Kissing the Tortoise Shell

I've posted a new story on The Problem with Leisure, my blog that houses some of my fiction scribbles. It's the text for a children's picture book (without the pictures -- dammit, Jim, I'm a writer, not an illustrator!) inspired by a real live fish that my son won at a school fair. And my son named the fish Shelby, though he is the nervous one.

Better Watch Out for the Skin Deep

In New York City, the change of seasons between spring and summer is not like easing yourself into a hot bath; it's a surprise shove into a cold pool. On Tuesday, the temps were in the sweet 70s. Then, BAM: Wednesday hits a muggy mid 80 and the air tastes bad all of a sudden.

Whenever we have the first super warm, humid day of the season, I break out. Seemingly out of nowhere, these deeply embedded pimples burst out of face. I have two huge ones on my forehead, and one nasty oozing one where the side of my nose meets my face. This type is new to me. It's dry and scabby around the edges, but manages to be always wet in the middle. And it makes the side of my face so sore that I'm taking ibuprofen. Did I mention that I'm in my late 30s? This kind of crap shouldn't be happening to me anymore, right?

Anyone who has met me can see the pockmarks that crater the skin covering my cheekbones. They create lumpy shadows on my face in harsh overhead lighting. I had a pretty awful time of it during my high school years -- I've seen people who've had it much worse -- but it sucked just the same.

Puberty hit and I had nickel-sized, cyst-like pimples all over my shoulders (backpacks and backslaps hurt!), as well as the cheekbone areas of my face. I was horribly self-conscious about them and utterly embarrassed. I did everything not to draw attention to myself, and withdrew so much that I rarely let anyone see the real me.

I remember being on this date in my freshman year with this girl that I had this crush on since fifth grade. We're taking the train down to Chinatown for dinner and instead of making witty conversation or letting her know how much I dig her, all I'm thinking about is how there is this massive red zit on the side of my face that is between us. Yo, she called me up for a date, so you'd think it was pretty obvious that she liked me. But I didn't believe that anyone as nice and beautiful and awesome as her could ever like someone like me. So, we had a few more awkward dates (I can't even remember if I ever kissed her hello or goodbye on the cheek -- forget about making out). We saw a horror movie at the old Orpheum on East 86th Street, and there was one of those shock/surprise moments when she grabbed my arm and buried her face in my chest...I could have died right there and then and been happy I was so starved for attention/affection. But did I ever let her know how much I liked her? I bet she spent all our dates wondering.

I'll always remember driving some of my school friends in my dad's car and one of the guys looking over at me and making this declaration to everyone else in the car: "Hey, look guys! [Familyman] even has zits in his ears!" It was the truth and it hurt more than I would ever let him know.

Only years later did I learn from female college friends that when they were in high school zits on guys didn't matter that much and that I would have been popular at their school...

So, the high school years are hell for everybody, with our own nasty personal demons tearing us up inside. Things turned out alright. In college, I finally found a dermatologist who knew what he was doing (the one I had in high school was old-school and completely ineffective) and cleared up my face (though the medication I took was later linked to severe depression). And I ended up marrying my college girlfriend and we have two incredible kids...and I pray every time I see their faces that my kids have inherited my wife's skin.

Natural's Not In It

Now that the weather is finally hinting at springtime, you start running into loads of people at the playgrounds in the neighborhood. On Sunday, we accidentally crashed the end of my son's friend's birthday party (girls only, so he wasn't invited) in the park. Yet, the girls swarmed around him like bees on fruit salad at a picnic, and he was invited to the remainder of the party at their apartment nearby.

When I dropped by to pick my son up, his friend's father, who is a pretty amazing artist, started showing me all of the different portraits he had done of his family and friends in paint or charcoal. In their living room was a rather prominent and realistic portrait of his wife, nude and very pregnant, and he's telling me all about it, blah, blah, she's naked. I'm no prude, now, and am all for depicting the human body in all sorts of artwork. You want to paint, sculpt, photograph, draw naked men and women, go for it. More power to ya. Still, the woman is in the flesh not five feet from me and I see her all the time at school and in the playground, and I just don't need this much information about her body in my head. So, I'm doing all I can not to look.

Later, as I was recounting my attempts at not looking to my wife (and she's seen the painting herself, too), our son found it pretty funny, but we also talked about how art students end up studying the human body, and how some people pose nude for the art students so they can make drawings of them, etc. So, later that night, being the ham that he is, my son strips down in our living room and starts striking all of these wacky poses and declaring that he's going to be a nude model for an art school. I tell him that he has to wait until he is grown up and then he can do that if he chooses. As the naked modelling continues, I joke that he should have a little fig leaf drawn over his privates. Being the creative little lad he is, he then places a blue Post It Note over his privates and does a little dance.

Bless him.

Do You Remember Rock'n'Roll Radio?

Over the past few weeks, whenever I just wanted to listen to some music on the radio, I found myself tuning in to the new-ish classic rawk station here in NYC. Now, I was a teenager in the early-to-mid 80s who LOVED New Wave (Echo and the Bunnymen and the English Beat were my top faves) and despised classic rock with the kind of passion only a 16 year-old kid could muster. But here I am two decades later, surprising myself how many of these songs I know -- and not only can I sing along, but I know their titles and who performed them. (How can Aerosmith's "Walk this Way" sound so damn good and tight after all these years?!) So, I'm not worried about being cool anymore and can gleefully revel in the rock'n'roll campiness of it all, but I'm stunned that I actually saved space for these songs in my brain, despite my all out efforts to deny them entry. (The whole thing freaks my wife out -- she thinks I'm headed toward some sort of mid-life crisis.)

When I was at boarding school (grades five through eight) in the late 70s, I was exposed to all sorts of horrific music. This was, of course, back in the analog age...so if you wanted to listen to music, you often had to seek out a record player. The only turntable that we students had access to was in the faculty lounge, which it really wasn't. First of all, all of the faculty (called masters) lived at the school in their own apartments (hence no need for a lounge to escape from the students), and the faculty lounge was just a fancy room where the school held receptions and other formal events. Students had access to the room at certain hours and I could usually find some of my classmates rockin' out to Boston, Kansas, Aerosmith, ELO, Styx, and the like. In particular, there were a couple of guys who would sit there in these sofa chairs rocking not just their heads, but their whole bodies back and forth to the beat, white boy's overbite on every one of them. Thankfully, some good new music seeped into my head sometimes...my bunkmate introduced me to the B-52's debut album and I was blown away the first time I heard The Ramones' "I Wanna Be Sedated" at a dance we went to at a private girl's school. I probably couldn't tell you one thing about any of the junior high girls that I tried to dance with, but the DJ played "Sedated" at least four times that night.

In high school, at fancy private day school in Riverdale where I was a student, the assault continued. I worked for a few years on the maintenance crew during holidays and summertime to pick up some spending money, and the guys that I was painting classrooms with who dictated our radio selection just didn't get The Smiths or New Order or Heaven 17. This was the "disco sucks" record burning crowd that would gauge your masculinity/sexual orientation by the tunes you dug. Obviously, I would fall into the freaks and fags category, so I just grit my teeth and kept slathering on the paint, though I always thought a little bit of me died everytime I had to listen to "Stairway to Heaven."

Damaged Goods

I used to drive a van around New York City picking up hookers.

Um, that doesn’t sound right…let me clarify. Senior year in college (1989), a fellow student hooked me up as the paid driver of van for a study that monitored the prevalence of HIV among street prostitutes in New York City (these were the days before the PC term 'sex worker'). Essentially, an HIV counselor, phlebotomist (both women), and I would cruise some of the nastier neighborhoods in the Big Apple for fresh blood: Hunts Point in the Bronx; projects near Coney Island Hospital (we’d always stop by the original Nathan’s afterwards); a no man’s land on 3rd Avenue between Sunset Park and Bay Ridge under the BQE; Park Avenue in Harlem under the New Haven line elevated tracks; 43rd Street between Ninth and Tenth, and the meat market in the West Village. We’d pay the women $10 or $15 bucks (whatever the going rate was for oral sex) for a vial of their blood, ask them some questions about their condom use and sexual practices, provide them with referrals for shelter, health care, drug rehab, etc., and send them back out into the mean night with a fistfull of rubbers.

On the flip side, we were no hassle, easy money for drugs (crack, really), and a bit of warmth from the van's heater on some cold winter nights. And god knows that all of these women needed some relief from their circumstances. These ladies were on the lowest rung of prostitution –- all headed for early deaths from AIDS, drugs, or violence. (I’d be really shocked if many of the women we encountered were still alive today.) Needless to say, these were not expensive call girls, or the cartoonish pimp-ruled hookers done up in thigh-high stiletto boots, g-strings and fluorescent-neon spandex tube-tops. More like grungy, gaunt, junkie shadows of their former lives.

Eventually, we all came to realize that the numbers for this study were going to be flawed. At least one other team besides ours went out to collect samples, and we only relied on an ever-growing computer generated list of participants to keep us from including the same women over and over. Yet, it was so easy to get around this: women just gave us fictitious names, or their street names…and towards the end, we were under so much pressure from the doctor running the study to maintain/increase the number of samples brought back that our crew ended up taking blood from the same women over and over (and there was a limited pool of street prostitutes that were willing to give us a blood).

Many months went by without incident. In fact, it was settling into a dull routine, but I needed the cash. Then, and you knew this was coming, one night we pulled over on a side street between Broadway and West End Avenue in the low Nineties. A grimy Twin Donut shop was on the corner, but the street was lined with mature trees and blank-faced townhouses. The HIV counselor (a thin, white, Jewish woman in her 50s) and the phlebotomist (a butch black woman who had been in the Army) were going about their business with one of the prostitutes, while I stared out the front window of the van. Then glass vials (empty, thankfully) began to fly. I turned to find both women trying to calm/subdue the prostitute, who still had a butterfly needle stuck in her arm. While the van was violently rocking, I got out and ran around to open the double doors on the other side, to release this fury back to the night.

Now, our safety policy was to NEVER man-handle anyone if trouble broke out in the van –- just get out of the vehicle and call the cops on our primitive cell phone.

I wrenched open the side doors of the van, and turned to find myself facing the chest of someone well over six-feet: the pissed-off pimp of our whirling dervish hooker. With one hand around my neck (one its way to crushing my larynx, really), he threatened to stab me in my gut if I gave him any trouble (I couldn’t see his other hand, but the blade was very real in my mind). So, I went completely limp in his grip, while I wondered what it would feel like to have a knife penetrate my soft belly. The pimp asked me if I was going to give him any trouble (not exactly how he phrased it), and I managed to squeak out enough air to say no. I was tossed aside just as the prostitute was thrown out of the van. The pimp and the phlebotomist traded threats and expletives, while I scrambled back around the van to get out of harm's way. Fortunately, nothing else happened, as the pimp and his lady ended up walking off into the warm summer night.

After jumping in the driver's side door and locking everything up, we called 911...but a squad car never came, so we drove back to the office. I was quiet on the ride down to the Village. I had never felt less manly (I had failed to protect my co-workers), but I was pretty damn happy not to have been knifed and on the way to the ER. Back at HQ, we took a Polaroid of the bruises on my neck (which I still have somewhere in all of my accumulated junk), and I steeled myself to call my girlfriend (now my wife) to tell her what happened ("I'm fine, but something happened tonight that I need to tell you about..."). Needless to say, that was my last night in the van...

I've Been Laying Down the Flowers

Okay, for the few people who used to read this blog, I apologize for not posting anything in several weeks. My bad. I lost my job, blah, blah, blah, I'm not going to bore you with all that. I've been distracted and, as can be expected, had some trouble writing. But, instead of wallowing in depression, I'm doing pretty well in my head now, and am forging ahead. Expect fairly regular postings from now on.

And, like many of my fellow bloggers, I've launched an affiliated blog, titled The Problem with Leisure, which will feature some of my fiction and non-fiction scribblings. The first short-story is titled "Under the Big Black Sun" and much of it comes from my experience several years back working at a residence for older people living with mental illness. Hope you enjoy it.