it’s been a while since i’ve had one of those moments looking at the site, where someone sends in something you didn’t write, but could have. i am at the office, feeling kind of jarred. i’m pretty cool with most of my secrets. i don’t have any secrets, really. but you know when you have a secret and don’t even know it and someone reveals it? whoa. it’s quite an indescribable feeling.
i have more going on in my life. but the internet has finally released its vise-like grip on my attention. it feels great. i’ve been doing a lot of writing, but probably not the kind of writing you’d expect. thus, no time, no time for blogs. but living, lots and lots of time for that.
sitting on the runway of the pittsburgh international airport, ray asked me a question i can’t remember now, but my answer was, “no, new york is like that girl who broke my heart so bad. but i still love her.” he smiled at me sympathetically and then the plane took off.
i didn’t spend too much time in the city because it made me too sad & there was no time–we didn’t go to manhattan for even a second, just stayed on the long island/brooklyn side of things. my dad picked us up from the airport in his wood-paneled station wagon, we went back to the psychotically clean house that used to be mine, we ate cupcakes & giggled with my sister. we stayed at my mom’s house because i don’t want my dad to know i’m dating a boy since it would make him think that i’m “cured” in terms of queerness, and nothing could be further from the truth.
anyway. i like having someone to show oyster bay to; someone to kiss on the winding wall over the bay that my friends and i used to run on in junior high; someone new to laugh at my mom’s non sequiturs and my dad’s drunken stories. a lot of genuinely hilarious things happened, but i don’t think they’d be all that entertaining to read about on a blog.
my plane ticket was totally worth the price for this picture alone:
it’s me and my siblings jumping in the field of our old middle school, which is right behind the house we all grew up in.
and this:
and this:
i have more pics uploaded at my flickr page if anyone’s interested. now i am back home and glad to be here. pittsburgh is hot and muggy and manageable, and i’m just enjoying the quiet.
Filed under: brilliant moments, gayz, new york, nostalgia, pittsburgh, wingnuts
i’ve been super-homesick for ny lately. i still have no desire to live there. it’s like a line i read from a sherman alexie story: “looking through photo albums she got that look on her face and i knew she missed my father. not enough to want him back. she missed him just enough for it to hurt.” enough that i get irrationally angry & jealous when other people get to go there. i miss strange, little things, like riding the subway all the way from brooklyn to astoria with kastoory and buying fruit at a vegetable stand in queens with her mom. like weird guys at health food stores telling me that everything in the universe has the same basic pattern, and that both mushrooms & stars look the same inside. like going to events surrounded by beautiful queers, with people onstage screaming the truth & everyone absolutely, full-force getting it. that’s not an easy thing to turn yr back on.
in other news, super bowl sunday was strangely fun. i went to the blue moon, which is a ridics gay bar in my hood. here is a picture of most of my friends freaking out because the steelers were doing something, and me & eric semi-trying to care:
the best part was, after we won & everyone was on the street freaking out, this drag queen named candy decided to celebrate by dancing naked in the middle of the street, which was amazing:
(both of these pics were stolen from branden. thanks branden!)
while we were walking back to tiffini’s house, she pointed out that one street corner was full of white people freaking out, and the opposite corner was full of black people freaking out. and that made me not want to be here anymore.
anyway. lately i’ve been looking at old lists that i’ve written. i love lists. mainly just things that i love and hate. #1 on my things i hate list from 2002, when i was twenty, is “being female”, which is kinda surprising now. #1 on my things i like list from 1997, when i was fifteen, is “beavis & butthead”. why am i telling this embarrassing fact to the internet? i don’t know. i think i am overdue on making another one, and i think that it’s important to periodically reflect on how, even when things change so much, they still remain largely the same. a thought both comforting & horrifying. it
when we were pulling into pittsburgh at 6 a.m. yesterday, my greyhound driver got on the loudspeaker and announced, “i want to wish you all a happy new year. and i hope that 2009 is the best year you’ve ever had, but not the best year you ever will have.” he sounded sincere and urgent. i don’t think i’ve ever heard such a genuinely nice new year’s wish. who would have guessed it would be on the hound at 6 a.m.?
new york was good, full of inspiring ladies & good people who i miss. i remain glad to be just a visitor, though. riding the LIRR back into the city on saturday night i felt the genuine misery, of all those people trapped in gilded cages miserably shuffling to work at some god-awful hour. that used to be me, and i am glad that it is not me any longer.
today is gorgeous & i can’t really enjoy it cuz i’m here. it’s okay, though, i guess. the building across the street blocks my view of the sky entirely, but one of its windows reflects it. i can see the most eye-blinding shade of blue & a bare spidery tree & all sorts of birds swirling around. i wouldn’t even know they were there were it not for this window, this little portal to the other world. to the casual observer, i am just staring vapidly into space. but you know what? the casual observer’s wrong.
the following conversation occurred, verbatim, between my family and i whilst eating pizza.
sister: dad, aren’t you, like, so glad that all your kids are under one roof again?
dad [ignoring her]: where’s the sauce?
[me and my siblings laugh hysterically]
dad: what? what’s so funny?
me: dad, jill just asked you if you were glad that we’re all together again, and all you could say is ‘where’s the sauce’?
[dad laughs. then there is a pause.]
dad: wait a minute. who’s the sauce?
brother: oh, goddamnit. I AM THE SAUCE!
it was good having my sister here for lots of reasons, like going on graffiti-laden walks and giggling about shit, but it was also nice to be able to talk about my family with someone who really gets it. because everyone’s family is fucked-up in its own unique way and it’s hard to understand. we were talking about my stepdad over coffee & sandwiches on my lunch break from work. she said, “i wrote a story about him for my creative non-fiction class, but i didn’t put in the part where he lost the car, because i was like, nobody will believe that! and when you write stuff down, it has to be believable…”
one day, after a long night of drug use, my stepdad came home without my mom’s car. i’m a little fuzzy on the details, as i was in college & lived an hour away & tried to avoid my familial drama as much as possible back then. nobody knows how he got home, and he’s dead now, so i can’t ask him how he got home from where the (perfectly functional) car was abandoned on the belt parkway in brooklyn, all the way back to my mom’s house on long island. i can’t ask him why he did it in the first place.
that sounds ludicrous, right? who does that? who loses a car? who drives a car onto the grassy median of a parkway and then travels thirty miles back home without it? maybe you, sitting there reading my blog, don’t believe me. it’s so ludicrous.
but it really happened. my mom really did call my dad, who hates her (and vice versa), and pleaded with him, as the mother of his children, to drive her to look for her car. and he did, and they found it, untowed, un-stolen, unmolested, just hanging out on the median as though nothing were wrong at all.
i don’t know; it’s just nice to be able to share these little weird pieces of me with someone who doesn’t look at me skeptically when i tell them. lately i have started missing my stepdad, whose demise i have yet to shed a tear about, mainly because i’ve been hanging out with ex-cons who remind me of him, remind me that he wasn’t all bad. that he was funny and interesting, even if he was a homophobic drug-addicted manipulative liar. a lot of the cons are ex-drug-addicts, and probably manipulative too, and maybe are still liars. who knows. but we have good conversations about how america is going to hell, we sing along with the radio, they tell me crazy stories about their lives and laugh at me when i spill water all over the table. and it made me realize how long it’s been since i’ve had that particular brand of crazy in my life, and made me realize that, i don’t know, i kinda missed it.
i’m at work now (as per ush when i’m writing blog entries) and “california dreamin’” just came on the cheesy music station that my boss makes us listen to. i can’t hear that song without thinking of this one magical day that me, liz and sharon had in manhattan, when we were buried deep in grief and it was so cold out and we managed to have the most amazing day ever. this song showed up in a hilarious dive bar near penn station, where the toilets had no seats, the bartender didn’t know how to make a margarita (and his own personal drinks kept getting swiped by this old man at the bar every time he took his eyes off them!) and had never heard of triple sec, and a woman who may or may not have been a prostitute put this song on the jukebox. she closed her eyes and danced by herself, in a corner, not with anyone or for anyone. she had one of those faces where it’s obvious she’s had a rough life. she closed her eyes and swayed to the music in such a way that i knew she, for a few minutes, was escaping cold snowy new york city and going somewhere softer and more temperate. and i wanted, so badly, to go with her. i think about this woman periodically and wonder about her. i think about all the prostitutes i’ve had meaningful interactions with (and there have been quite a few), but this woman and i didn’t have an interaction, really. we didn’t speak and i don’t think she noticed me at all.
anyway, yesterday i wedged myself into the steamy underworld of banquet serving! i woke up before dawn, rode my bike through stopped traffic as the sun rose to my right. i met up with my friend stephanie and we sat around for a long time, then worked our asses off. i met a lot of nice people. everyone else knew each other, it was like entering a bizarre club. people laughed and joked and told stories all day. a few nervous breakdowns were had (not by me), i re-aggravated my wrist carrying trays of breadbaskets. i had never done banquet serving before, and this was actually the first job i’ve ever gotten by straight-up lying. it wasn’t too bad though. i was really nervous about carrying the trays, but stephanie said, “i saw you carrying that tray, and you looked so confident. then you spilled that breadbasket and i laughed.” i thought i heard her laughing as i spilled that, but i figured i was just being paranoid. but that was the only thing i dropped and i didn’t really drop it that badly.
pandemonium ensued as 4100 professional women descended upon the banquet hall! we got coffee! tea! decaf! oh, where the fuck is that decaf. then we ate lots of delicious free food on our lunch break, and then more delicious free food during clean-up. cheesecake bites! chocolate covered strawberries! one of my tables didn’t show up at all & i had to throw out ten perfectly good, untouched meals. i’ve gone hungry in my lifetime; it made me enraged to throw all that food out. i said, to the guy wheeling around the garbage can, “god bless america, huh?” in a sarcastic tone. he just looked at me funny.
so lately i’ve been doing a lot of reading about ACT-UP & the AIDS crisis in new york city in the 80’s/early 90’s. i was around new york in that time, but i was a child being raised in a white middle class heterosexual nuclear family in the burbs, so i was mostly sheltered from that whole brou-ha-ha.
but there was this one time. i was 12 or 13, i think, although i could have been a little younger or a little older. i think i was at that angsty teen stage, which started for me at 10. i was just beginning to realize how fucked the world is, doing a little reading, hanging out with rough ladies who’d already been through a lot. but this was the day i realized, 100%, just how fucked everything really was (and is).
we had some cousins visiting from out of town, the ones from san diego i think, and so we went to the city to do tourist-y stuff. we went to the FAO schwartz store, which, if you didn’t know, is this very opulent toy store in a wealthy part of town. lots of songs, lots of things with faces. normally something i would have enjoyed, even though i was a disgruntled teen.
but outside, on the sidewalk, there was this dude. he was sitting on the sidewalk with a cardboard sign saying that he had AIDS and needed something like 50 bucks to get to florida to see his family again before he died. he was about the age i am now, white, slightly artsy, probably gay although i wasn’t looking for that yet. he was sitting on the sidewalk but leaning forward on his hands. he was crying hysterically, so hard that he was turning red, saliva dripping from his mouth in long ropes. he was screaming, in this truly desperate scream that i’ve rarely heard: “NONE OF YOU PEOPLE GIVE A SHIT! I AM DYING, AND NONE OF YOU PEOPLE GIVE A SHIT! NONE OF YOU HAVE ANY HEARTS! I’M DYING AND YOU JUST WALK ON BY!!” i stood, transfixed, utterly horrified. i think i might have cried a little too, although very subtly (years of being abused left me a very subtle crier, because i didn’t want my abusers to have the satisfaction of seeing me cry). i was just shocked at this raw humanity in front of me, at how bad life could get. my parents noticed, and hustled me away.
my mom said, “just ignore him.”
my dad said, “these people, they just want ya money! he’s not going to florida, he just wants drugs.”
and so we went into fao schwartz, where a gigantic three-story clock sang a cheerful song, where families of all types flocked around gaily, where employees with high pitched voices wished us a nice day, where cute toys smiled at us from every shelf, where everyone was brightly lit and every color of the rainbow jumped out at us. people danced on the giant piano keys and played with acres of legos. and all i could think, the whole time, was, “every single person in here saw that man. every single one. and nobody cares. he’s right, we all have no heart. he’s right.” and every little bit of artificial happiness inside the store made it even worse. to this day, i can’t go into or walk by any FAO schwartz without my skin crawling (ironically, i still love cute things, perhaps to a nauseating degree).
i cried the whole time we were there. again, very subtly, so it just looked like i was being sullen and wiping my face a lot. maybe i found a bathroom and broke down, or maybe i just held it in the whole time, i don’t really remember. all the other kidz in our party frolicked and had fun. i was silent, arms crossed. that guy wasn’t there when we left, but i felt much better once we were back on the cold, gritty streets of manhattan. at least we weren’t being completely utterly lied to. my mom asked me, “everyone had so much fun, except for you. why do you always have to ruin everything?”
