Moment Magnitude

Sea of Love

I want to use the word "cadge" today. As in sponge. As in sponging off someone else's experience.

The cold returned last weekend, and I felt like hibernating and watching television. After the aerial ski jump competition, and the women's long program figure skating, I went off the Olympics. I lost the patience and fortitude to tolerate the same-old, same-old advertising spots, even with the remote control mute. I felt like I was getting hives.

I stayed up until 4 a.m. Saturday night and watched movies, one after the other: Stage Beauty, Sliding Doors (again), The Phantom of the Opera (Gerard Butler is so hot - he should be the next Bond), Roma (a Spanish/Argentine film), and Children of a Lesser God. Make what you will of it - or nothing at all.

Two-plus weeks ago, the night of Surfer Girl's birthday, her Cute-Boy somehow - imagine that - left his identification and credit card(s?) at one club or other. He didn't notice the loss until he returned home, to that town in New Jersey otherwise known as the location of a certain Ivy League university. Since Surfer Girl and he had planned a rendezvous the following weekend, she fetched his misplaced items, intending to drive down and return them in person.

She told me that she planned to wear nothing but peek-a-boo lingerie (more peek than boo), a garter belt, thigh-high stockings, and heels. She would place Cute-Boy's items in strategic locations on her person. She covered up in a trench coat. For the drive.

Sea of Love flashed across my memory, Ellen Barkin in the scene in that typical New York deli, when she sashays up and down the aisles, seducing Al Pacino (before his eye-lift?) under the glare of fluorescent lights.

That Saturday, she sent me a text message while driving on the New Jersey Turnpike. I figured just around Exit 11, or thereabouts.

She wondered what might happen if a state trooper had need or cause to pull her over, given her (clandestine) attire. There she is, in her XTerra, zipping at 85, no make it a hot 90 miles per hour. The "statey" catches her on radar, and speeds after her, red lights flashing. After she pulls over to the shoulder, rolls down her window and the aviator-styled-mirror-sunglassed trooper says, "License, registration, and insurance card," she leans over to the glove compartment, and the trench coat slips in both directions off her gartered legs. The trooper can't help but glance down, behind the mirror shades.

"Miss, do you know how fast you were going?"

"No sir, I don't." Surfer Girl utters in her low-timbrered voice, raising her right hand to her clavicle, two fingers touching the edge of the lace that lines the cup of her push-up demi-bra. She remembers, always deny, always say no. "No, I don't."

The hair stands up on the back of his neck, his heart beats faster, his khaki britches grow tighter at the crotch. His thinking blurs. But he walks back to the patrol car, and prepares to run her license plate number through the system. He rests his palm on the stiffened fabric of the front of his pants. Lucky for Surfer Girl, her license comes up clean. He wonders what she might be doing, waiting, up ahead. And he makes a decision.

Surfer Girl waits. Her heart beats faster, because she doesn't want the speeding ticket. Cute-Boy is waiting. she is distracted, but let's her right hand fall between her legs, which are still spread apart. She thinks, the statey, the uniform, the mirrored aviator sunglasses.

The trooper returns and when he raps on her window, she starts. Now, maybe more words were exchanged, maybe words that had nothing to do with a speeding ticket. Maybe Surfer Girl took advantage of the man in uniform. Maybe he climbed in, maybe he stayed in uniform except for...a fly. Maybe all she had to do was let the front of the trench coat fall open. 

Or not. Up to you. Let's say instead that she got off. With a warning.

Truth is she didn't get pulled over. She made it to Cute-Boy's doorstep. But we didn't hear from her for two days, unusual. Did she fall for him, stay there the balance of the weekend?

Nope. She wrote later to say that she had her fun, that the sex was good, that Cute-Boy would be a great friend-with-benefits, that it would be a shocker if she ever settled down with a man again.

Whew. (Not yet, not yet.)

Surfer Girl wrote, "As I drove into the Holland Tunnel, from New Jersey, I got this burst of energy. There is this energy in the city."

Yes there is, baby. And it saves us every time.

Fairy Tale

Let's just say that I was at a restaurant/lounge in the Meat Packing District this week. A celebration for the place's second year in business - no mean feat in this town. Free champagne and finger foods.

Let's say too that the Lieutenant Commander invited me, and that a handful of us gathered among the throng, Prima Downhill for one. In fact, Prima Downhill explained, when I noticed that several sets of identical twins in identical outfits were working the party, that her good friends (yes: identical twins) at Twinsworld had cast them all for this second-year anniversary. A "two" theme.

And as long as I'm listing possibilities, set-ups, let's say that the Lieutenant Commander knows that I am cash strapped right now. I'm maintaining that it's a temporary thing. But strapped is strapped.

And then this.

Suppose I was on my sixth or seventh flute of champagne, the last two poured from cans. Since when does champagne come in cans? This was Sophia - the brand of champagne - from none other than the Coppola vineyard. Yes, that Coppola. Francis Ford. The Godfather(s). Sophia. Lost In Translation.

My social studies teacher at St. Patrick's, the Catholic grammar school in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, Michael Coppola, Mr. Coppola, he said he was related to Francis Ford. First cousins, I think. It was 1971, and I remember one of my classmates telling me about how Mr. Coppola's cousin was making this big movie, in which a big wedding scene was being shot in Staten Island. She said her half sister or something was going to star in it, play the role of the bride. That would have been Talia Shire.

We pronounced Mr. Coppola's name with the accent on the second syllable, a long "o." Mr. Coppola. Pure Brooklyn. Not the way Francis Ford pronounces his name.

But I digress.

Let's say that I went up a step toward the bar, to get another champagne (can or not), and when I turned and looked behind me, I lost the Lieutenant Commander in the crowd. I waited a moment, and he stood up. It appeared that he had bent down - and indeed he had. He came over to me and showed me something he found on the floor.

For argument's sake, let's say that he held in his hand a small plastic sleeve or envelope, the kind that looks as though a string or ribbon should be attached to it, like a press pass, or conventioneer's identification badge. Except that this is one was filled with money, folded greenbacks.

Perhaps I said something like, "What is that? Where did you find that?"

And I looked back to where he had been standing, expecting to see a frantic-faced person. I saw nothing but happy revelers, grooving to the ubiquitous beats of the music the deejay was mixing.

And perhaps the Lieutenant Commander explained that he asked the people standing around the spot on the floor where he found the plastic sleeve - if it belonged to anyone. And no one said a word.

At which point, let's imagine, he peeled several of the bills out of the sleeve, and stuffed them into my pocket.

"No," I started. "This is mad. Surely someone has lost this."

"Holly, I checked." He repeated what happened. "I held it up and shouted to the people surrounding me if anyone had lost this. And no one came forward. No one."

And he peeled out one more bill and stuffed it into my pocket with the others.

"I know you need it. Take it."

"Thank you," I asked and stated at the same time.

We each left not long afterward, he before me. When I got into a cab home, I reached into my pocket and counted five fifty-dollar bills. $250. And I thought, if I found $250 every night of the week, I could live. I could cover my expenses. I could live the way I do. And be okay.

And then I thought of Striptellectual. Maybe she earns an average of $250 each night she dances. And that's good.

Let's just say. Perhaps. Supposing. Maybe.

No Cure for Romance

I'm sure getting a lot of mileage out of this shoe fetish thing.

Striptellectual shared a good story with me. One of those that you think only happens in fiction. This one is real. Only thing is, I don't know how it will turn out.

Striptellectual dances for a living. That's a shot of one of the pairs of shoes in which she dances. Yep, that's a six-inch heel. She told me it's not so bad since the Lucite platform is over an inch itself. So I figure the pitch is similar to a four-and-a-half-inch stiletto-heeled shoe, no platform.

Last Saturday, at L-Diva's smash bathing suit fashion show, one of the models pulled a Naomi Campbell and fell off her Lucite platform heels. She stumbled twice, it's never pretty. Kind of the same feeling you get when you see Olympics ice dancers fall.

This one.

That much shoe, like an ice skate, can be dangerous.

I have no doubt or illusion that Striptellectual gets propositioned all the time. First, she dances, second, she's a real beauty, third she has smarts and a heart.

She was here, with me, for Aida's last night. Together we wept over the untimely passing of that small life.

Over the holidays, she was working, putting in extra hours. She told me once that the holiday season is her busiest.

An attractive fellow paid extra for private dances in "the champagne room." I am sure, like any professional, she keeps part of her innermost emotional self separated, apart from the nature of her work. Heck, I had to do a version of that my whole corporate working life.

This time, she let her guard down - a little. It doesn't take much, once that chink in the armor is located. The slightest fissure widens into a gaping maw. She kissed him. She told me he was "shocked." I can see it, the tall, good-looking, nicely turned-out man, sitting, getting what he paid for, sois disant, and then, surprise. Lip smack. I don't believe that kind of contact is encouraged, or allowed.

I've never been in "the champagne room," so I'm surmising. But I can construct a picture of it in my head, crystal.

A woman makes choices. Sometimes there is an element of risk. You don't have to dance for a living to "get" that.

Striptellectual felt the connection, calculated the risk, and made her move.

Data were given, and the following week, she pondered contacting the fellow. That's not something she does. The men in her personal life are not the men she meets at work. I would agree with that, although once upon a time crossed that line. Men at work. Sometimes we do.

She sent him a message. He sent her a gift certificate for Amazon. Not your usual dancer-client exchange. Striptellectual trends more toward Amazon's original product line - books.

From there, they went on few dates. I'm assuming he's a Wall Street guy. He's in his early 30s, is divorced, and has shared custody of his two young kids. For him, Striptellectual explained, the romance is getting serious.

Then, a couple of Fridays back, the guy is having a friendly poker game at his house. The game ends around midnight, and he phones Striptellectual to say he wants to see her, but that he has to pick up his kids early the next morning. So what does he do? He sends a black car around to fetch her.

"It felt so weird," she explained. "I'm in this car taking me god-knows-where. I had no address. The driver knew where to take me. I felt like I was in a scene from a movie. The rich, handsome businessman who falls for the stripper and brings her to his house."

She mentioned that she wound up in Colts Neck, New Jersey. I laughed. I finished high school one town over, in Tinton Falls. Horse country. Land of McMansions.

"When I got to the house, I was shocked," she added. "I saw houses like that only in the movies."

Meanwhile, I'm thinking, my brother, Scott, the builder of grand homes in the greater North Jersey Coast area, maybe he built the place. He could have, for all I know. One of the last places he completed, in nearby Navesink, is over 35,000 square feet, and includes a bi-level garage for the owner's collection. All that.

At the time, he said, "These people don't worry about money, They grow it like farmers grow wheat." I still wondered what the monthly utility bill on a place like that runs. Nah.

Back to our girl.

"He treated me like a princess - what have I done to deserve this? At 7:30 the next morning, the same driver was waiting for me outside to bring me back home. I laughed, thinking that if the driver had known what I do for a living, he would have asked how much I was paid for the night."

Priceless.

Here in the city, I hope to see Striptellectual soon, have a little tete-a-tete, catch up.

Who knows? Maybe she'll wind up with the rich guy in the cushy, green suburbs of New Jersey. If she does, I'll go and visit. I can show her around some of the old places along the shore. Sea Bright. Donovan's Reef. Foot-long dogs at Max's. Springsteen's old hangs.

Of course, this would dash her dream of living somewhere in France.

But like a dollar and a dream, you never know.

The Coldest Month

I think my girls are getting worried. They've been getting busy. And I have not. Not that way.

It's not as though I am incapable of taking the initiative. Or that I am closed to opportunities.

It's just...I don't know.

Maybe it's the cold, the winter, the uncertain phase into which my life has entered. I knew it would happen, but the reality hit this month. The funny-about-money thing. The link to self-identity, the safety, the freedom.

Right now, I am busy. Busy inventing a handful of projects, any or some combination of which may pave the way to the next big thing. All of which require me to sit hours on end, here in front of this computer screen, plying elements of the trade, the craft, the muse, the imperative - of writing, the writing life.

I can still muster my mathematical skills, although for the twenty-some-odd year-term of my professional, corporate, book-publishing life, I never did more than assess dollar costs, sales, and profits after all overhead considerations. Heck, balancing my checkbook was more engaging than reading interminable spreadsheets, project to program.

These days, I joke and say that the only profit-and-loss statement I want to analyze is my own. One way or another.

Would I feel better, would I be better - if there was a someone? Someone to offer comfort and care, or just a really good neck massage? Someone into whose arms I could curl as I drift off to sleep?

In those terms, youbetcha.

Just not one of the rash of recently-met fellows who cannot summon the neural synapses to think or reflect beyond the end of their own noses. Astonishing, really. I opted to engage in a passive way, the last few times, to contribute less than normal, to hang back, listen, and watch. And all these guys could do was talk about themselves, even to the deadening level of repetition. Retelling the same story, the minutiae, the reliance on trite phrases.

I have lost patience. Again. I'd rather talk to my shoes. Or to Jake. Meow.

There are two, however, who are buds, pure and simple. One is some fifteen years younger, the other is younger by a straight ten. One is my movie-buddy. The other is my brunch-buddy. One is Catnip. The other is a Cowboy. The former is tall and heady-with-a heart. The latter is a basic westerner looking for the lady-love of his life. They both deserve everything.

   

Meanwhile, I have to see as many of the 2005 Oscar-nominated films as possible before March 5. And I still want biscuits and gravy for brunch one of these Sundays.

Time to Convert

A germ of an idea has been circling the outside of my consciousness. Time to let it hit the bulls-eye.

My girlfriends have been having flings. Sexual flings. Not sure if any of the flings will convert to more, will stick. But right on, I say. Right the fuck on.

Datomantrix leads the pack. A new guy has turned up, in from the wilds of on-line dating and Suffolk County. She altered her hosiery for a date with him last week. He's amenable to driving in to town for sleepovers. Yee-ha.

(I've learned a new term from my East End pals. They call the regions on Long Island between the Hamptons and The City, "Mid-Island," or "Up-Island." Interpret that as you will.)

La Latina has not been idle either. She has tended to her biological needs with, let's just say, one of The Erasers. Seems to me that she is moving through the necessary stages after the protracted heartbreak of last year.

Surfer Girl scored a touchdown on Superbowl Sunday. She admitted the next day that she would have preferred the extra two hours of sleep. Instead. Let's just say she truncated the fellow's ego at the knees. The next victim is on deck, and from what I can glean, is psyched. Bon courage, dude.

Liz Taylor Jr. indulged with a Spaniard who was in town on business for a few days. Perfection, I think. Open to play, she seized, ahem, the opportunity - no emotional strings. Guilt-free, she claims. And he had "the most perfect ass." Oh honey, I know we women can so relate - that indentation on the perfect boy-butt. It looks and feels as though it was made for the heels of our hands. Place them here - and here. Yum.

Hot Momma may be working overtime in L.A. and in LA, the latter (the state) offering her renewed physical opportunities with a gorgeous man she's known since high school. Romantic, I'm sure. A convenient distance away, that too.

Sometimes, we're just open. Open to it. Like The Eraser Hypothesis, a set of factors lines up, deliberate or unconscious, or both. For example, you might sort-of say to yourself, okay, I've pounded four vodka martinis, and this attractive fellow is nuzzling my neck, sending tingles down my spine. It's not such a leap, is it?

Is it? 

I have not indulged in a while. It's starting to gnaw. Last weekend, sprawled on my sofa, idling watching the Olympics, images of Il Romano danced across my mind. Lascivious images. Although I had allowed him to put his hands all over me, I didn't allow his massages to go further. He disappeared, then reappeared, and disappeared again. I am relieved that I didn't give in to him. I know I would feel bad now. And I don't have the space for that, at the moment.

Still I indulged in my fantasy. He smells of tobacco. His dark eyelashes are ridiculously long. His beard is rough. I remember looking at the tops of his hands when we had lunch a couple of weeks ago. Soft black hairs extended past his cuffs. He was playing with my fingers, dreaming out loud, "Cara, you come (it sounded like cahm) with me to Miami. It is a conference. You come." Dreaming.

Staying inside my fantasy, I remembered those hands on my hips, my legs, my thighs. And while I never saw him undressed, I could imagine his body as an epitome of all the things I call male. And adore. All the things that make a man a man. Different in every way from me. Nothing more exciting exists in the world as I know it.

I could imagine right down to that moment. When. When delirious from his artful ministrations, you cannot stifle that little inward gasp. And then.

And then.

Too bad he vanished. Too bad, because he was the first one to get that close...in a long time.

Black Amex

Here's the set-up.

Liz Taylor Jr. organized a surprise birthday dinner last Saturday for Surfer Girl. The ruse took place at Scores. Yes, Scores. Scandal. The one in West Chelsea.

We gathered. One of Surfer Girl's best girlfriends came in from the East End. As radical as she is, her girlfriend races motorcycles, is married with two kids, and appears to be the alpha-dog of her brood. And she looks like Angie Harmon's sister.

UK-Guy and Cute-Guy were on deck. Veddy Briddish accents and one-up-badinage. Lads.

It worked. Surfer Girl was surprised. And pissed off.

"I don't fucking like surprises!"

   

Scores' management told us to stop shooting photos. And since the bouncers were enormous, and sporting dreadful hair styles - imagine slicked-back versions of Fabio - in whose world does that work? Right. Scores - we ceased and desisted.

We had dinner in the back dining room. Who knew Score's had a dining room? But yes, a lot of options. A lot of options if you like steak. But for us, food was beside the point.

Sloan walked in and our jaws dropped. Well, mine did. A strange spark zoomed across the guys' eyes. Boing!

Sloan - her real name, of course - was a lithe, lovely young thing, who in another line of work, would have looked slender and perfectly proportioned. Not in this place. Not in this circumstance, no. Sloan had double-d fake breasts. She looked like Jessica Rabbit - come to life. UK-Guy lapped it up. In all ways. She confided that her real name was Jessica. Her other real name.

And so it went. All the while a blizzard outside.

Scores didn't take American Express. The guys blanched. I'm sure it had something to do with Eliot Spitzer's or some other investigation.

"You don't take a Black Amex?" UK-Guy asked Sloan.

"We used to. I'll bet we will again. Just not tonight." She was blithe, she added, "But you don't have a Titanium Amex?"

Talk about metaphorical castration. Or urban legend.

All I knew is that my debit card was going to groan. We would divide the check. Scores is designed to suck the cash out of anyone's wallet - regardless of what color your Amex is.

Back in the main room, Sloane gave Liz a lap dance, courtesy of UK-Guy. Surfer Girl was triple-lap-dancer-danced. That's a lot of junk. In your face.

I lost a single bout of arm wrestling to the motorcycle-racing hellcat-mama. My elbow hurts today.

When we decided to leave, the monster-bouncers escorted us, Goodfellas-style (now there's a surprise) through the kitchen, through the back of the club, out the rear door, and we dashed across the street, through the snow to Cain, where UK-Guy had table service waiting. Now he could wreak havoc all over his Black Amex.

This, after his descriptions of mad sexual antics in Australia. Think proximity to Thailand. Think insertable items. Okay, stop.

We took pictures. I am not posting them. Not this time. Use your imagination.

UK-Guy got jiggy with a baguette. Cute-Guy flashed a very long, pointed tongue. The hell-cat frenched Liz, I think.

We split around four a.m., and I knew I was burnt. Home, home, sleep.

Surfer Girl wrangled a limo, and the gang insisted on some joint on 24th Street.

Good. I jumped out at the light on Sixth Avenue, but not before I landed in the middle of a fender-bender altercation between a yellow cab driver and smallish-fellow driving a big, black SUV. The SUV had skid through the snow into the backside of the cab, denting the bumper. The SUV driver's girl was screaming. Everyone had accents. I phoned 911. Maybe a cop would drive by in a few hours.

Somehow, the taxi driver had the SUV driver's credit card. Yep, a Black Amex.

I turned and walked the one block home, shaking my head.

Everyone would be digging out later in the day. Everyone.

Snow on the Way

Last evening, the local network newscasts amped and advised about the first, real winter snowstorm of the season.

NYC may get up to a foot of the white stuff, before the snowplows rev up and roll in, and that blasted salt mixture coats everything, destroys our boots, corrodes the undersides of cars. A day later, and the snow will be shoved up into gray, soot-coated piles. Slush puddles will form at every street corner of every intersection.

I curled up in my red flannel pajamas, and pulled a comforter around me. Jake nestled across my lap, and I sort of dozed, sort of watched the opening of the Winter Olympics in Torino, Italy. Sometimes I just need to take a night down, quiet, recharge the batteries (notwithstanding the funny phone call at 1 a.m. from Catnip.)

La Latina has been working late every night this week. I can imagine her, exhausted. She'll zombie into her apartment, crash, and dream about Caribbean climates.

Hot Momma is still in Los Angeles, suffering through a bout of strep throat, even as she finishes business adjunct to the Grammy Awards.

Prima Downhill is driving north, heading for her mountain. She should hit snow this weekend. I know she'll be psyched. It's been high and dry too long.

Striptellectual is working downtown, making good coin. A pole is involved.

Surfer Girl and Liz Taylor, Jr. are either working late on freelance projects - or pounding vodka and champagne respectively. If L-Diva is with them, she'll perform an impromptu act - or not. If she does, men will stare, wishing, wanting.

Datomantrix emailed this: "I am cutting the crotch out of nice, thick stockings. It's too freaking cold outside to wear stockings and a garter belt. My date will be able to cop a feel just as easily."

Damn. Hot time in the wintry city.

Shoe Fetish

There is a little Imelda Marcos in all of us. I believe that Peter Braunstein is in police custody somewhere, and does not have regular access to a computer, not that he'd track this down anyway - but he might (yikes).

I put the word out wide, to all my girls, asking them to don their favorite footwear, whip out those digital cameras, and send pics of their divinely adorned tootsies - or, calves, or thighs.

I can just hear Surfer Girl giving me the shout-out: "Hey Hooker!" I do like my tall boots in the middle of the NYC winter chill.

The result is the latest Photo Album, see Foot Fetish. Consider it a work in process. Or progress. I'll update as new images come in. Okay, Ladies, you know who you are. Keep it up. Keep 'em coming.

Back to Center

"How do you go to sleep?" He asked me.

"What?"

"I mean, how do you arrange yourself? In your bed."

I was flummoxed, looked at him. Huh?

"I don't know. I just get under the covers, read until I can't focus, until my eyelids drop. I turn out the light, sink into the pillows, pull up the covers, and...sleep."

That snippet of conversation rolls around in my head, not every night, but often enough. When I climb into bed, I ask myself, "How do I go to sleep - at night?"

Now I tend to pay attention. I have four pillows, two too many. Okay, three to many. When I stand at the foot of my bed, I see that the nightstand - which is an actual desk discarded from Saint Patrick's in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where I finished grammar school - is on the left. I tend to sleep on that side. Well, I start out on that side. I turn down the covers, stack two of the pillows, and read until I get sleepy.

But I notice that I roll to the center of the bed, pull the other pillows around me and burrow in. I have regained the center.

A year ago, the heartbreak was living here. He sublet his apartment for the extra dough, and rather than crash at his brother's filthy flophouse uptown, he brought his stuff - clothing, dop kit, reading material - here, piecemeal, over time.

And he hogged my bed. A fitful, frightening sleeper, he thrashed, ground and snapped his teeth, snored louder than the parade of garbage trucks on the street, and often left the bed linens damp from his night sweats. And of course, the flatulence.

I did the laundry five times as often as I do now.

On the second or third (or twelfth) watching of Something's Gotta Give, I noted the line that Erica, Diane Keaton's characters says, about regaining the center of the bed. Yep, I thought, you have to go back, retrofit yourself to your own bed, dammit.

I think it took me six months, but my bed is all mine all the time now. Except for Jake. I let Jake snuggle - in the crook behind my knees, within the curve of my belly. In the morning, he pads up toward my head, kitty-shiatsu, all of his eleven-pound body weight forced down into each of his paws. His whiskers tickle my nose. We both sneeze.

And then I have to get up and give him chopped animal in a can, little voracious carnivore that he is.

John Kochansky

It was bound to happen.

Sure, I had read about the deaths of high school classmates over the years. They were people I didn't know well, or with whom I had little or no contact. I didn't connect to any of those death announcements. Until now.

I got the call from my mother last October. John Kochansky was in the hospital, in intensive care, in a coma, in Monmouth Medical Center. She received word, an email message I assume, from my sister-in-law.

He never emerged from the coma. He died on October 14, 2005. He was forty-seven years old.

John Kochansky was one of my brother's few, close, high school friends - as far as I knew. My brother could be secretive.

My brother Scott and I were in the same grade, all the way from first grade. I joke that Scott skipped kindergarten. When we were children in Okinawa, my mother told me that it had something to do with the cut-off dates of our birth years. Scott and I are "Irish twins," less than a year apart. I was born in January, and he was born eleven months later that same year. They put Scott in the first grade with me.

In high school, John was a year ahead of us. He was enigmatic to most of his fellow classmates. His talent was enormous. He drew, all the time. Inasmuch as we would sit and stare at the creatures and landscapes that poured - as if in a dream - from his pencils, in contrast, his words were terse. He said little, and whether it was a pose, a protection, or just John, it created and maintained a distance between him and the rest of the school.

Which was smart. And John was smart.

I have two pieces of John's artwork. One is a cast iron cat sculpture (see above). The other is, as he told me, his "doodle pad." He said it covered his desk, and he would draw on it when he was talking on the phone. It hangs, framed, in my loft.

      

      

In time, I grew to realize how open he was. But back then, in the mid and late-seventies, John looked to me like another of the long-haired, pot-smoking, Jethro Tull, Led Zeppelin, but most of all, Frank Zappa-listening, cool guys. On the fringe. They were not ostracized the way they might be in today's high school culture. They existed, as I remember them, outside of sports-playing, cheerleader-dating fray.

When he spoke, and he spoke to me often in the years after high school, and after college (he did a year at Syracuse University - I came the year after and made it through the necessary four years, that full scholarship obligated me), his voice and speech patterns still echoed Frank Zappa's. He could describe in detail, in a deep, lilting, low-registered timbre, interspersed with pauses and rhetorical questions, one subject after another. So many subjects fascinated him.

I liked inviting him to my parties. He would talk - at length - to a guest, who would later find me and tell me, eyes wide, about John's conversation, or to be more precise, John's soliloquy.

I remember he cornered one friend - at a party in the late eighties - a micropaleontologist (yes, earth sciences again), not to discuss ancient bacteria deep down under the ocean floor (which is pretty esoteric on its own), but about the use of a musical instrument called a gamelan. From there, he described African musical traditions, one in particular, of dream-sounding female incantations used in the former Upper Volta, now Ouagadougou, during ritual female clitorectomies. The micropaleontologist made a good audience. I expect that his hard-science brain was less horrified than perhaps any of the other party guests would have been on that, or any other night.

John was a hemophiliac. I wondered often if that made him fragile. He worked light construction when he wasn't doing his art. He married. He fathered a daughter.

On October 18, 2005, I drove to his funeral, held at The First Baptist Church of Long Branch. Was John a First Baptist? The church was packed to almost overflowing. I stood at the back, listened, and watched. It was hard.

I spied my brother and his wife among the congregation. After the services, I stood there, rock still, hiding behind my sunglasses. Scott approached me, we exchanged three civil sentences, after which he stated, "I have to get out of here. I need air."

Scott left through a side door. I didn't follow. We're not close, not right now.

For more on John and his work, see Gregg G. Brown's blog, News Transcript, Farmingdale, New Jersey, and Gallery 31.

The afternoon was sunny. I drove east to the ocean, the place where, in my teens, I would skip school, smoke pot, and ride the waves. It's built up with condo high-rise apartment buildings. The shoreline is artificially hard-armored. One huge hurricane, and all of it will be washed and blown away.