I still haven't figured out entirely what I want to do with this. I know I don't want to get to whiny and abstract, but is it ok to use it as a diary of sorts? I got in enough trouble for that in the past. But if I wait for the inspiration to write only about other things, I'll probably never write anything at all. So for now, the occasional diary entry.
I'm in Long Beach. The workers downstairs are on lunch break, and all I know about them is something I just heard, that one of them in particular has a fondness for redheaded women, but he compared them to wild cats. As long as the sawing and hammering stops for a moment, I can't say I care much if his fondness is for octogenarian triple amputees. It's another beautiful day and I'm going to head to a coffee shop soon, but I'll probably leave my laptop at home this time -- the walk yesterday was kinda rough -- and just write. A vague ache moves through me like toxins in my blood: yesterday went wrong.
I'll spare the details, even though they're so odd as to probably be actually amusing, [this part deleted -- just like I shouldn't shop when I'm hungry, I shouldn't post when I'm cranky] It will resolve itself, as the other fifty or so fights we've had in the past eleven months have. [this part too.]
Probably the most amusing part about this is that my response to his nastiness was to go spitefully clean his kitchen when he had asked me not to. Yeah, I'll show you, I'll CLEAN YOUR KITCHEN.
So I'm hoping the sadness I'm feeling will make for powerful writing. It usually doesn't, but I remain an optimist. This entry is much mopier than I'd wanted it to be, than I wanted to be, but I'm going ahead with it, and going to try again before the redhead-lover and his pals start jackhammering into my skull again.
Friday, September 5, 2008
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Portfolio Grace
I arrived in Long Beach yesterday afternoon. It was one of the most painless trips I've had in recent memory... MUNI to BART to Oakland airport to Long Beach airport and my luggage was the fourth on the carousel and then it was a short cab ride to Marcio's house. He had, in our texting, expressed an unusual interest in the exact time of my arrival, so I wasn't as surprised as he might have expected when, as I mounted the stairs to his apartment, he threw opened the door and shouted "Surpresa!" But I was still thrilled. It was so cute.
The day went mostly without event. We hung out on his balcony and looked at our "babies," his now-massive collection of succulents. We napped. We had dinner at Taco Bell (a more romantic gesture than you might think), and we got groceries at Albertson's. We shopped online for a few things he needs, and watched half an episode of The Amazing Race because it was set in Rio. We cuddled and we slept.
This morning I began falling victim to my latest addiction and had to eventually drag myself out of the house. I had help: there's construction going on downstairs at the house where Marcio rents an apartment and the noise it generates goes between claw-your-face-off annoying and actually physically painful. So I walked to a coffee shop, specifically, Portfolio, at 4th and Junipero, because it isn't terribly gay and and therefore less distracting, the iced tea is yummy and the internet is fast and indefinitely free, with the idea that I would work here. "Work" apparently translates to responding to my emails, responding to comments on this blog, more of my addiction, and now writing this post. With this work ethic, you must be shocked no one has hired me in the ten months I've been officially underemployed. The least I could do, if I'm gonna fuck around, is work on my latest short story. But no, I grace you with my presence instead. And a bonus, trippy pic I took of myself in the bathroom here at the coffee shop. Because I can.
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
September Song
Saturday, August 31st, 2002, New York City. I'm at the Eagle again. I'm here every Friday and Saturday night, drinking myself into one bad decision after another, trying to forget my apartment in Brooklyn that never quite feels like home. It's crowded and I'm standing next to a guy that I think is very hot, allowing the hairs of my arm to brush up against his, waiting for my chance to introduce myself, or rather, for the courage to say anything to him. While I wait for the never to happen, an interloper appears, a guy I'd met some months earlier during the only threeway I've ever had in my life that was three complete strangers. There were supposed to be more of us that night, but we went in two cabs and one cab got lost, separating us all from our connective tissue, and specifically separating me from everyone I was particularly attracted to, but I'd gone through with it and after it was over, I had breakfast with one of the guys, Thomas, who was not as clever, maybe, as he thought he was, but clever enough to keep my attention despite being emphatically not my "type." So Thomas appears and I am all set to avoid him but he is more interested in Bob, the guy who still stands next to me. Something awkward, profound and painful passes between them and I stand, invisible, observing, and feeling, even if I can't hear what they're saying. Thomas is clearly shaken by the interaction and leaves us without ever so much as noticing me standing right next to him. I thought he had a crush on me but apparently that crush was trumped by his feelings for this other guy. I give up on Bob, for maybe another night, another time, and wander back into the crowd.
Later I run into Thomas. He is as confrontational as I recalled, in his declaration that he is an artist, in whatever else he might have declared in his challenging way, in, perhaps, his need for my attention. I flirt but I am not really interested. Even though he's cut his hair and looks much better than the night we'd fucked around, I've pretty much gotten all I needed to get from him and think he might be pretentious, or worse, clingy. I think an artist doesn't need to tell you that he's an artist in the first three sentences out of his mouth.
Later, still, it's four a.m. or later, and I'm walking towards the subway. I can't afford to always take a cab home, even though the subways are spotty at this hour and it can take me over an hour to get home. I'm walking quickly, as I often do, and I catch up with Thomas and two other guys who I will remember nothing about except that they existed, at one time, in one time and place, to completely unknowingly shift the course of my life with their very presence. He thinks the fact that I've caught him suggests I'm flirting, and maybe he's right, but it's still really my intention to get home. I walk a bit out of my way with them, for the company mostly, but when we get to Thomas' house, some twenty blocks later, he asks me a favor. He needs to go get drugs for these guys, and they can't come with him, so can I sit with them in his apartment while he runs this quick errand? No, I have to get home, I say, but he knows I don't, and if nothing else, he has a charisma that makes it difficult to say no to him. So I sit in a stranger's apartment with two other total strangers and make small talk. It isn't that long before Thomas returns, gives the boys their crack and sends them on their way. He is going to smoke some crystal and he wants me to join him. I say no and he pushes and I decide to submit, as I sometimes do, to my passive nature and pretend that I'm just an observer in all this, and so the next thing I know I am sucking poison out of straw.
I've done crystal before. I've had decent experiences and some monumentally bad ones, but there's that part of me that's a ridiculous optimist, and so I hold out hope that this will be at least decent. I know I'll probably have to fuck him but I'm okay with that. If I'd known what would actually happen I would have rushed home, grateful for my empty bed. It starts out well, though. We sit in the kitchen and smoke cigarettes and talk about art about the nature of it, the process of creating it. He shares things with me and I wish I had things to share with him as well but he has no internet. He has the same computer I have, but no internet. He can barely pay his rent, and I feel grateful for what I have, though I don't stop to think that he clearly has money for drugs. We move into the bedroom, still talking. When I smoke crystal, I usually just want to talk, and find it physically difficult not to. His begins to use his heightened awareness on me, observing things that I do, criticizing my negativity. I see it, too. Practically every adjective I use, and especially the adverbs, is hyperbolic and unnecessarily negative. I start to feel self-conscious. I start to doubt myself. It doesn't occur to me to think that he's high and doesn't know what he's talking about. Now I can't stop talking and can't stop noticing every word I say. He wants me to stop talking and to have sex with him but I can't, I can't do either. Hours go by. He pleads with me to stop talking, but i can't, and now I feel like a burden, I feel like every awful thing I've ever thought about myself is true: I'm endlessly self-absorbed, selfish, negative, pretentious, skinny, ugly, useless, annoying. He wants to try to sleep so I take his keys and wander the city. It's afternoon on Sunday. How did this happen? Why did I do this to myself. I feel the city's heart beating beneath me, and it feels like one huge body made up of all these microorganisms, these people, and I am not one of them, and I don't belong here. I have no friends here. I have people I fuck and people I don't fuck, but no friends. I go back and try to lay with Thomas, try to keep quiet. I hear music that isn't really playing, a Toad the Wet Sprocket song, repeating over and over in my head. I close my eyes and I see places I haven't been, expansive rooms that look like airport lobbies. I can't interact with anything that I see. I try to get Thomas to give me affection, to affirm my bruised ego, but he doesn't, he won't. He's ready to have sex again and now that I've been here eighteen hours, now that I've been broken, I figure I might as well try. My dick doesn't cooperate but I manage to fake it. He wants me to cum but it takes me too long and he loses interest. We order food but I can't eat. We smoke pot and watch a Coen brothers movie. I watch the movie so I won't cry again. By the time I get home, it's Sunday night. Somehow I'm able to sleep, wandering through the shattered stained glass of my broken dreams.
Monday, September 2nd, 2002. I wake alone. I was gone a full day and no one noticed. Not even my cats seem to care. My spirit still aches from all the self-doubt I'd been sucking through a straw. I get on the computer because it's my doorway to the world, to world outside my apartment door. A guy in California that I'd been trying to connect with in chat catches me as I sign on to yahoo. The conversation starts out surface enough, but quickly runs deeper, then deeper still, and as Thomas had torn me down, Barton is building me up. Barton. Later I'll realize that Barton is also Thomas' last name, but I haven't put that together yet.
barton: you are inspired charlie
barton: do you know what it means to inspire?
We chat all day. Literally, all day. It's Labor day and he and his boyfriend have the day off. I look at his photos and I feel like I already know him, like I know him from somewhere, like we've met before, though we haven't. He sees something different, something equally powerful and intense, when he looks at mine. We connect our webcams and smoke together, and I meet his boyfriend and I meet his cats and I watch him cook. It feels like I've been crawling on my belly in a dark hole and now I'm somewhere clean and warm and safe. I don't want to let him go. He offers to bring me out to San Francisco for a visit and I decide to do it, against all common wisdom to the contrary.
September 19th, 2002, San Francisco. I walk down the long hallway after getting off my plane, and in the distance, I see Barton waiting for me. I will be a new person now. I will cut out my negativity like a cancer and I will start a new life here, a new me. I arrive in San Francisco and I never leave, except two short and painful trips back to New York to settle my affairs, or what has passed for them. My last night at the Eagle, two people tell me that I am the nicest person they have ever met in New York, and a former friend who I have not seen since March tells me that he was, and maybe still is, in love with me. I will never see him again. New York isn't going to let me go so easily, and San Francisco isn't going to accept me so easily once I decide to move. It turns out the broken Charlie isn't dead, only sleeping, and my attempt at a relationship with Barton and his boyfriend goes predictably sour. But Barton and I stay close, so close, intertwined, on the rollercoaster, our hands in the air.
September 1st, 2008, San Francisco. "You are bad for me Charlie Rogers. Please keep your distance," Barton's email says. I'd run into him and his new boyfriend at the Harrison St. Fair and I'd come home, slightly buzzed, and filled with emotion and love for the world, I'd tried reaching out to him. This is his response. It arrives on the anniversary, six years, of that horrendous day that I spent in Thomas' cramped and cluttered apartment. I have another boyfriend now, and so does Barton. Everything has changed, in the way that it always does and always will. I don't even know how to feel sad about it, except that I tortured him for years with my inability to emotionally commit, and if nothing else, he found a broken dirty doll of a boy and brought him to warm clean place where the boy could heal, and I was that doll, that boy, and I have finally started to find a way to become the person I was always meant to be. Barton should be around to see it, and he won't, and I'm not sure I would even want him to be.
I never did crystal again, and never saw Thomas again. I have no memory of who those two guys were, but I did end up introducing myself to Bob, eventually, years later. None of them know how they inadvertently sent me on this path, and it makes me wonder if I've ever sent anyone spinning in a new direction without knowing it.
Later I run into Thomas. He is as confrontational as I recalled, in his declaration that he is an artist, in whatever else he might have declared in his challenging way, in, perhaps, his need for my attention. I flirt but I am not really interested. Even though he's cut his hair and looks much better than the night we'd fucked around, I've pretty much gotten all I needed to get from him and think he might be pretentious, or worse, clingy. I think an artist doesn't need to tell you that he's an artist in the first three sentences out of his mouth.
Later, still, it's four a.m. or later, and I'm walking towards the subway. I can't afford to always take a cab home, even though the subways are spotty at this hour and it can take me over an hour to get home. I'm walking quickly, as I often do, and I catch up with Thomas and two other guys who I will remember nothing about except that they existed, at one time, in one time and place, to completely unknowingly shift the course of my life with their very presence. He thinks the fact that I've caught him suggests I'm flirting, and maybe he's right, but it's still really my intention to get home. I walk a bit out of my way with them, for the company mostly, but when we get to Thomas' house, some twenty blocks later, he asks me a favor. He needs to go get drugs for these guys, and they can't come with him, so can I sit with them in his apartment while he runs this quick errand? No, I have to get home, I say, but he knows I don't, and if nothing else, he has a charisma that makes it difficult to say no to him. So I sit in a stranger's apartment with two other total strangers and make small talk. It isn't that long before Thomas returns, gives the boys their crack and sends them on their way. He is going to smoke some crystal and he wants me to join him. I say no and he pushes and I decide to submit, as I sometimes do, to my passive nature and pretend that I'm just an observer in all this, and so the next thing I know I am sucking poison out of straw.
I've done crystal before. I've had decent experiences and some monumentally bad ones, but there's that part of me that's a ridiculous optimist, and so I hold out hope that this will be at least decent. I know I'll probably have to fuck him but I'm okay with that. If I'd known what would actually happen I would have rushed home, grateful for my empty bed. It starts out well, though. We sit in the kitchen and smoke cigarettes and talk about art about the nature of it, the process of creating it. He shares things with me and I wish I had things to share with him as well but he has no internet. He has the same computer I have, but no internet. He can barely pay his rent, and I feel grateful for what I have, though I don't stop to think that he clearly has money for drugs. We move into the bedroom, still talking. When I smoke crystal, I usually just want to talk, and find it physically difficult not to. His begins to use his heightened awareness on me, observing things that I do, criticizing my negativity. I see it, too. Practically every adjective I use, and especially the adverbs, is hyperbolic and unnecessarily negative. I start to feel self-conscious. I start to doubt myself. It doesn't occur to me to think that he's high and doesn't know what he's talking about. Now I can't stop talking and can't stop noticing every word I say. He wants me to stop talking and to have sex with him but I can't, I can't do either. Hours go by. He pleads with me to stop talking, but i can't, and now I feel like a burden, I feel like every awful thing I've ever thought about myself is true: I'm endlessly self-absorbed, selfish, negative, pretentious, skinny, ugly, useless, annoying. He wants to try to sleep so I take his keys and wander the city. It's afternoon on Sunday. How did this happen? Why did I do this to myself. I feel the city's heart beating beneath me, and it feels like one huge body made up of all these microorganisms, these people, and I am not one of them, and I don't belong here. I have no friends here. I have people I fuck and people I don't fuck, but no friends. I go back and try to lay with Thomas, try to keep quiet. I hear music that isn't really playing, a Toad the Wet Sprocket song, repeating over and over in my head. I close my eyes and I see places I haven't been, expansive rooms that look like airport lobbies. I can't interact with anything that I see. I try to get Thomas to give me affection, to affirm my bruised ego, but he doesn't, he won't. He's ready to have sex again and now that I've been here eighteen hours, now that I've been broken, I figure I might as well try. My dick doesn't cooperate but I manage to fake it. He wants me to cum but it takes me too long and he loses interest. We order food but I can't eat. We smoke pot and watch a Coen brothers movie. I watch the movie so I won't cry again. By the time I get home, it's Sunday night. Somehow I'm able to sleep, wandering through the shattered stained glass of my broken dreams.
Monday, September 2nd, 2002. I wake alone. I was gone a full day and no one noticed. Not even my cats seem to care. My spirit still aches from all the self-doubt I'd been sucking through a straw. I get on the computer because it's my doorway to the world, to world outside my apartment door. A guy in California that I'd been trying to connect with in chat catches me as I sign on to yahoo. The conversation starts out surface enough, but quickly runs deeper, then deeper still, and as Thomas had torn me down, Barton is building me up. Barton. Later I'll realize that Barton is also Thomas' last name, but I haven't put that together yet.
barton: you are inspired charlie
barton: do you know what it means to inspire?
We chat all day. Literally, all day. It's Labor day and he and his boyfriend have the day off. I look at his photos and I feel like I already know him, like I know him from somewhere, like we've met before, though we haven't. He sees something different, something equally powerful and intense, when he looks at mine. We connect our webcams and smoke together, and I meet his boyfriend and I meet his cats and I watch him cook. It feels like I've been crawling on my belly in a dark hole and now I'm somewhere clean and warm and safe. I don't want to let him go. He offers to bring me out to San Francisco for a visit and I decide to do it, against all common wisdom to the contrary.
September 19th, 2002, San Francisco. I walk down the long hallway after getting off my plane, and in the distance, I see Barton waiting for me. I will be a new person now. I will cut out my negativity like a cancer and I will start a new life here, a new me. I arrive in San Francisco and I never leave, except two short and painful trips back to New York to settle my affairs, or what has passed for them. My last night at the Eagle, two people tell me that I am the nicest person they have ever met in New York, and a former friend who I have not seen since March tells me that he was, and maybe still is, in love with me. I will never see him again. New York isn't going to let me go so easily, and San Francisco isn't going to accept me so easily once I decide to move. It turns out the broken Charlie isn't dead, only sleeping, and my attempt at a relationship with Barton and his boyfriend goes predictably sour. But Barton and I stay close, so close, intertwined, on the rollercoaster, our hands in the air.
September 1st, 2008, San Francisco. "You are bad for me Charlie Rogers. Please keep your distance," Barton's email says. I'd run into him and his new boyfriend at the Harrison St. Fair and I'd come home, slightly buzzed, and filled with emotion and love for the world, I'd tried reaching out to him. This is his response. It arrives on the anniversary, six years, of that horrendous day that I spent in Thomas' cramped and cluttered apartment. I have another boyfriend now, and so does Barton. Everything has changed, in the way that it always does and always will. I don't even know how to feel sad about it, except that I tortured him for years with my inability to emotionally commit, and if nothing else, he found a broken dirty doll of a boy and brought him to warm clean place where the boy could heal, and I was that doll, that boy, and I have finally started to find a way to become the person I was always meant to be. Barton should be around to see it, and he won't, and I'm not sure I would even want him to be.
I never did crystal again, and never saw Thomas again. I have no memory of who those two guys were, but I did end up introducing myself to Bob, eventually, years later. None of them know how they inadvertently sent me on this path, and it makes me wonder if I've ever sent anyone spinning in a new direction without knowing it.
Camera misconceptions
1. Just because someone is pointing a camera in your direction does not mean he is taking YOUR picture.
2. Not all people walking around with cameras are tourists. Why is it common to document the unusual but unusual to document the common?
3. The correlation is minimal at best between having a "nice camera" and being talented at taking pictures.
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Amongst the bears (again)
I had forgotten all about it until a guy at Peet's asked me, on Friday, "So, are you going to the Harrison Street fair on Sunday?" Oh, right, that. I'd avoided it in the past, as I'd avoided all bear themed events, but the year before, after becoming friends with a bear enthusiast, I had discovered that the bears are actually FUN, so I'd attended Harrison Street with two friends and had a great time. So the debate: do I go again this year? My friends that I went with last year have since moved away, and I no longer have friends here to do that sort of thing with, at least not on short notice.
Today I thought, well, maybe I'll go, but I'll walk there and bring my camera, and take pictures along the way, so if it's too much for me to be there by myself, I can always retreat behind my friend the camera, and if the whole thing turned out terribly lame, I could justify the trip as a walk with my camera into a neighborhood where I rarely take my camera. But at two o'clock, with the winds already gusting outside my window, I thought, well, I'm not sure, especially after getting the news about Salvatore. Marcio encouraged me to go, so I decided to go to Peet's, and there I ran into a friend who lives in that neighborhood and although he wasn't planning on attending, he assured me it would be warmer down there. (God bless San Francisco's micro-climates!) So I went, and he was right.
I wasn't there long before I ran into Tony. Tony lived down the street from me in Brooklyn, but moved here recently. Although we'd barely known each other at the time, we'd shared a room at
IML in 2002, and had sort of permanently bonded as a result, so it was great to see him, and it turned out that he is now living right around the corner from me. I hadn't intended to drink, but he bought me a beer, which I wanted mostly to get a bad taste out of my mouth. (Maybe gum would have been a better idea, but I didn't have any.) And once I started drinking, I was pretty much assured to spend a good long while there. I stayed with Tony for a while but we got spearated when I ran into other friends... and then other friends ... and then .. you get the idea. I always forget that this is a small town and I've lived here more than half a decade and despite being quite shy, I seem to know a lot of people. Some I hadn't seen in a while, others I'd hung out with just this past Friday, and I even met a few new people. I only had two drinks, and turned down an opportunity or two to go to the Eagle afterwards, so hopefully I won't be hurting tomorrow.
In the past, these sort of events always left me feeling inadequate: not hot enough, not cool enough, whatever. But today I had the opposite reaction; just enough affirmation from strangers (some who were quite, um, friendly!), just enough pleasant interactions with people I know and enjoy, all without needing to get hammered (or worse) to feel okay about myself., all without needing to embarrass myself for the sake of further validation (don't ask), and I managed to keep my spirits up despite running into my ex. (More on that, perhaps, another time.) A good day, and a surprising turn from a morning that saw me unable to finish my breakfast because I couldn't stop crying. Yes, a good day, and the only bad part was that Marcio wasn't here to enjoy it with me.
Today I thought, well, maybe I'll go, but I'll walk there and bring my camera, and take pictures along the way, so if it's too much for me to be there by myself, I can always retreat behind my friend the camera, and if the whole thing turned out terribly lame, I could justify the trip as a walk with my camera into a neighborhood where I rarely take my camera. But at two o'clock, with the winds already gusting outside my window, I thought, well, I'm not sure, especially after getting the news about Salvatore. Marcio encouraged me to go, so I decided to go to Peet's, and there I ran into a friend who lives in that neighborhood and although he wasn't planning on attending, he assured me it would be warmer down there. (God bless San Francisco's micro-climates!) So I went, and he was right.I wasn't there long before I ran into Tony. Tony lived down the street from me in Brooklyn, but moved here recently. Although we'd barely known each other at the time, we'd shared a room at
IML in 2002, and had sort of permanently bonded as a result, so it was great to see him, and it turned out that he is now living right around the corner from me. I hadn't intended to drink, but he bought me a beer, which I wanted mostly to get a bad taste out of my mouth. (Maybe gum would have been a better idea, but I didn't have any.) And once I started drinking, I was pretty much assured to spend a good long while there. I stayed with Tony for a while but we got spearated when I ran into other friends... and then other friends ... and then .. you get the idea. I always forget that this is a small town and I've lived here more than half a decade and despite being quite shy, I seem to know a lot of people. Some I hadn't seen in a while, others I'd hung out with just this past Friday, and I even met a few new people. I only had two drinks, and turned down an opportunity or two to go to the Eagle afterwards, so hopefully I won't be hurting tomorrow.
In the past, these sort of events always left me feeling inadequate: not hot enough, not cool enough, whatever. But today I had the opposite reaction; just enough affirmation from strangers (some who were quite, um, friendly!), just enough pleasant interactions with people I know and enjoy, all without needing to get hammered (or worse) to feel okay about myself., all without needing to embarrass myself for the sake of further validation (don't ask), and I managed to keep my spirits up despite running into my ex. (More on that, perhaps, another time.) A good day, and a surprising turn from a morning that saw me unable to finish my breakfast because I couldn't stop crying. Yes, a good day, and the only bad part was that Marcio wasn't here to enjoy it with me.
Requiem Salvatore
It was mid-June, 1998, a lightly drizzly night, and Peter was out sweeping the street, and I was out with him. It wasn't uncommon for us to be outside that late, when the streets of South 
Philadelphia would be calm and quiet. Days earlier we had lost our roommate's cat Muffkin, so when I heard the soft, plaintive cries of a cat somewhere nearby, I went looking for their source, believing I might be the hero and I might have found the missing cat. What I found instead surprised me: under a car, a strange-looking creature. "Is it a cat?" I wasn't even sure. We lured it out with Muffkin's food and it immediately started following me. The colors of its face were unlike anything I had seen, split right down the middle, which I woud later find out was the mark of a tortoiseshell cat, and I would also later find out that tortoiseshell cats were always female. She was so dirty that when I pet her, my hand came back black, but she seemed friendly, and her dirtiness suggested she'd been on the streets for a while. I wasn't sure what to do, so we decided that we would walk inside for a minute, and leave the door ajar, and if she followed us in, we would keep her. And she did, and so we did.
A crazy cracked-out neighbor passed, and in his crazy way, grabbed the mail out of another neighbor's box and scattered it on the street. Peter picked up the loose mail, and he name on the envelopes was Louis DiSalvatore, and so we named this strange new creature Salvatore.
The next day she disappeared in the house, was gone the whole day, and when she reappeared, she had completely cleaned herself. She would run to the window when she heard my voice on the street and bound down the stairs to greet me when I arrived home. She liked Peter just fine but she loved me. She had a litter of kittens a few months later, and Peter's brother accidentally let her out before we were able to get her fixed, so she got pregnant again. She was so attached to me that she jumped on my lap to let me know that her water was breaking, and let me carry her up to the cardboard box we'd prepared for her and her soon-to-arrive kittens, and I stayed with her for the entire delivery as I had the first time, but this time she needed my help pushing out the first of the babies. He was coming out feet first and she was having trouble getting him out because his feet were getting caught, so I had to help her push him out by grabbing the kittens paws and pulling as gently as I could, in time to her pushes. The baby came out healthy, and five more followed.
When our house was filled with cats, Sal was not known for her personality. She was always a bit touchy about where she would allow you to touch her, and was the only cat I had who would swat or nip. But when she was away from other cats, she'd revert to the sweet kitten I'd fallen in love with years earlier.
She survived getting hit by a car in front of our house, right in front of Peter's eyes, and I still remember him screaming for me from the street, inconsolable. Like a cat, she had gone and hid after the impact, but we had found her, and she'd let us bring her inside. She'd been fine.
She was the third of our cats to come live with me in Brooklyn, after Olive and Pea, but shortly after she arrived I had to move to San Francisco and I left them all there. temporarily. Pea returned to Philadelphia, and Olive came here to SF, but Sal stayed in Brooklyn with my friend Wayne. I always imagined we would live together again one day, that I would come back for her and bring her here. I saw her earlier this month when I was visiting Wayne, and she clearly remembered me, and it was so good to see her. She's a reminder of a simpler time in my life, before I'd quite formed, before I'd become whatever it is that I am now, before I'd gone through my problems with Peter and eventually moved away to a raft of new problems here. She knew me before I knew myself, and I had rescued her from the street, and we loved one another without wondering why.
This morning Wayne texted me to tell me that Sal was gone. I know she is just a cat, and not even the nicest cat I've ever known, but I'm taking this one kind of hard. I couldn't rescue you this time, my little girl, but I hope you're happy wherever you are, and I hope you still remember me, because I remember you.
Philadelphia would be calm and quiet. Days earlier we had lost our roommate's cat Muffkin, so when I heard the soft, plaintive cries of a cat somewhere nearby, I went looking for their source, believing I might be the hero and I might have found the missing cat. What I found instead surprised me: under a car, a strange-looking creature. "Is it a cat?" I wasn't even sure. We lured it out with Muffkin's food and it immediately started following me. The colors of its face were unlike anything I had seen, split right down the middle, which I woud later find out was the mark of a tortoiseshell cat, and I would also later find out that tortoiseshell cats were always female. She was so dirty that when I pet her, my hand came back black, but she seemed friendly, and her dirtiness suggested she'd been on the streets for a while. I wasn't sure what to do, so we decided that we would walk inside for a minute, and leave the door ajar, and if she followed us in, we would keep her. And she did, and so we did.A crazy cracked-out neighbor passed, and in his crazy way, grabbed the mail out of another neighbor's box and scattered it on the street. Peter picked up the loose mail, and he name on the envelopes was Louis DiSalvatore, and so we named this strange new creature Salvatore.
The next day she disappeared in the house, was gone the whole day, and when she reappeared, she had completely cleaned herself. She would run to the window when she heard my voice on the street and bound down the stairs to greet me when I arrived home. She liked Peter just fine but she loved me. She had a litter of kittens a few months later, and Peter's brother accidentally let her out before we were able to get her fixed, so she got pregnant again. She was so attached to me that she jumped on my lap to let me know that her water was breaking, and let me carry her up to the cardboard box we'd prepared for her and her soon-to-arrive kittens, and I stayed with her for the entire delivery as I had the first time, but this time she needed my help pushing out the first of the babies. He was coming out feet first and she was having trouble getting him out because his feet were getting caught, so I had to help her push him out by grabbing the kittens paws and pulling as gently as I could, in time to her pushes. The baby came out healthy, and five more followed.
When our house was filled with cats, Sal was not known for her personality. She was always a bit touchy about where she would allow you to touch her, and was the only cat I had who would swat or nip. But when she was away from other cats, she'd revert to the sweet kitten I'd fallen in love with years earlier.She survived getting hit by a car in front of our house, right in front of Peter's eyes, and I still remember him screaming for me from the street, inconsolable. Like a cat, she had gone and hid after the impact, but we had found her, and she'd let us bring her inside. She'd been fine.
She was the third of our cats to come live with me in Brooklyn, after Olive and Pea, but shortly after she arrived I had to move to San Francisco and I left them all there. temporarily. Pea returned to Philadelphia, and Olive came here to SF, but Sal stayed in Brooklyn with my friend Wayne. I always imagined we would live together again one day, that I would come back for her and bring her here. I saw her earlier this month when I was visiting Wayne, and she clearly remembered me, and it was so good to see her. She's a reminder of a simpler time in my life, before I'd quite formed, before I'd become whatever it is that I am now, before I'd gone through my problems with Peter and eventually moved away to a raft of new problems here. She knew me before I knew myself, and I had rescued her from the street, and we loved one another without wondering why.
This morning Wayne texted me to tell me that Sal was gone. I know she is just a cat, and not even the nicest cat I've ever known, but I'm taking this one kind of hard. I couldn't rescue you this time, my little girl, but I hope you're happy wherever you are, and I hope you still remember me, because I remember you.
Saturday, August 30, 2008
Neighbor Night
Last night, I decided to go out with my neighbor Garett. We've lived in the same building for three or four years, and while we've hung out socially before when we would bump into each other, we've never actually planned to go out together before. I was looking forward to it. Garett is awesome.I started by going upstairs and hanging out with him in his apartment. I've lived in this apartment just shy of five years, and have been friendly with a number of other tenants (most of whom have since moved out), but I have never set foot in any other apartment in the building before. It was really quite interesting to see what Garett had done with his space, versus what I've done, considering that our spaces are almost identical. He has a better view than I do, but I also have a lot less stairs to climb to mine, and my plumbing fixtures are cooler than his, but he has a bedroom door where I just have a doorway. It was a bit like hearing a radical remix of a familar song. We drank whiskey and listened to music and talked about our neighbors and smoked a cigarette on the fire escape.
Then we went to 440, which of course used to be called Daddy's, and Garett calls it Debbie's. I only discovered 440 a year and a half ago, but went there a lot in the six months leading up to meeting Marcio, and since I've been with him, it's been pretty much the only place I've gone. It's walkable, which is nice. On the walk there, in front of the gym, I ran into a friend I hadn't seen in almost a year.
We stayed at Debbie's for two beers, or maybe it was three, and then went to a bear-themed dance party south of Market. I texted Marcio: "of course they have food at the bear party" but what they didn't have was PEOPLE, so we didn't even get one drink there, but went instead to the Lone Star, one of many places here that I've never been. The Lone Star is a bear bar, I guess, though it was also pretty empty, and the most memorable part of that experience was that there was a table of Krispy Kreme doughnuts right inside the door. Yes, it's true. Yes, I had one. We stayed chatting in a corner of the back patio until closing and then we came back here. We had one last beer in my apartment, for the symmetry of it, and then Garett went upstairs and I went to sleep.
And then ... today. I ask myself how on earth I ever used to manage to go out two or three nights a week, considering that today I had a headache all day and never even managed to leave the house, and my biggest accomplishment was a three and a half hour nap. Seriously - less than a year ago, I would have had a day like today but then gone out again tonight, and possibly again Monday night. How on earth did I ever get anything done? It's nice not to feel like I have to do that all the time.
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