Category Archives: slice of NYC life

Fun in the Sun

I had something closer to my heart to write just now, but decided to write something closer to my inflamed baboon’s asshole instead:

Dear NY State of Health:

 I had a message on the website congratulating me when I logged in recently. The green notice told me that there was nothing more I needed to do to keep my health insurance as it is for 2016. I then checked my Inbox for the message received on 12/20/25 and read that my subsidy was being removed. I called to straighten things out and two or three days later got an electronic disenrollment notice.

A confusing ninety minutes on the phone with NYS of Health on 12/22 resulted in erroneous information being inputted on my application on my behalf. The website crashed mid-conversation, which made things more difficult still.   During the first call Marlon told me he would list my income for 2016 as zero, since my income for the last three months had been quite low. I described to him why it would be inaccurate to list my 2016 income as zero and then the call was abruptly cut off.

When I called back I learned, from the next person I spoke to, Izahn, that Marlon had filed my application listing my income as “zero”.   I was unable to see my own application on-line because of the trouble with the website. Izahn assured me that he’d fixed Marlon’s mistake, submitted a new application for me and apologized for the website being down so I couldn’t see the application he’d filled out for my continued health insurance.   He advised me to send the most recent tax returns. They are enclosed.

I had two emails on Christmas Day, the first referred me to a notice that turned out to be the disenrollment notice at the bottom of this letter.     Marlon’s “zero” apparently triggered the other notice I was emailed on Christmas Day, informing me that the income information on the 12/23 application did not match income obtained from State and Federal sources.

 I’d like to maintain my insurance coverage. Your assistance is greatly appreciated,

 “Your assistance is greatly appreciated,”

He added ironically, disgustedly, clenching his face into a fist with which to smash the reader of his words to a powerless minimum wage bureaucrat working for the health insurance industry, under the guise of a program to help New Yorkers afford overpriced health insurance.

“They Can’t Do That!”

(note: this is a reimagining of a hideous courtroom encounter with an enraged young jurist who senselessly flogged a tired guardian with the unreasoning letter of the law.  No similarity to the actions of the angry hearing officer, if such a person even existed, is intended, nor should any be inferred.  Elpidio Ortega and Dave Levin, although arguably based on real persons, are also arguably not).

You don’t really understand how relentless the law is until you stand next to it for a long enough time.  Years ag0, as my dying mother was impatiently waiting for me to finish in court and get her for lunch, I had a conversation with a judge, on the record, that went like this:

Judge:  So, counselor, you’re telling you have  never even made an attempt to speak to your ward and have no intelligent action plan for the octogenarian, Mr. Ortega, a non-English speaking client of Adult Protective Services.

Me: (pause) … that’s basically what it boils down to, Judge.

The Judge asks a series of probing questions, my nods, head shakes and other body language and gestures are captured only as silence on the record, as is my detailed explanation.   Then the judge says.

So, basically, counselor, again, what you’re saying is you have never even made an attempt to speak to your ward and have no real plan of how to protect your ward, an 80 year-old man who is facing eviction.

Me:  … outside of what I have already said, Judge, that is what I’m saying.  There is only one plan now possible for Mr. Ortega.

Listen to the voice recording again, “outside of what I have already said” is a non sequitar when all I’ve said is that it boils down to me having no idea how to proceed in this guardianship matter.  

My adversary in the Housing Court that morning, Dave Levin, remembers well what I’d said, the steps I was taking, that he had already agreed to my excellent terms.  None of that is on the record.  The cunning and ambitious young judge made sure to make a clean record.

“A clean record comes in very handy when anyone questions your ethics.  If you can produce a transcript where everything that can be used against you has disappeared, you’re golden,” said his mentor Sheldon Silver.  This young judge was one of Shelly’s golden boys, had skipped over several more qualified candidates to become a Housing Court judge.  He dexterously rode the switch to edit our colloquy on the fly, delete the rest of what I’d said in the six unrecorded minutes.

But they have a clock in the courtroom, right on the bench, you will protest, surely when the judge and you speak on the record the transcript has a running time stamp that would show deletions.   

Oh, of course, absolutely — in theory.  But theory, we find, gets the snot whipped out of it by practice, almost every time.

In case a judge needs a break to make a phone call or look up a point of law on the computer, or use the bathroom, there is a switch that turns a tiny red light off and on and signals when the device is recording, when the transcript is being made.  The judge turns the recorder off between cases too, otherwise the log would be one running mess of courtroom sounds.  

Like so many things where the law is involved, keeping the system honest is on you.  If you speak without making sure that light is on, you learn to your horror too late, your remarks will leave no judicially cognizable trace.  

Once you know about the red light you can check it, point to it any time it is shut off, make a record of the light being off, correction to the record.  But, if you don’t know about the little red light, and the ease with which a concealed button can be pressed and unpressed, you are fresh meat for thirsty blood drinkers.  

“Off the record, please, your Honor,” means the tiny red light blinks off, the clock moves along, and all conversation is off the record, unless the judge decides something needs to be put on the record.  

“When we were off the record counselor for the respondent informed the Court that his client has not been seen in three weeks, cannot presently be located.   He reminds us that his client has evaded three psychiatric evaluations and a Heavy Duty Cleaning and that the last time he was in Court he spoke of having booked a reservation for a coach seat on an interstellar airline.  Respondent confirmed his flight arrangements by consulting a large, hardcover note book, and reading a long confirmation code from a blank page, aloud to the Court.” 

Outside of that kind of information germane to the case, there is almost never a reason to put something said off the record on to the record.  Everybody knows the drill.  On the other hand, an argumentative, angry judge, might prefer not to have an argument that makes him look like a cranky crybaby asshole preserved for all time. 

“Well, your Honor, I’ve already been waiting over an hour for you to look at and sign the three line stip [a stip is an agreement, stipulated to by two parties – ed.] Mr. Levin and I submitted to your Clerk.  You agree that the terms are reasonable and I have every reason to hope another Order to Show Cause will not be necessary.  In the event that the agency unaccountably does not do what it has already promised to expedite, I have almost a month before I have to make a motion.   Mr. Levin and I are in agreement about its terms and he has been generous in this negotiation.”  

Judge: this is not a bad stip, I agree, but I have a question for you, counselor, as the Guardian ad Litem.   As you know I am required to allocute this stipulation, even though your client is not in court, even though you and Mr. Levin are both attorneys.  But I have a few questions for you, and as you can see, I have not been sitting idly by as you waited for me to sign your stip, which I could not have done anyway, until I’d allocuted it.  

Me:  You will recall, Judge, that I’ve appeared before you many times as a Guardian ad Litem.  We have seen more difficult cases than this one, but the system doesn’t really have a good fix for this.  Tenant owes over $9,000 and has zero income so there is no way to get him any kind of grant.  He has to move.  He has adult children, also living with him, also with no income.  They will all have to find places to live.  The City does not have such places, outside of homeless shelters.  The best I can do is have APS get an Article 81 guardian appointed, that will stay this proceeding for up to a year, during which time they will find housing for him, hopefully.  At least then he will have a proper guardian for the person, as opposed to a Housing Court GAL.  Not many arrows in my quiver, judge.

Judge:  Did you meet with your client?  Is this what he wishes?  

Me:  Judge, the man is eighty, with no income and $9,000 behind in his rent, growing by $800 a month.  He doesn’t speak English and my Spanish is weak.   But Judge, even if he expressed to me, through a translator, his firm wish to retire to Kuai,  I could not do anything more than I am doing for him now, everything within my legal means to get him an additional six to twelve months in a rented home he can’t pay for.  It’s an imperfect system, I grant you, and we both know just how imperfect it is– and Mr. Levin’s client will be out close to $20,000 before this is over–  but I don’t see at this point what Mr. Ortega’s wishes have to do with it, I have to protect him in his place as long as I can.  

Judge:  Why would you take this case if you could not speak Spanish?  You’re telling me you never even made an attempt to contact him?  

Me:  I was in regular contact with his case manager at APS and her supervisor, Ms. White.  They both confirmed that he does not pick up the phone or come to the door.  Spanish was not an issue to your law secretary when she called to ask me to take this case.  Is there some insight I’m missing here, Judge?  

Judge (voice recorder on): So, basically, counselor, again, what you’re saying is you have never even made an attempt to speak to your ward and have no real plan of how to protect your ward, an 80 year-old man who is facing eviction.

Me:  … outside of what I have already said, Judge, that is what I’m saying.  There is only one plan now possible to protect Mr. Ortega’s interest in not being evicted into homelessness.

“They can’t do that,” you will say at this point.

I know, and dogs and cats can’t lick their genitals either. 

“You poor fucking innocent chump,” I will say.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Projects

There may be individuals, I suppose there must be, who can continue uphill, pushing a worthy long-shot project, undaunted by the continual climb, the lack of landmarks, fellow-travelers, encouragement, the barren landscape.   Could be part of the myth of the rugged individual, of course, the invigorating but pernicious idea that one person, alone, can create a community to play a small role in changing horror into hope.   There are the usual outliers, guys like Don Trump, who start with nothing and wind up– or who start with relatively little, a few million, say… and…. ah, fuck Trump and the Trump he rode in on.

There is, it is written, a time to reap and a time to sow.  There are other worthy projects I’ve been neglecting as I neglect the larger one, an ambitious undertaking that has already showed its potential to do what it purports to do.   Few alive today are aware of its great potential, true, but, anyway, it seems a good time to list and try to advance the other worthy projects I must also put my back into.  Progress in one thing helps in another.

Among the 901 posts I have put on this blagh since August of 2012 there are a dozen or more that can be raked into the approximate bones of the Book of Irv, the tragic and illuminating story of my difficult father.   There are posts on my mother, an equally compelling character, probably another dozen.   One of each of these story types was published, in abbreviated form, for a small but decent payday.  You can see them here and here.  Although each bears the mark of sometimes arbitrary editing, the small violence done to my prose, the random insertion of a cliche here and there– a very small price to pay for the nice cash money I received for them.

There are several posts about animals, my ongoing vigilance against doing harm, musings on friendship, etc.   Each should be raked into a little pile, organized, submitted somewhere for money.

Of course, when I write of raking into little piles and organizing, the chaos in here strikes an ironic pose, winks at me saucily.  “You want to rake some piles and do some organizing, my friend?  Really?  Heh.”   I should take these sprawling dunes of paper, drawing books, boxes, cords, rulers, cutting boards, sunscreen, dropper bottles, rubber stamps, dead electronic devices, hats, zipper bags, music books and many other odd items and tame them, one by one.  Would make everything else much easier, no question.  One small triumph inspires the next.

There is also the memory of the excellent advice an adjunct professor in law school gave us at the end of that last semester.  When you study for the bar exam, he said, treat it like you are in training for a grueling fight.  Set a daily schedule of study, keep to it, but also eat well, work out, get enough sleep every night.  You need to be in the best shape of your life, he told us, mentally and physically.  Sitting for hours studying means you’ll need to schedule daily time for exercise.  The exercise will also help you unwind from your studies and improve your sleep.  I took him at his word and rode the bike for an hour every night.  It helped a lot as I passed two bar exams in three days.

After long days at the computer, mostly distracting myself, I rode my bike, briefly, each of the last two nights.  It was good to be rolling again, if also a little sobering to be reminded– when you get back on the bike it takes a while to build up to where you want to be.  Those hills you conquered on nightly rides in the past will kick your ass until you build back up to being able to kick their asses.  I’ve been there before, needing to get back into shape, getting back into better shape.  It is a pleasure when you do, a struggle to get back there, a longer struggle the longer you neglect to begin.

Like so many other things in life, my friend.

 

 

 

 

Ten Minute Drill

On your mark, get set….

wait a second.  I forgot my timer.

OK, here we go.

Wait, wait.  OK.  Ah, it’s no use.  The mind is like a molasses pond.  Hands like spoons.  Nothing good will come of this.

“There you go, again,” comes an uncanny Reagan in my ear.  

“Some boys are not content to let these nocturnal emissions come naturally,” says the Boy Scout manual, in the years before one spoke openly of masturbation.  “While this may cause no real harm, any real boy knows that anything that causes him to worry should be shared with a scout master or priest.”

“Father, I don’t know what it is, but I am not content to let these nocturnal emissions come naturally to me,” says the boy.  

“Oh boy,” says the reader, eyes rolled heavenwards, tired of this frog march already.  

“Have no fear, gentle reader, less than five minutes left,” writes the blahgger reassuringly.  

“We are not reassured….” says Meryl Streep, in her uncanny Eleanor Roosevelt voice.   It was her, the credits revealed, who read Eleanor’s part so perfectly in the brilliant Ken Burns documentary on the Roosevelts.  

“THIS is what you are doing today?” asks a disembodied voice incredulously.

We could use a class traitor like FDR in the White House today.  Is nobody inspired by his example any more?

“That’s it,” says the guitar in the stand, “you will pick me up and play some standard in C.  How about the intro to Stardust?  There, that’s a good boy.  Leave everyone alone now.”  

When she’s right she’s right, I think wearily, either that or a short nap, or both.

Still 50 seconds left.  Are you concerned about that?  I am not, just waiting for the beep.  Turns out I don’t have pneumonia, something much more vague.

BEEP!

 

 

Leap Into Action — as though you mean it!

Said a small voice, easily ignored.  I should get the timer, set it for ten minutes, since I can’t let myself slip into this tap tap tap right now, must somehow, you know, leap into action, as though I mean it.    I enter a kind of focused hypnotic state here, outside of time, not thinking of what needs to be done, thinking of other things.

I’m thinking about an art exhibit I saw the other day, beautifully mounted in a nice space on the fifth floor of an inconspicuous office building on West 21st Street.   The artwork was created by men and women of all ages locked on an overpopulated prison island, the stuff of nightmares.  10,000 people waiting, sometimes for more than a year, for their speedy trial, or to accept a plea deal that will spring them, with “time served”, from what can only be described as hell.   A tiny proportion, perhaps a few hundred, participate in art therapy sessions, sessions most of them love.   A much smaller group wind up dead, like the teenager from one of the art therapy groups, not long ago found hanging by some kind of noose.

Overcrowded with people arrested in NYC who can’t afford bail, this island is a fortress with a long history of brutality toward the possibly guilty.   Anyone who has the money to post bail is spared the purgatory these poor souls are jammed into.  I recall from law school that a person able to post bail is something like 95% more likely than one who stays locked up to avoid prison time in the end. There is institutional injustice in our broken Criminal Justice System, we all know that, and cities like NYC have long, sorry histories, we finally have a mayor who seems intent on addressing this injustice and blah blah blah.

In the meantime, people like this good woman struggle to bring a bit of light into that dark world in ‘the belly of the beast’, as one man with a talent for words, many years in that darkness and an unquenchable need to be violent once styled it.

The woman who arranged the exhibit, spent hours meticulously typing out the professional descriptions of each work, spray-mounting paper works onto mats so they could be hung for viewing, taking care of all the publicity and other details, is someone I’ve known since we were young teenagers.   I walk in and join three others viewing the art on the walls of the large, airy gallery.  I give her a tired smile and she returns this smile with one so exhausted-looking it is almost heartbreaking.  We hug and she offers me a tour, once I’ve had a chance to look at the work.

The theme of the show is Hope.  Hope is written on many of the collages, the elements of which must either be torn out and glued or given to an art therapist, who, at some other time, will neatly cut out the indicated elements for later collaging.  The prisoners are not allowed to have even the scissors kindergarten kids use.  Too dangerous.  While a marker can be jammed into a fellow inmate’s eye socket, they seem to be allowed to use markers, these mostly non-violent prisoners assumed innocent until their speedy, if long-delayed, trials.

I point out one drawing I love, among many that reflect only the game attempt to cling to hope in a hopeless place.  There was something about the drawing that drew me to it, the lightness of touch, the colors, the joy in the childishly rendered woman who stands with her arms open at the center of the frame, the lovingly rendered foliage and prayer beads forming a frame.  My friend briefly lights up, this was done by a sixty year-old woman in one of her art therapy groups.  She’d be thrilled for a note from me.  

I write to her, tell her the drawing was beautiful, gave me great joy to see, as it must have given her joy to create.  I tell her I hope she will continue to draw.  I felt good expressing this appreciation.  

I forget to tell her something very obvious to me now.  “I hope you get out of prison soon.”   I don’t realize that omission until just now.  I nod to think I’d done something nice in writing the note, can’t really get too worked up that I missed a chance to write the thing that would have meant the most:  I hope the tumor is benign and they get it out with no pain and that you have a fast recovery and are reunited with the children whose names you lovingly inscribed inside the heart-shaped frame of the prayer beads.

After a beautiful memorial service for a cousin of mine who died at 40, after apparently sucking every moment of joy and meaning out of her short life, I shook her father’s hand.  “It was a beautiful memorial,” I told him.  

“Yes, if only we didn’t have to have it.”

The art therapist cannot bring anything that can be used as a weapon into the prison.  This means no umbrella when it’s raining.  She drives over the guarded bridge to the island, parks her car and walks to a checkpoint and if it’s raining, so be it.  A small price to pay to do blessed work.

Lost My Pants

I have to get back to work, I am long, long overdue to get back on my house-cleaning schedule, and determined to get on it immediately, but I thought this was interesting enough to take a quick break to tap out.

I have been losing things lately, something that is not like me.  In spite of the chaos in my apartment, it has been rare, until recently, that I actually lose anything of any importance to me.  Hard to believe, if you look at the shifting stacks of papers, books, small items, shirts, musical instruments balanced everywhere in haphazard piles.  Take my word for it, though, keys, pens, glasses, chargers, important papers, almost never mislaid.

But lately a long-time favorite pen, expensive and hand-tooled, a cherished gift I always clipped on to my right front pants pocket– gone.   Like a kick in the stomach.   A couple of other less important things, too.  Troubling indications that I have to right the psychic ship.

The other night I went to the laundromat, washed, dried and folded a new pair of pants.  Took all my clothes home, put them away, went to Sekhnet’s the next day.  Came back a few days later, took a shower, went to put on a clean pair of pants.    No pants.

Slipped on a barrel with suspenders, like a cartoon character, dashed desperately over to the laundromat.   A glance at the lost and found pile, a few ratty towels and orphan socks, told me someone had taken the new pair of laundered, neatly folded pants I’d left on the counter above the rest of the laundry.  Why wouldn’t they?  No pants, crap…

This was a problem easily solved, and I did so directly.  Website of the store I’d got the pants in, ordered three pairs (they are not expensive pants), tapped in a bunch of numbers from the old tarjeta del credito and waited.  Following the progress of the shipment on-line, it was a matter of only four days before the USPS was scheduled to deliver my new pants.  Today was the day.   

Waited around for the buzzer from the postal worker telling me the box of pants had arrived.  Four o’clock, no buzzer, what the hell?  Went down to the lobby to check for a notice.  Opened the mailbox and there inside was a bag of pants.  How did they get three pairs of pants into a bag and inside a narrow mail box, I wondered.

“They must be pants like the Cockroach’s” theorized Sekhnet.  She was referring to the special lap-dancing pants a one-time friend had described to me years ago.  This connoisseur wore the thinnest pants available, they had the added advantage of being easily paper-toweled dry in the men’s room and made ready for the next dance.

She called him the Cockroach because of my description of her body language the first time they met.  He considered himself very charming, irresistible to women, and comported himself accordingly.  As I walked toward them in the hallway Sekhnet was leaning steeply backwards, away from him, as though recoiling from a human sized cockroach.   She looked in danger of falling backwards on her head, or jumping out of her skin.  He was pumping her hand, smiling from ear to ear, telling her how pleased he was to meet her.  She seemed to be wondering where she’d find a can of Raid big enough to spray this sucker.  

“Yeah,” I said, “they must be the like Cockroach’s.”  I opened the bag, three pairs, thin as you please, just in time for winter in NYC.  Now I just have to figure out how to make some space to put them away. 

A protest out the window

My rented apartment is in the back, away from the noise of the cars on the avenue that comes into the sunny front apartments.  On the window side there is a narrow alley between this old building and the one next door.  Out the back windows there is a larger expanse, a back alley city-scape where a rumble for a low budget version of West Side Story could be filmed.  The apartment is usually quiet and good for sleeping.

Years ago there was a man with Tourrets living across the alley.  In moments of my own frustration I would pause to listen to his outbursts, unintelligible growlings of rage, and think “the man makes a lot of sense.”  Then one day I didn’t hear him anymore.  I read a piece in a newspaper about a guy screaming vehemently at another guy in a nearby bodega and being beaten to death with a baseball bat.  I think it may well have been him.   Now I am the man with Tourrets, though my outbursts tend to be one or two screamed obscenities when the internet goes out suddenly or my computer has some robotic fun with me.

Recently someone moved into the building, seemingly a theremin player.   The theremin was featured on the soundtracks of many black and white horror movies, its quavering, wailing tone sliding eerily from low to high and back.  Used properly, it makes the hair on the spine tingle.  I was lying in bed one day listening to someone methodically going up and down the fluid scale of a theremin.  

After a good while, when the theremin began singing in regular intervals and more typical scales, I recognized these were a soprano’s voice exercises.  “Oh, God,” I thought to myself wearily, “shut the fuck up….”  I turned my head on the pillow so that my mostly clogged ear was facing outward.   The high pitched vocal exercises continued, but were slightly muffled.

After another few minutes a man with windows on the alley could stand it no longer.  “Will you please shut the fuck up?” he called gruffly and politely out his window.   I smiled as the singing stopped.  My smile turned to a smirk as the startled soprano resumed her exercises.  I realized it was time to get out of bed, and distracted myself in the other room as the singer continued to chase her dreams directly above my bed.

Talking to Myself

I mentioned to a friend a while back that I often speak aloud when alone, sometimes in thick foreign accents.  At times these outbursts greatly amuse me.  I felt a little mad mentioning the laughing fits I sometimes have while alone.  

“I do the same thing,” said my friend, another fellow who loves a good laugh.

Late at night exhausted Sekhnet has been maniacally practicing her Spanish with an app called Duolingo.   She’s also mastered a lot of French vocabulary using Duolingo, though she has no idea how to pronounce the language, which, as all Americans know, is very fwah tah tahn.  For some reason one night I heard the words “el pais” pronounced enough times over her smart phone that I soon found myself, in moments of silence, lowering my voice an octave or two and saying “el pais!”.

Sekhnet has a new surveillance camera for her apartment in Sekhnetville where I spent a few hours yesterday.  It apparently catches snips of any motion it detects.  She was chuckling over the snip of me, by the door, saying “El Pais!” to nobody, in a deep voice and with great emphasis.   This is ridiculous enough, but then I turned to pick up my sandwich on a plate and apparently said to it “come on, Pah-eesy” and took it into her other apartment to watch the latest episode of Ray Dawnovan.

A painful death

Sekhnet is very protective of the little mother kitten in the back yard.  The little beauty is about nine months old, all alone, and raising three kittens she gave birth to a few weeks ago (you can see their recent baby pictures here).  A very good mother, by the looks of it.  Talk about babies having babies.   We’ve seen several generations of these feral cats, it is rare that any live more than a year or so. This one is a beautiful cat who lives in Sekhnet’s garden where she is now raising her offspring.  

We could easily get her adopted– except that as she was born wild and abandoned young, she does not let anyone touch her.  She seems to be a diminutive serval cat, more wild than most, closer to her wild ancestors than a cat that will jump into your lap, as affectionate Cathead, who lasted about a year in the wild, used to.  She eats from a spoon now, looks at us expectantly when we come outside, doesn’t object to me petting her kittens and will occasionally brush against you, but is not trusting enough that anyone would risk having the little beauty as a pet.  Hard to have a pet you can’t pet.  Nor could we catch her without somehow trapping her.  Plus there are the kittens she’s now caring for.

So it’s tricky not getting attached, and at the same time being protective.  Sekhnet is fiercely protective, and so, while I was in the back checking some brussel sprouts on the grill I heard Sekhnet yell in her most threatening growl.   Raccoons, the usual troop, were fighting in the yard next door.  Sekhnet, thinking they might have been threatening the kittens, yelled to chase them off.  As she ran to the front of the house she startled another raccoon that was in her driveway.   Then I heard a heart-rending scream from Sekhnet and dashed to where she was.  “It’s Skinny Tail!” she wailed in despair, her favorite raccoon, the underdog, undersized, an outcast.

Lying motionless in the service road was a raccoon, there were no cars at that moment.   Cars come flying down that stretch of service road at ridiculous speeds, assholes in a hurry.  There should be speed bumps on this section, and cameras to catch speeders, but there aren’t.  Sometimes cars come by at 50 miles an hour preferring horns to brakes.   “He’s still alive!” Sekhnet wailed, through her tears, and I saw the raccoon was indeed breathing.  I felt an instant of relief as I saw it shake its head.  This is going to have a happy ending, I felt myself think.  A second later he staggered to his feet, took two steps and then Sekhnet screamed.  A speeding car ran him over but somehow didn’t kill him.    

Completely fucked him up, though.  He fell on to his back in obvious agony, hands pulled up on his chest as though praying, but every part of him seized by paroxysms, like in a Russian novel, the soul struggling against the agony of the body.  His legs kicked as his head jerked on the pavement, drawn up hands twitching in agony.  It seemed to last an eternity.  It was incredibly painful to watch and impossible to look away.  Another car hit him finally and blood poured from his mouth.  He didn’t move any more.

Poor Sekhnet was wailing, as she went out into the road to prevent cars from pulverizing the dead raccoon.  I gave her my flashlight, which I’d been using to check the grill and then to spotlight the raccoon, and she kept it trained on the little corpse as she continued waving cars around the body and crying.  I called 911, then 311, told them the story, was told they’d eventually send somebody from animal control to collect the little cadaver, could be up to 48 hours.  Sekhnet later told me I should have said the animal was wounded, they’d have come sooner, because a wounded animal is dangerous.    

Meanwhile she couldn’t stop crying and waving at the cars to go around the body.   I noticed the dead raccoon’s thick, bushy tail.   “Sekhnet, it’s not Skinny Tail,” I called, then, after a moment trying to console her, went to get a shovel.  With multiple flashlights and Sekhnet directing traffic I managed to get the dead animal all the way over to the far side of the service road.  

He’s lying there now, white marked face facing toward the oncoming cars on the drivers’ side, by the far curb.  Lying on his side in a comfortable sleeping pose against the far curb he looks peaceful.  It would take a drunk asshole or sociopath to hit it again, though there are always those flying down the service road too.

The Opposite May Also Be True

Went back to buy the guitar today.  As I passed through the main room there was a quiet vibe in the electric guitar section.  A young woman played quietly with a phone propped on her thigh, maybe jotting down a song idea.   A guy, who looked, with tattoos and serious Scottie Pippen profile, like a possibly dangerous gang member, was playing some meditative lines that brought Jerry to mind.  A few other people played, thoughtfully, none of them too loudly.  I reproached myself mildly, perhaps I’d been too harsh the day before about those exhibitionist wankers I pictured driving themselves into dividers.

Into the acoustic guitar room where a guy was checking out a booming electric acoustic bass. I took the guitar into the other room, with the acoustic amps, and slid the glass door closed.  An introverted kid with dark hair dyed blonde on top sat facing the wall, a big acoustic/electric guitar plugged in.   The kid played some interesting open chords, paused as I got in tune.  I played for a moment and the kid started again, an open chord the young guitarist could not have spelled.  The raga bass note was D and it was not hard to find things to play that complimented the kid’s strange chord changes.

The notes you finger on the strings form harmonies, chords.  Some are basic ones every beginner learns, G, A, D, Dm, E, Am.   You can spell these chords by naming the notes you finger:  G-B-D-G-B-G forms a simple G major chord, spelled 1-3-5-1-3-5, the places of these notes on the G major scale.  You can make the harmonies fancier, and weirder, by changing a note or two of a familiar harmony.  You can also change the voicing, the order of the notes.  A G chord can be played with a B, its third (a strong harmonic partner) on the low string. Lower that B one fret to a Bb and you have a cool fingering of a G minor chord, with the minor third in the bass.   You can add notes to harmonies, subtract notes, play open strings that give unusual sounds — there are many possibilities.  Jazz guitarists can tell you that you have fingered an inversion of a C6-9 chord, called that because the notes added are the sixth and ninth degrees of the C major scale, but many guitarists, particularly young ones, just find cool sounding chords and mess around with them up and down the neck.

These odd chords and eccentric invented voicings are among the first amazing things creative young guitarists discover, and this young player was working with these ideas as I was checking out the guitar I was going to buy.   The young guitarist was not insistent, in fact was somewhat reticent, but from time to time some of those odd chords would flower into the air from the amp, a rhythm would be tapped out. I’d catch a chord and bend a bass note along to it, let it shimmer, then play a little run ending with the flavorful riff from Norwegian Wood.  It sounded good to me, this interplay, and it felt good, too.  There could not have been a greater contrast between this interactive guitar player and the showy jacked up masturbator of a few days earlier.    

I lingered, checking out the guitar, listening to this kid’s ideas, adding notes and ideas of my own.  The guitarist was making musical sense, there was logic to the choices and a sensibility, a poetry, that made it easy to follow.  Most importantly, he left generous patches of silence among what he was playing, inviting oxygen-rich spaces where music can breathe and grow.

It put me back in time to when I was first learning the guitar, the magic feeling when something accidentally turned musical.  I thought of my friend Paul, a young man who couldn’t spell even a simple chord to save his life (and once, when his life literally might have depended on it, he couldn’t be bothered to learn to spell) but who is probably the most intuitively brilliant and inventive guitarist I’ve ever met.  He’d stumble on a chord shape he loved the sound of and would soon fashion a song out of it, then another, then five variations on that.  I remember his beautiful solo arrangement of By The Time I Get To Phoenix, a song that caught his fancy, though he couldn’t have told you the key or the names of any of the chords he was playing.

This kid in the acoustic guitar room was no virtuoso, but he played with great taste.  The way he lovingly took a sound and played with it reminded me of Paul, of my own early experiments with guitars.   I could have played there until the store closed, the guitar was nice to play, the room was air-conditioned, the amp had a great reverb, our levels were perfectly adjusted so we could hear the nuances of what each of us was playing.  I suppose we played for about an hour.  

I got up, unplugged my new guitar and bought it.  As this was going on the kid left, head down, eyes avoiding everyone else’s.  I wanted to say “hey, you sounded good.  It was a pleasure playing with you.”  It would have meant a lot to the kid, I think.  My reflexes were too slow.  I said nothing to the kid, but I note here; things may be horrible sometimes, but without warning, the opposite may also be true.  Be alert for the small miracles that make the rest of this worthwhile.