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08
Dec
06

New York Lesson No. 332: Morse Code, Radiator-Style

By Eric Leave a Comment
Categories: New York Lessons
Tags:

I thought it only happened in movies, but as of last night, I am officially a witness to a tenant communicating with the super by banging on the radiator.

Usually on film, the character bang-bang-bangs on the thing with a wooden spoon or wrench or something to create as much ear-splitting racket as possible. This person was relatively conservative, with his economical single, clear, solid clank! every 20 minutes or so.

The correspondence was simple but unmistakable: “Turn on the bloody heat!”

I can’t say how effective this method of communication is. It’s sort of like sending pulses out into space in the hope that extraterrestrials will receive them and good-naturedly bounce them back to us before they are flummoxed by broadcasts of the Spice Girls or Hitler. I don’t know whether the super received the message or not, or whether it induced him to fire up the boiler, but I certainly heard it loud and clear. And so, I suspect, did everyone else in the apartments below me. And though my hooded sweatshirt, warm-up pants and wool socks testified to my agreement with the tenant’s position on the matter, I would rather he had clanked on the super’s lobby apartment door than send the message via my living room as well. After all, if any one of us on floors one through five had any control over the situation, there would have been no need to bang in the first place.

02
Dec
06

Hi, my name is Chip, and I’ll be on your shoulder this evening.

By Eric Leave a Comment
Categories: Bar Stories, Dumb, Gay, New York and People We Don't Like
Tags: ,

Last night at the bar, a friend and I were distracted by a beautiful man taking off his shirt. He was standing with his back against the bar, facing us. A small cadre of piranhas had gathered around him. The guy who had asked him to disrobe — let’s call him Chip — draped the shirt briefly and inexplicably across my friend’s shoulder. Pleased to be included in the proceedings, we continued watching. How could we not?

Seconds later, the heavenly creature was persuaded to drop his pants to his ankles. We all cooed in approval. He was hairless, except for a trail of fuzz that ran south from his tight navel and dashed seductively under the waistband of his powder-blue briefs. Chip then grabbed the waistband and unceremoniously yanked the shorts down hard.

The guy put on a good show of being embarrassed and tugged them half-heartedly back up his thighs, but Chip was pretty insistent about leaving him exposed.

My friend and I looked at each other. “That’s not something you see every day at this bar,” I said, loud enough for everyone around me to hear. Like the red-blooded American homosexual males we are, we continued to react loudly and enthusiastically to the gentleman’s sudden and unexpected nudity.

Chip turned half-way to us and said something we couldn’t understand. Something about chocolate.

What?

He repeated himself louder, or said something similar, but it still wasn’t making sense to us. It was something like: “You can stop talking about chocolate now. I know you don’t like the chocolate boys.”

My friend and I were incredulous. Who said anything about chocolate? Was he talking about black boys?

Whatever it was, Chip continued laying into us. It seemed that he was accusing us of being racist. Chip is African American. But we had said nothing about him. We had said nothing to him. We weren’t even looking at him. We were too distracted — and rightfully so — by the gloriously indecent exposure before us.

“Dude,” my friend said, “We don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

“We’re not talking about you, if that’s what you think,” I added. “We were talking about the naked guy.”

Chip was clearly agitated, and he continued his tirade. The more he said, the more worked up he got. There was something menacing and cold in his voice. It was all so sad and stupid. A moment that was so frivolous and harmless and fun had been sucked dry in just a few seconds by this guy, and all because of assumptions he was making about us. Who’s the racist here?

I wanted to try to figure out what he thought he’d heard us say so we could defuse the situation and move away without any trouble. I imagined we might laugh uneasily at the silly misunderstanding — uh heh heh heh… — and assume stations at opposite ends of the bar without any fuss. And I might have tried to play the peasemaker if he hadn’t then turned to my friend directly and said, “And by the way, I’m better-looking then you are, too.”

My friend sort of recoiled, wide-eyed and incredulous. It was making less and less sense. Chip then let loose on several aspects of my friend’s appearance. Chip evidently did not approve of certain things. What the hell was going on? He was fighting back with personal insults when we never even attacked him (or addressed him, for that matter) in the first place?

“Whoa… wait a minute. Where did that come from?” I asked. “What are you talking about?”

“Hey, fuck you!” my friend shouted back.

At this point, I grabbed my friend’s bag and pushed it into his hand. “This is crazy. Let’s just go,” I said, not wanting to see who might get hurt if the situation escalated (it was less likely to be my friend).

Neither of us knew what Chip had heard or what he was going on about. “Bravo,” I said to him. “Have a lovely night.”

“Yeah, you too,” he said coldly.

“You bet,” I said. “Of course.”

I tugged at my friend and we headed toward the door. “Yeah, fuck you, you little asshole,” he yelled to Chip.

And when I got outside, I realized that I was in such a hurry to get away from the danger that I had forgotten to say good-byr to any of the peopel we were with. A complete stranger’s idiocy had just completely scared me out onto the sidewalk.

30
Nov
06

Your Way, Right Away

By Eric Leave a Comment
Categories: New York and The People in Your Neighborhood
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Mmm… Juicy!

One morning last winter, walking to the train just a few blocks from my apartment, I became aware that people walking on the other side of the street were all sooner or later becoming transfixed by something on my side of the street. Whatever it was, it lay in front of me. As I approached the corner, it came within view. In front of a car parked a few yards ahead of me was the blackened, shrunken, charred husk of what was — until very recently — someone’s car.

The fire must have burned very hot, because across the sidewalk the bush against the apartment building was brittle and leafless. The screen in the window of the ground-floor apartment was burned away. The sidewalk near the wreckage was black. The asphalt around the car was covered with melted bits and pieces and something that looked like black-and-gray foam. Where the tires were the day before were now masses of something looking more like lava rock.

This is not something you see every day in my neighborhood. Understandably, it will draw some attention. It must have stunk to heaven. It must have lit the whole block. I wondered if the the gas tank exploded, if anyone was hurt. Was it revenge, a stray cigarette, insurance fraud, an unfortunately positioned magnifying glass on a sunny day?

The situation became more tragic when I noticed something more.

There was no car parked in front of the burned heap, but the car parked directly behind it … well, from the front seat forward, it looked remarkably similar. The paint was gone; the seats were good and melted; the dashboard was half missing; shattered glass lie all around.

I wonder what’s worse: owning the car that was completely consumed in flames, or owning the car that, by the luck of the draw, was parked behind it and consumed only half-way in flames? What is worth more: A half-destroyed car or a completely destroyed car?

17
Nov
06

Getting the Feeling Again

By Eric Leave a Comment
Categories: Gay, Music and New York
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I’ve had a spring in my step, humming Copacabana to myself — Her name was Lola! — all day today. Yes, it’s Friday. But I’ve also been overdosing on Barry Manilow.

I’ve always had a soft spot for him. My mom had a bunch of records when I was a kid and, later, greatest-hits tapes. I used to rotate those records through my regular play list, which included Sesame Street Gold, Mickey Mouse Disco, and the E.T. soundtrack. (Turn on your heart light!)

He always made me think of New York. It was his accent. And something about his sense of style. These days, I guess he’s more a figure of Las Vegas and cruise ships, but now that I live in New York, listening to him still brings it all back to mind, and it’s still very New York to me. But it’s an old New York. It’s a faded, grainy color TV-screen, Solid Gold, polyester, white patent leather, pre-MTV, Chorus Line, afros and bell-bottoms sort of New York.

It’s so delightfully old-fashioned. No one writes songs like those anymore. In our age of irony, no one can afford to be so earnest. But that’s his schtick, and he can still work it. “I am music and I write the songs”? It’s very hey-let’s-put-on-a-show!

I’ve had a craving for a while now, so I recently downloaded a bunch of stuff the other day. I look around myself on the train in the morning. He’s got hip hop. She’s got reggaeton. Judging by that one’s thrapping fingers and expressive eyebrows, he’s probably listening to some sort of emo band. And I’ve got string arrangements swelling as Barry waxes melancholic over and over about Mandy. If they only knew, I would so get beaten up. I love it.

My mom and I sometimes listened to her tapes while cleaning house or sitting around on vacation. Up at the cottage one summer, we were listening to “Weekend in New England,” and my grandmother put down her National Enquirer, folded up her glasses and declared: “I think he’s a queer. Don’t you?”

I’ll never forget that. I think it was the first time she had brought up the topic. She regularly had a litany of offensive pronouncements about Blacks and Asians — without ever quite understanding why they were offensive. (“It’s how I was raised,” was always the excuse.)

“Nah,” said my mom, vaguely put off, not because she was disappointed by my grandmother’s deragatory tone, but because she saw no reason to discuss the love that dare not speak its name.

“You don’t think so?”

“Well, he’s singing about women, Ma.”

“Huh,” she said. “I don’t know. Just something about him, I guess.” Then she picked up her glasses and began to read again.

07
Nov
06

Election Volunteers

By Eric Leave a Comment
Categories: New York and The People in Your Neighborhood
Tags: ,

I think the charming lady who helped me at my polling place yesterday was the same woman who helped me on Primary day a few months ago. I wonder if she always works at the 25th district polling station.

After thanking someone in Spanish for voting, she told me that one of her many nephews is also named Eric and that he is a lawyer in California.

I love these little old ladies, sentinels of democracy, who guide voters through primary school gymnasia and church community rooms across the country, drawing back that plastic curtain, gazing hopefully up at us through heavy eyewear.

I love the gatherings of two or three neighbors, sometimes with a baby carriage, usually with a coffee, catching up on gossip and grandkids.

I love pulling that lever — clank! — flipping all the switches — fft! fft! fft! — and pulling that lever back — clunk!. The sound of voting is so satisfying. I hope we don’t ever go digital in my district. How ever then would the little old ladies be able to help us?

13
Sep
06

My Faith in Humanity Tourists Restored

By Eric Leave a Comment
Categories: New York
Tags: ,

I am notorious in my own mind for leaving my card in the ATM. When withdrawing money, people are usually given their cards back these days before they are given their money — I think. Wasn’t always this way. It’s one of the great technological innovations of the last five years or so, in my opinion. Still, however, when making deposits at an ATM, we are not given our cards until after we make the deposit. The banks want their money. They don’t want people to make phantom deposits to give themselves a temporary bonanza of Monopoly money before the beancounters figure it out the next day.

So, when I make a deposit at an ATM, I almost always forget my card — until the machine starts squawking or beeping at me. There was a period a few years back when I lost my ATM card once a month for three months. It wreaked havoc on my online billing accounts. I have since recovered.

This is not to say that I am never forgetful when making withdrawals.

Tonight, when I left the ATM anteroom, I reflected rather pridefully that I didn’t forget my card. (It’s the little things, right?) However, the shocker came when a young woman ran up behind me a full block away from the bank, calling, “Sir? Sir!” to inform me that I had left the ATM without my money.

I thought she must be talking about someone else. But when I checked my wallet, the $40 I had just taken out was indeed not there. I gasped audibly.

“Some people have your money,” she said. “The people who came behind you. They’re at the bank looking for you.”

I thanked her profusely.

Then she gave me perhaps the funniest bit of information: “They’re tourists.”

I made a run for the bank.

Was that final detail meant to help me recognize them? Or was she drawing a contrast between tourists and New Yorkers, as if to say that a local would never pass up such opportunism? (I once saw a $20 sticking out of an ATM — with no one around. I walked right past the machine. When, a minute later, the devil on my left shoulder had knocked the angel off my right shoulder, I went back to the ATM and found the cash gone. Yay! With a faceless stranger safely designated the “bad guy,” I was free continue my life as a self-righteous Midwesterner.)

Either way, I made short work of that $40 at the bar minutes later.

11
Sep
06

Year Five

By Eric Leave a Comment
Categories: History and New York
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My sympathies to news reporters, producers and editors who are working today, living and reliving the disaster. Thank you for what you do.

My sympathies to the families and friends of lost loved ones who are forced to remember our way as well as their way. Our public remembrance is an invasion of your private grief. Thank you for your strength.

My sympathies to the idealistic Washington interns who have to put up with our pompous leaders, many of whom are too mindful of re-election to grieve without politics. Here’s hoping you learn and improve on the model.

Year Six has begun.

29
Aug
06

More Gayness

By Eric Leave a Comment
Categories: Gay, Me and New York
Tags: ,

When I came out nigh on 11 years ago, I vowed to resist the temptations of the dark side and to use my powers only for the forces of good, but yesterday I inadvertently grossed out two little kids.

Sometimes when you’re gay, and you say good night to a gay friend, you give him a little kiss. Sometimes, after one too many at the bar, you give him a big one. Sometimes, less frequently, he might lay a good one on you — with some full-on tongue action if you’re lucky.

In my world this is normal.

In the world of the little boys who captured the moment in their Fujicolor memories, it is not.

I was vaguely aware that they were posed behind me at the corner, standing with their dirt bikes leaning against their thighs, having just crossed the street. They had seen us, stopped still and went silent.

Then one of them piped up, “Ew! Oh geez! Those boys just kissed.” His friend said nothing.

First, I thought, what are these two kids doing out on their bikes at this time of night?

Then I was transported back to my elementary school playground, the site of much juvenile character assassination, where the tombstones of egos are lined up along the edge of the blacktop.

He wasn’t even making fun of us, but for a half a second his reaction got to me.

Mustn’t … kiss … a boy. Going … to hell.

I’d been there so often before, and on both sides. I don’t remember ever being teased for being a homo in school. But I definitely was teased for other things, abundant athletic ineptitude being chief among them. But what is worse is that I — in fact I — did tease other kids about being homos.

Shame hung like the limp shadow of a memory, waiting for me to notice, draw it around my shoulders and wear it home with me.

But I left it hanging there. I turned and walked away, the kid calling out behind me, insistent that somebody hear him, “Ohmygod, gross! Those boys just kissed!”

I didn’t have to turn around. I didn’t have to look at him. Let him see what happens at the corner of 12th and A at 1 a.m., I thought. Let him remember it, and let his shock fade away to nothing.

13
Aug
06

Flounder

By Eric Leave a Comment
Categories: Animals and New York
Tags: , , , , ,

Walking along the shoreline toward the parking lot at the beach yesterday, we saw a little kid and his dad fishing. They were standing on the beach like anyone else, but they had rods, hooks, and fishing line. It seemed unusual and dangerous to be fishing where other people were swimming, but what do I know?

   Image hosting by Photobucket
Flounders are weird-looking. They swim sideways, and they have evolved to have both eyes on the top side of their bodies. I wonder if it’s always the same side. And who decided: right or left? Mother nature is a slow-poke, though: Their mouths are still sideways.
[www.northfloridafishing.com]

As we passed by, the dad was stooping down to pick something up from the sand. It looked like a large, broad, flat, brown leaf. Some kind of fish, I figured. Sure was ugly. He carried it carefully with two hands and walked toward the water. The kid, maybe 6 years old, maybe 7, looked up at us and exclaimed, “We caught a flounder!”

Then, turning to the people walking just behind us, he added, “How unusual!”

It was this second part that caught my attention, his high-pitched voice, his stress on the second syllable: “How un-yoo-sual!” I started laughing to myself at his precociousness as I walked away.

He was beside himself with surprise, joy, pride. I heard him repeating it a few more times, probably to anyone who looked at him. A flounder! How unusual!

When I was a kid, catching any living creature was a thrill, from the smallest tadpole to the largest pike. I loved fishing as a kid — everything but breaking the worms apart with my fingers. (I usually used a knife. A clean cut seemed more humane. Certainly less messy for me.)

His dad must have said it earlier. Looking at the fish on the line, the kid asking what it was, he must have said something like. “Huh. A flounder. How unsual.” And that kid, so desperate to grow up and emulate his dad, was sharing the news with us all.

09
Aug
06

All This for a Bagel?

By Eric Leave a Comment
Categories: Food and New York
Tags:

It’s amazing what you can get for a buck on the Lower East Side: a toasted bagel with butter, a banana, and an earful of conspiracy theory.

A guy ordering a few slices of American cheese from the deli nearby struck up a conversatin with me out of nowhere.

“Did you see that Al Gore movie? What’s it called?” he said.

“An Inconvenient Truth,” I said. “No, I haven’t seen it yet.”

He said he just loved it — “It’s so scary, because it’s all true” — and all but made me promise that I would see it at th earliest opportunity. I assured him I would. And I do plan to.

Then he asked me about another documentary, something called Loose Change, which I had not heard of. Many of my lefty friends have, I’m sure. Probably I’m just not paying enough attentinon.

“Oh yeah,” he said. “It’s great. It explains how 9/11 was entirely set up by the government. It’ll knock your socks off! It goes through point by point and says how it was all set up.”

I was incredulous. Was a New Yorker actually suggesting that 9/11 was a government setup? Aren’t we past all of this five years later?

“It’s very convenient,” he continued, “that the only plane that didn’t make it was the one that was supposed to hit the White House.”

I can understand the frustration with our government. As he put it a moment later: “I tell you, I wish it had hit the White House. I’d like to bomb the White House. Take care of all of ’em at once.”

Nevermind that “all of ’em” don’t all work there.

I can even forgive an off-hand wish to see the neocons — gulp — eliminated. But to honestly believe that 9/11 is an elaborate construction of a government that has shown itself over the course of five and a half years to be, at best, incompetent, you’d have to be crazy or just uneducated. It’s just not in the realm of possibility, from what I can see.

“Thank god for term limits,” is all I could think to say.

There’s a good Wikipedia entry on the movie. In its objective, just-the-facts-ma’am way, it sort of debunks the movie by default. Loose Change sounds like a piece of crap. It was made by three guys with $2,000 and laptop using other people’s footage and logically misleading tactics.

I feel funny linking to a Wikipedia entry when Wikipedia is one of the sources cited by the filmmakers, a source which, as explained in the entry itself, is not entirely reliable enough to back up allegations as serious as those in Loose Change. So, how can it be reliable enough to debunk it, right? Well, it has a lot of reputable annotations. Seems good enough to me.

One of them, Screw Loose Change, is blog with a pretty comprehensive collection of debunkery.

Anyway, after revealing his dreams of decapitating the American government, the guy shifted the conversation to big business and Ken Lay. He mentioned a movie called Enron: Where did your Money Go?, or something, playing at some local cinema, as well as a few others I don’t remember. He went on and on about white collar crime and the persecution of the poor and middle classes… Halliburton… bla bla bla… much of which, in the cases of the big scandals, is probably true.

The shop owner, in a futile attempt to save me, tried to wave him off. “Leave him alone. Leave the pooor guy alone!”

I certainly wasn’t doing anything to save myself. Why am I so nice to strangers? I didn’t want to argue with him, but I didn’t want to indulge him either.

Then he veered over to The Media and of course the insidious desire to lie to the public and cover up all the Truth exposed by these messianic amateur filmmakers. He told me I should listen to WBAI, which is not controlled by corporate sponsorship, if I wanted to know the truth. Maybe it is good, but should I go by this guy’s endorsement?

Meanwhile, my bagel was getting cold.

People who live in the United States — which is not the panacea of democracy it wants to be, but which is obviously better than a great many other places in the world, arguably most — are free to criticize the motivations of government and big business. That’s fine. Hooray for democracy: You can wish George W. Bush dead and not get arrested.

But if you think the dark forces of government and big business are as oppressive and dangerous and ravenous as he seems to believe, if you’re that freaked out about the world, how can you wake up and just go about your work like normal every day? If what he thinks is true is really true, I’d be either terrified to the point of suicide or fighting mad. I wouldn’t be wasting my time in the deli telling some guy who works in the neighborhood to watch some documentaries. I’d be on the next boat out of here.

But, oh… he was so smug. He knew it all. He was so safe and above it, and we were all duped. I suppose just before Bush, Cheney, Condi, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Gonzalez, the executives of the New York Times and Andrew Fastow merge and absorb the ghost of Ken Lay to assume their true form as an unspeakably grotesque leviathan, sent here by unseen forces to destroy the world, this guy and the rest of the Believers will be rescued by a passing fleet of space ships and whisked away to an alien civilization where milk doesn’t go sour and flowers don’t wilt.

Maybe I have more faith in the rest of the world outside of Washington to know better than a few guys with a couple thousand dollars and a laptop what’s going on in America. But maybe I’m just naïve.

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the untallied hours