February 2002
26 February 2002 | Garbage
Returning from China Star last night, I noticed that someone had spilled a pile of garbage in front of my building, behind the little wall where the garbage cans are kept. Seeing this, I recalled an incident from a few nights back. Just as Rachel and I reached the door, I saw a man crouched behind one of the cans, apparently digging through something. I was in the middle of telling Rachel a story when this happened, and abruptly stopped. Rachel looked at me, saw that I was looking in the direction of the garbage cans, and looked there herself. Neither of us said anything. I remembered but did not relate a similar incident which occurred seven years ago, outside a friend’s apartment in San Francisco. As Nick and I were walking up his stoop, he saw some guy taking a dump behind his trash can. This was in the middle of the day. “You can sleep there,” Nick said (at first I didn’t know who he was talking to; it wasn’t his normal voice), “but do me a favor and shit somewhere else.”
I’d been impressed with how Nick handled that, and this played into my silence when confronted with the crouching man. For from what I could tell, he wasn’t crouching to relieve himself but to be closer to whatever he was looking at. This wasn’t a worth a confrontation, I decided; if people want to crouch behind my trash cans, they can crouch behind my trash cans, no biggie.
Tonight, though, I wondered if I had made a mistake, for the garbage was piled in the exact spot where the man had crouched. Coincidence? I think not. I think the man dumped it there in a fit of pique. Something he was looking at upset him, so he poured a can full of garbage on top of it, to bury it.
If I’m correct, then that thing is still under the garbage. Which means that if I look hard enough, I might be able to figure out what upset him so much, I just have to wade through a bunch of garbage; the thing that upset him will be the thing on the bottom.
I’m not doing this.
25 February 2002 | Ships
A personal ad, according to one approach, is like a resume. The object is to say enough to get an interview, or this case, a date. Thus one must accentuate the positive and downplay, or ideally skip over, the negative.
One problem here is that you end up sounding exactly like everyone else, which will likely attract no one, or no one interesting. And it goes deeper. For anyone with any sense knows that people, however marvelous, are always fucked up in some sense. So the initial date—and all subsequent dates, if they happen—come to resemble that game Battleship, where two players take turns trying to sink each other’s hidden ships.
Actually, I disagree with myself. We don’t try to sink those ships; we try to avoid them. And then when we can no longer avoid them, we try to pretend they aren’t what they seem to be. Or this describes a certain stage. Later, often enough, it’s bombs away.
A friend, inspired by Rachel’s recent cover letter, has taken a different tack. Frankness. Just lay it out there. Here are my ships. You better not have these ships.
I find it beautiful. As is she, by the way. Beautiful, smart, and funny. And if you’re a single male living in New York, you can email her. Only I’d read her ad first. Yes, definitely read her ad.
Disillusioned female prone to mild depression and sugar binges seeks stable male 30-40 for long-term, committed relationship. ME: Expressive, healthy and boundary-less. I love to bake and practice Aikido. I have insomnia and rarely sleep the whole night through. I have a full life and probably don’t have time to go out with you anytime soon. Plus after talking to you on the phone, I probably won’t want to meet you in person anyway. YOU: Tolerant, sensitive, introspective. You are tall, muscular and sexy. You earn enough money to support me so I can quit my dumb job. You have straight teeth. You are good in bed and don’t fall asleep the second after you come. You won’t get jealous when I flirt with all the cuties in Aikido. Spanish speaking a plus. You are not: a liar, a loser, a nerd, a neb, a Nice Jewish Boy, a social worker, a stutterer, a drug user, or still having strong feelings for your ex-girlfriend. If you’re interested in talking, call me between 9 and 10 pm Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday. That’s my only free time.
25 February 2002 | Gamble
As soon as you call it sadness, it becomes sadness. Better to call it something else then. Tiredness. I feel this way because I’m tired.
Better to not say, Why am I so tired all of a sudden? or, Why have I been so tired these days? Better to not ask questions that lead to certain answers.
The rule of thumb in gambling is: Never bet more than you can afford to lose. That’s a good rule. But how do you know how much you can afford to lose until you lose it? It’s guesswork. Better to bet nothing then, although that too is a gamble.
22 February 2002 | Manifesto
I want all the shows on television to be about me and my life. All of them. On all the channels, including cable and pay-per-view.
I want Dan Rather to come on and say that Michael Barrish posted something new on his website today and that it was about a break-up with a woman. Something that happened in the past, evidently. It’s unclear which ex-girlfriend it might be about, but now with more on this late-breaking story, let’s go to John Roberts in Williamsburg.
I want all the cooking shows to be about the food that Rachel makes and also the two dishes that I like at China Star: Broccoli with Fried Tofu, and Rice Noodles with Vegetables.
I want dozens of sit-coms involving me and my wacky bathroom-mate Michelle.
I want late-night infomercials plugging the Michael Barrish workout.
I want talk shows that feature kids who’ve dropped out of high school because Michael Barrish dropped out of high school and who are now writing bad poetry because that’s what Michael Barrish did after dropping out of high school.
On Sundays, I want pundits to debate whether I should buy an extra battery for my digital camera.
I want MTV and all the music channels to be replaced by a single show that features Kevin Fanning of whygodwhy sitting in his living room and performing covers of my favorite songs and making mistakes and not caring.
I want commercials banned, with the exception of an occasional posting of my To Do list.
I want Sci-Fi shows set in my own personal future.
I want hard-hitting investigative reports about my mouse problem.
I want all of America to be transfixed by a night-time drama about a web developer who sits in his shoebox apartment in Williamsburg trying to figure out why a certain layout is breaking in Netscape.
I want Good Morning America changed to Good Morning Michael, and I want the Today Show to be about my day and no one else’s.
I want to go from channel to channel to channel and have it all be about me, Michael Barrish, all of it.
But I don’t ever want to watch it. No. I just want it to happen and for no one to notice that it has happened, except that people suddenly lose interest in television and take up other leisure-time activities, like, say, reading the novels of Thomas Bernhard—particularly The Loser but also his final work Extinction, and perhaps some of the middle to late novels such as Old Masters and Correction and The Lime Works, but most importantly The Loser and Extinction.
Oh, and also The Woodcutters; I want them to read The Woodcutters.
21 February 2002 | Container
I don’t remember what she said or did or even what it was about, but I know that we were standing outside that place in Harvard Square called The Garage, which isn’t a garage at all but a little indoor mall, lord knows why it’s called The Garage, it’s certainly not big enough to have ever been a garage, and I was screaming at her.
There was a trash can right there, right where I was screaming, so I kicked it over, or did something else to it, I don’t remember what exactly, I was so ripped, if that’s what you call that, so fucking livid. She was—this I remember well—surprised by what I did to the can, I could see it in her eyes, so I did the same thing again, just to say, Hey, you liked that, well look at this.
I am by nature a mild person. Like anyone I get angry now and then, but rarely do I show it, and then only to a degree. However the feelings with her were so intense that if we weren’t fighting we were fucking, or about to fight, or fuck, sometimes it didn’t matter which, although no, I suppose it mattered, it did, but anyway there seemed no way to contain it.
So while I was doing whatever I was doing to the can, which by the way plenty of people were watching me do, not that I cared, I screamed something like, THIS IS IT. THIS IS SO FUCKING IT. I DON’T EVER WANT TO SEE YOU AGAIN. JUST GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY LIFE AND DON’T EVER COME BACK. Something to that effect.
And this was just our first break-up.
I recently remembered something I’d forgotten. Only, is the word forgotten? The word is, hadn’t thought about in a long time. Because who can keep everything in their head all at once? No one. Only one thing fits in there at a time, and all the rest… well, I’m picturing a room with stuff everywhere. That stuff is the stuff that is at hand in one’s head, the stuff one doesn’t necessarily ever think about but is always there. Such as one’s name, I suppose. Although, yes, people do sometimes forget their names, which means that one’s name must be remembered just like everything else. Still, to remember one’s own name seems different from remembering, say, the big rock in Howard Skolnick’s backyard.
That rock is a good example of what I mean, because I don’t think I’ve thought about it in twenty years. And it was big—about the size of a buffalo, if a buffalo kept its legs folded under, which isn’t something that buffalo’s ever do, I imagine. What’s interesting is how I found it. I found it by “traveling” around my childhood street, going from house to house and looking for something that one remembers differently than one’s name—an example of that. Various things appeared, but none quite as apt as the rock in Howard Skolnick’s backyard.
It was impressive, that rock. Not merely because of its size, but because it was there. No one else had a rock in their backyard, which to me indicates that it must have posed a problem for the people who developed the land that became my block. Because I have trouble believing that that rock was the only rock around, in the beginning. No, I suspect that rocks abounded, in the beginning, but that the developers managed to dig up all the other ones. This rock, though, could not be dug up, or they deemed it unwise to try, and so it remained.
Notably, I don’t remember ever thinking about the rock at the time. It was just here and had always been there, so what was there to think about it?
One’s name is like this, I suppose. As are all the other things in the “room.” They’re just there and don’t need to be hunted down or even thought about much. Which frees up resources for the remembering-the-rock kind of remembering.
This reminds me that I’ve now forgotten the thing that sparked this piece, the thing I recently remembered. I do remember remembering it, though. When it came to me, I thought, This is something I haven’t thought about in a long time. And in characteristic fashion, I pondered what other such things I’ve forgotten—or rather, not thought about in a long time — a paradoxical task. Well, maybe not so paradoxical, but daunting.
For it seems that there are a million things that I could possibly be thinking about now. I mean, from the past. Yes, even if I limited it to things that resembled a buffalo, I’m sure I’d be here all night, remembering.
And then forgetting. Or not forgetting (I keep making that mistake), but thinking about other things instead.
Such as Howard Skolnick’s sister. For the life of me, I can’t remember the name of Howard Skolnick’s sister, nor even what she looked like. Did she look like a female version of Howard Skolnick? I can’t remember. And as is often the case in these cases, I wonder if she died and that I forgot. I’m not just saying this for effect: my mother corrected me recently when I spoke of her aunt, my great-aunt, in the present tense.
But getting back to Howard Skolnick’s sister, here’s the way it is in my head. I see Howard Skolnick’s basement door. I’m in the street outside his house and I’m looking at the basement door, which is open, I mean the outside one is, but there’s a second door inside it, a screen door, which is shut. So I’m looking at Howard Skolnick’s screen door, which is white with a big section in the top half for the screen, and through the screen I see Howard Skolnick’s basement, which I can barely see because it’s so dark in there, and I’m thinking about Howard Skolnick’s sister, I’m standing in the street and I’m thinking about Howard Skolnick’s sister and I’m looking into his basement, which is dark, and so for this reason I have the sense, this is me now, me in the present, that something bad happened to her.
There was a sewer under our street. I guess there must have been a sewer under every street, but our sewer was different in that you could actually go inside it. The entrance was just beyond the street that fed into ours. We’d scramble down the hill there, into a kind of ravine. Slanted cement walls led to a cement platform, like a little stage, and that’s where the entrance was, at the back of the platform.
We’d bring flashlights along. You couldn’t go into the sewer without a flashlight; it was pitch dark.
The sewer was round, a perfectly round tube about five feet in diameter and made of cement. A little stream of gooky stuff ran down the middle, so that you had to walk bowlegged to keep from messing up your sneakers. The walls, particularly near the gooky stuff, were covered with a dark slippery substance, most likely algae, which made for treacherous footing. We walked slowly.
People said there were rats down there, but I never saw one. Maybe the rats were frightened by our flashlights, I don’t know, but I still think I would have seen one if they were any to be seen.
Some kids (I just remembered this) wouldn’t go in. They’d wait at the entrance. I wish I could remember who these kids were, but I don’t. Anyway, it’s not hard to guess who they must have been.
No doubt one these kids told his parents about it, which is how the whole thing ended: one set of parents told another, and so on. I don’t remember how my own parents reacted, but it doesn’t really matter, because enough kids got into enough trouble that we couldn’t go down there anymore as a group.
So I started going alone.
Our street was a cul-de-sac, a giant C. The main tunnel of the sewer cut straight through the opening of the C, then branched off right and left. As a group we never explored beyond the branching point.
I’d go down there after school. I kept my dad’s flashlight hidden behind some rocks near the entrance so that no one would see me lugging it back and forth.
I never told a soul I was doing this. And more than once it occurred to me that if I fell and hit my head, I’d rot down there, because no one would know where to find me.
I began with the left-hand branch, following it south toward Brian Cohen’s house. Smaller sub-branches, barely big enough to crawl through, fed off this branch every fifty feet or so.
Naturally I found the whole thing terrifying. I’d take a step or two, stop, look back, look forward, take another few steps. Then it’d be too much and I’d have to turn back.
So it must have been a week before I finally reached the end of the north branch and found the note. A wooden board lay across the tunnel, two or more feet off the ground. On the board was a plastic bag; the note was in an envelope in the bag.
I should have said that all the kids who either went into the sewer or stood outside the sewer were boys. I didn’t really play with girls at this age; the girls did their thing, and we did ours, and there wasn’t much overlap. Of course we’d stand in the same line to buy ice cream, things like that, but it was a classic case of girls maturing faster than boys—our only way of talking to them was to say something gross or insulting.
The one exception to the separation rule was Pamela Wilson, who sometimes played sports with us at the insistence of her brother Anthony. I had a crush on Pamela, based in part on the fact that she could throw a baseball farther than me. Sometimes it seemed that she liked me too, but since I knew that was impossible, I decided that she was just being nice because she felt bad about the throwing thing.
I was wrong, though. Her note made this clear. She’d seen me go into the sewer a few times and had decided to leave me this note. She said I had a nice smile.
Actually, that’s as far as I got, the nice smile part. Once I read that, I put the note back in the envelope (the envelope was torn now, but what could I do?) and got the hell out of there.
And that was the last time I ever went into that sewer.
14 February 2002 | Floating
At the
first office, Paul is given a piece of paper and told to deliver this to a person in a second office. At the second office, the process is repeated. At the third office, which is smaller than the others, a bald man at a table takes his paper and asks him to sit across. On the table rests a device with a meter and two metal tubes attached to it by wires. The man explains how the device works. Paul is to hold a metal tube in each hand. When his “reactive mind” is triggered, the meter will register this fact and the man will report it to Paul. Does he understand? He understands.
In truth, Paul has zero interest in Scientology. However, the sex with Eve is great, and in his experience the sex isn’t always so great, or else there’s some other problem or collection of problems that make it unworkable, so in the end he told Eve he would try this one thing, this one time, knowing how important it was to her.
Afterwards, the process with the offices is reversed. The bald man gives him a paper to bring to the second office, and there he’s given a paper to bring to the first office.
Eve is waiting for him in her car when it’s over. He gets in and puts on his seat belt. She asks how it went, so he tells her about the bit with the offices.
“No, I mean the session,” she says.
“Well, it was fine,” he says. “I even enjoyed myself now and then, if that’s allowed.”
She smiles. “It is.”
“The only thing weird part was the part with the needle.”
“Um, which part with the needle?”
“You know, the part where he says that your needle is floating. On the meter.”
“Why did that seem weird?”
“I don’t know, it just seemed to be floating a lot.”
“Well, I’m not surprised because—” She looks at him. “Wait, he explained this to you, right?”
“What, the needle? Yeah, he explained it first thing. But it was weird because every time he said that my needle was floating, I felt fine. We’d be talking about my penis or something, my childhood, I don’t know, and he’d say that my needle was floating, so I’d be thinking, Damn, why it is floating again? Because I thought I was over that, whatever it was.”
Suddenly Eve is livid. “He was telling you that you’re okay! When your needle is floating, that means that you’re okay!” She slams her hand on the dashboard. “Fuck!”
Unable to stop himself, Paul roars with laughter. It’s the end, he can see that, she wants him to be a Scientologist and he’s no Scientologist, nor ever will be, which is crushing, because he really thought it could work with her, but this is too goddamn funny.
11 February 2002 | Gum
My best friend until the age of eleven was Richard Sauginkan. My mother claims that Richard and I met by crashing our pedal cars together, but I don’t remember it.
In fact I barely remember Richard at all. I have a single photo that includes him—taken at my tenth birthday. In it he sits to my left, holding a slice of pizza in his mouth with his right hand while using the other to form a peace sign. Without this photo I would have no way of knowing what he looked like. He looked like Sal Mineo.
But for all that I’ve forgotten, I do remember this: everyone loved Richard. I recall my mother standing in our kitchen and raving about how gorgeous he was. And it was true: Richard was a looker. And not just a looker, but a sweet-tempered kid; that is, to the extent I remember.
When we were about ten, Richard and I convinced two neighborhood girls, Lisa Rothman and Debbie Pitcharelli, to play kissing games with us. Suffice it to say, these girls were totally hot (for ten-year-olds!) and I would have given anything to kiss either. However it was clear from the start they both preferred Richard.
Not that I minded. That is, yes, I minded the way Lisa kept turning her head to the side during Seven Minutes in Heaven (conducted in her father’s downstairs office). But no, I had no issue with either girl liking Richard. Richard glowed.
Having said this, my only other clear memory of him (not that he actually appears in this memory) is the time I decided in a rage to spray him with a bottle of Fantastic, which I thought of as poison. I remember going into the basement to get the bottle. Did I spray him? I’ve no idea.
When we were eleven, Richard and his family moved to Syracuse. We said goodbye in the street, next to his family’s station wagon, now jammed with boxes. After Richard got into the car, I went around back and stuck the piece of gum I was chewing under the fender. This is probably the coolest thing I’ve ever done.
I don’t believe that Richard and I ever corresponded, and then at nineteen I “disappeared,” completely cutting myself off from my friends and family. In the time I was gone, no one knew where I was or even if I was alive. When I returned, at twenty-five, my sister told me that Richard had come back to Philadelphia soon after I disappeared, and that he had enrolled in college there, at Temple, and that a few months later he had died of a heroin overdose.
That was twenty-two years ago; Richard’s been dead for twenty-two years. And it’s been thirty years since I watched that station wagon drive down our block and make the turn onto Maxwell Street.
Sometimes I find myself thinking about that day. I imagine that it must have been painful for me, an eleven-year-old boy, to lose my best friend like that. But the truth is, I don’t really remember it. And anyway, that’s not really what I think about. What I think about is the gum. Did the gum make it to Syracuse? Is the gum still under the fender? I know it’s awful, but what I think about is not Richard, my best friend until I was eleven, but the gum I left under the fender of his family’s stationwagon.
09 February 2002 | Elevator
The last time he saw her, she gave him his winter coat. She was standing in her doorway. She said nothing the whole time, not even, “Here’s your coat,” or simply, “Here.” Instead she held the coat at arm’s length until he took it. Then she closed the door. No doubt she would have dropped it on the floor if he hadn’t taken it fast enough.
Today, seven years later, he receives an email from her. An email saying almost nothing, as it turns out, other than that she’s happy now and hopes that he is too. In response he writes that in his mind she’s been standing behind that door for seven years, because that was where he left her. “I guess it seems like I’ve been walking down your hall for seven years,” he adds, and it strikes him that this is exactly what he’s been doing all this time: just walking down her hall and never reaching the elevator.
07 February 2002 | Pool Hall
I ran into my grandfather in the pool hall on Mott and Houston. I was just passing by and got the urge to play. My grandfather’s been dead over a decade now. He was by himself at one of the tables in the back.
He looked the same as I remembered and was smoking the same brand of cigars. I don’t know anything about cigars, but I recognized the smell immediately; that’s what made me look.
Funny thing: it was my other grandfather who liked pool. This one… well, I never saw him play a game of any kind, not even a card game. Aren’t grandfathers supposed to play card games? Basically all this man ever did was sit in a big black recliner and smoke cigars.
When I saw him back there, I thought that maybe I’d been mistaken about him being dead. It’s not as crazy as it seems, particularly since I don’t have much contact with that side of the family. Well, zero, I have zero contact. I guess it goes back to my dad, who calls me once a year and tells me he wants to have a relationship with me. Except he doesn’t quite say that exactly; instead he talks in this weird lingo he picked up from The Forum. Stuff like, “I want to acknowledge your willingness to put yourself out there and share your authentic truth.” I try to be nice about it, he’s a person with feelings like anyone else, but it’s hard to get around the fact that my authentic truth in this case is fuck off.
Anyway it’s my sister who keeps in touch with my dad, so it must have been through her that I learned that my grandfather had died. Oddly, though, I don’t exactly remember her telling me. Or I guess that’s not so odd, really. My memory’s not the greatest and I hardly knew this grandfather.
It was the other one I was close to. In fact he’s the one who taught me to play pool. We’d go to this place in Roosevelt Mall and play for a couple hours, but real slow and with him explaining what he was thinking on each shot. It was amazing. He’d have this whole elaborate plan in his head about where the cue ball needed to be four shots down the line.
Given all this, it felt weird to see the other grandfather at the pool hall. Weird meaning confusing. And then on top of that, I had this awful feeling of wishing he was the other one. Because this one… Well, I don’t know anything for sure, but my sister says he used to beat my father with a board or something. I don’t know how she claims to know this, but he certainly never hit me; in fact, he rarely even sat up in his recliner. Still, that’s what my sister says, and my sister usually knows what’s she talking about.
So I have to admit that this board thing entered my mind when I saw him. Not that I was worried about him attacking me with a cue stick or something. I just felt a little uneasy about starting a conversation with this person who I knew had done certain things—things I had no interest in broaching at this late date. Because what was he going to say in response? “Yeah, yeah, so I beat your father, what of it?” What would be the point? Because here he was, ten or more years past his death, playing a game of pool. Most likely he had long since forgotten all that—assuming it even happened—or even if he did remember, I couldn’t imagine him admitting it all to me and wanting to have a conversation about it.
Then I remembered this other thing my sister told me. Actually, this was the first thing. My sister says that my father used to hit me as well. I mean, as well as his father hitting him. Just not with a board or anything. Actually, I don’t remember what he hit me with, I guess with his belt. Anyway, I don’t remember it and can’t even say for certain it happened, except that my sister is pretty insistent about it.
So when I saw my grandfather again, I thought about him hitting my dad and my dad hitting me, and the whole thing just put me in a shitty mood, when just a minute before I was feeling pretty great. So I don’t know, I guess I overreacted, but after that I just decided to move on and let him play his game in peace.
On the way out, though, I had this crazy thought. My thought was that I was going to walk outside and immediately see my other grandfather coming down the street. I guess it was because I’d just seen the first one that I thought I could see this one. Well, that plus being in a pool hall, which always makes me think of him. So in my mind I constructed this cornball fantasy where I run up to him and embrace him and tell him how much I’ve missed him, although he’s always been there with me, and then he says something funny like, “Yeah, there were a few times there I kinda wished I wasn’t there with you,” and I laugh and say something funny back like, “If you only knew what I would have done if you just left me alone for a sec.”
Anyway, it was all so vivid that I started crying (I mean, in the pool hall) and then the guy at the desk said, “Hey, you alright?” so I said, “Yeah, I’m fine,” and got the hell out of there.
Needless to say, my grandfather wasn’t coming down the street when I made it outside. I didn’t have to look to know this, there are certain things you already know without having to look, but I looked anyway. He wasn’t coming.
06 February 2002 | Canoe
The voice is always the same: a kind of a barely controlled rage. I’ve never heard her use it when awake. I can’t even imagine such a thing.
Of course I’m always asleep when it happens, so that probably affects how I hear it. Because it’s so quiet then, and dark, and I’m drifting along in what feels like a canoe.
And yet it never scares me. I hear it, and know, and I’m with her again.
This most recent time she shouted, “What the fuck is your problem!”
It’s always something like this.
I put my arm around her, to wake her.
“I had a bad dream,” she said.
“I know,” I said. “It’s okay.”
“You were there,” she said. “My mom was in the basement screaming at us to get downstairs. She would always scream like that. I don’t think she had any idea. I felt embarrassed because you were there.”
I pulled her closer and fixed the blanket.
“She doesn’t know what happened,” she said, “she’s forgotten everything.”
“I have too,” I said. “It’s easier that way.”
Her cheek was resting against my chest. I felt her tilt her head back to look at me, not that she would have seen anything in the dark.
“That’s true,” she said, “you have.”
Yesterday at 3:02 pm PST, Heather proposed to Jon in the comments section of an unrelated post on his website, adding parenthetically that she was “on her proverbial knees.” At 3:04 Jon responded with a big “Yes!”
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, Come on.
Well, come on yourself. At 4:53, in response to some disbelieving gibberish written by yours truly, Heather confirmed that she meant it, and then at 5:03, Jon wrote simply, “This is love. And yeah, we’re serious.”
According to Heather, and I have no reason to doubt her, her mom is going to “totally poop her pants.”
Well, no kidding: I almost totally pooped mine and I’ve never even met these two.
From This is Love by PJ Harvey:
I can’t believe
that the axis turns
on suffering
while my head it burns
05 February 2002 | Arms
I don’t remember what she was doing exactly, but for some reason she lifted up the blanket for a second, and we both looked down at things, and then she said, as if in discovery, “You have a penis.”
There was no sense denying it.
“I do,” I said. “And if I didn’t, I don’t think you’d be with me.”
“That’s true,” she said—a bit too quickly, I thought.
I’m not so hot at remembering dialogue, but after this we discussed the question of whether she’d be with me if I didn’t have any arms. At first she said she would, but over time I convinced her otherwise.
It turns out that arms are nearly as important as a penis.
04 February 2002 | Happening
I don’t
know what just happened. Something wasn’t right when I reached the corner of Broadway and Marcy. Clusters of men were milling about, looking south, up Broadway, or some cases east, up Marcy. I couldn’t see what they were looking at, but I could hear this weird sound that seemed to be coming from somewhere beyond the building over yonder, across Broadway and a bit south. It sounded like a cross between a fog horn and someone shouting the word fight, or maybe fought, over and over. Whatever it was, I’m pretty sure it was being made by a person.
While pondering this, I noticed the police car parked in front of the deli on the opposite corner. Apparently the cops had been in a hurry, for they had parked at an angle to the curb and backwards. Looking south, I spotted several dozen well-dressed Hasidic Jews—a mix of men and women—approaching Marcy, expressions of concern on their faces.
I wanted to know what was happening, but since I was already late to meet Rachel for dinner, I reluctantly climbed the stairs to the J train. As I reached the platform, the Hasidic posse appeared on the opposite platform, pouring in through the service entrance. I followed them on my side as they marched south along the platform. Toward the end, on their side, I saw a man face-down on the cement. A cop had his foot on the man’s back and was peering over the side of the wall that borders the platform. He had a flashlight in one hand, a gun in the other.
The Brooklyn-Queens expressway passes under the platform here. At first I thought the cop was looking down onto the expressway, but then I stood across from him and glanced over the wall on my side. We were ten feet beyond the expressway: the cop was looking at what was probably the grass along the edge of the road.
The Hasids stood together near the cop, gesturing wildly, almost like caricatures of concerned people. Some had their elbows on the wall, feet off the ground, and were peering over. The men wore those crazy hats they wear, the kind that look like enormous car engine filters but with fur on them. Because of the wind (it’s windy tonight), their hats would periodically begin to lift off their heads, so they would keep reach up to smush them down.
I tried to get a look at the man on the cement. He was large, with a mop of dark hair, and seemed oddly relaxed.
Then my train came and I got on, although I continued watching through the window as the cop took his foot off the man and cuffed him.
That’s all I know. I’m writing this on a different train, having overshot Pacific by five stops.
I think I’m upset.
Whatever happened back there, it might still be happening.
