My parents would attend drunken bacchanals in the woods of Northeastern Connecticut, in the decade of the seventies. What else was there for a married couple, one of whom was a college professor and the other a homemaker, living in a split-level ranch on three acres, with four kids, one of whom was off to college doing God-knows-what, and one car, and nothing around them but the trees and the starry sky, to do?

In those days drinking was a sport. You were half a man if you didn't keep the pace. There's a story, my dad passed out under the piano. The way my mom told it, that was his M.O. To cozy up under the grand piano at a certain hour. Like it happened a hundred times. Maybe it did. Or maybe it happened once and became mythology. This is what Dad does when he's drunk. There was something, I have to admit, that rang true in that characterization of him, even if it was unfairly extrapolated from a single event. I could well imagine him checking out semipublicly like this, making a bit of a show of his resignation, a grouchy gesture of interior civil disobedience. Under the piano. But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe that's not him at all. Maybe that's only him because that's the story that got told.

There's another story from those blurry nights: He saved some poor fuck's life who passed out face-first in a ditch of icy water. Some fuck from the English department or something, who was drunk as hell and went out to piss in the woods. "Has anyone seen whatshisname?" someone asked, through the haze of smoke and pretentious conversation. "Why, no," my dad said, or something, and he went out the kitchen door and looked around and found the fucker in a ditch, in the dark, breathing what could just about have been his last. My mom never hesitated to tell that story either, principled as she was, and she almost made it seem like both happened on the same night, or happened night after night - save the man, lie beneath the piano; save the man, lie beneath the piano.

But I'm pretty sure that's not the case.

It was 1975, I think, when my dad grew his beard. He was sitting there at the head of the dinner table, or was it the tail. I was sitting on the side to his right, as I always did, I suppose. He hadn't shaved and we took notice and somehow it was communicated that he was growing a beard, though I don't remember that he said a word.

In the summertime my mom would brew iced tea and we could have it with lemon and a little sugar. We drank it out of those smoked green or gold glasses, sculpted with thumbprint-sized indentations around the bottom half. With ice from the metal tray that frosted up around the handle and stuck to your fingers if you had no patience and tried to crack the ice before running it under water. The sun set so late, we left the lights off and let the sunset seep through the woods and through the picture window, through the kitchen window and the door.

Steve was beside himself that the Giants won. We were all planning a skiing trip and as we were leaving the Super Bowl party I asked him if he and Natuza had a ride yet.

"Oh!" he smiled. "We've, we've... made other arrangements. Already." He could barely suppress his laughter, cheeks red and rosy, eyes like slits. As though their arrangements involved a top-secret trip to the moon.

Practically the entire fourth quarter, he'd sequestered himself on the outdoor deck, peering at the TV from the other side of the sliding door, his breath clouding a patch of glass. 'Cause it was good luck. Only at the end would he come in from the cold.

The Ballad of Kirsten O.

There was this girl in class, Kirsten O. Everyone hated her. She was the type of outcast that gave every single other person the feeling they belonged. The weirdest, awkwardest, most preyed-upon geeks could vilify and ridicule her – and hardly anyone missed an opportunity. We'd pan her with gazes of sneering scorn as she walked down the hallway from class to class. She was never safe and she was always alone.

Why she was the object of such extravagant contempt is perplexing, as such things usually are. She was ugly, but she wasn't the ugliest. She carried herself with what seemed to be a bit of a haughty air, preposterously – a chin-up, tight-lipped pout which had a regrettably princessy effect. But that's not why everyone hated her. That was her reaction to everyone hating her. It was all she had to offer in defense. There seemed to be something about her that was tragically askew, accursed. Maybe we detected in her what we detested in ourselves. Maybe we just sensed, primitively, some malignant aura about her. None of this was any fault of her own, of course, but in the ruthless calculus of twelve-year-olds' minds she emerged as the village scapegoat.

And keep in mind that as I'm not her I must count myself among her tormentors. It's only fair to say.

One day we were called into the Language Arts center, the entire class, must have been the seventh grade class. One of our teachers announced to us that Kirsten and her single mom had been the victims of some kind of home invasion, some murky attack by a deranged man with a hammer. One or both of them were raped – at least that was the insinuation. I don't think the teacher was willing to assert that there had been a rape, to use that term. I don't know what happened - something horrible happened. Everyone adopted a posture of appropriate solemnity upon hearing the news, then promptly forgot it. The upshot was, Kirsten won't be in school for a while, but be supportive, that kind of heartwarming shit you get from teachers. God, I'm now realizing that the teachers had no idea what an extreme pariah she was. They assumed we'd be mortified to hear this news and that we'd all - her friends in particular, she must have friends - reach out to her, be there for her, that type of shit.

Eventually she crept back into our midst and we walked ever wider circles around her, keeping in her in a sort of perpetual quarantine.

But that's not why we're here. What I can't shake from my mind is not any particular incident of Kirsten being berated by kids, it's one of her being berated by an adult. I remember I was sitting in the cafeteria and I spied her sitting alone - of course - at a table against the wall. Our principal, Mr. Perotti, was strolling about imperiously, chit-chatting with the students. He passed by Kirsten's table.

"Mr. Perotti, look!" she exclaimed cheerily. She never spoke a word to other kids. "I was feeling especially hungry today so I bought two ice creams!"

Sure enough, all she had to eat were the strawberry shortcake ice cream bar she was gnawing on already and the crushed almond one still in its wrapper, before her on the table. I'll never forget the way she over-articulated the word "especially" through her braces. Es-pesh-ee-ully.

Mr. Perotti paused a couple of beats and drew back, aghast. "YOU mean to tell ME that ALL you're having to EAT FOR LUNCH is TWO ICE CREAMS!?"

Kirsten recoiled. Every head turned.

"Are you CRAZY? What kind of lunch is two ice creams?! Do your PARENTS know this is what you eat?! What's the matter with you?"

I'd never seen Kirsten Olsen more humiliated and unhappy than at that moment under the shadow of that looming, shouting, shaming man.

Goddammit, Mr. Perotti. Dammit. Why'd you have to do that. Why, why, why, why, why.

People say that life is short. The Beatles, Thomas Hobbes. Astrophysicists and Hindu mystics. But in fact it is not. It just drags on and on. Especially towards the end.

IIWII

It is what it is what it is what it is what it is what it is what it is what it is what it is what it is what it is what it is what it is what it is.

That idiotic grouping of five words, only three of which are different. It almost wants to be a palindrome - It is. What is it? - but instead, it is what it is. It's what you say when you're too tired, lazy, depressed, or stupid to say what it really is.


I clambered down the stairs with the two boxed curtain rods resting unsteadily under my arm, like two jousting poles. By the time I was halfway down the block they were scissoring alarmingly, veering towards passersby, sliding down my side. Finally I carried them with both arms, to my chest, like someone bringing firewood in from the cold, or carrying a bride across the threshold. Finally I made it to FedEx, where I was instructed to fill out the green-and-white form. Over my shoulder I heard the manager greeting a very old man who'd crept in behind me.

"How may we help you, sir?"

"I'd like to send a package," the old man said, uncertainly, but with a trace of irascibility, like he'd already been slighted or ignored.

"You may send a package. You may purchase envelopes and packaging materials. You may insure a package. You may have copies made. One of these..." - here he paused, searching for a term - "beautiful young women would be more than happy to assist you. Simply come right up and take your pick."

The time after the Super Bowl is over and before bed, dirty like dishwater, with the too-bright lights and all our heads clouded drunk, when the post-game interviews fade into ads and then the requisite, over-hyped network premiere, when the guests disperse to put their coats on, linger ten minutes more, and then leave for good. It's like the doldrums in the middle of the second quarter, when you're not sure where you are, whether you're watching a football game, and whether you need to drink more beer or take a piss.

This was an incredible Super Bowl, one to redeem many others, and to justify all the attendant dreariness.

In order to make sure I had the name Devil's Tower right in my previous post I consulted the Internet. Just to know it's Devil's Tower, not Devil's Peak, not Devil's Mountain. And I couldn't help but click on the official Devil's Tower Web page on the National Parks Service Web site. I was amused to find that bewilderingly, the fourth of five highlighted "Quick Links," coming right after directions, hours and fees, is Can I Bring My Pet?

I gazed up to the roof of the Marriott from the eighth floor bar and lounge atrium, with the elevator column in the center shooting straight up by dozens of stories, with cars gliding up and down its exterior. I sought some apprehension of wonder that this thing could be, that here it was before me, some notion of future now. But instead it all seemed leaden and dreary, grayed by the relentless come-and-go of conventioneers and bored and surly kids with their put-upon moms and pops in tow.

Last night I dreamt about my dad and as I spoke to him, in some version of his stricken state, blue and rose clouds roiled and gathered in tight, contiguous spheres. Somehow reminiscent of the gathering clouds of mothership activity in the sky above the government-installed landing strip on Devil's Tower after everyone thought the show was over and it was time to pack up the big synthesizer and go home in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." Today on the phone, wanting to allude to that, I told him it was stormy in New York, which in fact it was. "Ah," he said.

As I read our project management professional training text in class today I was gripped by a sudden chill and aching heart. It occurred to me, the relentlessly drab language. The repetitiveness. The preoccupation with documentation, with process, with exhaustive steps and procedures. Inputs, tools and outputs. The obsession with outcome that's in scope with plan, the outcome being a product, a service, or, sinisterly, a result. The inarguable mandate intimated by the charter. The enormity of whatever task it must have been to drive its performers to the codify these methods in every possible combination, covering every conceivable circumstance, over hundreds of soul-obliterating and life-negating pages. It occurred to me, this was the project plan for the Holocaust, abstracted from its particulars.

I never run out of breath until I reach the top floor of our building, the fifth floor, our floor. I pant like an old man as I approach, lumbering, reaching for the keyhole with my key.

The key never fails to make a spark on the lock.

They installed new lights in our lobby and dilapidated stairwells, bright lights that are surely meant to conform to code or evince a renovation for which they might have cause to jack up rents. They are dismal, garish lights, too bright. And some cocksucker from Domino's Pizza left a stack of menus to fan out on the foyer floor.

Ronke is our project management certification trainer and she was born in Nigeria and now she lives in Dallas and she used to live in Connecticut. People call me Ronnie because it's easier, she said in her accent. So Ronnie, Ronke. Whatever you like. In the end we were perfectly unsure what she wanted us to call her.

"I seldom eat lunch," she said today after she came back from break and John inquired. She said she'd been window shopping in the rain.

The Japanese guy at the Columbus Circle stop who does the one-man-band thing, playing boogie blues on the guitar and some kind of percussion with his feet, over and over again, excruciatingly.

We used to go down to the ice cream place at the end of the road, and then you turn left and there it is the next intersection. Down a hill, past the peeled-paint, haunted barn, and up a hill, and down another. To a place called Four Corners, due to the fact it's an intersection four corners result. Gas station, gas station, gas station, ice cream. A farmer's market when it's warm, in one of the parking lots of a gas station. The ice cream place was called Kathy John's, and it had this idiotic old-timey theme, a sign with a silhouette of corseted woman on one of those bicycles with the giant front wheel. Suppose she was Kathy. Inside, the high school kids who worked the scoops were required to wear candy-striped vests and little fucking red bow ties and those fucking beribboned straw hats that remind you vaguely of Mark Twain or someone in an Impressionist painting who has a mustache. There was a replica of a nickelodeon that showed little grainy black-and-white films of what I want to say were Victorian women in scandalous states of undress and engaged in all manner of unseemly and ungodly activities, all the glorious uns at once, but I'm pretty sure that's another memory. It was maybe really the Keystone Cops.

When I dawdled in the morning before getting dressed for school my mom would say, "Put a nickel in it."

They piped in the ragtime and the dixieland nonstop I do not need to tell you.

There was also inside of Kathy John's a retail store for candy and it seems to me that the entire place, maybe ten feet wide by thirty feet long, was stocked with varieties of rock candy and rock candy only. Rows upon rows of jars of rock candy rods in every imaginable color and flavor: lime, root beer, raspberry, butterscotch, chocolate, tangerine, cherry, orange, green apple, strawberry, watermelon, lemon, blueberry, cinnamon, ginger. The favored configuration was the rod. Like the radioactive rods they put in the water in nuclear reactors to provoke the steam, I suppose, but a whole lot smaller and a whole lot sweeter.

So I'd had these rods from time to time and I recall even shoplifting a fistful or two but the big idea was the ice cream. We'd go there after dinner sometimes and there was never any junk in our house, that was the type of family we were. So it was a pretty big deal, going down to the end of the road and left and up and down to Four Corners.

Something today in the 42nd Street subway station reminded me of vanilla ice cream cones from Kathy Johns, anyway. The place was a restaurant too, with corned beef sandwiches and onion rings and hot dogs and shit. With the menu all dolled-up and cute to look like a newspaper from 1912. So I remember the cold, cold plain sweetness of the vanilla ice cream, with steam coming up off the top, the almost meaty quality of the first bite you take when the ice cream's still hard, and you get that shock to your solar plexus and to your brain because it's so cold, and there's the faint smell of fry oil in the air, oil that's had onion rings and fries. Anyway, it made me remember.

It occurs to me, about Hillary Clinton's fabled welling up of tears, her famous hushed and halting and speech, it was not purely earnest nor contrived. It was both. If you want to know what was going through her mind then, and you know she won't be the one to tell you, read on. She had a pang of pathos, of feeling sorry for herself, not without reason mind you. But once she felt that pang she let it linger within her, and thought, This is great. I'm going to use this. And she did, brilliantly. It was real. But make no mistake, she was always in control.

I hear the creaking of the door.

I sat too near someone on the subway train today, as we both were sitting down, and I apologized after his hip grazed my knee.

Had lunch with John at a restaurant made up to look like a circus. Except it wasn't full on a circus. Just a round room, a rope ladder suspended horizontally in an arc above the bar. A candy-striped menu, like an old tent I suppose. We talked about the absurdities in theoretical physics, about as best we could.



Illustration by Louise Asherson

As I was cooking dinner tonight, sweating, things on the stove and a thing in the oven, I heard a knock upon the door, shave-and-a-haircut-two bits. It was a smiling young man I did not recognize.

"Hey!" he said, extending his hand. I took it. "Your neighbor! From across the way?"

"Oh," I said, "yeah, yeah." Niceties ensued.

Then this: "I'm an A&R rep for Atlantic Records and I heard you singing and playing your guitar. You sound really great. Do you, uh, have a CD I can have or something?"

I was dumbfounded, sort of confused, harried, but I saw no reason not to play along. "Really?" I said. "Wow, that's, um, that's incredible! Thanks. I'm glad you say so, I'm really..."

"Yeah!"

"I don't really have anything I can give you but I can, you know, get something together." I was trying to say all the right things. The steak was cooking.

He smiled. "Great!"

"Yeah, thanks for..."

"Yeah! Yeah. One other thing: Could you keep the volume down? You know, after about midnight. We're trying to sleep."

Then there followed me saying of course, and him saying you probably hear our stereo too, blah blah, me saying no, no, I don't, because in fact I don't, and then at the end he gave a cheery reiteration that he likes my music, it's just a little bit loud, OK, goodbye, thanks.

I don't need to tell you that I was angry and embarrassed. What a miserable little humiliation. But then as I mulled it all over I wondered a few things, wondered which of them was true:

1. He is an A&R rep for Atlantic Records and was lucky to count on that gambit to, he imagined, soften the unpleasant impact of delivering the message he wanted to deliver. A funny sort of coincidence, but why not?

2. He is, of course, not an A&R rep for anyone. He contrived that fiction because he figured it'd be, as above, a humane way to shut me down.

3. The entire episode was sarcastic. He was sick to death of being kept up nights by my squawking voice and emphatic fingerpicking, like the plucking of feathers from a goose. What can I do to really fuck him up, he thought, and that's what he went and did.

I'm leaning towards #1, with #3 a not-so-distant second. He did seem very agreeable the whole time, not the least bit angry. But who knows with people. And yet, to assert to a neighbor that you circulate in a certain line of work when you do nothing of the sort is a little dicey. He could very well find me at some undefined point in the future, introducing him to some other music biz mucky-muck, as "my neighbor who works for Atlantic." Then again, who works for Atlantic? Isn't that too obvious? Haven't they been absorbed into some nondescript multinational, Hachette or Universal? So the reason #3 seems more likely than #2 is this: Just about every goddamn decent normal fucking person in the world who's kept awake by his neighbors has the decency and candor to tell them - whether in person or in a coward's note slipped under the door - that they'd appreciate a little more quiet late at night, thank you. And that's perfectly fine. To fuck with someone, you'd have to be cruel. Then again, I feel I should guard myself against any paranoid conclusions, for these are often false. It's the simplest answer that's usually the truth. So maybe it is #1.

Whatever it is, I'm fucking pissed, and tonight I played and sang until the clock struck 12.

Stumbled up windy Third Avenue late last night and right into this place, one of these new places that seems to be run by kids out of college and caters to drunk kids out of college and serves them cheesesteaks and cheeseburgers and fries and as I stood in line I thought someone was going to say something about football and I'm wearing my Eagles hat. Someone sitting at a table, a black guy in his twenties, was talking to someone in line in front of me, something about the Giants and who are they rooting for, and then he saw me and said, "This guy's an Eagles fan," and I said yeah but I'm a Giants fan for today and it was as though I hadn't said a word; he paused a beat and went on talking to the others.

Played decent pool tonight at the Stoned Crow, won the first game with a little run that left me buzzing with adrenaline. I couldn't for the life of me remember the name of the waitress, but she remembered me, turns out her name was Emmy. Natuza thought she knew but asked her, at the end, just for good measure. We tipped extravagantly and then parted ways, those of us who still remained, in opposite ways on Washington Place.

I've been captivated by the Air France theme music, audible when on hold with the reservations desk or, more invasively, and more strikingly, in the cabins of their aircraft as you board or at the end, when you've just awoken from the thud of the landing gear upon the runway, when you've had a night of wine and cramped reverie, you've had just about enough and you're abstractedly gathering your luggage, which may have shifted during the flight, so be cautious, and you're preparing to deplane to a Jetway or down the passerelle to a waiting tandem bus in the cold, white morning. It's a strikingly melancholy song, slow, sung by a woman in an aching voice. It's got lyrics like "away with the sea" and "the miles that lie between us." This whole musico-mass-transportational experience, with the deep, vague sadness, the fractured beauty, and the instructions to fasten your seatbelt, or perhaps the jetlag as the case may be, it's enough to send you into a formidable state of dissociative intoxication. The willingness of this enormous corporation to use such a heartrending piece of music may well be French; it reminds me of years ago when I was in Paris and there was some kind of film festival going on. All it amounted to was something like a Euro off admission on Tuesdays or whatever; it was just an initiative to get people into theaters, smudgy with the fingerprints of bureaucrats from the chamber of commerce. But there was a little video and a theme song they played before every movie that played in every theater in the city that week. It was a montage of city scenes, I believe, but what was striking was the music. It was a song sung in harmony by young male and female voices, and its melody followed a cascade of minor chords. The lyrics were something like - translated into English - "The city of Paris invites you to the festival of cinema." But the melody was grippingly moving, and I wanted to cry every time I heard it.


I saw a beautiful, young woman on the subway platform at 72nd Street today, earnestly masking-taping a flier to a pole. I have to see what it says, I thought. I craned my head and perceived just these words, on the left side of the page beside her gloved hand:

IT IS INHUMANE