami, a sketchbook was enough. The yearning to loose it upon the world at-large was an aching presence, and that urge forged strong, enduring friendships that, to this day, remain intact, if not somewhat estranged in the post-analogue, post-9/11 world. The sense that the period would reap an authentic voice for Miami’s artists; that its labor to legitimize those orgys of shared moments of inspiration seemed palpable and within reach at the time, but, eventually would wane down to nothing. The kingdom was at hand, or at least it seemed to be just before the Twin Towers went down.

More than twenty years later, hindsight says that the movement was, squarely, still-born. That is to say, the body of work produced during that time remains in sketchbooks and on cassette tapes. It resides in the hearts and minds of those who lived through that period. It continues to live as a dream unfulfilled, and as a memory of what could have been but didn’t – a loose end, a longing, an itch for those who were there.

Soon after the millennium turned, the luster of common purpose seemed to pass, and as if a spirit of hope for local artists slipped away the scene seemed to evaporate not with a bang but with a whimper. By year 2000, the proving grounds and venues were places to disclose airplane fare for other artistic markets. Some would choose the west coast while others New York City. Others hung up their instruments, pencils and paints and retired alone or with their spouses to la vie quotidian. In short, by the year 2000 a diaspora of “the scene” had begun for the Miami creatives of the late 90’s.

To be sure the dates for this record, 1997-2000, are arbitrary. The scene, as it were, had its precedents and antecedents prior to ‘97, and the diaspora was (and still is) a long process that continues to unfold. Also, Miami has its scene, as it always will. It could also be argued that Miami creatives did, in fact, manage to tease out a unique aesthetic half-way through the millennium's first decade: The Aughts. It was epitomized by acts such as The Spam All-Stars — described best as, perhaps, Afro-Cuban Disco.

The dates chosen here, 1997-2000 are merely to serve as a lens to focus and shape the discussion and bracket a much larger process — a process which one could argue is prescient to the “now.” This record, hopefully, can communicate this “last hurrah” of a classical, pre-digital world, unfolding the circumstances which crafted for those who participated the self-same vision that has galvanized every generation; reconstructing in each the fundamental aspirations at the heart of the “human enterprise.”

In other words, this record could, potentially, serve as testimony of recreating the “Millenary Kingdom;” it is a record of youth filled with camaraderie and of the sharing in that abiding memory of Camelot. This volume hopes to tease out and keep at the fore the proverbial Grail for civilization as it undergoes its radical transformations.

Perhaps, it is presumptuous to think that subsequent generations have found it difficult to assert a similar analogue; but, for what it’s worth, this was how it was done in the late-90’s in Miami, Florida. This is the story of that vision and an account of that stillborn revolution.

JC Martinez-Sifre

Brooklyn, NY 2012

Edited and abridged, May 2025, Main Library, OTR, Cincinnati, OH.

[Poem] Morning Star

ijcmartinez@gmail.com (J.C. Martinez-Sifre) — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 22:12:00 -0400

So He said, "I am The Light;"

And so, the was The Darknes,

As opposed to what it had been:

The All

For an unbounded eternity.

Suddenly, He gazed into The Darkness,

Transfixed — enchanted, until

He, himself, is in it.

All full of desire;

Lost in the daydreams of expectations;

Amidst those for whom it has never occurred:

This, right here, is enough;

Even, notwithstanding,

The Darkness.

Go play in the dirt,

And be comforted,

that The Light shines for all!

(Except for those who prefer to live

In The Shadows),

Like the first man and first woman,

After their work giving names to the creatures and things of The Earth,

took to wresting for themselves,

The names for things befiting celestials.

The audacity!

They?

Knowing the names of heavens reserved for the luminous creatures … for the noumenal things.

Like Truth and Justice and Love;

Good, but mostly Evil,

It being least distant to The Darkness,

And, their understanding of it having been demonstrated so thoroughly;

But, at least they know Beauty,

which was born out of The Darkenss.

What can you know of these things

Since, you *are* the darkness,

And, you will die?

Don't you see that even The Light cannot know itself, by itself?

Pride.

[Poem] Torchie

ijcmartinez@gmail.com (J.C. Martinez-Sifre) — Sat, 22 Jun 2024 18:58:00 -0400

It could be unbounded; un-complex,

Honest and close,

open,

all of which is unusual for me.

I forsee an uninterrupted horizon,

sublime connection,

easy kindness and caring … fulfilling,

all of which I could get used to

… at last.

I confess:

I am love-bombing;

But, since you are the balm,

It'll likely unfold like an eternal flame.

Or, at the very least,

Like the unknown soldier

who, despite it all,

made an indelible mark on the fabric of the cosmos;

or,

As with any flower

— an alive thing,

Which when nourished by good soil,

and sunlight,

and climate,

It flourishes.

Untitled, Aug. 10, 2022

ijcmartinez@gmail.com (J.C. Martinez-Sifre) — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 15:27:00 -0400

Her eyes glower at me, trying to contort into condemnation:

"How dare you take the chicken-wings away, JC!"

"We finished them."

"To the bone!?!"

"Grissel and all," I say, nudging the half-filled glass of white wine at her while trying to re-spark the spliff in my lips.

Etc., etcetera:

And, yes! for sure! I'd forsake tobacco for a solid chance at kissing her for hours on-end. What fool wouldn't.

But, her glowering at me, flush with the reckless abandon at the sports bar, so … so chere; chère … cherecherécheré … and all sorts of fancy things like that … ;-)))) @}--,-- …

+ + +

It took quite a while that night traversing less than 10-meters up the block, draping her in my sport-coat … there being Turks and goat cheese and a lots of lost time with old friends; and, not enough of her usual pauses saying, "Go wash your hands JC! … go smoke outside. FUCK YOU JC!," and all that Jazz that I'm charmed by.

It was a homecoming, after all … implied, as it were.

Like: "AHHH! that!" she says when slaking the butter knife clean of the aged, artisanal cheese with one's lips. I hadn't noticed the honey in the jar earlier …

+ + +

In some past life, we had been working our way down the caldera of Santorini on a mule … who knows who was the mule or who had been the man that time, Agamemnon having gone off for stranger things than just getting-by: a man (or woman) and her mule.

+ + +

Sometimes I draw (illustrate) what makes me smile in awe. It's usually naked figures in some sort of rapture. Sometimes the gladness comes simply in humming along to whatever the Bluetooth is casting: and, sometimes (very rarely) I find the words to communicate that ineffable delight the abides and becomes more noticable in times of quite repose … like the kind I find in having met you and the joy I'm suffused with while in your company which sustains for a few days afterwards like the tone of a gong working it's way toward quiesence.

[Fiction] #BandName

ijcmartinez@gmail.com (J.C. Martinez-Sifre) — Wed, 29 May 2024 04:00:00 -0400

"#TwilightChildren or #TwilightofTheChildren? ... Band Name … with the hashtag and everything,” she said. “#TwilightChildren … Esquire!"

She was on a roll tonight, picking up handfuls of sand. It was past two in the morning. The sand spilled out of her long, delicate fingers partly on to my face.

"I like it.” I said with forced enthusiasm. “How about: ‘#ChickenOfTheSea’ — with the hashtag like you said?"

She looked at me with that scorn I had never managed to get used to or be able to brush off.

I began plucking on the nylon strings with gusto trying to conjure up some melody that might pass as part of that gaddamned demo she obsessed about getting together. Late night, “networking,” she said, for, “her career,” she said.

“Twilight children,” I howled a few times over the bar chords I strummed, back-peddling to that “good listener,” she and the couples’ counselor had been trying to make of me these last few months. The passion had drained away long ago, though; so, no matter what “good listener” I might become, I would, nonetheless, just be part of her band, and nothing more.

I had already found out about that producer she kept going on about — Ricky. I hadn’t mentioned that I knew because, fuck …. what would it matter anyway at this point.

She put her arm on my shoulder. I just wanted to stay on that for a while. Her arm around my shoulder — the warmth on the back of my neck; a whiff of her floral, French cologne infused with the oils her skin, alone, made.

I drifted into humming. My strumming played the chords slower and more sloppy. I couldn't tell if the breeze I felt along my arms was stillness. It was stillness, but moving. I just couldn’t tell if it was my arm or the ocean breeze that was moving or still. Then, I noticed the salty breeze and the mist from the sea-spray landing on my lips; a moving stillness, I thought — alive, the ocean's sea-shell song. And then, there were the whales out there in the distance; the breeze brushing past my arm while making a hollow sound in the guitar's body; I watched the navigation lights from the tankers in the distance — both solid and blinking — miles away … in the shipping lanes ... decorating the horizon. The light chop, dotted by the waxing moon, trying to feverishly reconstitute its shape for my gaze on it into that straight and unswerving road to heaven.

All of this happened in an instant.

“Be a good listener,” I thought, turning my attention back to her — to her arm over my shoulder and to the pitch, deep violet of the horizon. I wanted to stay on that — all of it — forever, but the scorn on her face — this one — finally broke my heart.

My soul just fell out of me. I couldn't tell if I had shit in my pants — the heartbreak washing over me so fast like an ancient memory washed ashore.

“This ain’t gonna work out,” I thought, and like the wet sand that the surf had made bubble before retreating back into the deep, I felt the hatred that bubbled in me for her.

I had always imagined myself to be a “great” listener. I wasn’t wrong about that; just wrong about her.

I considered whether or not I had ever taken a good look at her these past couple of years; that I hadn’t understood a goddamned thing that had come out of her mouth in all time we’d been together. All the bickering. For what?

God! I hated myself for wanting her still. I hated her for being so beautiful to me. I was disgusted, thoroughly, by my wanting her still ‘cause I knew I could only be a jerk to her from now on. Those last few months ... so full of contempt from her; it all landed on me like a pile of bricks, and my heart shattered.

I guess this shit happens all the time. It all happened, like I said, in a split second.

My chest heaved once. A sob came out of me in one, lurching heave, and then it was gone. I wiped the moisture that had pooled on my face from the last few gusts of cold mist.

“Shit,” I sighed. I used the guitar like a cane to stand up. I felt old and feeble. I walked through the sand towards the promenade’s lights. There was part of me that hoped I would hear her calling out to me. I was certain, though, that she wouldn’t. I should know her by now, after all.

I didn’t look back, but, probably, she watched me walk off from the beach-blanket, dumbfounded, thinking, “What the fuck, dude!?!”

I always wondered what happened to that beach-blanket — if she gathered it up and kept it or abandoned it right there and then. I liked that beach-blanket.

I cursed myself being a fool that night — a cold-hearted fool. I knew I was making a mistake, but, at the same time, I knew I wouldn’t regret it.

We didn’t ever talk again — not really. Sure, we exchanged pleasantries, and we took care of whatever business we had with each other, but we never strayed beyond that.

I still don’t regret it, but every night since, I’ve had a momentary, passing feeling that I hadn’t had a very good day today — not a very good one at all.

A Nirvana Song

ijcmartinez@gmail.com (J.C. Martinez-Sifre) — Thu, 11 Jan 2024 08:13:00 -0500

I’ve never, legitimately, owned a firearm. I was never legally wedded, though I lived with her seventeen years and had a daughter with her … pets, plants, all kinds of pets. We were all pets about the place, I suppose. I didn't mind cleaning all their shit, though it was a thankless job and didn't pay any ... not even kindness or good-will.

I didn’t get any degrees or certifications beyond a high school diploma. Never, legitimately, bought a car or a home though the record might show I had gotten a loan on and paid off the BMW 325i; around the same time, the record might show that I had bought a three-bedroom townhouse in the gated community of Aventura, FL called “Sailboat Bend.”

Much later, I think all of that was some perverse sense of "fairness" from my parents ... my father's ongoing affairs with women spilling into buying them homes and cars, too. I've always been the one they used to wash their hands of it, I guess. I pieced it together. I did have the assurance that my mom had hired a private investigator along the way, so, whatever I had imagined did have documentation and evidence.

It's not really the point -- what really happened. That was never anyone's concern, and my thirst to "know" really was just for my own edification since not even my closest friends or lovers ever believed me ... or, really, it only mattered to them that there would be hand-outs of cash-money indulgences.

Everyone of the Caribbean on every side, really exploited all the guilt. Everyone in that generation, ultimately, felt themselves justified and much, much better than God-himself, though they all think each other a jack-ass. I don't blame them.

Now, while I never “legitimately” owned a firearm, a few found themselves in my possession. I never fired one, though. I never had the occasion or the chance (much less any know-how or practice) to have been able to get a shot off.

The day I rolled into the strip mall in North Miami and brought out the load I had accumulated from my dad’s arsenal, there was an orgy of boys – mostly dishonorably discharged or, just doing their thing in Margaritaville – showing me how to operate them – the pistol and the shotgun. They were very happy to play with the weapons. It was some other kind of male lust … none of which I ever managed to indulge in.

A few weeks later, a sheriff from Broward County was typing into a laptop at my parents’ place – closing up a detail.

I told him I had sold all the weaponry somewhere in Georgia for gas money … but I hadn’t. Instead, I invited dad to reclaim his pistol, shotgun and rifle, but, as far as anyone was concerned, those firearms disappeared somewhere in Georgia.

I don’t think I had become aware yet that Marvin Gaye was shot dead by his father from a pistol he had gifted him. I suspect, even still, my father has a chamber loaded just for me in one of those guns off the grid. I wouldn’t blame him. I've been an aweful son to him.

The other gun that came into my possession resulted from some weird combination of a loan and a drug deal and a guy I had recently returned from a road trip to Mardi Gras with. It was handed to me in a hardshell case, and I kept it in my nightstand for several years. I thought, if I’m really in a hurry to surrender to la lucha, the struggle – there it was: same place I kept a large ashtray – the top drawer of my nightstand. I had surrendered to la lucha several years prior. I’m no hero. All I know is that a three-day coma feels almost like blinking, or it felt, as it were, like all of the eternity that had occurred before my birth. So, there was the handgun if I wanted to expedite oblivion.

But, at some point … someone I had assigned to look over my home and my pets while I was on vacation … well, somewhere in that, the pistol in my night drawer dissapeard.

I never asked any of those who had keys to my place. Frankly, I was more concerned that they’d use it on themselves, though I think they had all conspired to do me a service. I’d already grown inured to the idea that fate oughtta decide my time of dying. I don’t think whomever took that gun – well-meaning, sure – really thought it through.

Wasn’t my issue any longer … none of that. I've moved on from all that.

Really, I think, a lot of people I've loved and/or who have, presumably, loved me are still under the opinion that I might fold one day. If they don’t think that of me, then they, at least, can attest to the fact that I had folded; and, so, really, I don’t blame them for thinking me undeserving a place on this Earth or if they don't care too much for me outside not being the one to ruin Christmas this year. I don't blame them, but really, I think them more pre-dead (or in the waiting room in perpetuity); and, I feel sorry for them out of, honestly, the most obnoxious perspective possible.

I’m prescribed a lot of medicines. I’ve even been prescribed a dog. I’ve looked into the city code, and, turns out, I turned out a pretty well-behaved and “good” citizen. In addition, both of my grandmothers, at some point said to me, point blank -- as an adult, having known both their love well into my mid-30s -- "You turned out good, kid."

So, ya know: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

a.k.a. "Porchlight Red"

ijcmartinez@gmail.com (J.C. Martinez-Sifre) — Thu, 4 Jan 2024 03:05:00 -0500

You gave me this glass orb long ago, Lee, while you were still in high

school — a birthday gift (see attached picture). I suppose it was originally meant to serve as a paperweight. I think you gave it to me when Nathan and I were starting to rub each other the wrong way — the period leading up to my moving out of the Biscayne Park apartment.

The birthday you gave this orb to me may have been in the same year our band, The King's English, played its three or four well-rehearsed originals at the Miami Shores Country Club, one of the songs, if you remember, was about necrophilia. I bet none of the “landed gentry” assembled there noticed what that song was about. They were probably too absorbed in their polite conversation and mini-quiches floating about at the fund-raising soiree.

That night at the Country Club, I remember Mr. Wicker — our acting “agent” rather than in his usual role as the school’s music teacher — was smiling broadly from the stage’s wings. I had thought at the time he was smiling out of pride at seeing his students, both current and former, fulfilling what he slaved over daily; what he had dedicated his life to; what has, at times, developed into a nervous twitch in his face.

We had written the songs; we practiced and polished them; we performed them. We channeled the Headmaster’s yearly litany to the student body of cultivating one's “Six Potentials,” revealing what the curriculum of our small, private, high school intended to foster in us -- future leaders. That night we managed to have our performance intersect, meaningfully, with the world we would, hopefully, inherit and replicate in time — just as our parents had for their parents.

Our performance that night was, ultimately, for the true beneficiaries of all the school’s endowments; and board of directors; and “tenured” teachers-become-institutions like Mr. Wicker; it was for our parents-parents — our grandparents. You know this to be true, Lee, now that you’re a dad like me; and, if you hadn’t thought about it like that, you know I’m right about the place our necrophilia song occupied there and then.

It's Natural by The Kings English

click to play now

In retrospect, though, the music director may have been the only one listening to me slapping the strings of my bass guitar while Felix-Ramon belted out the chorus: “It’s natural; it’s natural; it’s only natural.” I’d like to think our teacher (and mentor) was getting a laugh at both our naivety and the subtle irony of “sticking it to them” for once … and with total, realized Grace.

No one complained — that’s for sure, because a few weeks later we were on stage playing to the hoi polloi of the village during their annual July 4th celebrations at the country club. Even though Felix-Ramon, our front man, was out of commission that day, having come down with a severe, immobilizing flu, the show went on. To my reckoning, no one littering the 18th hole that afternoon on their beach blankets seemed to mind the lack of lyrics to our tunes. We did it karaoke-style — like with that pop-song whose buzz was only beginning to die down on the radio stations ... the one by Lenny Kravitz.

I think, by then, Lou had come on board as the solo guitarists.

Man! You two were both wicked guitarists as teenagers! I can’t imagine how much more depth and feel you both must be able to add to the chops you had already mastered. These days, the pictures Lou's been putting up on his wall’s profile -- he looks like he’s rocked with Carlos Santana or Hendrix. Bet he (and you) could rip with them, though I suspect you’d be rolling with Prince’s entourage ;-).

* * *

Again, in all likelihood, you gave me this paperweight as a token of the friendship we had forged the same year we both played a set with the Miami Shores Community Band at the public tennis courts. We had been marshaled again by Mr. Wicker for some village groundbreaking ceremony. The town officials officiated with their speeches; and with their golden shovel; and with a small audience assembled on bleachers; and, … and all of us roasting in the summer sun.

Meanwhile, the small wad of LSD we had taken before we got there was still under my tongue. The colors of nature — the green-ness of the trees, the blue-ness of the sky — had started to get really amped up. I remember giving you the classic musician’s nod in the middle of our last tune, which was, perhaps, Appomattox March or a John Phillip Sousa arrangement.

Those were some good times, man. To this day, I still sing the Star Spangled Banner’s harmonizing the part that I had played at every home, varsity football game and at every assembly throughout high school: “second chair,” B-flat Cornet.

If you remember, later or some other night shortly afterward, Nathan charged into a party we were at brandishing a cheap, nylon-string guitar with a warped neck over his shoulder. We were all tripping that time, too (ehem! band practice 🤔), and we were failing miserably at adapting the lyrics Felix-Ramon had given on a sheet of loose-leaf paper, into a song. It wasn’t five or six minutes before his tuning of the guitar to Open C before there was a song, brother; a song arose — born out of being frivolous; and carefree; and full of spirit; and from … from the recklessness of youth … from us being together.

You know that anyone who was there that day has that song branded in their psyche; it remains in lasting memory for all of us — just like Nathan still does — both as a memory and_

I don’t know if you’ve been back to the campus, but he also lives on as a wizard mosaic that was installed in the last five years along the art building’s facade.

I managed to make my peace with Nathan before he passed away. It happened a few years after I left the Biscayne Park apartment; after you and your class graduated and drifted away … to college, I suppose. Honestly, I didn’t pay much mind back then to all the people that merely drifted out of whatever hustle I had busied myself with; trying to whittle away at my own brand serenity … becoming progressively more settled; trading in my unhealthy passions for a more abiding sense of interdependence with the rest of the world; to arrive at an abiding sense of fulfillment.

I can’t tell if it's me, Lee, or if it’s all the fear floating about in the air, and on every screen; the state of our Nation and history, but the pervasive sense of ease I’ve managed to carve out for myself is cut with an equally jagged edge of loneliness … much more profound than the one underscoring of all those daydreams of love during my teens.

No, Lee, that sense of being an outcast, East of Eden, the crusty character of an Ancient Mariner going Aqualung at a wedding reception. Yeah. Ripe, bro. Ripe old age. Everyone says I’m still young, but my daughter talks about Flock of Seagulls and Michael Jackson as if they are pre-historic. That’s how she puts it: “from the old days.” No shit!

Ripe, Lee. I’m feeling ripe.

At any rate, the night Nathan and I managed to make peace, was a July 4th. I was having a slice at Steve’s Pizza, when the stray thought of him crossed my mind. I could see him trudging the lawn, loaded down with milk crates and several orchestra stands.

Twilight was already well underway. I knew I would miss the fireworks, but I drove over after my slice to deliberately “bump” into him. I found Nathan sweaty and finishing up the last of his part of loading his Tuba and other equipment into the school’s van. We both expressed excitement to be in each other’s company.

I think I drove him home that night, and we caught up on the long ride up the Turnpike. Driving him past the Casino and the drive-through tailers you and I used to buy cartons of cigarettes from The Seminoles, tax free. I don’t know if you ever noticed,Lee, but the house Nathan grew up in was also adjacent to a very large cemetery.

We stopped at a Miami Subs Grill before parting ways — the one near his mom’s place. Go figure, our last encounter happened at the same place we conceived the plan to move out of our folks home and into the Biscayne Park apartment. I can remember having the sense that I would not see him again for a very long time as I waved him goodbye, turning out of the driveway. It didn’t occur to me, though, that this would be the last time I would see him; but, then again, I couldn’t imagine what confluence of circumstances would bring us back in each other’s company. In that sense, I did acknowledge that we may never see each other again; it’s the same kind of a tacit acknowledgement I give myself every night going to sleep, thinking, “This may be it; what if I … ? What happens then … .” Like Seneca says, “[The Sage reckons] all that a man cherishes in life, even his own personality, as temporary holdings, and he lives as if he were on loan to himself, and is ready to return the whole sum cheerfully on demand;” in that sense, I said my goodbyes to Nathan — without regret or remainder.

I don’t have any regrets either about those days. They still resonate like the finely woven bubbles that form the swirling helix in this orb you gave me another lifetime ago. I don’t have regrets for the acid trips or having gone permanently and certifiably nuts from them.

I sometimes stare at this thing you gave me. It has fallen several times on hard floors, and it has developed some character beyond what the boutique or esoterica shop you bought it from had originally intended. You’d have to come fly over and visit to see the ripples emanating from fractures at a few spots along its surface, cascading into the glass’ lattice. It’s remarkably beautiful where it remembers the blows of Fortune from those falls.

I also don’t regret pantomiming Jedi lightsaber battles in front of Nathan’s lawn where he had nested during all of high school into his early adulthood like an angry dragon — the entire floor of his bedroom covered, two-layers deep in toys and yellowing underwear. I wonder from time-to-time about his mother and his sister … whatever became of them? I don’t really care for an answer; the thought crosses my mind every so often, though.

I’ll tell you what, Lee, the memory of Nathan that naggs me often, is the one of this night talking to Nathan on the porch of our apartment. It was the conversation that, eventually, culminated a few weeks later with me moving out.

It was the dead of night, and I swear, Lee, on that porch, I saw a glowing red aura around him even through the darkness and the sound of cicadas. I was sopping up a midnight snack of Fruit Loops in grape juice on the porch before going back to my bedroom for my “second sleep” when he opened the door and sat himself down in front of me. I couldn’t tell if he was intentionally trying to be theatrical about it. You never knew with him_

Like, you could never be sure if you should believe his staunch,purist rhetoric about how he’d never been stupid enough to try drugs or alcohol; or, if the rumors were true: that he had conducted erotic rituals drenched in Goldschlager with that polyandrous girl and some other dude. The thought of his natural odor of sweat that had fermented in the deep folds of his fat wiped clean by that girl’s armpit and leg hair; by the dense, limp, uncombed hair that could properly be called a “mane” … all washed by cinnamon spirits, the flecks of gold from the bottom of the bottle glittering on their flesh. The image still gives me the willies. Both extremes were equally plausible with Nathan, if not deliberately cultivated.

I was groggy, but since Nathan and I were now totally strained as friends, generally interacting little, I was cautious with my pleasantries as he sat himself in front of me. He seemed to be so angry in those “last days” in Biscayne Park, that whatever was on his mind had also resulted in him and Felix-Ramon growing estranged. The rage poured out of every part of him; and, to this day, others that would occupy our couch still talk about him as an agent of true evil. But, I never witnessed anything strange; just an overpowering sense of “the willies” — terror.

It wasn’t a far stretch to go there with his fascination and study of secret societies … his fervent, evangelical stance on the dogma surrounding Discordianism; his odd practices: asking my best friend to piss on a wooden cross made from table legs; his violent outbursts like the time he smashed a cardioid microphone into his forehead until he bled because, as he said, we fudged a take or two of his original composition during a rehearsal.

That night on the porch, he was clearly trying to communicate to me, in good faith, a revelation he had had. I couldn’t understand it. He tried to relate it to me with some analogy of three orbs swirling in and through his hands and arms and around each other. All I saw was the color red. Him. Red with rage, and I just didn’t get it. I still don’t get it.

I could understand by then why he would have been filled with anger — a morbidly obese giant raised by a well-meaning single-mom, self-evidently at the school as a recipient of some grant from the Alumni association and not because he came from a well-to-do family.

You know his whole life was spent in devotion to that school — just about all of it. I was glad when I came back a couple of years after his death and saw the tile-mosaic of him near the art room -- an effigy of him as a grand wizard — cape, hat, wand and all. Certainly he was the harbinger of magic — that magic anyone can assume when delving into the latent imagination of one’s childhood.

The night still puzzles me. I wonder what Nathan realized and tried to communicate. I still wince a bit thinking that he may have been pacified — unburdened if I (or someone) had managed to understand him in and around that night. Memory can be unreliable, mixing events up; mashing them together and turning deep, spellbound discussion and dark rituals into a color. As with this memory: Poorchlight Red.

Screen Capture of Andy's Chest

ijcmartinez@gmail.com (J.C. Martinez-Sifre) — Mon, 1 Jan 2024 18:23:00 -0500

Confession

ijcmartinez@gmail.com (J.C. Martinez-Sifre) — Wed, 13 Dec 2023 16:10:00 -0500

the only thing that'd could've made today any better is for you to have been here, now (dusk), listening to R&B and Jazz on the Bluetooth, slipping into peaceful sleep, worming our way into our tightest embrace -- like slimey snails; the fragrance from her neck: dry sweat and yesterday's cologne__

it would have been better, otherwise, totally entangled -- body, mind and soul (for a brief moment) with one whom I adored.

yeah ... that'dve been nice. Alas ...

Bob White Special, October 13, 2000

ijcmartinez@gmail.com (J.C. Martinez-Sifre) — Sun, 22 Oct 2023 20:49:00 -0400

When Bob White smiled, it was deep and inviting. It stretched across his face, quick to appear, but reserved. His grin would start and slowly spread over his face like an avalanche until a mouthful of missing teeth was showing. He’d suddenly recoil from it, as if scared to have allowed it to show, only to reconsider -- chapping his lips; trying to hold it in, staring into you before his mercy for you overcame him and he burst back into laughter. He groaned along with it, as if he’d heard you tell him an awful joke, and he’d point at you, calling you out. At other times, he would bring up a hand from the bar counter and echo what had made him laugh with quick hand gestures of American Sign Language.

When he danced, he would stumble through his cautious steps, holding up in one hand a plastic cup full of whiskey, and in the other, a cigarette. His delight was infectious, and though he was slim and emaciated from his steady diet of cheap liquor, his presence filled the room.

One could hear him through a dense crowd calling out, “Hey baby. I said, hey baby.” He’d shimmy for a couple of beats with whichever body was nearest before continuing: “I said hey. I said, hey baby. I said don’t you know.”

In early afternoons, it wasn’t rare to find him sitting at Churchill’s Hideaway with a newspaper and an Irish coffee in front of him. While reading it, he rub his face often with the hand that wasn’t occupied with his cocktail or cigarette. You could see him trying to wring the horror out of it – all the hatred spread open across the front page. Or, on one occasion, I found him at tucked towards the end of the bar underneath the sweat swampy mess of people reaching over and through his brooding for their turn with the bartender. I was one of them, asking causally while I waited for my drink what was troubling.

“Got no money, and I got no honey,” he said.

It was a sensible enough cause to be in the dumps, I thought – down and out. So, I bought him a drink and left him to his sorrowful reverie. It struck me for a moment this was the real him. Or, more to the point, this was just as much him if not all of it because the Bob White who drenched himself with expressions of radiant, drunken, “hey baby! I said, hi,” was all I suspected I would get a chance to know.

* * *

Madonna Raw Bar was on the upper part of the dive totem pole. The inside was a bit grimy, and lit towards the back with bright bulbs. However, the bar itself unlit. The contrast left one feeling like the place was only partially open for business. As soon as I walked in, Leah took my arm and began ushering me out sliding glass doors to a wooden deck where Bob White sat hunched over a newspaper, brooding. She whispered into my ear that his brother had just passed away, and deposited me in a chair across from him, announcing, “Look! Your friend is here!”

For a moment Bob White came alive, his gaze fixing itself on me. His broad grin emerged, and he extended his hand into a handshake of sorts. His index, pinky and thumb remained extended while the other fingers were curled the sign language for “I love you.” I put my hand in the same pose, and our fingers crossed.

“Let’s do this right,” he said, after a moment, stressing each word.

“I’m sorry about your brother,” I said to him, while we embraced, and he thanked me.

Leah had gone back to the conversation at the bar counter, and after a few brief conversations, I saw Bob White sitting back at a table – grieving. His head kept swaying from end to end, and I could hear him and mumbling, “I’m telling you now.”I watched him saddened.

“What’s your fondest memory of your brother,” I asked out of the blue.

“What,” he said. He cocked his head as if he hadn’t heard.

“I said, what do you remember most about your brother?” He just looked at me with disbelief.

“What!” It came out horse and exasperated. I asked him the same question again, thinking that I had tread on treacherous ground.

He had venom in his eyes. “Why are you asking me this?”

“Well, people live on in our memories, and I wanted to know something about how you felt about your brother,” I said.

His disbelief increased, his eyes grew cross, and his permanently nappy peppered Afro just swayed along with his head. “Why do you want to know about my brother,” he said finally. His hands came up from under the table, and unfurled, “Why?”

“Bob, I just wanted to know because I care about you. I thought you might want to talk about it.”

“You don’t care about me,” he said. “You don’t care about me at all!”

“Ohh,” I said, really chewing on what he said. I was only trying to help, I thought, but I had stuck my foot in my mouth now. “I suppose,” I said, “asking you about your brother, expressing concerned is the only way I know that I can express my caring for you.”

“My brother’s still alive, my mother passed away.” He still oozed with disbelief in his voice.

I didn’t know what to say. “Ohh, man, Bob. I’m sorry. I was told that it was your brother that had passed away.”

“Well first get it from the source before you start askin’ what’s going on,”

“I’m sorry,” I said thinking that he was absolutely correct.

“Anyway, what do you care about anything,” he continued.

This was unbearable to hear, but I remained steadfast, “Bob, I haven’t met a person yet that I don’t care about.”

“Can you accept this,” he asked. “Can you accept this?” He continued before I have a chance to answer. “That the Palestinians, and the Israelis aren’t getting along because they don’t care about each other, and aren’t listening to each other?”

“I can accept that.” A conflict in the Middle East was in The Herald’s headlines that morning.

“What’s your nationality? What’s your background?”

“Puerto Rican,” I said. All the tension that had built up at the table dispelled itself. I scratched my beard. I must have looked Arabic to him. He started to laugh.

“I had you all wrong,” he said. He laughed again, and this time I laughed with him. “I had you all wrong! You’re just a Puerto Rican, and that’s all over there, and you care, but that’s not you.” He extends his had, and we shake, Bob White Style.

From that understanding, and then on, we didn’t talk much more for the rest of the evening at Madonna’s. After a while, he asked me if I could give him a ride to another bar, the King’s Stable, and I agreed.

* * *

Bob and I walked out of Madonna’s toward my car. He was looking shitty, swaying across the pavement of the parking lot. When we got into my Jeep, a compact disk started to play from where it left off. The disk was a compilation of old style big band Jazz. It started in high gear, and we drove off, enjoying the Dixieland tempos as we made our way towards the Stables.

Bob White was enraptured by the music. He mouthed the words of the songs, even when the tune only carried the melody.

“I didn’t know you were into this kind of music,” He said finally. I started speak, but Bob dove back into the melody, mimicking the scratchy vinyl voice now coming from the speakers.

“What’s in a Bob White Special,” I asked him curious.

“Shit man! It’s just cheap whisky with some water in it!” By this time we were already pulling into the Stable’s gravel parking lot when a Duke Ellington tune came on. Bob became reverent. He tilted his head back enraptured.

“This is the Duke,” he asked mystified.

“I think so. I didn’t get the track names from the CD. They’re not written on.”

“This is the Duke,” he started laughing and clapped his hands. The car stayed idle in the parking lot, and we both listened to the tune drift through melodies. The piano meandered around twinkling in the trebles, then water-falling down into bass notes. Bob White’s laughing sounded like he was crying.

“My uncle played with the Duke,” he said. “That’s my uncle there playing the bass.”

He fell back into a silence, and I leaned into my seat. The jazz kept rolling out to the speakers, filling the car. It undulated; it’s themes toying around. The snare drum mimicked the piano. The bass walked. It filled the space, and Bob laid back in a trance. The hairs on my arm stood on end. There was only Duke Ellington, and something magical was happening. To feel so low earlier, then now, released into a bliss, the two of us sat in holy rapture. We didn’t say a word. The Duke said it all for us. I felt high.

The song trickled away. It ended, not in an abrupt jazz refrain, but simply each instrumentalist drifted off. Each stopped carrying their tune, and the song vanished into an elegant repose. I turned off the radio, and we sat there still mesmerized. We said nothing, until finally we looked at each other, calm and expressionless. And from out of nowhere, we both started laughing. We went into paroxysms, looking at each other. We laughed, as if in the music we’d been told a punch line, and we doubled over for minutes until it too drifted off into a serene repose.

The King’s Stable is really just a package goods store in Little Haiti. However, it’s set up like a bar. You walk in through a back door, walk a ten yard corridor towards the bar area that opens up to a pool table, a rectangular bar on the left, a dance floor on the right, and tables in between. As far as I know, they don’t have a proper liquor license. So when you order drinks, they serve you a bottle of spirits, a mixer of your choice, and a bucket of ice with plastic cups.

I had a feeling of relief as we walked into the King’s Stable. We didn’t talk as we each had a Bob White Special. We toasted to his late mother, and he thanked me effusively for making the toast. I left within a half an hour towards South Beach.

I don’t think I’ve seen Bob White since. Someone told me that he’d moved to St. Augustine. He inherited his mother’s house, and is living in it now. Sometimes I hear about him from a friend who keeps in closer contact. Bob White has mentioned that the town stinks because the bars close at two, and a city ordinance doesn’t allow liquor to be sold after eleven.

[Repost] Group Therapy

ijcmartinez@gmail.com (J.C. Martinez-Sifre) — Sat, 16 Sep 2023 22:07:00 -0400

Originally drafted and posted to a prior blog on Aug. 15, 2008.

I am not them - not by a long shot. I am not a group of shattere middle-aged men, sitting with chairs arranged into a circle. We're in a barren conference room of a Catholic hospital, and the crew with their admixture of attitudes and disposition to this congregation talk openly about their "great redefinition." That is, they defined themselves as having a problem that was beyond their controll, and only an act of divine mercy could spare them from themselves.

A pudgy young woman with a clipboard resting on her lap tries her hardest to draft solutions for them, but she fails miserably. She's just an intern, after all, without the professional experience or sensitivity to break through the men's tough coat of pain.

My head knocks against the eraser holder of a dry-erase board. I'm slouching, and I swear that the jittery crystal meth guy who's just sobered up and just mentioned that he's savoring the option of suicide has just been overwhelmed by all the options that have been lobbed his way from the intern and the room. The consolers say to this incarnation of Job, that it will be a lot of work and a lot of time to be worthy angain, to be redeemed. He's just been informed that it might take years before his outlook improves, but, by golly, he's taken the first, right step - being here.

Sadly, he's insufferably hurting NOW, and his hopes are dashed of some immediate relief like if the box of Tylenol said that your headache will be gone the day after you ingest the tablet and, only after a good night's rest.

He thanks everybody profusely for their encouragement, and it's clear that every "thank you" is just to say "Will you please just shut up now?" The group continues to offer help for many more minutes, regardless.

A fat engineer - a veteran to the program - fancies himself the intern's aid and the liason to the group of patients. He seems to enjoy this way too much.

The only REAL dude is festering in waves of justified hatred. Over the course of years (three, I seem to remeber), he developed a concrete plan for his community re-integration. Wave after wave of social work questionares were filled out by him whose intentent was to guide him to define, concretely and on paper, his innermost, most burried wish for himself and his particular gift to the world via his labor.

His diamond was polished over the years in this group. He had soul-searched. He had completed the sentance a hundred times over that began like, "Bosses are --" and "When someone tells me I've done a bad job, I --." Other questionares had him circling an array of numbers on the page - all meant to illicit in him his deepest yearning for fruitful employment. His completed forms were stored in your average file-folder in the second drawer of a metal filing cabinet along with the other's of the group.

The program yeilded for him a plan - a written document that described what he wanted out of employment and how he was going to get it.

Seething, it slips out that his employer just said that same day that his "plan" was too vague. The intern is speachless and fumbles to find some encouraging words for him. Her science and training failed her. Statistically the REAL dude was just unlucky, a proverbial Free Radical in her equation whose only hope was some kind of strange approach wrought by Quantum Psychodynamics.

One thing binds us all: a penchent for self-mortification. We all have a tendency to whip ourselves to death through either drugs or unhealthy relationships or both ... mostly both.

Here's an unhealthy relationship if I ever heard of one, right here in this room I'm in: take an adult and put him in front of a coloring book whose figures take the shape of "complete the sentace" or "circle all that apply to yourself" and what you got is a recipe for a person with a chronic penchant for behaving like a child - a person who will never stand on their own two feet because the reinforcement from society at large is, "you can't do it on your own, and only an act of divine mercy will save you."

Here's another unhealthy relationship: the REAL Dude has a justified anger to assume that the world is a cruel and unusual place. On the one hand, his counselors are saying, "Do this for us, and you'll be granted your hearts desire." His counselors are called Social Workers. On the other hand Society -- the object social workers profesionilize in ... what, presumably, is the final product of rehabilitation -- is unsatisfactory.

Here's another unhealthy relationship: the fat guy who enjoys this hoo-ha so much, he may never graduate and move on to being okay. Why would you want to be "healed" when being sick is so damn fun and fulfilling. He's has nine months of sobriety. Most illenesses besides old age and natural causes kill you long before the nine month mark has passed.

Here's another unhealthy relationship: the guy who's trembling with fear about just being alive, who's lamenting that he's a burden to the world and his mother and who's backpeddling, terrified that this intern will commit him and strip him of his freedom for mentioning the "S" word (she threatened to do so) ... Well, he's a poster child for a Rolling Stones cover tune - one we all know oh so well: I can't get no! Satisfaction! Sex is dangerous for him, drugs are dangerous, and rehab is dangerous. His mom is dangerous. The internet (something he mentioned as a source of sex) is dangerous, and this interin IS DANGEROUS!!!

* * *

I'm beginning to suspect that this world is a cruel and unusual place. It had been my predeliction to assume that the universe was a place of order - the creation of divine love and justice. But, in these last few weeks, I suspect, in the tradition of the Gnostics and Conspiracy Theorists, that this Earth of ours is nothing short of the playground for the Devil - a sort of sandbox for his machinatiions and a proving grounds for his more ambitions projects in the lower realms.

I sympathize, and would even go so far as to empathize, with the Real Dude, and the suicidal dude, and the fat engineer dude and the untrained intern.

There is something rather special in all of this: choice and its counterpart, lack of choice via pernicous addictions; the metastasization of trauma and grief.

So it's told in the Catholic Orthodoxy, human beings are precious to God above and beyond any other thing in his creation precisely because we have choice. But what happens to God when addiction sets in, and we no longer have choice ... when we are irrevocably bound by affliction -- lost in it. Are we damned on this Earth?

Is the Devil and God looking over their last Chess move with some sort of "touché" attitude?

* * *

For what it's worth, I don't think I'll be able to make the next meeting with the boys. I suspect that I'll be resuming my sessions with my philosopher-therapist soon to resolve my existential questions.

And, as I type this, I will not be saying on Monday that I'm X days sober, but that tonight, by God or by the grace of some divine tempter bent on challenging the belssing of Free Will ...

By golly, I'm having a beer right now, despite my good intentions, and it was good.

*** This message sent from a mobile device

ocean park, pr

ijcmartinez@gmail.com (J.C. Martinez-Sifre) — Tue, 29 Aug 2023 20:02:00 -0400

Those mild waves lapping up that you'd been trying "body surf" with lackluster success then grabs you and takes you in its undertow, tumbling you over and over; and, it seems like forever ... undrowned and rising out of it, the salt-water mixes with the mucus, noatrils still stinging respiration still settling back into a rhythm. Building sandcastles didn't really matter anymore. Top of the nose and back already charred. Hurt. Would hurt, a lot.

Then, getting hosed down before being let back in through the side, one's swimsuit weighed down by gobs of sand between the legs.

Dad's practicing his firearm.

My namesake whose place had been on the right, on the other side of the grate was kicked out by granpa long ago. He had left his congas and his waterbed, deflated.

Some other time, I overheard my uncles reasoning him being childless due one of them noticing at a urinal his urethra on the side and not at the tip of his penis. It happens.

Some other time he was telling everyone present about he'd been unsuccessful that year smuggling in a parrot from somewhere. Thing, apparently, freaked out and pecked the shit outta him and the stewardesses in the back of the plane. You could still smoke on planes back then.

I never really got a chance to know the person I was named after very well. He always told the best jokes at the holiday house parties.

There are still a few chickens pecking around where the swimsuit had been left piled up with all the sand, next to the washer-dryer and the door I never opened thinking it haunted and deadly to go in there.

Within the hot bath, lathering Johnson & Johnson baby shampoo, I hear dad's still practicing beyond the window of the shower his target practice -- some pistol. He might have been twenty-nine at the time.

Later some other afternoon, the Dominican butch-girl with a sweaty and stained a-shirt and red jogger-pants propositions me (indescently). The sofa was a florida pattern and wicker. In retrospect, I would guess she had been hired to de-flower me by somebody next door, my dad already having pointed out (by the way) where his dad, my grandfather, had thrown him into a brothel in Old San Juan, saying, "now go be a man."

My dad described the experience, and I can only imagine (the ecstacy), involving him loosing all the strength in his legs, convulsively.

Uncle -- gramps' namesake (the fifth or sixth), shuffles from one room to the other with a hangover ... his Dominican wife, my aunt, still enjoying my squirming in the wicker sofa, the hard-on I'd had starting to hurt (and, she knew it). It was nice.

And, after throwing pepitas at a STOP sign in front of the house along Cacique, I have a BB gun in-hand and am pumping it. Frambueza (cherry flavor) is still on my lips from the shaved ice piragua, and I manage a shot -- like 20° up and to the right of the pigion, compensating for the breeze; it, about fifty yards and several rooftops over there, nearer McLeaey Ave.

I didn't expect to hit it; but I did, and it died. It's gasping for breath left an impression on me.

I think in those days, I still looked up in the evenings, thinking I'd see Skylab or Rudolph The Red Nose Raindeer. In those days, I didn't think a parent could be able to lavish themselves with illusions of being great for having acquired the fineries now considered the mark of "awesome." Him with the most toys wins, after all.

It never dawned on me as a fledgeling in Ocean Park that a parent wouldn't ever take the time to notice that their kid was and had become as great and as awesome as him (though fineries were something for those still in the enthrall of rubber-necking "society-folk;" and, it would seem, that as the mark of success hasn't gone over well at all, The Duke of Sussex still screwing up and his mother (and boy-Epstein) still dead).

I didn't think the task of parenthood would be, if one might have found the chance for it or to gain purchase with it as an enterprise of inspiring envy and FOMO in other parents; for it to become an effort, with all one's might, to make sure one's progeny *not* behold this majesty of creation or to ponder the mystery of being, that being a distraction to the acquisition of things more luxurious that anyone else had managed to get.

Some people -- you just can't reach ... not even sometime next year ... after The Republic has fallen or any number increasingly catastrophic events, both natural and man-made, make it clear through the growing body counts that this is an outright culling going on here.

And, in the midst of all the forthcoming frenzied scramble for the remaining crusts of bread and toilet paper from the Magnificellaneousness of kinfolk and countrymen, it will still come down on a person like me to be blamed and to hold, like a tampon, all the blood and guts and blame they all, especially those whose grandparents just barely escaped extermination from in the last culling, were too cowardly to be better than, though they had been warned repeatedly? throughout all their history, what folly befalls those who make idols of and worship inanimate things such as silver and gold.

[Non-Fiction] Onomatopoeia

ijcmartinez@gmail.com (J.C. Martinez-Sifre) — Fri, 7 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0400

In my first manic episode, 18-years-old, I had been restrained to a bed in leather cuffs -- hands and feet (standard protocol for psychiatric units at the time -- early 90's); and, while chewing at on the leather restraints, I was pondering what, if anything, was funny about that joke: "Why did the chicken cross the road? ... To get to the other side."

In the midst of reflecting on Fatherhood, the concept, and which came first -- the chicken or the egg, the paradox, and things like that, my dad walked into the room, and we both started laughing hysterically, because, turns out, the joke is riotusly funny. And, he "got it," and I got it, and we laughed together about it.

He stood at the doorway laughing. He didn't come in, and I don't recall seeing him again during that first time admitted for this disease; though, I was moved to a private room shortly after that -- on the smoking side of the ward -- stage-left of the nurses station.

I didn't smoke at the time; never thought to. My dad, after all made his career as a pulmonologist, a lung doctor.

The unit was shaped like a dumbell -- two round large living spaces with couches, books, a TV and recliners; and, the windows were oval. The hospital building had likely been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, it being a few blocks from the Water Tower.

Many years later, fully medicated and adhering to the available treatments with religious zeal for more than a decade, it dawned on me that, while I was laughing -- busting a gut over that joke -- my dad had been weeping, not laughing. He had, likely come straight from the airport that afternoon. The thought came while I was convalescing, yet again, after another in-patient stay. He was around that day, it being that "other" weekend when another doctor covered for him and he had a couple of days not on call. It dawned me listening to music coming from his study that for him the moment was one of tragedy instead of comedy. So, I went to his study, and I asked him: "That day in the hospital ... you were crying, right?"

He replied flatly: "Yeah."

We never spoke about it again since.

I had only seen him cry once before -- the moment he realized his dad would be dead -- iminently. That day at the hospital was the second and last time.

The only joke I can recall my dad ever telling me went like this:

He turned and said, "Son. I'm on a new diet."

We were sitting in the lobby of the hotel, waiting for my mother to come down, having a beer before venturing into dusk for a stroll to that restaurant she had had a hankering for since their last visit to New York City.

"Atkins?" I said.

"No. It's the chicken and bread diet."

"How does that work?" I asked.

He maintained a straight face. We were talking in spanish. The joke only makes sense if it's said in spanish, but the punchline loosely translates into english as this:

"You move one thigh over here; and the other thigh over there ... ." He clenched both fists and repeated quickly the word for bread in spanish: "Y Pan! Pan! Pan! ... ."

There's a kenetic energy of hand movements that I belive would be implicit if you get the joke.

His eyebrows arched viscouly and he went into horse paroxysms of wicked laughter. So did I.

It's an onomatopeya, pan -- bread. It was funny, and he's still on a diet, but not, exactly, the same one. People don't change -- not really.

[SMS left unsent] Untitled

ijcmartinez@gmail.com (J.C. Martinez-Sifre) — Fri, 10 Feb 2023 11:49:00 -0500

I had a very vivid dream just before I met you (not kidding; for real) -- one of those kinds of dreams that still unfolds though you've started going about your business for the day; and, I was very much in love in a jacuzzi with someone while mother-of-my child comfortably (and, approvingly) toiled away, unconcerned, on her laptop in the other room.

I remember being fretful, towards the end of all the bliss, that I'd might scare you off being so goddamned, irredeemable intense *at you* ... with so much regret unwilling before I awoke, fə real, my darling.

[poem] Raemundo

ijcmartinez@gmail.com (J.C. Martinez-Sifre) — Sat, 26 Mar 2022 07:40:00 -0400

For Raymond, whome I met at Carl Schurtz Park, Yorkville, NYC on Friday, July 8, 2022 and who I hope to be face-to-face with again. Safe travels, sojourner & wayfarer. You will be in my thoughts and prayers until eternity ends.

Minor edits, Carl Shurtz Park, Sept. 27, 2022 and Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn Sept. 16, 2023

You seemed like the sort,

I'd've like to have met,

In St. Thomas where we both had,

Respectively,

Moored.

You … with those you traveled with and

endured;

And, me with mine.

Admiring the age on your face.

Crows nest … crabs feet,

You, so tan in your navy-blue bikini

The patina of burnt wisdom glazed with brine on your torso when you changed from,

a larged-brimmed hat from L.L.Bean --

Its chinstrap chopped off long-ago,

For ad-hoc laces on that tropical trail,

Using now a silk scarf to keep it, the hat

(and your bust — or hips)

buttressed against the passions of the Caribbean.

Though that was exactly the thing to embrace now (if ever).

Life begins and fifty, you'd shout!

Fifty is the new forty, I'd reply!

It was our common refrain, like the sails flapping on the tack when we went wherever we wanted to.

You always had your reasons for your moods,

And I, decades prior, learned,

You had your reasons for them …

So, I didn't question or try to understand them anymore …

So long as I could gaze on your sleeping face, and press myself against you every once-in-a-while.

More often than not, you preoccupied yourself with the BLTs,

Reveling in the pure piracy,

(or gentlemanliness)

whatever it's called nowadays;

- or-

with making sure —

calling out from the bow,

the anchor had dug in deep (to your satisfaction);

And, now we could rest and bask in the glory of creation.

(Sometimes that would mean my having the pleasure of your nakedness …)

I got off, really, on your bending over the railing, taking this enterprise so seriously.

I'd push the levers in and out of neutral,

Enough to jerk the boat from it's slowl drifting port-side, back to starboard …

just enough torque to let you know I was still yours to direct,

though, really, the tide and the current did most the work;

Looking over the binacle at your bustling,

and at your boobs which never, ever have gotten (nor could they have gotten) old with me.

As many times as I had had you,

my forearm around the small of your back,

pressing your torso up into me,

Bending your back and lifting you off the bed

So that we

Could be

One …

Your digging your nails into the back of my neck (and, you weren't one to make a show about such things),

Those days being all about:

Fenders;

And cleats;

Lines, and Sea Bass, and the

tops of one's soles re-radiating,

All the sun they'd gotten beaten down with all day long;

Measuring out the days with teaspoons

— literally,

like the kids say it nowadays, hitting the "Tees" hard: LIT'really;

and, not like the lax "Dees" of lidderally drunks.

Earlier … when we had met and broken the ice with what had led us both here to this place: A dockside restaurant,

Enjoying a "Jamaican Black-and-Tan"

Dragon Stout + Red Stripe

Discussing how we'd later take our chances with the trollys

Or the taxis we could hitch

Just beyond the gravel and chain-link fence of the marina …

(Flagpoles and the smell of diesel),

To find some place to have a cosmopolitan and dance together

(Dance konpa),

And be like a compass for each other,

Even if just for this night only,

Orientating our movements much like the winds or aligning each other to magnetic north —

To each other's body, and the way each of us liked to move,

Or be touched,

And to know in it

That we belong, even if only to each other and our particular way of cruising around this world,

like:

Albatross.

That night, we met,

The tides of fate having us drift apart,

Only to find each other again in Tortolla;

And, with all those subsequent years of patchy comms

So that we'd each, eventually, learn to love, or at least, make do, suffering the fools;

Having always something to re-criminate besides each other.

That first night:

floodlights out there rippling in the harbor, independent of anyone, but, always,

seemingly,

shimmering like The path to eternity,

Paved on the surface of the water, specifically for you or for me

(but, not for anyone else);

One of us dangling our feet over the bow or from the deck chairs near the transom.

Years later, heaven unfurling for us when we were being silly between the bed sheets: innocent (and, dirty) all at once.

Breathlessly reminiscing of those first few nights,

When we confronted our desolation independently, but

Already hooked with each other —

Restless, and unable to sleep,

Fetching some more drink from the ice chest,

Finishing it and another while resting our chin back on the spit and polish,

Before the dizziness had nothing to do with the surf, but,

Instead

The inevitable of what we'd grow inured and ambivalent to:

passing out, senseless, alone and wanting,

Amidst the sounds of the harbor lapping up on the hull.

Or, unable, to loose consciousness,

Filled with anticipation for tomorrow,

And watching the sun rise over another pristine horizon,

Anticipating another encounter,

Feeling hopeful,

for the first time in a long time.

[Poem] Batata mornings

ijcmartinez@gmail.com (J.C. Martinez-Sifre) — Sun, 2 Jan 2022 16:23:00 -0500

I lived for the Batata mornings

Breakfast in bed

The eggs scrambled into the buttery

Malawach bread,

The other one -- the one filled with Nutella

for after the Coconut waffle

and for after the fries

… for after the first feature; and, for

after some work done for the boss -- nakedly;

Or, later (or, after that)

After your unraveling a rendering of your weeks’ yield of the drama

the trauma

By this time; my head was on your thigh

warmed by both your legs and your laptop,

petting the dogs head resting on your other thigh,

All of it making your belly so warm, I’d have to jerk the fan closer to me.

And, then after some laughter;

And, then after some Heideggar and Hagel and Kant;

And, then, after all sorts of S’ak pase and Na’ boule.

And, after all that

Finally

Your yielding,

Goddamnit

… your toes would curl up; and your horse breath in my ear

Would make my scalp go electric

Time could have been a song; or just its’ refrain;

And, the space of between you and me disappeared for

Just

minute.

To drift back, almost immediately,

into the week;

drifting back into sleep, forgetful until

the hurricane we had made -- our child (us made one)

bursts in …

And tells us she’s alive

– very much so.

“Tamale; tamale!” We finally figured out

after a couple of stakeouts was:

A guy on a bike, every Saturday (religiously).

A block away, the Imam goes at it again,

Five times every day:

Five moments to reflect – especially during Springtime when the windows were mostly open

And the decay wafting in from the nearby cemetery was sweet, like

How it smells when rot transforms back into fresh

and virgin earth.

The trumpet of revelation always nearby and

within earshot

To have known then-and-there; or, in retrospect,

Especially, when we were being tame with each other,

(every once in a while)

… to recall at least *one* of those Batata mornings; in the R&B;

In the sweet potato fries;

and, in all sorts of other pronouns we had for

for naughty things.

[Missive] One for the Angels

ijcmartinez@gmail.com (J.C. Martinez-Sifre) — Tue, 21 Dec 2021 05:41:00 -0500

I

George, I don’t have to tell you in this letter that Mardi Gras was a mess. It was unfortunate that our accommodations for Mardi Gras with you and your gang dried up. No apologies are necessary, brother. Instead, I’m the one who must apologize to you. Our intricate plans to spend your one and only drunken reverie for the year together never materialized after so much anticipation.

Beyond that, I feel a sense of impropriety to you, considering that I didn’t even have the courtesy to exchange farewells with you upon leaving New Orleans. There is also something I need to get off of my chest, and since you’ve always lent an impartial ear to any of the shenanigans I’ve shared with you, it seems to me that my confessions here in this correspondence would, at least, be received by someone with a kind ear.

Regarding the issue of accommodations, I had an ill-conceived backup plan, knowing that a friend of mine from high school lived near St. Charles Street. It was only a matter of finding his place. Now, I neither had his address nor a clear idea where to find St. Charles Street, nor had I called in advance to let him know that I would be arriving in town for the festivities. However, considering the upcoming week of reckless abandon that was ahead of me, I had neither qualms for not having a place to rest my besotted bones, nor was I worried about the triviality of finding my high school friend’s apartment. Zach, in is naturally somber demeanor, seemed to share my attitude.

After we purchased a map, we made our way towards the French Quarter, and since I had been to New Orleans, it was only a matter of dead reckoning as we wandered through the narrow streets to one side of St. Charles before we finally found one that I had a vague recollection of. We parked my car against the sidewalk, and to my surprise, it turned out that we landed ten yards from my friend’s apartment. I was certain we were at the right place. Unfortunately, when I knocked on the door, there was no answer. I walked through a small courtyard filled with small potted plants, and stepping on a cinder block, I looked through the windows. The apartment looked familiar, but dark and vacant. Zach stood on the curb and didn’t bat an eye when I told him that things looked grim. We resolved, after brief deliberation, to leave a note on the door. We then wandered without direction into the afternoon bacchanal that spilled out from every cranny of the city.

Well, George, the rest of Mardi Gras was, understandably, a blur. The note I had left on my friend’s door was never removed in the four days we were there. I suppose I didn’t tell you in our singular encounter that Zach and I ambled back towards my car after every raw, bead-laden night of carousing, and slept in it until the mustiness and sun beaten sweat of the next afternoon rose us from our intoxicated sleep.

We even found behind a set of low shrubs that lined a whitewashed house a hose spigot that we used as a makeshift shower. In the afternoons, we did our best to cleanse ourselves of the funk from the night before, dowsing our armpits and rubbing our face in the cool water. By the second day, though, I didn’t even bother brushing my teeth. It seemed illegal to be living in a car, but then again, New Orleans was replete with drunks and tits and doomsayers with their sandwich boards full of Bible passages.

Everywhere the mob of people pressed against each other down Bourbon Street along with the odors of stale liquor, puke, and bleach which oozed up in the afternoon sun as if from the concrete streets itself. Within the spirit of this chaos, I’d say Zach and I weathered it rather well.

However, by the third morning of this, I noticed that my beard had grown into scruffy sandpaper, and on several occasions, I reeled when Zach moved closer to me in the crowd, smelling like a filthy bum. The patina of hell incarnate grew thicker on my body by the hour, and a fog descended upon my spirit, so that not even the parades seemed interesting anymore.

By the fourth afternoon, I stirred in the back seat of my car, and found Zach in the front seat, awake and still twisted like a pretzel from his slumber. He saw me stir, and turned his head towards me.

“You want to get out of here?” he asked.

“Yeah, let’s go.”

I wriggled the car keys from my pocket while Zach squeezed himself over the armrest to the driver’s seat. I had a splitting headache. Seconds after the ignition started, I was asleep again. When I woke up, we were in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Now, George, I was grateful to be in Charlotte. It Zach’s city of origin, and we had agreed before our trip that we would make a stop there at his buddy’s place before returning back to Miami. It represented to me rest and recuperation. It represented serenity and a return back to the reality and order I was accustomed to. Most of all, as we maneuvered through the parking lot of the apartment buildings, I set my greedy thoughts on the luscious shower that was moments away—hot, scalding, and filled with the baptismal goodness of a return to a civilized life. And, detoxify we did. Zach and I spend most of our stay there as couch potatoes, playing Nintendo and watching television for most of the day.

Our time in Charlotte was relaxing, but I never felt truly comfortable there; a mild anxiety remained with me from Mardi Gras. I did, after all, have a discrete agenda while I stumbled through New Orleans. I wanted to get laid. Nothing would have made me happier than to lure a perky hoochy-mama back to, of all places, my luxury four-wheel-drive accommodations. I assume that you had a similar motives during Mardi Gras, George.

But, as it turned out, the women at Mardi Gras were stingy with their wild side—at least to me. I couldn’t trade my fancy beads for flesh to save my life. There always seemed to be a clause on the trade like, “No, I want that one,” or, “beads and a drink, or no go!” I even had a woman looming over a balcony throw back my beads saying that they weren’t good enough for her.

On one occasion, Zach and I shuffled through the throng on Bourbon Street, and just out of arms reach, a pa-pow honey lifted up her blouse without the aid of any beads at all. Instantaneously, George, every sex-starved man within arms-length radius lunged, and I saw over twelve pairs of hands reaching out to those poor, molested, perfect breasts.

So, George, playing Nintendo and the couch potato wasn’t going to cut it for me. I felt restless, and I moped around the apartment feeling jilted and even like a failure. Mardi Gras should have been a sure thing. I was, then, pleased when, with the coming of evening in the good old Queen City, Zach and I hopped back into the car and hit some of his old haunts.

On both nights in Charlotte, we found ourselves at a small pub and coffeehouse called Phat City. Apparently, Zach had helped build the place and was friends with the owner. I admitted to Zach that he had made a funky little place. It had a dark interior that favored the eclectic clientele with its black walls, an array of church-like candles, mismatched furniture, and a small stage. Leaving the place one night, Zach pointed out to me a derelict school bus that was parked with its flattened tires on the gravel parking lot. He told me, laughing, that he and the owner had taken turns blasting at the wreck with a shotgun. Our drinking binge continued, unabated at Phat City, and I felt my constitution wear thin.

After a couple of days, Zach and I bounded over to Asheville for a night to pass a few hours with another friend of his, but we returned to Charlotte no better than we had left it. My besotted discontent grew rather than dissipated. I have a vague recollection of a police officer jabbing me with his nightstick while I lay comatose on a lawn. The event seemed humorous to me the next day, but there’s only so much fun, only so much tequila, you can have, George, before it starts to wear you down and turn from pleasure into pain. An attitude of hollowness and detachment converged upon my degenerating spirits, and the outlook I now viewed the world with became disconcerting. The trade between lustful angst and drowned numbness left a sour taste in my mouth.

Zach and I stayed one more night in Charlotte, and in the late afternoon we packed our things for the ride home. We were lazy with the affair and were in no rush to get back to our lives. So, nighttime came before we climbed in the car for the long ride. However, Zach wanted to say his farewells to his friends at Phat City before he left, and we accommodated ourselves back into its familiar setting before venturing out onto the highway.

When we parked the car, and walked through the gravel lot, for the first time I noticed that the climate had dropped to a biting but tolerable chill. Since leaving New Orleans, the weather turned, and made its way down the thermometer, but wrapped up in my thoughts and stupor, this fact had escaped me thus far.

Enclosing the entrance of Phat City, then, the management had erected a large tent over a spacious wooden deck that housed several picnic benches. The tent had several plastic flaps along all of its sides rolled down to the floor, whereas in our list visit there, they had been stowed in tight bundles at the top of the canopy. As we walked towards the entrance of Phat City, and under the tent warmed by space heaters, I had the impression that we had stumbled onto, crashed, so to speak, someone’s outdoor wedding.

We walked inside, and Zach struck a conversation with the bartender in an instant. I was left by him, drifting towards the corner of the bar, unattended and with no one to speak with. I looked around, dejected, for a good couch to slump onto. I was through with getting drunk by this time, George. After a fruitless and undecided moment with the array of Phat City’s furniture, I walked back towards the parking lot, and grabbed a composition pad I had brought with me. I retired to one of the picnic benches and opened the pad but only starred at the blank page. By the time I snapped out of my reverie, I looked around the deck and noticed it had filled up with several other groups of people.

I hunched back over the table, and sunk into my thoughts. However, I shook out of them when my table lurched for a moment. Here, I beheld a truly unexpected surprise: a young woman - lithe, with a cru cut, a tank-top, and wearing camouflage pants - had stepped upon the tabletop, and loomed over me. She walked the length of the picnic bench several times, stepping over my composition pad. She shimmied her body around in palsied but seductive movements, and I was dumbstruck.

George, she looked down at me, licking her lips, and then she did the unthinkable. She took off her blouse, and threw it to one side like a seasoned exhibitionist. She danced, and she danced, and beyond that, she did this to the muted bass notes that resonated from behind the bar’s interior. Outside, the only music came from a group of rowdy men at another picnic table who had taken to imitating the woka-woka-woka refrain of a Seventies’ porno flick.

Now topless, she seemed to hesitate, though she continued to prance around with abandon right before my eyes. Then, George, she crouched down, and grabbed my stunned face in her hands. She continued downward, and soon spread herself supine across the entire table. She lay right over my barren composition pad like a sacrificial offering.

Now, a grin spread across my entire face. Though stunned into paralysis beholding this young woman, I lifted my hands from under the tabletop and wordlessly took up my most precious set of Mardi Gras beads that still hung around my neck.

I reached over to her, and she graciously lifted her head from the table — yielding, as I wrapped the beads around her neck and her porcelain chest. With that, this young woman grabbed the back of my neck, and drew me in towards her face, blessing me with a long, (albeit theatrical) wet kiss.

A small hesitant crowd, probably equally amazed by this young phenomenon, flowed out from within the bar. This young woman moved out from under me, from out of my personal spotlight, and jumped from my table, only to step upon the one housing the rowdy men. There she continued her performance, and soon unzipped her camouflage pants.

By now, Phat City’s owner had maneuvered himself onto the deck, and I thought that this madness would come to a halt — posthaste. Instead, he cheered along with everyone else, clapping and yelling out to the dancing girl to get on with it and take her final G-string garment off. One of the rowdy men, even, produced a dollar bill, and slipped it under the cotton strap. I have to admit, George, all of this was a bit overwhelming.

She didn’t bare all, but instead jumped from the table, gathered her clothing, and disappeared headlong through the plastic curtains, vanishing as suddenly as she had appeared. A lively chatter remained present in the wake of her performance, but soon it tapered off. The rowdy men returned to their somber talk and those who had come from within the bar, walked back in.

I returned to my composition pad with fervor. In a way, George, what I had been seeking in Mardi Gras became manifest in the young woman’s dance. I had my gratuitous flesh, and satisfaction was my reward.

A few minutes later, I was rustled once again from my calm meditations. The young girl returned, fully clothed, and to my amazement, she plopped herself down next to me. She had with her a large cloth bag that she placed upon the table. I took a good look at her now. Everything about her was tight.

She had a petit nose that turned upward and high cheekbones that gave her green eyes narrow and sharp contours. Though her skin was pale and studded with an occasional large freckle, the spots were not numerous enough to be anything more than beauty marks. Despite her paleness, her complexion had a peculiar quality of dullness, as if the ambient light became trapped into her pores, rather than reflecting out from them.

“What are you writing?” she said without hesitation and with force.

“I’m trying to write poem,” I said. “To collect my thoughts.”

“I write poems too. Do you want to hear one?”

She reached into her bag and pulled out a thick spiral notebook, and began flipping through the pages, deliberating for a moment on each one. She settled on a page, and she bent herself towards me, reading her verse. Honestly, George, I had a hard time concentrating on what she read. Instead, mental scenarios of how I might keep this creature tethered to me with insightful remarks kept my mind lurching. She looked up from the page when her presentation finished, and waited for my response.

“Do you mind if I read it to myself? I had a hard time getting it all the first time around.”

She handed me her notebook, and I still had a hard time concentrating on what I read. I studied her poem, assuming a thoughtful disposition. She leaned against my torso, and rested her chin onto my shoulder, presumably reading it along with me. To me, the poem expressed anger and confusion. I stared at the words, but I was still too turned around to understand anything but the emotion that underscored them. Without looking up from the page, I began nodding. “Wow,” I said after a solemn sigh, “I can really relate to this.” The reaction seemed to please her. Of course, I could relate to it — the rage, but I had no idea what she was trying to say through it.

“Here, read another one.” Still pressed against me, she drew out her arm, and turned the pages. I noticed something curious about her arm. Along the inside of her forearm, an array of thin scars were etched into the skin and arranged into neat rows. I drew back from her, and looked into her, this time with true sincerity. I took her wrist into my hand, and looked down at her forearm. I ran my fingers along the slight lumps as if reading braille.

“What is this?” I said.

“It’s nothing,” she said, her mood deflating in an instant into melancholy. I knew what those scars meant, and the sudden image of this young woman, taking up a knife to her skin, flashed through my head.

“I’m sorry for what you’ve had to go through,” leapt out of my mouth.

She looked away. “It’s really nothing.”

We didn’t say anything for a moment. “What’s your name?” I asked.

“Pain.”

I laughed, and that broke through her somberness. “How do you spell it, if you don’t mind me asking, P-A-I-N?”

“Well, really it’s spelled, P-A-Y-N-E, and that’s my middle name.”

“I suppose that it fits, though: P-A-I-N? Can I call you that?” I was giggling while I repeated her name several times.

“Sure.”

Our conversation turned back to the poetry, and we took turns reading from our respective notebooks. But, as we continued, the poetry fell by the wayside, and we spent more time in conversation.

“This one here is for my father,” she said. “My father’s in jail. He went in last week.”

“That sucks.”

“What sucks even more, is my mother’s dead. I don’t have anybody left.”

“Jesus. So, you live on your own?”

“I’ve been living on the streets.”

“Don’t you have an uncle or aunt you could stay with?”

“No. My family doesn’t live here.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“I guess I’ll get a job, you know?”

“Man, that’s a rough situation, having nobody and no place to stay.” By this time, Zach had come out from the bar and sat across from us. “Zach and I have been homeless, in a way, for the last week. We were at Mardi Gras, and we were sleeping in our car. So, I can relate to how rough that can be. For one, going to the bathroom becomes a pain in the ass, literally.” She laughed.

There was a pause in our conversation, and Zach tapped me on the shoulder, asking me if I wanted to get back on the road.

I looked at Pain. “Well, it was a pleasure meeting you. I had a good time with our poetry slam.”

“Yeah, me too.”

“So, what are you going to do now? I mean, where are you planning to sleep tonight, some bush by the gutter?”

“I don’t know. In the morning I’ll call a friend of mine, and see if I can stay with him.”

I began to lift myself from the picnic table, but a thought occurred to me. “Hey Pain, considering that you have nowhere to go and no place to be, do you want to come with me and Zach back to Miami? You could stay with me.”

“Sure,” she said casually. “When are you leaving?”

“Now.”

“Do you mind if we stop somewhere so I can pick up something?”

“Don’t mind at all.”

And, with that, the three of us got into my car, and drove with Pain’s guidance to a nearby house that she claimed belonged to a friend. She ran out and into the house’s alley, and came back a few minutes later with a garbage bag. Zach was silent while we waited for her in the car, but I couldn’t help expressing to him my nervous anxiety. There weren’t any doubts, but this strange twist of events made the world seem turned inside out.

I took the first shift behind the wheel, and Zach remained taciturn, as was his nature, beside me. Pain fell asleep in the back seat, and I figured it must have been her first comfortable rest in some time. I sank into my thoughts, turning this matter around in them. I didn’t know whether to be terrified or joyous. However, by the third hour of our drive, though, I had not come to any resounding conclusions. However, I felt comfortable with my notions of what was to come that things would play out all right.

After we refueled, Zach took the wheel. Instead of sitting next to him in the passenger seat, I moved into the back with Pain. I lay there with her, with my arms wrapped around her, and with my fingers interlaced into hers. While she dozed, I looked up at the car’s roof and felt her squeeze my hand periodically.

“Hey, Zach,” I said. “Where are we?”

“We just crossed into Florida a few minutes ago. I can feel its shittiness already oozing back into my bones.”

Pain squirmed, trying to readjust her body, stretched it, and went prone against me again. When she settled herself, I took her chin into my fingers, and took a disbelieving look at her face. In the darkness of the highway, her features appeared youthful to me.

“How old are you anyway, Pain?”

“You really want to know?”

“Yeah, really.”

“I’m sixteen.”

George, I’ll tell you that I felt all the blood drain out of me, and a sharp pain stung my neck in my usual sensation of panic. “You’re sixteen,” I said deadpanned.

Then, I had neither a chance to settle into my terror nor to begin my deliberations on what to do next. A tremendous thudding sound replaced the droning hum of the car’s motor inside in the cabin. The thuds became more frequent, and it drew my attention to the crackling coming from the windshield.

“Are we in hail yet?” screamed Zach over the thundering that overcame even the stereo’s music. “Are we in hail yet?” he kept repeating. But, George, he slurred the word, “hail,” in such a way that to me it sounded like he was saying, “hell.”

“Are we in hell yet?” I heard him repeat again and again, and I snapped into a maniacal laughter. The guffaws overtook me until there were tears streaming down my eyes, and my gasping took on the quality of weeping.

II

When we reached Miami in the afternoon, I found myself assuming an unbearable calm … resignation, I suppose. At that point, I still had not been told that transporting a minor across state lines was a felony. During the last leg of the drive, I resolved to remain chaste with her. I only considered how I now had a little girl in my hands, and that her fate was my responsibility.

As such, I took her to the Salvation Army after settling her into my beachside apartment and after making it clear to her through insinuation that her place in my home was on the sofa bed. I let her pick out an array of new clothes, and then took her to the grocery store, letting her fill up my vacant fridge with any goodies she desired. She was a child, though, so when she selected Rice-a-Roni, Hamburger Helper, and instant potatoes, it didn’t occur to her that these things needed, in addition, some eggs, milk or beef to be prepared. Furthermore, considering that she was destitute, I gave her an allowance. Can you believe that, George! I was now a twenty-six year old father figure, and not a mature one at that. I know you’re laughing at this despicable situation as you read this.

I insisted that she would feel better, more independent, if she found a job. But, after several days of shuffling her about to different stores, after picking up a pile of applications, it became clear to me that she wasn’t interested. I, of course, had to continue putting in my shifts at that coffeehouse you’ve been to. I gave her the option, then, to either accompany me to work, or manage for herself during the days by taking the bus. Instead, she spent most of her time baking her skin on the beach, which was, of course, behind my apartment complex.

Soon, though, I fell back into my routine, and by the second week, her absence was a deafening reality every time I walked into my home. I conjectured that she was still around by finding hair shavings in my sink, or seeing that her bed sheets had been shuffled around from the previous night. However, when I found her lingering in the apartment, I grimaced since Pain, as per our first meeting, was naked most of the time.

I have to admit, it was a strange form of torture. Though my resolutions remained intact, there were times when the gulf between us seemed to lessen. I overcompensated, fearing my inner passions by remaining away from my home as long as possible. I only went there to sleep, and as a consequence, I found that the only thing I knew that would help pass the time was to linger in bars until dawn.

On one occasion, I lay in bed, sleeping away one of my now common hangovers, when I rustled from my sleep only to find Pain standing over me in a bikini. She urged me to wake up, complaining that she was bored. I turned over onto my stomach, wincing at the thought of leaving my pillows. She nudged me with her foot several times, and then seeing that it was of no use, stepped onto my back like a geisha. I told her to just let me sleep. She sighed in disgust, and walked out of the apartment, slamming the door. I slept an awful lot in those days.

Soon, I found strangers knocking at my door asking for Pain, disturbing my comfortable dominion. Then, a friend of mine, a photographer from the coffeehouse, approached me with a spread she had compiled. They were all of Pain on the beach, and though the photos were tasteful, the expressions Pain assumed in them — here a seductive look; the joy of beachside abandon; her gait suspended in mid air on the film … it made a vulgar impression on me.

Then an event occurred that I don’t think I will ever forget by the sheer horridness of its nature. I walked into my apartment at dawn after a serious bender. Upon rounding the corner of the hallway that led to the beds, I saw, George, I saw Pain sleeping there flanked on both sides by two naked men. I looked down on the floor, and fixated for what seemed like an eternity on the used condom lying upon the white tile. George, I don’t think I’ve ever felt such a welling up of sadness in my life. I was sad for Pain, sad for how she had come into my life in good faith, only to turn into everyone’s pawn.

Disgusted, I walked back out of the apartment, and went to the coffeehouse, hoping that upon my return that sight would be gone. In the late afternoon, I ventured back, and was thankful to have my home to myself. But, when I awoke from a deep slumber that night, Pain sat across from me on the sofa bed looking troubled.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Sort of.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Um,” she hesitated, “While you were asleep just now, um, well, I was on the beach with some friends, and we came back, uh, and I took your car keys out of your pants.”

“What are you saying, Pain?”

“Well, we got pulled over, and I said to the cop that you let us borrow the car. We couldn’t find the registration. They towed your car away, but my friend is going to pay you back, I swear.”

I clenched my teeth, speechless, but for some strange reason, I wasn’t angry “It’s okay, Pain. Don’t get stressed out about it. I’ll take care of it in the morning, no problem.” I said it more out of exhaustion than anything else.

In the following week, a change came over Pain. Her demeanor grew dark and reticent. Her usual zest turned sour, and concern washed over me every time I found her sulking either in the apartment or in the coffeehouse. Also, I noticed that she was sniffling often. At first, I assumed that it was a condition of her depressive mood, but in fact, she was getting ill. Furthermore, the bronze complexion from her beach-going no longer looked healthy. Instead, it was a mixture of red and peeling skin, where on her spotted back, the contrast of burnt flesh and her natural pigment, showed the brutal effects of too much sunshine.

Again, George, my heart broke when I walked into my apartment, and found her lying prone on the sofa bed, whimpering, feverish, and charred. I hustled back out the door, went to the grocery store, and paced the isles for any kind of remedy I could find for Pain. I approached two firefighters who happened to be in a checkout line, and asked them what I could use for an ugly sunburn. They suggested Noxema, and so I found myself back in my apartment, applying the balm to Pain’s back, gave her some fever pills, and asked her to drink as much orange juice as she could stomach.

From then on, I stayed with her, and she returned back to health. The downtrodden funk, however, remained with her. I tried to cheer her up by asking her if she had written a poem recently, to which she gave a flat no. Christ, George, all I wanted now was to find her content, and I racked my brain thinking of a way to dispel her malaise.

Days later we were driving home together from the coffeehouse, and I became bold with our conversation. “You’re not happy, are you?” I said.

“I’m not a happy person, you know.”

“Well, look. You’ve seen me, how I love to be in that freaking coffeehouse all the time. I don’t claim to be a fundamentally happy person either, but being there makes me happy.”

“And?”

I was unsure where my argument led to, but I pressed on. “Well, is there a place on this Earth where you’ve felt happy to be at?”

“I guess so.”

“Well, where would that place be?”

“This antique store back home. The woman that runs it is really nice to me.”

“If you could, would you be there now?”

“Yeah, but—”

“Do you want to go home, Pain?”

Her face lit up. “Yeah. Could you take me back?”

“Certainly. I would have taken you back any time you asked. Do you want to go tonight?”

“Could we?”

“Okay, then. It’s settled.”

So, George, we grabbed her things in my apartment, and drove onward to Charlotte without delay. Pain slept the whole way, and throughout the entire dark, silent night, I starred at the pale light my headlights cast upon the pavement. For the first time in a month and a half, I felt relieved. The tension slipped away from my being with every hour, and with its disappearance, the contrast of calm that replaced it reached an unbearable pitch. That sensation, though, was foreign, and again I reverted into an anxious state only to find that there, my tenuous footing with this emotion crumbled back into euphoria.

When dawn arrived, we were only an hour away from our destination, and I maneuvered out of the expressway into a desolate gasoline station. I stepped out from the mustiness of the car into the cold air of the morning. I walked underneath the hum of the station’s fluorescent lights, and my breath came out in vapors. Exhausted, I reclined against the side of the car while holding the pump tight.

I looked out past the station and towards a vast pasture that extended into the horizon with only a speckle of trees within the vista. The sun had yet to break through the Earth’s plane, and I beheld a cloudless sky, pure and painted with a rich palette of pastel blues, greens, and gold. A brisk wind resonated with hollow tones in my ears, and I thought, in my brief moment of repose, that this sunrise, this morning, this sight, with its absolute serenity, was one for the angels. I wanted to tell them about this, tell the angels when they asked me in my dying moments how my life had been. I wanted to tell their hungry souls, bereft of feeling—of human feeling—about this sunrise, and about how, in the last reckoning, the way I felt was inexplicable. Pain continued her dead sleep in the front seat, and I couldn’t help thinking of her, of the last few weeks, and of my place within those events. Then I looked once again into the pasture, at its indifference to me, or to Pain, or to anything at all, and, George, I felt humble in the presence of this panorama.

By mid-morning we arrived in Charlotte, and I prodded Pain back to consciousness. She indicated several rights and lefts, and soon we parked behind the place she spoke of the night before. She jumped out of the car, and I crawled into the back seat. She came back to the car, saying that the store was still closed, and I told her that I needed to sleep for a while. When I awoke later that afternoon, I expected to be alone once again. Instead, Pain was still in the front seat. Her place would remain closed throughout the day, so we drove for a few minutes, landing back where we started: Phat City. We had lunch together in silence.

There was no fanfare in our farewells, George. I stood up from the barstool, and looked at Pain. I thought I might hug her, or give her some advice. I suppose that I wanted be close to her, but when the moment came, I extended my hand with a word, and we shook. I walked back to my car, and turned the ignition, taking a right onto the expressway on-ramp,and I never saw her again.

The thing is, I’m neither proud, nor ashamed by what happened. I surveyed again the landscape of the last weeks as I drove off, and recognized how barren it was to me. The future, too, seemed equally empty, even absurd that it could and would arrive. George, there is a terrible aspect behind all these events I’ve managed to convey to you. I perceived wretchedness in all of this thrashing around, above and beyond the events with Pain. I set out to confess to you, and I must confess now. My horror was not in what I did or didn’t do, whether or not I might be good or evil for it, but in the fact that I felt nothing at all in the face of those things – no pleasure nor pain. I felt nothing, as I rode home, and I wondered whether or not I had the strength of character to accept it—to be redeemed in my indifferent destitution.

[Non-Fiction] The Bones-Butter Rhythm Section

ijcmartinez@gmail.com (J.C. Martinez-Sifre) — Sun, 10 Oct 2021 14:12:00 -0400

It's strange that I wouldn't even remember his name anymore. We were good buddies, after all. I remember him as this wiry, meek looking little guy with a boyish enthusiasm and an immense talent for drumming and music. He was at once down to Earth and totally eccentric. He was a responsible man — a married man — a homeowner, but he had not lost the disposition to entertain me with a sort of refined version of show-and-tell when I would come over to his house.

He had majored in music while in college, specializing in steel-drums. He worked on a cruise ship's cabaret. He was paid to make calypso sounds for the passengers embarking through the gangplank towards registration at the Port of Miami. I remember a lot about him — even the way he looked and dressed — Hawaiian prints and with thinning, wispy hair; protruding adam's apple; lanky … I even remember when he showed me the keyboard he had plugged into his computer since he had been commissioned to compose the MIDI score for a theatrical production. But, his name … gone.

I had met him through his wife, Sarah. That I remember. She was this unbelievably exotic specimen of a woman. Brown, but with sharp, European features. Jet black, wavy hair. Curvaceous, and with an indefinable accent to her English that was neither Indian nor Pakistani nor really, truly from England. Turns out, her accent, apparently, was "Persian." She made it a point to be recognized as Persian and not Iranian. I had never met a “Persian” before outside of a ragged secondary school textbook in ancient history; she was a stunning woman, and she was dumb. She met her husband on the cruise ship they both worked on. She was a fitness instructor who guided the passengers through some synchronized movements at the shallow end of the cruise ship's pool. Some woman, Sarah.

She had begun to be a regular at the open mic nights — one of my regular shifts — at the Cool Beans Cafe. The place had already become, oddly enough, a major locus of performance for the artistic subculture of the entire county of Dade. It was no more than 300 square feet; it was established in one of the middle units of an aging strip mall in the most unsavory part of Biscayne Boulevard. It was known to run out of coffee, spoons, mugs and so on, from time-to-time, but it's open mics and its “stage” had become legendary, occasionally featuring emerging, unknown acts that, Behold!, were on MTV a few months after passing through the joint. Even the emcee for the open mic - a guy who dressed up like a wizard and maintained a long, white beard and told tales while striking a kind of tambourine with a lamb’s thigh bone — had become iconic.

Sarah wrote her name down on the sign-in sheet every single week to perform the two or three songs she knew on her guitar. She was new to the instrument. She was new even to the idea of making her mark as a performer. By God, she was awful, and in a way that no amount of dedication, practice or instruction would correct. But she was lovely; delicious. Even the emcee, Nicholas the Storyteller, who had been dubbed "Syphilis" by the high-school punks that were often in the audience, swooned and bangged the bone on his large, Celtic drum a little more vigorously when announcing her act.

Her act wasn't her music, it was getting to watch this fox make a complete fool of herself in front of an audience and imagine ... imagine ... like, imagine that in another era her act would have landed her an infamous role in Frank Zappa's orchestra (or at least a place on their studio's couch). Or, that David Bowie might might have morphed this “Persian” into the Babylonian uplink for Ziggy Stardust, bedecking his treasured background vocalist with silky golden robes, a jeweled headdress … white mascara and a tambourine.

To her credit, she had composed the two or three songs she performed. She claimed they were the product of the deep stirrings of her soul, but in retrospect the guitar arrangement was probably her husband's doing since she fumbled through getting her fingers in the right place to make the chords. The lyrics were likely lifted out of some very beautiful journal of hers which only contained ornate penmanship. The lyrics weren't all that deep and she sung them out of tune.

However, since I played electric bass; and, since, by then, Sarah had come to know me as someone who plays bass; and, since I had expressed, one of those nights she had performed, an eagerness to help take her act from a solo gig to full instrumentation (before I had known she was married); and, since I had come to find out her husband was a drummer, it wasn't long before I was invited over to their cottage-style home on A1A, in the oceanfront village of Surfside for our first “rehearsal.”

That night, I brought my small practice amp, a patch cord, and my black, Fender bass guitar which had been dubbed "Butter" years before by someone who had watched me perform and was strung out on cocaine. The name stuck, and as I walked up to the front door laden with my gear, I suppose I had also brought with me the expectation that, by some stroke of fate, this would all end, sooner or later, in an orgy (or something like that) — involving some nakedness … I imagined this band we were forming to be the music or the sex or both.

So when Sarah’s husband turned out to be this cool cat — someone I soon began to admire, I was somewhat disappointed, knowing that she was probably happy with him. He wasn’t the usual insensitive pretty-boy or outright derelict dope-head that I had presumed women like Sarah tend to glom on to. But, who knows how this would play out, I thought.

Her husband turned out to be a musician of the first order. There's always this sublime satisfaction when you have a chance to jam with someone who is either at the same or at a better caliber than you. You get this sense that the psychics were right all along in saying that all humans were endowed with ESP but had lost it shortly before the dawn of history.

Sarah's husband was a much, much better musician than me. Even though he specialized in bucolic instruments, especially the steel drums, he was deft with his jazz-style, powder blue drum kit and well-versed in the 26 Rudiments of Drumming.

After I had set up my rig and he had unpacked and assembled his kit from the closet; and, while Sarah was in the kitchen making herself a cup of tea before the first rehearsal of our power trio, her husband and I got acquainted — not through conversation, but by improvising on the blues in the key of E.

When Sarah came into the room, her husband and I were already deep into the bridge in what had started to sound like a Led Zeppelin tune. She watched us while sipping on her mug with a strained smile. We hastened to do one round of the head before our fortisimo finale — presumably for her, our audience. Aplauso, aplauso, she said, clapping mildly.

After her husband and I stopped laughing from all that shit-talking and the dirty jokes musicians are wont to trade when they talk through their instruments, we wondered aloud to Sarah why she hadn't brought out her guitar and begun setting up.

What could she do? She was out-classed, and so she did the only thing she could do — she got pissy at her husband for humiliating her. I mean, she didn't say anything out-right, but she balked at getting her guitar from the bedroom. She made a few crude remarks to him as she begrudgingly retrieved it and brought it into the study where we had set up. She snapped the latches to the case open, and she sneered at her husband while both he and I tried to explain how to improvise a blues in E — just a warm up, you know. You can't get it wrong, we said. It doesn't even matter if you're in the key of E or not, we'll follow you.

Well, before we all hit our first note together, she quit the band. She huffed and puffed back to her bedroom with her guitar back in its hard-shell case, and with my dreams of a the drug and drink-induced, careless threesomes shattered; and, with Sarah's husband facing a very long night after our rehearsal, we packed up our rigs, chatted over a few beers for about an hour while Sarah calmed down, and that was that.

Wasn’t she was the one wanting to be a musician? Wasn’t this all to fulfill the expression of her deepest passions? It was her dream, right? How else was this supposed to end, after all? Making music is a sloppy affair, and any band worth a squat is bound to be inbred and feckless with their organs and orifices while remaining true to the heartache and disastrous choices that drives it. Some musician she was, that Sarah.

So, as the weeks went on, Sarah sort of fell by the wayside while my friendship with her husband blossomed. We would meet at a cafe in Surfside’s small commercial strip for its weekly gathering of jazzy-types and jazzy-wannabes.

Its decor and ambiance distinguished itself by being truly the product of decades of geegaws being glued to the walls by any number of different temperments of the countless employees to had served there. The usual fare in those days were geegaws glued to the wall in the exact, same way as every other cafe or restaurant bearing the same name throughout America. This cafe displaced one’s customary, well-groomed and market-tested experience of a dusty floor littered with peanut shells and drinks prepared by trained “mixologists” for the momentary illusion of having stumbled into a run-down dive in Paris’ Latin Quarter. And, true to the atmosphere, it drew from a surrounding community built on retirees who could recollect the glory days of Jackie Gleason’s Miami. Sarah’s husband and I joined a uniquely eclectic club whose ranks were filled up by aging failures or former aspirants to the Blue Note or the Green Mill’s stage.

We watched lackluster performances of scat vocals. We sat in for the jams, adding our shared penchant for classic rock and ‘70s R&B overtones to Take the A Train. We tried to recreate, if only in our hearts and subconscious, the moment that Joni Mitchel and Jacco Pastorious probably waltzed in here for cocktails after a long day with the tourists at the Marco Polo Hotel on the other side of the causeway.

Oddly, it was kind of a sad scene. An oasis of the Roaring Twenties at the height of an era where Matchbox Twenty, Blind Melon and the like were saturating the radio waves. We were experimenting with and rehearsing a forgotten cannon of music while the vital subculture was coordinating with the “real” nightclubs in South Beach to establish Miami as the capital of hip-hop, electronica, techno and, generally, beat-oriented music. They succeeded in that enterprise not long before this curious little place and its antiquarian club wordlessly disappeared as if it was washed away by natural beach erosion.

I suppose that Sarah had that sixth-sense to know it was a sad scene unlike the Cool Beans Cafe's very much alive and acclaimed open mic nights because, while her husband and I snapped our fingers to recognize virtuosity, she never, not once, ever joined us or played there. At The Cool Beans, however, her regular, weekly performances were paying off by getting a small but dedicated following to listen to the same two or three songs — again.

But, as it goes, my friendship with her husband had matured into an outright “bro-mance,” and I’d often be at his place talking music and MIDI with him while Sarah was pulling late hours. I had spoken it over with The Cool Beans’ owner, and she granted us the stage when we decided to forego convincing Sarah to add guitar and vocals.

We were a duet, The Bones-Butter Rhythm Section, and the act consisted of completely unrehearsed, stream-of-conscious grooves, and our song titles were often called Five Minutes, or Ten Minutes. If we wanted to spread the sauce thick, we’d title it all fancy, like, Three Minute Groove in C sharp minor 7, Adagio.

Our performances were very well attended, and we continued to spread the values of our antiquarian club-mates by wearing either barrettes or turtlenecks or both to our performances. Turtlenecks in Miami, ladies and gentleman! We were praised for being, I don’t know, avant-garde in a city desperate to be counted as a cultural epicenter like New York or London, but really we were just show-offs and our grooves weren’t all that good or entertaining. I got bored by them while I played them on the small coffeehouse stage. Before half the set was finished, I would get weed-induced panic attacks knowing it would be another twenty minutes before I could get another complimentary beer. But, our audience — mostly older bourgeois and North Miami professionals — ate it up, excepting, of course, Sarah who never — ever — not once, attended a performance of ours.

I can’t even remember her husband's name, but I can understand when I think of it, that we must have been a bit cruel to Sarah. Here she was hustling to be a singer/songwriter while me and her hubby undercut her gusto by not only playing several gigs, but also packing the house with our cheap warez … no deep stirrings of our soul were ever put into the music, and there she was cut out of the band that she formed … still struggling to get through the F minor bar chord in one of her songs.

But, for my part, there was no awareness at the time of how my presence in Sarah’s life must have been affecting her matrimony. Only, one day towards the end of my bro-mance with her husband, the three of us were casually sipping beers and chatting amicably, and I could sense the envy and jealousy between them. Or more precisely, I could sense the envy and jealousy Sarah had for her husband, and I could sense his frustration in what I could only imagine were more frequent quarrels over nothing at all.

During one of the last times I was over at their home, I was leaning against the door jamb of a threshold between the kitchen and the dining room. I was gabbing with Sarah who was preparing her Chamomile tea on the stove. Her husband, on the other side of the wall, sat at the dining table.

Absent-mindedly, I began thumbing through a stack of papers on the china cabinet spanning the wall between the dining room and the kitchen. My fidgeting caught hold of a colorful piece of heavy-stock paper. I slid it out from under the stack of bills and paperwork. I thought nothing of it. It was just an odd sensation that demanded investigation. For a split second, though, I held a glossy eight-by-ten in my hands. It was Sarah’s breasts — naked and with a look on her face that expressed both agony and rapture simultaneously. They were voluptuous — the puffy white clouds in the background of the image. They crowned her while the tops of tropical palm trees thrust her exposed figure into the foreground.

I knew immediately her husband was the cameraman, lying under her in the sand of a Bahamian beach. He must’ve snapped the picture while their ship had dropped anchor for few hours or for a day. Sarah stared at me in her obvious rapture; her husband stared back at her with an expensive camera lense pressed to his face; it so happens that the camera was on the same china cabinet that night, just further down on another stack of papers.

It was only a brief second before I had realized the error of my curiosity. Both Sarah and her husband — each with a clear line of sight to me holding up the photo print, chest-high but without a line of sight to each other — went into high alert, both reflexively lurching towards me with wordless, throaty urgency.

I quickly re-filed the photo before they reached me, and we all awkwardly came to the agreement that nothing whatsoever had just happened. On the other hand, something did happen. We drifted apart, or at the very least, I was either distracted by something else and had stopped coming around, or maybe her husband stopped calling me to come over. I don't remember, exactly.

I still get, to this day, a bit hot and bothered by the memory of that image. Our band ended up in a threesome … sort of. Sarah, in hindsight, was a musician after all, and our band did, in fact, cut the muster. I was wrong; wrong about her. The whole affair was probably what led to the addition of another off-tune, mournful vocal melody in Sarah’s repertoire at The Cool Bean’s open mic. This, she confessed nervously into the microphone, was the first time she would be performing the tune. She was still grappling with shaping her fingers onto the strings of her guitar, but this song was … real; it truly was written by her, and I could tell because It was mostly rhythmic — one minor chord played with varying syncopated strumming patterns. It was thin on a clear melody. It had a verse, chorus, verse progression, but no bridge. Yeah.

She did a few takes before gaining enough momentum to break the orbit of her stage fright, and continue through to the last bar of the song. It wasn’t half bad. Not great; not inspired, but it was still, despite the critique one could levy on it, leaps and bounds better than the other two or three songs I had listened to a dozen times by now.

Her husband wasn’t in the audience that night. That wasn’t odd, though. He had never been there. Some marriage, those two.

Months later I had forgotten about them except on the rare occasion that I found myself driving through Surfside and passed by their home. As a matter of fact, the last time I saw Sarah, I was en route to, literally, the end of civilization: to Chrome Avenue — a two-lane highway which had a levee running along one shoulder keeping the swamp — The Everglades — damned up on the other side.

I was driving that night to set of warehouses near Tamiami Airport to meet-up with my band-mates of the last few months — another power trio, but this time, the fox was the bassist, I was the drummer, and Stan was the singer/songwriter. I had thought that if I switched to an instrument I only had passable proficiency in, some of the band tensions I had just stepped out of wouldn't arise. The fox was new to her instrument, and she, unlike Sarah, was not new to the aspiration to be a musician or to those disastrous choices and heartache that one feeds off of as a musician.

Plus, those two were both loose and having sex in the up-stairs loft Stan had constructed for himself in his makeshift live/work warehouse in the middle of nowhere. They had shacked up long before I joined their ensemble. Stan’s songs were about cat neutering and about the trials of constipation. He sold me weed but offered it freely to the bassist.

I was on my way there, passing through Surfside, not only for our regular band practice, but also to deliver my trumpet which I had picked up from the Miami Shores Community Band rehearsal space that afternoon.

That week, I had been feverishly ferrying all of my musical equipment that I had gotten hold of over the years to Stan’s place. I had already taken a PA system, a performance-grade bass amp, a four-track, and a drum machine, not to mention the broken drum kit I had fished out of a dusty garage, refurbished with house paint and set up permanently in Stan’s warehouse since the first rehearsal. I was in the process of trading it and everything — all of my gear except for my axe, Butter, and a small practice amp — for a derelict 1970-something Nissan Z car he wanted out. I even threw in the cardioid microphone that had been dangling by its patch cord like a noose from a rafter of Stan’s low-hanging deck. I was giving it all away, or rather making an even exchange, for the fixer-upper which had thick, haunted house-style cobwebs in its cabin from being under a tarp for so long.

I was fully aware that it was destined to spend several years on blocks, but I needed a new past-time. I was over being a musician in bands with all its drama and heartache. I never seemed to be the one getting laid, and it always seemed like being in a band inevitably devolved into petty bickering like that of an old, married couple ... with all of your band mates; petty arguments with three or four contentious, massive egos that comes standard-issue for musicians — especially the ones without any talent.

At any rate, the trumpet was the last of it, and I was on my way to deliver it. I was driving really slow through Surfside because I had learned the hard way after a late night frisking from one of the patrol officers of the village that those signs posted along the three-quarter mile stretch of A1A saying, “Don’t even THINK about speeding” were no joke.

A few hundred yards into the neighborhood, I saw just beyond my headlights Sarah’s rump bouncing stunningly in Lycra while she was finishing her evening jog. I don’t know what got into my head. Whatever it was that possessed me, I now mourn that I lost somewhere along the way — a sort of explosive impulse to improvisation. I probably lost it the day Butter was stolen from the trunk of my SUV in New York City while on my way to the town of Woodstock some years later. All that was left now of my musical muse was a pile of shattered automotive glass — translucent and strewn like gravel on Perry Street.

It had been months since Sarah and I had spoken, but so far as I knew, she and I (and her husband) were still on good terms. And so, on impulse I began unlatching the case of my trumpet in the passenger seat with my free hand. By the time I was rolling up to her, the mouthpiece was in place and the passenger-side window was down. I kept pace with her for a few seconds, observing her jogging with a kind of blank awe of a stranger who knew nothing about her. And then, I put the trumpet to my lips, pointed it at her and let out a blast that those who had been commanded to topple the walls of Jericho would have been proud of.

She jumped, startled and insensate at what had just happened. I began laughing maniacally, sensing that she couldn’t figure out where the noise had come from. It was a couple of miles later before the tears of laughter that had been streaming down my face dried up. Some jerk, I was.

I don't think I laugh like that anymore. It's more of a mischievous grunting these days — the kind you can type out like this:

ha, ha, ha

All the heartache and poor choices didn't stop, though. It never does. What did stop was the willingness to improvise on it; what stopped — or rather was forgotten — was the laughter; how to laugh, like, really, really hard. It's strange to think one could forget a thing like that, but there it is — stuck in the deep well of time with Sarah's husband's name.

I never managed to get that Z-car back to a lot I could access since the tow truck driver that night needed its missing deed and non-existent registration to get started with the tow. But, it didn't matter. I never played with any serious intentions in a band again. Not ever. Instead, I managed to score a few months later, or more precisely, borrow without much intention of returning, an acoustic guitar. I resolved to write the crappiest country-western songs I could possibly compose. They ended up being very campy. They also ended up being very catchy. And, one night, I decided to perform them at The Cool Beans Cafe open mic which Sarah had abandoned long ago. The songs were received well and the suggestion came more than once that I ought to record them and capitalize on them. But, I didn’t. I couldn’t anymore. Really, I just couldn’t.

[Caption] Playero Daze

ijcmartinez@gmail.com (J.C. Martinez-Sifre) — Sun, 21 Mar 2021 09:01:00 -0400

Every so often, when something or another is going #retrograde, I find myself ruminating about my parents' death and getting all tearful about it -- same as I did when I was a little kid in onzie PJs. #JobberHats #PlayeroDaze #CondadoPR

— at

Rockefeller Center (Plaza)

[Repost] Ashley and Joe's Baby Shower, Sat. 6-24-2017 Missive

ijcmartinez@gmail.com (J.C. Martinez-Sifre) — Thu, 11 Mar 2021 06:54:00 -0500

Ashley and Joe,

Congratulations on your forthcoming blessing! Thankfully, Auntie Tiffiny, had the wherewithal (and the unquestionable authority) to include us in this celebration of your union into one. She did so with the brilliant suggestion that we submit a word or two about things we might have learned thus far in this journey of parenting.

Before I go into my less-than-comprehensive list, I can testify that Tiffiny's baby showers are legendary. She organized and emceed ours, and it remains one of our often-reminisced and cherished memories; so, don't f-ck it, up. I'm looking at you ... Joe.

And so ... I submit to you, Ashley and Joe; family and friends; those who are present; those whom we wish were present -- both past and those to come -- some thoughts to consider:

-------- 1 ---------

The value of the following verse from The Book of Matthew, chapter five, verse thirty-seven cannot be overstated as informing a solid parenting strategy. It reads:

"Just say a simple, 'Yes, I will,' or 'No, I won't.' Anything beyond this is from the evil one."

- New Living Translation

Among the many things I could list about its value is that it will spare you at every shop, mall, park, extracurricular activity — just about anywhere — from your child developing a very costly habit such as a baseball card collection, or, these days, those goddamned Pokemon cards. Virtual currency and in-app purchases - “No, I won’t” all the way!!

I can testify that I only barely managed to skirt through the demographic of American Dolls unscathed. The horror when I think about its affect on the pocketbook. (*wink* @Nando)

-------- 2 -------

You will f-uck up, and you will ruin your child. Think of it as a "right of passage." That little bundle of joy delivered into your arms ... helpless and swaddled up like a bug in a rug WILL ultimately spend their late adolescence and early adulthood as a source of unbridled and unrelenting resentment.

Inevitably, they will resume their adoration (if not respect) for you when and if they decide for themselves that they’re ready to stand on their own two feet. Pray that this happens for your child in their early twenties.

Unlike the Klingon proverb, "Revenge is a dish served cold," turns out that for is Earthlings, "Revenge is a dish served with more than a dollop of cuteness." (Dr. Catherine Ward; Big Apple Pediatrics; Satori's Pediatrician and fellow Trekkie circa 2010)

-------- 3 --------

There's a very short window in which your are bigger and stronger than them ... not that that implies anything ... Buuuut ... my mother has an awfully strong hawk-like pinch; It made all the difference.

My grandmother (GranNina), so I hear, was a sharpshooter with a slipper. Just saying ....

But really, there's quite an enormous number of places in the blogosphere to SHARE those feelings constructively and anonymously. I SHIT! YOU! NOT!

-------- 4 --------

Becoming a parent: It's not what you think it is; not what you may have heard or been told. What's worse is that nothing anybody or any book can tell you can prepare for what's in store for you. It's something you'll have to pick up while you're knee deep in it — from within the wafting odor of the soiled diaper; immersed the magnitude of wailing only a child can produce … a child strapped onto your chest while the Starbucks in one hand spills out over the lid and dribbles onto the cuff of your dress shirt. Meanwhile you need to find the car keys, the wipes, the extra diapers, and there's also the urgent chiming of your smartphone buried somewhere in the Vera Bradley bag one of the grandmas has already likely supplied you with.

In short, you're screwed -- literally. It’s what got you here. Incidentally or by deliberate cultivation of that lifelogging, biometric apps wielding stallion — now you’re screwed.

White knuckle it if you have to. Don't worry, though. There are hundreds of thousands of years of instinct and ten thousand years of civilization and five thousand years of written history and at least a hundred disinterested Facebook friends and more than likely, ten or so contacts in your phone to get you through it.

Conjur up to your mind (or watch on Youtube now), the scenes in Parenthood (1989) where Steve Martin's face goes wonky as if he were riding a roller coaster.

In the first instance, there's an admixture of nausea and terror on it. In the final one, the look on his face is indescribable. The closest approximation resembles satisfaction mixed with awakening or realization; what I imagine the tone in The Lord’s voice when at the end of the day’s labor over his creation, he proclaims more than once: "it was good" (Genesis 1:1, NLT).

I sell it to you, "at cost," as my mom often says.

-------- 5 --------

It was a constant refrain of my mother's while growing up that, "The only thing a child needs is unconditional love." I believe that she was trying to say that to raise a healthy and whole child, it doesn't come down to any specific thing, status or economic situation. Instead, communicating that they are loved is truly the key to their wellbeing.

After all, what does an infant know about the difference between a mattress and a metal file drawer stuffed with blankets and plush toys. What does it know about park grass meant for a picnic versus the green carpeted area near the food court of Kenwood Mall?

I would, however, like to add that, in my humble opinion, a child also needs to feel that they are safe.

I often find my thoughts going to Psalm 23; I think it captures what it means for one to feel safe. I live in New York City, after all ...

Psalm 23: New Living Translation (NLT)

A psalm of David.

1 The Lord is my shepherd;

I have all that I need.

2 He lets me rest in green meadows;

he leads me beside peaceful streams.

3 He renews my strength.

He guides me along right paths,

bringing honor to his name.

4 Even when I walk

through the darkest valley,

I will not be afraid,

for you are close beside me.

Your rod and your staff

protect and comfort me.

5 You prepare a feast for me

in the presence of my enemies.

You honor me by anointing my head with oil.

My cup overflows with blessings.

6 Surely your goodness and unfailing love will pursue me

all the days of my life,

and I will live in the house of the Lord

forever.

Now that Satori is well into her ninth-year, it would seem that she's gaining her own independent sense of assuredness about things being a-okay. However, I'm sure she looked to me and her mommy as her de facto proxy for, “The Lord,” named in this psalm.

It dawned on me recently that Fear and Freedom (the conscious feeling of it) are mutually exclusive; one pushes out the other. And so, it's a good idea to think through what it means to be "a-okay.” The tendency for the mind is to construct extraordinarily vivid pictures, scenarios, and reasons for how it’s all going to hell, and though it will, the feeling you have for the world you chose to bring them into is the kind of thing that rubs off on them .♱

If you become supple and receptive to what should rub off on you from them is a renewed chance to witness the abundance and beauty that surrounds you as a father or as a mother; to be grounded in the special place you occupy in the march of history — to carry its march forward just like every one of your ancestors has to before; to share with them a moment in the mercy and majesty ... the awe of this creation we all have will get but a brief glimpse into.

Yours truly,

Juan Carlos, Easmanie and Satori

Brooklyn, New York

Summer Solstice

June 2017

♱ Erikson, Erik H. "Growth and Crisis in the Healthy Personality." Identity and the Life Cycle. New York, NY: Norton, 1994. N. 51. Print.

Pollo Encebollado

ijcmartinez@gmail.com (J.C. Martinez-Sifre) — Fri, 5 Feb 2021 05:42:00 -0500

Why would anyone have expected that he wouldn’t become unhinged after he was cast aside – with a glad-hand – by his family, both the one he had devoted himself, and the one of his upbringing (most, but not all, of course) ?

His friends found him very annoying (most, but not all, of course) … sometimes entertaining, but mostly annoying and sad.

They let his calls go to voicemail; and, their thumbs would hesitate before they hit the like button. There were too many dangers and duties to shore up anyway for anything as frivolous as “frivolous time with old friends.” Not even on Zoom. The Pilates hadn’t been done.

That's what preoccupied them -- something more august and noble than those who preoccupied themselves with video games and cable TV. They lavished themselves, instead, with the satisfaction that the Pilates (or whatever was holier that anything else) had been done.

Most were oblivious to the trends and ideologies that constituted the "now." And, yet they saw themselves as those to refashion the inertia of History to their own liking, like a hamburger ordered a-la-cart for their offspring, without knowing a spit about the trajectory it had taken since their arising into the cosmos.

Nonetheless, they were surprised … beside themselves that he went unhinged.

-– ¡Imaginate! Que verguenza.

They (those) were also the sort to be surprised (and continue to be) by the likes of … well, … anybody that’s in the news these days – fake or otherwise.

It’s not surprising, though.

What might have surprised them, was how flavorful the pollo encebollado came out. Lots of “umami” and a touch of saffron.

He had made several calls trying to invite someone, anyone to share it with him either in person or via a device. None would be available that day, though -- not even those whom he had offered to pay their round-trip train fare in addition to wining-and-dining them.

(this was before the global pandemic that would further distance them (ir give another convenient reason for it) though this situation would have benefited from their prior friendship and chamaraderie -- their solidarity as "friends.")

This was not surprising, either.

He had grown inured to their vague reasons for politely declining with remarkable consistently over the past few years. He had also both carefully investigated his suspicions, and collected anecdotal reports verifying that, ultimately, they feared him.

They seemed, despite the brilliance of their youth or education or lifelong experience together, to have succumbed to this national cancer of believing everything they read or saw in the news, distinguishing themselves only by what talking points they applauded for or reviled. Naturally, then, he would be feared as the prevailing narrative for people who were like him in the news was that they were very, very dangerous -- like how a tamed lion is, still, very dangerous.

Maybe they were right -- prudent. Nonetheless, he enjoyed the pollo encebollado very much, despite his lack of company. Black bean soup over white rice and garlic toast accompanied it, and he sopped it all up stoned, mildly tipsy and partially naked, sad for them to both have missed out on it and for how much their lives had become a continual response to fear.

[REPOST] Something from the way-back machine: Freerangebeing issue #3

ijcmartinez@gmail.com (J.C. Martinez-Sifre) — Fri, 22 Jan 2021 04:42:00 -0500

FRB_Issue 3 by JC Martinez-Sifre