Sugar Hillbillies

Most people of my generation will recognize the name Sugar Hill from the rap group and record label behind “Rapper’s Delight.” What many of us, including T and I didn’t really know was that the neighborhood, nestled on a hilltop overlooking the Harlem valley between Morningside and Washington Heights on the west side of Manhattan, got its name from its reputation as an enclave for the affluent African Americans who lived there during the Harlem Renaissance. It was where they went “to live the sweet life.” And “they” included Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Thurgood Marshall, W.E.B. Dubois, Ralph Ellison and Langston Hughes, who wrote of the neighborhood: “If you are white and are reading this vignette, don’t take it for granted that all Harlem is a slum. It isn’t. There are big apartment houses up on the hill, Sugar Hill, and up by City College — nice high-rent-houses with elevators and doormen, where Canada Lee lives, and W. C. Handy, and the George S. Schuylers, and the Walter Whites, where colored families send their babies to private kindergartens and their youngsters to Ethical Culture School.” So there.
Add to this list now “Cookie Doe” and “Senor Rita”. The building in particular that we looked at is a century-old landmark (one of fewer than approximately 500 in the city), next to an old aqueduct, now a hilly, shady, community garden; across the street is the Dance Theatre of Harlem, and around the corner, you can look out over the Bronx river at the old Yankee Stadium – at least, until they tear it down to make way for the new one. How we came to get our 30-something mitts on this sweet slice of the hilltop is a matter of luck, timing, and charm. Between the soft economy, T’s reserves, my raise and credit, and our combined charisma – as well as a little help from supportive brokers, bankers, lawyers and developers keen to feed the “Second Great Harlem Renaissance” – we all have conspired to put these keys in our hands. The ink has yet to set or dry on all the paperwork, and it’s a risky venture that will drain our collective resources, but barring any great unforseen calamities, it should be a solid investment. So, expect an invitation to a house-warming and homecoming soon.

Homeless Where the Heart Is

Found: female senior citizen, Spanish-speaking, presumably Mexican. Age: 80’s, petite, slender. Appearance: disoriented, wearing a hospital gown, adult diapers, speaking incoherently. Location spotted: near the freeway offramp. Upon translation it was established that she had wandered out of a convalescent home and was searching for dead relatives and friends.

“Take me home, I have to get home, let me go home,” she pleaded in Spanish through her wrinkled lips, in her weak voice and broken cadence as they returned her to her room.

In the late 1950’s, when Cancun was still a small world and my mom was in her early teens, her mother had a stroke. On their way to the dentist my grandmother slumped over at her dresser. This is how my mother found her. My grandfather, a musician, became an alcoholic nanny-chaser. When he died soon after, my mom had to drop out of school, start working and spend time living with various relatives. Her older sister was restless and self-aware; by the mid-60’s, she had moved to Los Angeles to come out and live an openly gay, swinging life. Soon she convinced my mom to leave her wandering husband and come out, too. And so my mom followed in the early 70’s. On our passport picture, my 25 year-old mother sits straight up, her black Mayan hair in a modern flip at her shoulders, her arms around us – me, all of 3 years old on one lap, my brother, not yet a year old, still sucking on a pacifier, on the other. This woman was not far behind.

This woman found wandering the streets a few weeks ago was even then already a longtime family friend. She owned a diner where my mom was waiting tables when she met my dad who was in the military. This woman found mumbling by the freeway in a paper dress was there when the officer married the waitress. She was there when he wasn’t, which was often. She was there when I was born, when my brother was born, when my brother’s daughters were born. This woman, my godmother, is not our grandmother through blood, but through something infinitely more elastic – time. She never let me forget that it was to her arms that my mother clung during her labor pains. What this woman forgot, or chose not, to tell me is what my mother told me late at night – that when my mother went into labor, this future godmother refused to call a taxi or ambulance until the very last moment. A few minutes more and I likely wouldn’t be writing this. Almost 40 years later, my mom’s face still turns red when she describes my face being blue from complications caused by the delay.

When my aunt died of a heart attack a few years ago, my mom refused an autopsy; not because she trusted my godmother who was my aunt’s roommate, but because she suspected her. My mother was already suicidal; any poison in her sister’s body and my mom would likely be in prison. This woman was, as we all discovered in our own time, our own ways, actively involved with witch doctors and black magic. She brought priests, fortune tellers, and a parade of mystics into the house more than once. I found jars of oils and herbs; I heard and saw things out of the corners of my eye; someone else found things wrapped in black ribbons, Bibles with pages ripped out of them; my brother woke up to her staring at him in bed several times – once when doors were locked from the inside.

She had a spiritual guide in Mexico; on several occasions she flew people to him for a few private sessions – for a fee. She would often talk about how much money she had, but refused to wire me any when I called her from a pay phone on the streets of Chicago in the dead of winter. She would invite me to lunch, only to gossip and drill me about the rest of my family. She boasted about how much her real family loved her, yet she lived with us for over 30 years. She never gave my aunt and her girlfriend, nor my mom and her girlfriend any privacy. She constantly tried to turn my brother against my mother and taunted my mother repeatedly with a curse that her oldest son would never be near her and that her youngest would never leave her. And so, gradually, one by one, we all shut her out until we lost track of her.

But this woman is stubborn. She will not die. She lingers and haunts us alive. She creeps into my dreams and holds my conscience hostage. Whenever she appears, she appears with my aunt; they are always together, but not; they are always asking me to get into a car that is not theirs to take me – where? Sometimes she asks things like “Why haven’t you called me?” Every time I visit Los Angeles, her condition is worse, but she does not die. Somehow, this frail, soiled, senile woman manages to escape again and again in a vain search for something that feels like home. The world will not have her, yet she will not leave it. Does her karma scare her? Her endurance forces my mother, my brother and me to look at ourselves and wonder – “what kind of people are we?” long after everyone else in her life has stopped asking or caring.

I know that my mom, despite all assurances from my brother and me, looks at her and sees her own future. I see how it makes my mom cling to her partner of over 30 years, even though they’ve had separate beds for a while and have retired to different cities in Mexico. I know I see it in my future, and in how I cling to “E” after 17 years. When the numbers on our medical charts go haywire and our organs follow suit, will we find ourselves frail, soiled, senile and abandoned too? When my mother, a veteran of the first wave of AIDS funerals, says, “She asks for you,” and pauses…I recognize the regret and opening in the silence, I know that my mother is waiting, asking for me to absolve her and say, “OK, enough is enough; whatever this woman’s done, nobody deserves to go out like this; let’s give this woman a dignified death,” as if it were really up to us. In my heart, I feel that she is waiting for me to release her, and from the darkest part of it, I lord this morbid power over her. So instead I say, “I can’t. It wouldn’t be sincere. I would be motivated not by forgiveness, but by fear. I’d be comforting myself, not her.” I’d rather stick to my convictions and take my lumps in the end. I, you see, am a good faerie, a bodhisattva, an enlightened creature and all my acts are rooted in a higher truth. But, we all understand what is also happening. The three of us are taking our revenge, taunting her with our intimacy, our dedication to each other, to her exclusion. As long as we’re a family without her, we have won.

Why else would my eyes be bloodshot, if not from tears of joy?

Checking Out

I was in our High School library, the one where Van Halen had just shot the video for “Hot For Teacher.” I was always in the library, if not this library, then some other library. I had read that Holly Golightly lost her accent learning French, and as far as I knew, mechanics and leaf-blowers didn’t speak French, so shortly after Truman Capote died, I took up French. One of my counselors noticed and suggested Comparative Literature as a major, since I already spoke Spanish. I agreed to prepare for the AP exams. When the day came to take the test, I walked into an empty room for the French AP, a semi-crowded room for the Spanish AP, and a room overflowing with Academic Decathalon champions in the English AP test room. I was often at school an hour before class, and stayed an hour or two after class, longer if I was having an intense discussion about Apollinaire or watching a Truffaut flick. 

On one of these afternoons, when our library was pretty empty, I grabbed a book from the shelf, and was startled to find my friend B.M. staring back at me from where the book spines had just been touching. He stared at me as if we were in prison and he was planning an escape. Before I said anything, he said, “I know about your secret; I have one too.” I started to ask what he was referring to. My life was rife with secrets, I was unable to pick one to focus on. BM returned the book on his side. I moved around the stack, to ask him what he meant. But he was gone. 

His statement was ominous. I was pretty sure my secret life was wrapped pretty tight. Clearly this was about him. But what could we possibly have in common? We lived and grew up on the same block, went to the same elementary, junior high and high schools. BM was a tall, light-skinned Mexican with green eyes and an Irish last name. He wore glasses, kept to himself, and was devoted to music and played several instruments. He was rarely allowed to play in the street with the rest of us. Sometimes his skin would break out. All adolescent stuff, I thought. 

I was a loner by choice, anticipating life beyond Marshall  High almost as soon as I entered it. I was not planning to bond with anyone on my block, in my class, because I knew someday I’d be living in New York, speaking French, and wouldn’t be seeing any of these people again. I wasn’t worried about my sexuality because after all, we did go to school with a pair of 6-foot Filipino cross-dressers who came to school in full, thematic drag day after day. And everyone on our block knew my family was special – after all, someone had spray-painted House of Dykes on one of our walls. The only thing I worried about was the fact that at age 16, I was dating a 32-year old business man who left his office early to pick me up at school. But even that didn’t seem like a big scandal – at least not for me.

The other thing I could think of was that BM had been talking to someone else, a mutual friend, and a cruising rival. We’d see each other around town, and kept a comfortable distance until one day, just before he graduated we finally connected – in the Aimee Semple McPherson Temple of the Four Square Gospel, of all places. But even this didn’t seem like anything BM should be lurking around about. What was he going to do – tell everyone in school that I popped a teen load in a church; that I had a funny, blond, blue-eyed uncle in button-down shirts? So, what was BM freaking out about? It had to be about him.  As I looked around the library, it hit me – BM was gay too. And unlike me, he didn’t have the luxury of being raised by a swinging family. No, BM was raised by a tall, quiet father and a nervous, submissive mother – a traditional, Mexican country couple raising a large, Catholic family. And here he was, reaching out, as we all do, to a new family.

I stood there, feeling sorry for BM, wondering how in the late 1980’s teens could still be suffering like this – in Los Angeles. I mean, Van Halen was just slithering on our desks. This was where Waldo got off the bus and found his mojo. We were living in Silverlake, where we walked past several leather bars on the way home from AP classes. We could pick up copies of the Advocate, right next to the LA Weekly and LA Reader on the way home. I finished checking out my books and headed home. 

The next day, I didn’t see BM on campus. That night, as I was at home studying, I took a break and did something I’d never done in all our years living in that house. I walked up the block to BM’s house. I rang the buzzer, and waited for an answer that didn’t seem to be forthcoming. As I turned and started walking away, someone, one of his sisters, I think, peeked out from inside one of the windows. “He’s gone,” she said, and disappeared. 

Yellow Fever

I was sitting at my desk, thinking “the honeymoon is over”. I’ve pitched a few product upgrade ideas to the top dogs and have been subjected to adjectives like “genius”, “fabulous”. And now, the feeding frenzy is on. The emails are flying in. The pace is quickened. Results are expected. To make sure I don’t overlook anything, I’ve pasted Post-its all over the place. I am surrounded by them. They’re stuck on papers pinned to the wall, on the computer monitor, on the overhead cabinet, under the keyboard.
“This reminds of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’,” I thought, recalling one of my favorite short stories. TYP tells the tale of a woman’s descent into madness when her husband locks her up in a room in their summer house. In the narrator’s own words, “there is something queer about it.” If I allow myself to think about everything that is expected of me I too start seeing patterns and hearing voices in the yellow stickies. They are the faces and voices of teachers, librarians, professors, poets, journalists – everyone who ever conspired to convince me that I could, should, must amount to something substantial; that my drive, ambition, affinity with language, even my fears of exclusion, abandonment, dislocation – all of it, was of all bloody cliches both a gift and a duty.

As the voices and images ping-ponged in the echo chamber in my head, I spaced out and lost track of where I was, what I was doing, what time it was. I may have been sitting there with my fingertips suspended above the keyboard, staring past the monitor, through the screen, deep into the circuits, looking for connections to my own synapses, for a minute or two, or five. When I snap out of it, I usually have to get up, go out, get some air, get some coffee, grab one of the endless free candy bars in the kitchen. I’m pushing 40 and I still feel like at any moment, everyone is going to stop, point and make some ungodly pod-people sound that makes it clear I am a fraud, a hustler. The older I get, the less I feel like I’m in control of the charade. Like I might go postal one day.

Then, as I’m visualizing the scenario, one of my instant messenger blinks. Someone has sent me a video link. I click on it – because, you never know, it could have some work-related value – and there it is on the screen, my ape-shit fantasia streaming on the world wide mess: an office worker snaps and starts tearing up the office and attacking everyone in it. My anxiety turned to laughter as the office drone had a real-life Howard Beal moment. He was mad as hell and he wasn’t going to take it anymore. It looked so cathartic, like so much fun. But I can’t really say I want to go out like that, dragged out of some office building broken down. That would mean the post-its won, that I took them too seriously, that I really believed that these little yellow sticky squares meant something more than just a paycheck. 

I checked my personal email for an antidote, a quick shot of my other, real life. And there it was, an invitation to interview Yellow Magic Orchestra. “What the fuck with the Yellows today,” I thought. Piss, gold, jaundice, daffodils. Yellow, yellow, yellow. I forwarded the invitation to Earplug who replied instantly – “hell fucking yes!” And just like that, my mood shifted. No longer was I riddled with the anxiety of being an office drone and driving a mobile product into the ground. No, suddenly I was filled with the exhilarating anxiety of interviewing Ryuichi Sakamoto about being an electronic music pioneer. Looking stupid in front of thousands of readers all over the world put the post-its in perspective.

No, I would not be bashing in my coworker’s head with a flat screen monitor, at least not today. But in case you’re wondering what that might have looked like, ping me and I’ll send you the link. I’m online all day.

(Or, just click here.)

Funky Space Reincarnation

This evening T came over to talk condos and brownstones and Washington Heights. I was sitting on the window sill, smoking, one leg on the fire escape, watching the sun set on The Castle where Marie Curie caught radium poisoning. There were raccoons running around on the fire escape last night. They strayed over from the park and climbed the trees and scaffolding and zip, zip – up the ladder to the roof! The building is being rehabbed and there have been ropes hanging outside all my windows for weeks now. Once, I spotted one of my fellow Mexicans in the mirror, working the ropes. I smiled, as I splashed on my eBay-bought Chanel Pour Monsieur on my way to my 2.0 McJob, but he just looked at me, confused.
T laughed as soon as he walked in and fell on the couch, nearly spilling his catnip. Apparently, the fabulousness of my just-home-from-the-office look was too much for him to take in with a straight face. “What the hell is going in here? What happened,” he asked. On the iTunes, Marvin Gaye’s “Here, My Dear” album gave the room an extra lush glow.
It had been running through my head all day, especially as I walked around Hell’s Kitchen in the hot sun at lunchtime. New York, in the summer when it sizzles, is one big meat rack. People were glistening, frisky, looking tres pret-a-porter. The new office is next to Hooters; the construction guys love eating on its steps and ramps. For a couple of blocks, I walked behind two foxy chics in baby doll dresses and counted the heads turning.
Maybe it was the weather, the pheromones, something in the stars – but, I felt relief for the first time in a long time. My allergies were still killing me, and the wind wasn’t helping. But I had the unmistakable sense that after an extended limbo, I had finally detached, caught up with my self, my life again. Homo got his groove back. In time for tonight’s new moon and midnight rain.
And all day this record would not stop playing in my head. When Did You Stop Loving Me, When Did I Stop Loving You – “as I recall we tried a million times” chaka-chaka-chaka “pretty birds, fly away...”
But who was you? Silly Gemini, “you” is You! Of course. The answer to everything sounds an awful lot like Marvin Gaye. Thank God.
(The fact that this track also turns up in a Dior spot featuring Charlize Theron is just sissy gravy – and so has nothing whatsoever to do with anything. Who are you to judge me, anyway?)