Category Archives: NYC: A Users Guide

I’d like to thank the Academy…

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versatile-bloggerLet me entertain you
Let me make you smile
Let me do a few tricks
Some old and then some new tricks
I’m very versatile

Stephen Sondheim/Jule Styne

The lovely and talented Jennie from Tip of My Tongue gave me a Versatile Blogger award. How nice is that!? Previously, the only accolade I’ve received was the WordPress King of Typos and Misplaced Commas Award, which might sound awful, but it came with an honorarium.

As part of my thanks/acceptance, I’m required to reveal seven random facts about myself. Unfortunately, the REALLY interesting tidbits are not fit for public consumption. You’ll have to be content with these.

1. I saved a life. Actually, I saved several. I was on a Coast Guard search and rescue team. I drove the boat. When you throw a line to a boat that’s taking on water and transfer the passengers over, they look at you like you’re God. We were, literally, the difference between life and death. It’s pretty intoxicating stuff, especially when you’re just a kid. I haven’t done anything as gratifying before or since. The investment banking weasels I worked for after the Coast Guard are paid many multiples more, but they’re not fit to tie the shoes of the men and women in the Coast Guard.

2. I don’t recall having one conversation with my father. Not one! That dude looked right through me like I was a wisp of steam that somehow got into the dining room. He was a tragic figure, but not in the grand Shakespearian tradition of Hamlet or Edward IV. He was a mama’s boy who felt put upon by the world. His favorite song was (not kidding) Burt Bacharach’s Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head. Boo-hoo-hoo. Poor me.

3. Many, many years ago, I attended a picnic in Bruce Springsteen’s backyard. It was at his horse farm in the bucolic New Jersey countryside in late September. A beautiful early Autumn day. Blue skies and a cool breeze. There was tons of food and stuff for the kids to do. There was a demonstration of trick horseback riding. Near where a field started, a stage was set up. Not a giant one like in a stadium. It was just four or five feet off the ground. The kind you’d see at an outdoor community theater production. Some members of the E Street Band were there along with other sundry New Jersey musicians. After we all stuffed ourselves silly with bar-b-cue and beer, they climbed on stage and played for about three hours. None of his songs. They were all from the Motown catalog and classics from the 60’s with a few chestnuts from the 50’s and 70’s thrown in. Different musicians would hop on and off the stage but Springsteen never left. Fred Schneider of the B-52’s sang a rousing version of Sam the Sham & Pharaohs’ Woolly Bully. I talked to him afterwards and he said he had no idea what the lyrics were and was just making it up as he went along. As dusk settled, a gigantic, golden, harvest moon came up low on the horizon. Springsteen looked over, saw it, and launched into Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Bad Moon Rising. It’s one of my top five best days ever. Stuff like this isn’t a part of my life. I’m just regular.

4. When My Bride and I announced our engagement to her parents, her mother wept. And they were not tears of joy.

5. I’m a small-time rare book dealer. I’ll buy a book that I feel is being sold under-value with the intention of reselling it either at an auction or on eBay. The problem is that once I’m holding it in my hands, I can’t bear to part with it. That’s why I can’t do it for a living.

6. I didn’t lose my virginity until just two months shy of my 20th birthday. I had plenty of opportunities but I never wanted to be that close to anyone. Also, I didn’t want to become dependent on something that could be taken away from me as easily as it was given. Pretty smart, right?

7. The most important relationship in my life has been…ready?…New York City! The most heartfelt and gratifying relationship is with My Bride and Daughters. But, let’s face it, if it weren’t for New York City, for better or worse, I wouldn’t be the man I am today. I wouldn’t be typing these words. It molded me. And make no mistake—it was a real relationship with highs and lows and arguments and longing. I got mad once, walked out on her and had an 18-month affair with Phoenix, Arizona, but I came running back begging. She took me in, thank God. What was I thinking?

57th street

57th Street R train station below Carnegie Hall

6th avenue

55th Street and 6th Avenue

A forgotten doorway to my past

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binLong-time readers know what these are. For the benefit of new readers, [I have new readers! Thank you, WordPress migration.] this is a storage bin  filled with journals from when I first moved to New York as a young, scared, lonely boy. There are hundreds and hundreds of single-spaced typewritten pages and many books filled with shaky, unsure handwriting. I had completely forgotten about them for many years but they resurfaced not long ago. I occasionally crack one open and post an entry. I offer these without edits and with the caveat that I was an emotionally immature, crude and not very nice person. Especially to women. But I’ve since learned a thing or two and I have forgiven my trespasses. I hope you do the same. I am in a constant struggle with whether or not I should destroy these. I don’t want any of the ladies in my life to read them.

When we last saw our hero, he was in the throes of a crisis of his own making (as they almost always were). An extraordinary woman he was seeing, Bonnie, had given him his walking papers. He had spouted off at length about how the work of avant garde artist John Cage was dull, unimportant, lacking structure and, worst of all, pretentious. Unbeknownst to him at the time, Bonnie, an older sophisticated architect, wrote her thesis at Yale on the career of John Cage.

~~~~~~~~~~

August 30, 1992

In an effort to better educate myself and repair the damage I wrought with Bonnie, I invited her to a concert of John Cage’s work at MoMA. Bonnie asked if I was paying penance and I said, of course I was, so she agreed to go. The concert was just awful. Honestly, it only confirmed my suspicions but I’ll never admit that to Bonnie. I still want to sleep with her.

They had a lot of nerve calling it a concert. It had very little to do with music. The opening and closing numbers used traditional instruments—violin, viola, flute and a few others. They would each take a turn playing a long, sustained note. They’d occasionally overlap for texture but it was little more than a drone. The middle piece was three guys standing in front of a microphone crumbling and then un-crumbling pieces of newspaper and then slowly ripping them into long strips. This was accompanied by a man tapping a plastic plate, a woman pouring water and someone tapping two plastic tubes together. We heard some people in the back laughing, so I know I’m not alone in my mystification. There was a beautiful Steinway grand piano on stage but the only sound that came out of it was some guy occasionally plucking a string or slapping the wood. I listened with all sincerity but all I heard was someone ripping newspaper and beating up some poor piano. It didn’t mean anything to me. At the conclusion, the audience erupted with wild applause. I don’t get it. But I think I might be back in her good graces, so that’s good news. (Note: It didn’t work. Things were never the same again.)

September 1

I just got off the phone with Bonnie. Apparently, it’s not enough that her business is failing and she’s teetering on bankruptcy and might lose that spectacular apartment. She said, “Mark, I had blood coming out of my rectum. I thought it was just a simple hemorrhoid but I went to a doctor and he’s sending me to have tests done.” She’s at Cornell Medical Center as I type this. I told her I’d accompany her back home but I’m being spared that horror, thank heavens. I feel awful for her but it’s disgusting to hear about it in such graphic detail. I’m completely turned off. She said I could stop by later today but I’m wondering if she’ll be too out of it to receive guests.

Bonnie is sick. Joan only wants me to look at an apartment in Chelsea that I can’t afford. Klinger is in Miami. Colleen wants to see me, but I think she’s getting the wrong ideas. Cindy is in Arizona. I haven’t heard from Jennifer. I can only see Laura if I pay for everything and I’m broke. That leaves a city full of strangers. And my cats.

September 2

Bonnie got back from the hospital late last night and sounded awful so I didn’t visit. She’s going to be okay, thank God. Hemorrhoids. What the fuck is a hemorrhoid, anyway? Remind me to look it up later. Her doctor thought it might be colon cancer. They knocked her out with nitrous oxide, lucky duck. I’ll bet they didn’t have go to the Key Foods and empty all the Reddi-wip canisters, like I have to. I’m happy she’s okay but all I can picture is blood flowing out of her ass. I don’t think I can sleep with her again. Maybe if she goes down on me I’ll be okay. We’ll see.

~~~~~~~~~~

Quite the charmer, wasn’t I? I’ve created a new category for my other journal entries, but THIS ONE is the best of the bunch so far. It’s amazing how you walk around thinking nothing is happening when the truth is you’re having the time of your life.

~~~~~~~~~~

Another big blankey of snow this week. No surprise there. On Tuesday, I heard Irish author Roddy Doyle read from his new novel (and got a signed first edition, OF COURSE). He said the Irish winter he left behind was typically cold, wet and gray. He’s absolutely thrilled with the snow. Wait until he tries to fly out. See how much he likes it then. Here are some shots of Central Park. See…it ain’t all bad.

central-park1

central-park2

central-park3central-park4

Redneck alcoholic cavalcade

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I impulse-purchased a recent issue of Billboard magazine. There was a cover story about Howard Stern I wanted to read. I finished the article on Stern and turned to the back to the Top 50 song listings. I got to the country charts and the following songs were included for the week ending January 25, 2014:

Drink a Beer
Drunk Last Night
Bottoms Up
Drink to That All Night
Whiskey in My Water
Cold Beer with Your Name on It
Sober
It Ain’t the Whiskey

Well done, Nashville. Way to perpetuate the drunken redneck-loser stereotype. I don’t have any idea who the artists are singing those songs but I hope they’re proud of themselves. Drinking is to country music what violence is to rap. Make a fast buck glorifying abhorrent behavior and I guess any weak-minded individuals who get hurt along the way are collateral damage. I’m just an uptight, middle-class white dude who isn’t in on the joke. And please don’t try to shame me for disparaging cultures different than my own. This is my sandbox and I’ll call bullshit whenever I see fit.

~~~~~~~~~~

In my previous post I lamented the growing use of cell phones and tablets as a distraction for children and also the preference we seem to be developing for engaging a device rather than a face-to-face interaction. I went to my kid’s basketball game again this past Saturday and saw a new low, which I didn’t think was possible:

baby computerReally, dad? The baby, too? This kid doesn’t stand a chance. Or am I making too much of it? Go on, give it to me. I can take it.

~~~~~~~~~~

We had another in a series of horrific snowstorms last week. Last Tuesday, it took me three hours and forty-five minutes to get home from the city. According to my calculations, I can fly from JFK to Turks and Caicos in that amount of time. Here’s what my car looked like when I finally got to the parking lot:

car snowIsn’t that pretty? It looks like something from a pastry shop. Good enough to lick.

Unrelenting sub-zero temps here. Crippling heat in Australia. Droughts of historical proportions in California. While driving down the Garden State Parkway the other day, I saw a snowy owl fly by. A beautiful bird with a large wingspan. (Technically, they’re raptors.) They’re indigenous to Arctic regions and have no business whatsoever being in New Jersey. Experts are at a loss to explain this anomaly.

Good thing we blasted a gigantic hole in the ozone layer. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have these interesting weather patters and broken migration routes.

~~~~~~~~~~

Here’s a bit of slight of hand mastery for your entertainment. Look carefully and don’t blink or you’ll miss it.

trick2Abracadabra!

Presto!

trick1Tee-hee. An oldie but a goodie. I showed my friend and he said he’d probably find it a lot funnier if he was 10-years old. Whatever.

~~~~~~~~~~

sixth avenue6th Avenue and 47th Street, Tuesday, January 7th, 8:35 p.m.

~~~~~~~~~~

Exile on Pain Street. Now with a new WordPress skin and, by popular demand, fully functional Like, Follow, Reblog and Share buttons along with comment response alerts (I hope). Still a few kinks to work out. Meeting the demands of a fussy nation since 2008.

This is how I lost her

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In the last paragraph of my previous post, (Three weeks ago. I know. But when I get the I-don’t-cares, the first thing I stop caring about is this stupid blog.) I mentioned a long-ago dalliance with Bonnie. Go back and reread that paragraph and then come back here. I’ll wait…

This is how I lost Bonnie.

*     *     *

Bonnie was way out of my league. She knew it and I knew it. She was a successful architect and a Yale graduate who had a bitchin’ apartment right across the street from the Museum of Modern Art. She was a Renaissance woman. She dabbled in stage design and performed in a modern dance troupe when she was young. I, on the other hand, had just gotten out of the Coast Guard and had begun an exciting career as a word processor.

She was significantly older than I was. I don’t know by how much because I was never gauche enough to ask, but it was quite a few years. On the surface, you’d think we wouldn’t have anything in common. But I know what she saw in me (aside from my youth). I had an insatiable hunger for experience and knowledge. I hadn’t attended college so I had a lot of catching up to do and Bonnie made an excellent Sensi. She guided me through the literary, artistic and theatrical classics. She taught me all about New York City, which was quickly becoming the love of my life. It fed her ego, which was fine with me. And we were passionate. She still had a dancer’s flexible body and I had energy to spare. We were Bogie and Bacall in reverse.

bogart

We would attend functions together and knew that her friends were talking about us behind our backs. We’d take mental notes to ourselves of all the sideways glances and whispers, retire to her apartment, lay in bed, compare notes and laugh our asses off at them. We were awfully, awfully fond of one another, but never in love.

*     *     *

Currently at MoMA is a Post Modern art exhibit. The feature piece is the manuscript of avant-garde artist John Cage’s 4’33‘‘. In this piece, a pianist walks up to a piano, sits down and does absolutely NOTHING for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. The “composition” is whatever ambient noises occur in that period of time. Floorboards creaking. People coughing. Programs rustling. Cage was pleased at the premier in 1952 as, according to him:

“… people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked and walked out.”

Here’s what the sheet music for 4’33” looks like:

cage-2On August 12, 1992, John Cage passed away. There was a front-page obituary in the New York Times. I was over Bonnie’s apartment and let her know, in no uncertain terms, that I thought Cage was a pretentious fraud and that a front-page obit is wholly unwarranted. I told her that nobody *I* know or listened to was ever influenced by Cage (certainly not Rush) and that four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence is neither music OR art. It’s just lazy. I prattled on for several more minutes and finally ran out of gas. Bonnie looked at me.

“Are you done?”
“Ummm…yeah.”
“My dissertation at Yale was on Cage’s career.”

That was it. I blew up the bridge. That distance between us was never traversed again.

*     *     *

I bumped into Bonnie in the summer of 2012. I was seeing a play with My Bride and she sat several rows behind me. I leaned over and whispered, “Hey, I think that’s Bonnie! Do you think she’d remember me?” I couldn’t concentrate on the play. At intermission I got up and walked to the lobby and out of the corner of my eye, I saw Bonnie get up out of her seat. I stopped her as she walked past.

“Hi, Bonnie. Do you remember me?”
“Oh…I remember you, alright.”

Bonnie ended up marrying a multi-billionaire. You’d know his name if I said it. They were married for a short period of time and then had an amicable divorce. She always wanted to be traveling and on the go and he just wanted peace and quiet. They threw a lavish divorce party for all their friends to show there was no hard feelings. The wheel spins, doesn’t it?

*     *     *

Several people have written to say my Follow button does not include an option to add my site to a WordPress RSS reader. No doubt this accounts for my low readership. It can’t possibly be the content, right? To add this site to a WordPress Reader, go to your reader, click on Edit and add my URL. Conversely, I’ve moved an email subscription widget below the photo of dear St. Lucy and her plate of eyeballs. I blame Obamacare for my Follow button kerfuffle.

Of CBGB’s and the way-back machine

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journalsA while back, I unearthed a plastic bin filled with journals I kept when I first moved to New York as a confounded young boy. Thousands of hand-written and typed pages. I had forgotten about them and their reappearance knocked me on my ass. Looking back, it’s astonishing how naïve I was in the ways of love and life. But I suppose that’s a claim we can all make.

Occasionally, I’ll arbitrarily pick a book, crack it open, and post what’s within. It’s surprising how entertaining the seemingly mundane can be. Well…entertaining to ME, anyway. Admittedly, I have a bias. Caveat: I offer these unedited and make no excuses or offer any apologies for the offensive material and coarse language. I wasn’t a fully-formed human being yet and it shows.

*     *     *

August 23, 1992

I’m miserable, bored, lonely and tired of all the rejection. I’m sick of not having any friends. Sometimes, I stare into the mirror for a long time to see if I can see what’s wrong with me. Fuck this town. But moving isn’t the answer, either. I’m better off bored and lonely here than bored and lonely someplace else.

Last Wednesday I walked over to CBGB’s because both Austin and Cindy’s bands were playing on the same night. How convenient is that? I hate walking into that place alone. There’s Cindy’s band clique and there’s Austin’s band clique and I don’t feel particularly welcome by either one, so I sat at the bar alone. I think they all think I’m creepy. And sitting at the bar drinking alone exacerbates my creepiness. I looked like the house leper. I ended up staring at Hilly Kristal all evening and if there’s anyone in that joint who’s creepy it’s THAT GUY, not me. Cindy said he’s a cheap bastard who doesn’t pay the bands, even though he charges a cover. He considers it a privilege to play there. Fuck, Hilly, it might have been a privilege in 1979, but it ain’t no more. Pay the fucking bands, man.

[Note: CBGB closed in 2006. The site is now a John Varvatos boutique, which makes me deeply sad.]

At least Cindy and Austin were happy to see me. Cindy’s kind of ordinary looking, but when she’s on stage playing her bass I want to rip her clothes off and ravage that flat chest of hers. Girls who play bass are HOT. Today, we rode our bikes to the park and sat in the grass. It was nice out and even though she didn’t get back from a gig until early this morning and looked like a corpse, I tried to kiss her anyway. She started to but pushed me off and said to stop because I have a girlfriend, meaning Bonnie, which isn’t really true. We rode to an outdoor cafe and had a couple bottles of beer, which I paid for.

We rode back to Cindy’s apartment and there was a big Puerto Rican street festival in front of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Her bedroom window was right above the stage so we had a perfect view of the bands and beautiful Latina dancers. There was a huge 12-piece orchestra with a big horn section. We sat on her fire escape and drank beers (which, again, I paid for). Even though I made a failed pass as her, there was no tension between us, which can sometimes happen. We enjoy each others company. I was drunk when I left and let me tell you something, riding a bike down Church Street into oncoming traffic with a beer buzz no fun.

Last Friday I was supposed to go to the laundromat but Bonnie called so I took the N train uptown instead. I don’t recall the exact sequence of events but eventually we wound up in bed. I exhibited an almost bizarre degree of control. First fast and then slow. She said slow was driving her crazy. I have no idea how I was able to hold out but I did. I never finished because I didn’t have a rubber. She, on the other hand, had a tremendous orgasm. Afterwards, we walked to the Evergreen Diner and I was laughing because she could barely walk. It’s just a few blocks away and when we were done eating, she told me she had to take a cab home because she still couldn’t walk. I started laughing and she got really mad at me, so now we’re on hiatus. Way to go, Mr. Sensitive.

*     *     *

empire-state

The Bryant Park Hotel and Empire State with holiday lights.
Wednesday, December 18, 8:45 p.m.

ny-times

The New York Times with taxi cabs.
Wednesday, December 18, 9:05 p.m.