Do You Have Synesthesia Too?

What I remember tonight is Al Jarreau playing on my father's stereo. The speakers were high, mounted atop two identical cabinets painted white. One stored the multi-decked stereo and all my father's albums—all his Peter, Paul and Mary, his jazz collection, his Crosby, Stills and Nash. His Al Jarreau. The other held a bar with tumblers and bottles and a pullout white board where my father cut limes. It was a little bit shiny but there were marks made with his knife on it. I remember the sound of the piano music playing from the speakers near the ceiling and the redolent sound of the ice cubes clinking against my father's low tumbler, the color of his whiskey golden brown. I remember the gold band on his ring finger. And I remember the smell of his skin mixed with smell of a cigarette.

That smell came to me years later. I had forgotten it. I was in my home in Venice. A salt-eaten, centuries-old apartment at the northern tip of the city. Paint fell from the walls in sections. I had begun smoking then, in that year, in that unusual place, egged on by a Croatian woman and a Venetian man one night at a low-slung wood table in a wine bar in the old Jewish ghetto with red wine decanters mostly empty in front of us and a series of plates slick with the grease of fried fish now eaten. "Do what you want to do," the Venetian said to me.

I was sitting at a Formica table in my apartment when the smell infiltrated me. It was the kind of table that pretends to be wood but is too shiny. I remember staring at a poster on the wall, only I don't remember what the poster was of. But I remember stopping my writing and staring at the wall and resting my chin in my hand and smelling something familiar and distant and warm and complicated. It was the smell of my father's hand. I saw his wedding band more clearly than I see this screen in front of me now, the heft of his knuckles, the white spot of the glint of the metal.

This smell—I can't describe how personal it is still. It is the smell of my love for my father, his love for me.

I have one of his tumblers still. It is low and a bit square for being an actual round glass. Its bottom is thick, making its gravity low and centered. You feel weight when you hold this glass, even though it is tired now and somewhat whitened and milky. He gave me this glass with three others he had grouped in a set after I moved into this apartment in Brooklyn. Only the others are lighter, with a slightly smaller diameter. There is only one of his originals, and I use it when I feel shameless, when I don't worry about breaking it.

He Looks Like a Blond Tootsie Roll

Lucificken has turned me into a classical-music-listening, tea-drinking, sewing freak. I spend my mornings sitting in a chair positioned in sunlight in the kitchen with the small monster on my lap and the evenings with said cup of tea and the small monster at my feet. It's gotten so bad that last night I was reading the New Yorker and delighting in the absurdity of its columnar ads (as Chicken curled at my side): "Freudian Slippers" (only $24.95), "Small Bird Bowl—Add zest to your nest!," "The Wallet Pen—Now, you always have a pen."

Then I saw an object I felt I must have. I must go to fieldandrose.com and purchase what is called the "American Leaf Charm Bracelet." How lovely those little sterling silver and 18 karat gold oak, maple and sycamore leaves looked to me. I've always had a weak spot for the trees of my childhood, and suddenly I felt that wearing them around my wrist was exactly what I needed. I remembered the sound of my childhood dog, Ellie, barking as she jumped up and down on her chain tied to the big oak in our backyard. I remembered looking out my childhood window at the falling maple leaves in autumn.

Then I spent a moment considering the bracelet's potential ugliness. How mixed-metal was this objet? It's hard to see in the black and white photo. Would I hate this thing as soon as it was on my wrist? Likely.

I came down from my leaf-charm-bracelet high and put the magazine down. No, Lucificken will not have his way with me. I will not become the woman who listens to WQXR, drinks chamomile tea and darns her clothing just because she has some time in the evening. Most important, I will not buy that bracelet—I will not become 80 years old before my time. Fuck you, American Leaf Charm Bracelet and every dangly sound you'll ever make. I bet you make some pretty sounds though. Hm.

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita.

I am not dog-sitting a dog named Chicken. I am taking care Lucifer in the guise of a shitting machine.

Little "Chicken" digs in his heels anytime I need him to do something, like, say, get the fuck off my roommate's bed. Or, say, walk on his leash without magically escaping out of his own collar. (Don't look at me with that cute little underbite, you rat-eared, crazy-faced mutt.)

Then again, he does play with plastic pot-scrubbers. That's cute. And I did wake up in the middle of the night to find him under my bed. Again, cute.

But waking up this morning to the stench of his turds on my bathroom floor—not cute. Then again, I am heartened by the fact that MotN told me he awoke to the smell of turds in his bathroom as well. His guest-cat had shit in his bathtub.

"At least your dog has manners," he told me.

"Manners?" I asked. "Because he shit on my bathroom floor instead of the tub?"

All I can say is that I looked up just now and saw him dragging his tiny, squat ass across my living room rug. Thanksgiving. Yeah.

It is Thanksgiving. Yes. I worked tonight. We ate cold, greasy eggplant parmigiana and baked ziti from the only place that would deliver. A tossed salad was brown and the accompanying bread was stale. Tomatoes so hard and white I have never seen. I felt sadness like never before on a holiday (because of a holiday) and wondered how my life had become so narrow I would work then return home alone to a dog who is frightened of me. I walked around my office and felt my feet drag on the floor. Really drag, in spite of being aware of this.

But we hit deadline early and I made my way down to my sister's house by the Hudson River. I walked 10 minutes in a sopping night, wet jeans, cap pulled low.

My sister opened the door and kept talking to her friends as I removed my wet boots and jacket and lay down my umbrella. I said hello three times before she turned to face me. Yet as I skulked into her house, I remembered how the light in there is always warm and sweet, and that the food is always ambrosial. This is where her kind heart opens up: in the welcoming, no matter how quiet or seemingly dismissive. She has still welcomed me in her way, and always will, I hope.

Brussels sprouts sautéed in balsamic vinegar and stuffing with chestnuts and pears. Too many other dishes with so many fresh and colorful ingredients. Reisling, then homemade pecan and pumpkin pies and limoncello straight from her honeymoon last week in Naples.

Her new Danish husband is agreeably drunk off a thimble of wine and her friends and I discuss the merits of creating such a thing as a "Fish Whisperer." I eat seconds and then dessert immediately on their heels, because, as everyone tells me, "It's Thanksgiving. This is what we do."

I go home to face Lucificken. And would you believe it? Here I am and suddenly he has come to me and allowed me to scratch his tummy and has climbed into my lap. He just licked up into my nose, and I can still smell his tongue.

"Adagio for Strings" but Samuel Barber has just been played by the New York Philharmonic on WQXR. My night went from drenched and sad to warmly calm, more the sound of rain than the soak of it.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Or Maybe It Is Sumer

Oh my god, I am living in the ancient city of Ur, New York. The skyline from my bedroom window is a golden orange, the striations of clouds above it lavender blue and the layers of buildings are ziggurats, stacked one in front of the next, giving those of us across the Euphrates-East River a rare vision of the towers of the people who dwell near heaven.

Now I look again: The skyline is flat, the clouds are gray and the people of this third-millennium city are, like, "Mesopawho?"

Snakey.

And They Will Know Us by the Name "Bill"

I did a double-take. Circling among some friends I know at a local bar was a man. A very tall man with shaggy brown hair and a patterned button-down who looked like a friend named Bill. Only Bill had moved to Boston.

"I'm sorry," I said to the guy, who was not my friend Bill. "You just look so much like my friend Bill who moved to Boston."

"My name is Bill, and i did move to Boston," he said, clearly dumbfounded.

Well, knock me upside the head and call me...Bill.

Mind you, this is the same bar where I met the alterna-Dan. [See "It's Like a Pantyliner," June 12, 2006.]

There is clearly a name/identity warp in this location. Doppelgangers abound, and I seem drawn to them there. I shall alert the authorities immediately before any more harm is done. To them. Or me. Or to you, my faithful readers who are obviously boinging around your room at this very moment from shock and disbelief. Get a grip, help is on the way.

31+31+30+31+30=Pazzesco

Sometimes when the express train and the local train pass each other in the tunnels, you can see across into the other one. They speed up and slow down so that you can catch someone's eye and not know if they will soon surpass you or fall behind, or if the two trains will actually diverge into the dark, on separate routes.

Today I saw a boy, brown hair, red cap, playing with an orangey-tan-skinned action figure. He doopty-dooped it about the window on the C Local and glanced up every so often to see if I was still watching from the A. It was a moment of self-awareness on both our parts, and eventually the boy fell behind as we zoomed past him. (It was also a moment where I felt oddly transported to the 1950s. Boy in cap plays with action figure on train. Stickball. Newsboys. The Dodgers.)

I spent the rest of the trip trying not to touch the fur rimming the jacket of the Upper East Side Lady on the seat next to me, and trying harder not to sneer visibly at her. She eventually put down her New York Times and daintily started adding sums in a column with a pencil. 31+31+30+31+30=153. It was quite a point-by-point moment of addition, as if she were in class with the kid in the red cap; her pencil moved slowly down each numerical column (1+1+0+1+0...) and then she took the sum and began anew with that number in a new, equally boring column. (Fur+Dye Job+Pencil=Horrible Woman on the Train Next to Me.)

Today I dressed myself (as I tend to), rushed out the door, bumbled down the stairs, realized I had a hole in my skirt, ran back up the stairs, changed my skirt, left on my shirt, tussled with my hair (again) and ran back down the stairs to go to work.

Here I am, in the office, now feeling...naked. It is the occasional feeling that I have forgotten to put on some important piece of clothing, but no matter how many times I take stock of what I'm wearing, I seem to be entirely clothed. Disconcerting. And dreamlike.

And now I have that feeling that I often got in Venice: Something odd is about to happen, as we knew when the city's alarm would sound in the morning for the soon-to-come acqua alta. The city would soon flood and we would all be donning Wellingtons and jumping from makeshift plywood bridge to makeshift plywood bridge and laughing like foreign hyenas, trying desperately to not fall into the filthy water.

It is a day that can only end in one way, and I think you all know what that means.

You do, I know you do.

(Sneaky folk.)

The Rule of Threes

My publisher just dropped by to give me a pen that lights up bright blue when you click the top: wicky-wonky, wicky-wonky...blue!

I will be baby-sitting a dog named Chicken over Thanksgiving.

And I gasped when I accidentally bumped into a colleague in the newsroom just now. Not because he scared me, but because his hair was sticking up like a loony-bin madman's.

(Laugh so you don't cry. Laugh while you cry. Cry.)

~

Addendum:

I asked an editor how his day off yesterday was.

"Shitty," he said.

"Why?" I asked.

"Because I went to a wedding," he said.

"You don't like weddings?" I asked.

"I hate weddings," he said.

"But weddings can be so beautiful," I said.

"So can a gorilla eating your head," he said.

Autumn in New York

The wind is whipping up against my windows like an animal tonight. But I couldn't sleep anyway. So now I sit here writing by the light of my computer screen and I will tell you about a party.

It was a warmer than usual night, and the couple had gathered their friends and parents and assorted others; like the girl who came in tall and lanky, in opaque black tights and a gray flannel miniskirt with a face from a movie that could have starred Marcello Mastroianni.

The lights were warm and soft. Guests were sweating from a strange heat even as it neared midnight on this November evening. On a stretch of avenue in downtown Manhattan, the apartment sprawled beyond what could be called very big: It likely took up a larger space than any apartment you will be privileged to see in this city in your lifetime, and then it joined itself to another of the same size. Blond-wood floors, expanses of white, books. One small barking black dog.

An elevator opens into the living room. On the walls are so many Picasso and Matisse lithographs and drawings they begin to feel like woozy backdrop rather than rare and fantastic objects, each to be admired on its own. Then, maybe, you remember to look at them, one by one by one, and you lose yourself for an unspecified amount of time as you examine every angle of the face of a horse/woman or a sprawling nude. You wander through each room with a glass of prosecco or vodka or red wine in hand and you find yourself stopping to stare at a tiny Miro, or a print by a contemporary of Malevich.

An older couple plays host tonight, former hippies who have the culture-soaked intelligence of Old New Yorkers, people who probably smoked pot with abandon and hosted similar soirees forty years ago, only in tinier apartments with smokier airs. The young couple we have gathered to celebrate is handsome and smart and look sparkling and in love, if a bit stressed to be the center of attention. They are less sure than their hosts, but the kind of people who know how to mix with couples forty years older than them, appreciate what they can teach and offer, which, on this night, is the quiet kind of love that throws young couples parties.

In a back room, one host offered a young woman three fingers from his secret stash of tequila. They laughed at their covert sharing of what he called his "new drug," new because he had long stopped taking another kind, he confessed. She drank with him, then wandered back to the epicenter of the party and spent the rest of the night sipping from what seemed a renewable glass of alcohol, a cup that appeared to never actually drain, never truly be empty.

Buy Your Treasure on the Manhattan-Bound A

"Fourteen-karat gold ring...
That's what i found...
I'll sell it right now...
Cheap, cheap, cheap."

He recites it like a snake-oil hawker giving his spiel in Olde Tyme days. I can't see his face--it rings forth from behind me, way back in the car, clear and full-bodied, vaguely hucksterish.

(Cheap, cheap, cheap, like a tired, old bird. Best offer, it's yours.)

"A jeweler estimated it at $240. I'll sell it to you right now for your best offer."

Minutes go by, and now the value has gone up.

"I showed it to two jewelers. It weighs 5.8 grams. They said it was worth $260 to $290."

I point out this increase in value to the woman next to me, who snorts.

"A guy in a pawn shop said he'd buy it for $80 but I don't have a New York license. I'll sell it to you now for your best offer."

The man finally slumps into my sight: He is stoop-shouldered and young, has a goatee and an olive-green cap. A hand-rolled cigarette rests behind his ear.

"I am not knocking Jesus, but it's a beautiful depiction of him. You've got to see it to appreciate it. I'll sell it right now. For your best offer. I'll even take one-tenth what the pawn shop said it was worth. Anything. Whatever your best offer is."

"It's 14-karat gold. It has the imprint inside it..."

"Nobody interested, huh?"

"The detail is amazing..."

"I found a ring..."

"City of Masochists"

"Yo, nigga. She's always on my ass. She knows I'm smokin' something, and she's always trying to catch me out."

"Niggas" fly from this kid's mouth one-two-three-four as he spouts about how he tests negative but this woman, whoever she is, is always trying to trip him up.

"I drink Colt 45s and two cups of water," he tells his friend, who smiles and nods, yeah, that'll trip her up.

They know I am listening. I stop caring and the conversation swims into the distance, floaty.

A friend said to me last night, "New York is a city of masochists."

A man raps his knuckles on his temple, just below his cornrows. One-two-three-four-five, then he is still as if it never happened.

(My friend told me last night, "New York is a city of masochists.")

There are empty plasticine bags all over the streets of the city and the USS Intrepid is stuck too deeply in mud to be tugged out of port for an overhaul.

A dead praying mantis lay on my stoop yesterday. I looked to see if its head were missing in case a female had eaten it after copulating.

Yeah, a friend said to me last night, "New York is a city of masochists."

The Glamorous World of Journalism

Forty-five minutes to get to a shitty part of an assfuck borough. Rows of Tudor houses next to gas stations and strip malls. A car driver who won’t stop blathering about directions and which way each street goes. I, it must be said, have a hangover. Everything sucks harder than it has to.

I reach my destination on time, thanks to Blathering Driver, who tells me repeatedly during our journey that he will do his best to get me there at 3 o’clock, in time for my scheduled interview. “I’m good at hustling,” he says.

He is. We arrive. I ungracefully push myself out the car door and clamber up some stairs to greet my photographer, who is already waiting for the interview. We are at the office of a famous fashion designer. He, it appears, is running late. So we sit. Me and the photog, who turns out to be one of those people who ask questions, questions like: “What’s the last book you read?” “Where do you live, where did you grow up?” “Where did you go to school?” “What job did you have before this?” I, it must be repeated, have a hangover. I answer curtly, hoping for the probing to end.

“Can I just take your picture?” he asks me as we wait in the reception area, which is violently colored in fluorescents.

“I’d rather you didn’t, no,” I tell him.

He focuses his camera on me anyway, so I sort of ignore him while he snaps a couple of shots. I look up, asking him to please stop, and he takes a few more while I am looking at him.

“I never do this,” he says, “take pictures of the reporter I’m with. I think it’s those glasses.”

“Um, ok. Just stop, though?” I tell him. “I’m feeling pretty unphotogenic today.” In truth, I am free of makeup, my hair is long and loose, and I feel sleepy. It’s a bare feeling, which is probably what he’s liking. Whatever it is he’s liking, however, is getting a little beyond creepy. Witness:

“Well, it’s the photographer who can make you look good, so don’t worry about that. And I can use Photoshop.”

Bite me.

(Forty-five minutes later, I head back to my office, cursing the designer who never showed. Asswipe.)

And just now a reporter wanders in. I heartily complain my cranky heart out to him.

“Don’t worry, McBickle,” he says. “You’ll be dead soon.”