Moment Magnitude

Lemonade

I am dead tired of making lemonade.

Not only lemonade, but lemon chiffon and/or meringue pie, lemon curd, lemon custard, lemon squash, lemon anything-else. I'm done with it.

This year, 2007 threw bucket-loads of lemons at me. And I am fearful and hopeful at the same time, because while the year is winding down, more shit could happen.

To wit, a fast recap (not dispassionate, not at all, not an iota):

Early in the year, the IRS audited me. Corporate for all my professional life, the first year out as an independent, and whammo. I pushed back, the claim is in appeals (abeyance, a moratorium), so I am not dwelling on it as much. The sum might amount to $4 or $5K. It's not a lot, and that's not the issue. It's the principle of the thing.

In spring, Jake passed, after more than sixteen years of cat life. Aida, his litter mate-sister passed more than a year earlier, and although I allowed him to slow down in his old age, without veterinarian intervention (I have doubted that decision often, even when I counter it with the knowledge that the vets would have injected him with needles, placing him in an intensive-care, metal cage - and that would have been worse), his little body withered away until he fell into a coma.  He breathed his last, collapsed on my bed, as I whispered the stories of his life. I miss him every day.

My younger sister, 39-years-old, was diagnosed with breast cancer, stage four. And before she had a fighting chance, her husband carbon-monoxide asphyxiated her, their innocent five-year-old daughter, and himself in a double-murder-suicide. This happened on September 7, and made the front page news for a handful of days in Portland, Oregon. All I know is that the dysfunction in my family saved me this time. I hadn't seen or really communicated with my sister in, I guess, ten years. I never met my niece. If I had, I would be writing this through a medicated haze. As it was, I self-anesthetized the first week after it happened. Did the tragedy mend other rifts in my riven family? I have no hard evidence yet. I have exchanged some conversation with my brother, who acted heroically, traveling to Portland with my father, making identifications at the coroner, collecting some of my sister's belongings from the scene.

I do know that my mother's and stepfather's hearts are broken, and the best I can do is to spend time with them, no mean feat in these cash-strapped days.

Over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, my car was stolen. My beloved 2001 Audi S4 Avant (the bi-turbo engine, limited production, no longer available), was taken from right in front of my building in Chelsea. The police weren't positive, but I was. I checked my EZPass account. For those who do not have these indispensable windshield devices, they allow drivers to pass through toll booths without stopping. The toll is electronically recorded from the windshield device. Women have caught cheating husbands from reviewing their EZPass accounts online. I think a reference was made to such an activity on an episode of The Sopranos. The moment I checked my EZPass account, I saw that my car had been taken between four and five in the morning, to Newark, also known as "cop shop central." The car was targeted. Just last night, a Maserati, several BMW's, Volvos, Range Rovers, and an Escalade were parked on my block. I am shit-out-of-luck, and playing the GEICO paperwork-waiting game. The interim courtesy rental has been a 2008 Pontiac Grand Prix (not worth the hyperlink, trust). The very first car I owned (in high school) was a 1969 Pontiac Grand Prix. The irony is not lost.

A week after the grand theft auto, my bank called to tell me someone was using my debit card to make peculiar online purchases. The identity thief spent about $100 before we closed the account. The bank will restore the money, it's just more paperwork. The thief ordered a Tupac CD, an XBox game, VistaPrint business cards with my name and some gobbledygook data - an incomplete address, a science fiction book, some other services. Some of the goods and notifications were mailed to my NYC address (even though the address was incomplete). Bizarre. I attempted to return the merchandise, without much success, but I did notify my bank.

One company, who sent skin care products called Hydroderm, accepted the cancellation, but allowed me to keep the products. I have to say, this stuff feels much better than the Hymed line I've been sampling recently. (I doubt that any cream reduces wrinkles, but I like when a skin product feels and smells nice.)

I think I can sense an improvement coming with the new year. I will be renting my loft out for a while, it can pay for itself until I can refinance and drop the payments to a manageable level. I took an apartment in the East End. I plan on coming back into the city once a week, stay with many of my dearest and wide-ranging group of friends. Soon, I'll be driving some kind of other car - I allowed myself to muse a bit. Which make or model?

Tomorrow I travel to New Mexico, to spend the holidays with Mom, let her be Mom. We'll pass into 2008 in each other's company.

H-O-7-7-Y

When I was three or four years old, just learning my letters, starting to hold a pencil (a new, more grown-up instrument than crayons, though I loved crayons for decades), I wrote my name: H-O-7-7-Y.

"Aitch, oh, el, el, wye," I would say. I printed the letters, all-caps, box-like, and admired the symmetry. They looked so right.

We lived in Okinawa. In fact, we lived there for five years, from 1963 to 1968, during the Viet Nam war.

My young mother suggested to me that my "L's" weren't quite correct. I am pretty sure I either protested, or ignored her. In my mind, I knew that they way I wrote my name was the right way, there was no brooking the argument.

It was only when I started kindergarten that I had doubts about my "L's." The teacher told me my letters were not letters at all, that they were sevens ("Count with me, one two, three..."). I had to admit, in my child's mind, that my letters were indeed, sevens.

Over a few days, I noticed how the other children wrote their letters, and I noticed too that I was the only one writing sevens instead of L's. And then, I doubted myself.

I tried writing my name a new way: H-O-L-L-Y.

I didn't love it right away. The bottom line of the new letter sat on the lined paper, making it stand out less. It didn't look as perfect, but I chose to stick with it.

I think I was embarrassed, for a four-year-old. I didn't want to appear to be too weird. My thick-lenses, magnifying eye-glasses (cat-eye style, of course) made me look strange from the rest of the children. I has been stuck behind Coke-bottle eye-glasses since the age of two.

So I talked myself into accepting H-O-L-L-Y, into preferring it, convincing myself it was okay.

But for a while, I dug in my heels. I was a stubborn little kid. I had to make the change, internally metamorphose, before I allowed anyone to tell me what to do.

Funny, I still behave that way today. Sometimes. 

Brother, Brother

I returned to NYC - full-time - late in the summer of 2004.

I drove from Boulder, across two-thirds of the country, and planned to arrive at my loft the same time as the moving van - to off-load.

Since the movers would take five or so days, I planned to stop and visit friends and family along the way, before I turned up outside my hometown apartment door.

It turned into a pleasant mini-odyssey. I stopped to see a fabulous (and I do mean fabulous) long-time friend in Chicago, a former-favorite assistant in Pittsburgh (married, with a baby, a lovely husband and home, all of which she deserves), and I hoped to stop in to see my brother and his family on the Jersey Shore, before I swung north and home.

All went swimmingly, until I got to my brother's.

A bit of backstory. My brother and I are less than a year apart. I was born in January, and he in December of the same year. Eleven months apart, true "Irish twins."

After I completed kindergarten - the school system determined I was of the correct age to attend but my brother was not - my mother prepared me for the first grade. Apparently, the school system's age designations shifted, and my brother was put into the first grade with me. In essence, he "skipped" kindergarten. Nevertheless, we entered and remained in the same grade for the entirety of our elementary and high school education(s).

Although we are not twins, I suppose we developed some degree of non-verbal communication. Our childhood was not an easy one. I make light of it now, and say that we were raised like wolves. We fought a lot, but I know I always had a deep care and concern for my brother, even if I rarely articulated it.

When he was very young, he had repeated bouts of strep throat, and as a consequence, as many bouts with big, penicillin-filled needles. He was just a little boy, with a tiny, bony butt, and shoulder blades that stuck out like a newborn bird's.

Bacterially, I possessed the hardier constitution.

But he grew stronger and bigger than I - and he pummeled the blazes out of me, often for the slightest insult - in my opinion anyway.

It wasn't easy. Our father was of a capricious, rage-filled nature. He was gone often, but when he was home, I know that a knot of tension and worry kept me on guard, on watch. Although we misbehaved as any kids did, sometimes - and without warning or apparent reason - our father would explode, and knock the crap out of us. My brother got worse than I did. And I hated it - I was the wide-eyed tearful witness, helpless to defend him, or myself. And terrified. There are episodes that I remember, that I will not forget.

Still, as an adult, my brother and I grew close, I think as adult siblings do.

Over the years, I have found it easy and enjoyabe to sing his praises. We were both voracious readers, but I made a career out of it. He was more musically talented than I, and a natural athlete. I was more obviously competitive than he - in my pursuits (academics, socially, high school musicals up to my senior year, college admissions, a college scholarship), and I know I probably irritated him when I cheered him at his high school track meets, questioning the results, wanting to understand the nature of his races.

Still, we were both hell-bent on escaping our "crazy family," as he called our parents. I went off to university, but not before he one-upped me, and took off without notice. He was only seventeen years old, but had packed his room clean - and was gone.

I recall he told me, some weeks later, that I couldn't leave him there "with those crazy people." That's a line he was able to use on me again, decades later, when my mother called us together for a Christmas celebration. I didn't want to go, but my brother persuaded me. Mom had moved to New Mexico by then, and my brother and I spent a couple of days hammering up the steep hiking trails of Sandia Mountain.

By then, my brother was well on his own road to success. After a years-long stint in the Arizona (call it his college-equivalent), he returned to New Jersey, and pursued two life tracks. One was his own residential carpentry-building company. The other was bicycle racing. He succeeded at both, on the local level.

He also went through a series of long-term monogamous girlfriend relationships. Some of these were fraught with "sturm und drang." One early debacle resulted in resentment between us, and I resolved thereafter to never get involved. The serial romances continued, through a first, disastrous marriage and divorce, through a few more women - before his present marriage. He fathered a daughter at the age of forty. I doubt that the marriage has been easy (given his behavior pattern), but I do not doubt that he adores, is crazy about, and loves his daughter.

For some wacky reason, he ceased communication with my mother. He gave me flimsy, unsubstantiated reasons, once - but hey, that's his issue, not mine. And yet I know that the limited interaction with her granddaughter causes my mother anguish - which seems so unnecessary.

Despite these challenges, I still always thought and spoke so highly of my brother. His business has grown exponentially - in accordance, in part, to the absurd growth in real estate value anywhere within one hundred miles of New York City, and especially anywhere close to the Atlantic ocean and adjoining waterways.

At the age of forty-seven, he is a paragon of athletic fitness, and looks some fifteen years younger. In many ways, he resembles a certain uber-famous movie star, who has starred in a series of wildly successful films about casino and art thefts (no, it ain't Clooney, guess again).

Somewhere along the way, his values seem to have grown more conservative. Money can do that. September 11 did that to some.

I have remain steadfastly skeptical. I lean left of center, but I understand and value the worth of a dollar. Perhaps NYC Democrats are like that - in any event, we seem to care about our city first, and we understand that we are different from the rest of the country, liberal or reactionary-right. I prefer to question authority, to use my own mind, to query, to take little at face-value. I am not a fan of the present U.S. government leadership - and the truth will out, as it does. I suppose I am more Aristotelian in my thinking - I want my nation's leader to be super-smart, someone whose mind and character I can respect. Like so many others I have had to wait - and it will be a full eight years gone.

Because we were raised overseas - in Okinawa during the Viet Nam war, and in Germany, close to the Czechoslovakian border during the Cold War - I have an innate respect for the U.S. Armed Forces - the people on the ground, doing the hard, terrible work. If I have developed an intolerance for anything, it is that, in war time, the people who suffer most are women, the elderly, and children. I am no fan of war. I don't care if academics can argue about it's historical necessity. Bah.

Why this tangent?

Because, when I returned from the West, when I visited my brother and his family, he instigated a conversation over dinner that turned ugly. The presidential election was looming. He asked me what I thought of John Kerry, and I responded that I was concerned the American public would not embrace his wife - she seemed too European-aristocratic for mainstream voters.

I do not know why or how this angered him, but he went berserk in an angry, neck-vein-throbbing tirade about how we had to support this president, how he loathed liberals, how we had to support our troops, etc. I admit, after I attempted to counter the assault with reasoned questions, that I tried to mollify him - to calm him down. A knot of tension had sprung forth in my stomach.

To this day, I do not believe his rage and anger had the slightest thing to do with politics.

And I know it had nothing to do with me.

I suspect that my brother resents that I am unencumbered by my personal family responsibilities (there is, ahem, a downside, but on balance, I do prefer my choices and my freedom). I suspect that he has, unwittingly or not, taken on aspects of the dreadful nature of...our father.

I stayed that night in my brother's house, after he mumbled downward into relative quiet (just like our father would do after a rage-attack). I shared a bedroom with my then four-year-old niece. I awoke in the middle of the night, to see the little girl thrashing and babbling in her sleep. Sleep disorders, hmmm, surprising?

My brother's wife remarked to me after he lost his cookies, "I have never seen him go off on anybody like that - except on me."

Holy shit. That could not be good.

I know from my own personal work, that if I place myself in a situation that is not safe for me (emotionally or otherwise), then I will remove myself from it.

And that's exactly what I did. For all my brother's smiles and niceties the following day, I had placed a call to my one-and-only high school girlfriend, who lived in Princeton with her two boys, a girl, and her adoring husband. She bade me come stay with them directly - and we had a glorious time, catching up, hanging with her (first and foremost) and her kids.

I made it to the city and my apartment on time, my heart slightly heavy, but ready to press forward into my future.

I have had minimal to no contact with my brother, my sister-in-law, or my niece.

My mother told me just last week that she learned that my sister-in-law is moving out, with my niece. My brother and she are separating.

I am not surprised.   

Painter's Pants

I'm moving East for the summer.

Yep, over the course of next month, I'll be trundling essential stuff to a charming house in the East End, renting from and rooming with one very droll British gal.

I'm not relinquishing my NYC home. Never. But I plan to sublet it to downstairs neighbors while they undergo renovation.

I'll write stories from out there, which I've done essentially anyhow for the past two summers. I'll be blending two lines of work, but more about those in later posts.

After our handshake conversation, my roommate-lessor-to-be and I chatted about, well, men. I remarked that I happened to notice a couple of builder-contractor fellows in a delicatessen on Main Street in Bridgehampton. From behind.

She replied that she is fond of the sculptural appearance of men's derrieres. (Good girl, that.)

The fellows wore tan, canvas, cargo-style pants. Utility pockets, tool-belts, thick-soled boots, heavy jackets over thermal underwear (it was still chilly two weeks ago when I was out there last).

A familiar look among the year-rounders out there. A familiar look at the north Jersey Shore, too. My brother is a builder - of ridiculously enormous homes in Monmouth County - and that tends to be his work attire.

It reminded my of our high school days in the mid-1970s. The style among the cool boys was painter's pants. White painter's pants, close-fitting below the waist and butt, then somewhat baggy, with generous-sized pockets, and loops attached to the side seams. Construction workers' pants.

Some fellows wore denim versions.

Heck, I think I even owned a pair or two, rebel, pot-smoking, class-skipper that I was during the latter half of my high school career. And Oshkosh overalls. Never mind the National Honor Society - I wanted to be cool - and I think I was finally, by the time I was a senior.

The boys looked good in those britches. And the fellows today look just as good.

I think that may be the, ahem, diversion for this upcoming summer.

Jake

Jake passed yesterday. He was almost seventeen years old, I think. Maybe eighteen, my records and memory are not one hundred percent.

He lived fifteen months longer than Aida, his litter-mate sister, who died in January 2006.

He had been deteriorating, given his age, and he was such a comfort to me after his sister died. I loved this critter. He was the best cat, a classic orange tabby. The Jaksester, Jakerama, Jake-o-matic, Ba-zeep, Ba-zoop. He was more dog than cat, as I've written.

At then end, I suspect he had some form of dementia, his biological systems had almost shut down completely. He hadn't been able to jump very high since we lived in Boulder. Not up onto the kitchen counter the way he used to (Aida's heft eliminated that option a couple of years earlier). His hindquarters shrunk over the year, but he got around pretty well.

In the last weeks, he took a general turn for the worse. He slowed his eating, and became incontinent. I suspect that his kidneys and other internal organs started to conk out, as is normal. Still, he would wake me up in the morning, talk to me - or meow often as was his vocal habit, keep me company, want to eat my food (which now that he was old, I allowed), greet me whenever I returned home, come trotting form wherever he was resting and yell at me (it sounded like "Where have you been already?").

I realized that when he stopped eating - even as I attempted to force some mild yogurt or liquid cat supplements into him - that his body was at its natural conclusion. The last day, he could not walk, and started to hide, as cats do when sick, or when they are at then end of their lifespans.

His last several hours, he had tremors. I am sure his brain was depleting itself. His last night, I made him as comfortable as possible on my bed with me. Every twitch or sound and I started, gently touching his cheek, telling and retelling him the stories of his life.

What precious kittens he and his sister were, some eight weeks old, straggly, brought to me from a barn in Orange County, upstate New York. Their hair stuck out at odd ends, and they needed to be de-flea'd. They were little terrors as they grew, ripping around the house, destroying drapes, rolls of toilet paper. I took days off from work when I had them fixed, so concerned that they were in any kind of pain. They didn't seem to notice, and bounded around the house.

They lived in Fort Lee, New Jersey for the first three years, then six here in NYC, another three and a half in Boulder, and finally home again to this same Manhattan dwelling.

Together, they would perch their front paws on the edge of my bed and wake me up every morning. Two little faces. In the last year, Jake slept with me most nights - it was easier for us both.

Whenever I put on my running shoes, Jake raced over. He was guaranteed a round of petting as I tied my laces. He would stretch out to his full length, and let me run my hands up and down his belly.

He was a talker. Sometimes, he meowed for several minutes in one run, changing tones, changing from shorter chirps to drawn-out notes. He loved to yell right after he produced something significant in the box. I liked to think the elimination made him feel good.

In his last months, he would sit close and stare at me. For long periods of time. It might have been eerily disconcerting if I didn't love him so much.

That last night faded into the light gray tones of the morning. Almost half past six, he twitched again, but did not left his head. His breathing was so shallow that his abdomen barely moved. His breathing went through a series if small, raspy exhales. When I took his paws, I felt his pink pads go cold, and a moment or two later, I knew he was gone.

He was at peace, my baby boy.

And I am not.

I cleaned up the litter box, gathered all cat-care paraphernalia, and took it to the garbage. I wrapped his limp, little body in a light blue towel, and placed him in his carrier. A couple of hours later, I took him to the vet, and made final arrangements for his cremation. His ashes will go into a tin next to his sister's.

I am experiencing phantom sensations, as if he is still here. It happened last night when I was sitting on the sofa. I thought he had dropped down from the cabinet behind me and was pressing against my back. I thought I felt him, and instinctively put my hand behind my back expecting him to be there.

I have not lived alone for seventeen years. The loft feels empty. There is no cat litter grit under my bare feet. Already, I am brushing off less cat hair from my clothes. I am not sneezing as much. But my eyes won't stop watering.

What I have done is broken my heart, and although my big brain knows that each day will be easier, right now is just not good. 

I'm off to the gym soon - I need to release some of this free-floating anxiety. I know when I lean down to tie my shoes, I think he'll come running over to be scratched, and rubbed.

I never had children, And if this hurts so much, I wonder, how do parents survive the untimely death of a child?

Science-thinking isn't working for me right now. It will. I know it. Just not yet.

The Real Mikhail

The whirlwind. The bull in a china shop. The non-stop chatter, the question after question, the endless phone calls. The almost impenetrable accent. The incessant need for instant gratification. The clothes, the books and papers, the light-speed topic-by-topic change, delivered breathlessly in the ceaseless, life-and-death sounding monologue.

He sucks the air out of any room, all six feet-plus of my dear friend, whom I call "The Mad White Russian," one among the litany of phrases and names I use to describe him.

Also: The generosity, the bottles of champagne, that big ole romantic heart, the sensuous love of art and antiquity, the sweetness, the intellect, the passion and curiosity, the friendship we've shared over the years.

I adore him in segments, or intervals: The various visits we have shared together, from New York, to San Francisco. to Paris. More time than that, and I would explode - or pass out.

I expect that after the last three days, a visit to Moscow will feature at some point in my future. And Surfer Girl's too. You see, he brought a friend, and I am not kidding, the fellow is a sausage magnate. Writing those two words, even if they describe one of his actual businesses, makes me chuckle. He also owns Muscovite restaurants and a bookstore chain (!). All that and he seems to be a genuinely good guy. Yes, I sensed a little energy between Surfer Girl and him, sausages notwithstanding.

The Russians have threatened to return to the city - for a more substantial stay. Right on, I say. And maybe we'll all be together for a week in the East End this summer. We'll see how and what may unfold.

No Parking

Last weekend, the NYPD closed off my street, the block north of me, and two blocks west of me, both Saturday and Sunday. Friday, the big-rig Haddad trailers and orange cones lined some four blocks square.

When this happens, since I live in a perpetual movie set, the street noise is lessened. This time, I thank The Bourne Ultimatum.

They shot two blocks away. I heard and saw nothing. Well, a crowd gathered at one production assistant-NYPD-cordoned-off intersection, trying to get a look.

When the film releases, I'll see if my neighborhood made the final edit.

Snow Falls, Evaporates

Some three-plus weeks ago, I attended a memorial service in Monmouth County, New Jersey. The complete story can be found here and here.

The untimely and unnatural death of Mary Dean Buckley was remembered by friends and family in the town of Rumson.

I knew Mary. She was the sister of a fellow I dated back in the early-mid 1980s (that is a whole other story). I did not know her well, but I recall clearly that she was real and true, loving, present, self-effacing, and I expect, a very good person. I'm sure she had her foibles, tics that her family forebore and forgave. I didn't know her well enough to see any of them. She should not have died. She was forty-seven, and she left behind a husband and four sons.

Her funeral was held last November.

The follow-up service was held on a cold, gray weekday, in a white, clapboard Catholic church, situated just across the Navesink River from the barrier spit of land called Sea Bright. I arrived after the service had begun, and took a seat in one of the rear-most rows.

I was oddly relieved that after so many years, I have forgotten whole chunks of the Catholic mass. I sat and watched the faithful.

I surveyed the backs of heads, trying to identify people that I am sure I had not seen in twenty years. I recognized Mary's husband, Matt, his thick head of hair still thick and full, but now completely silver.

Other faces felt familiar, and I caught the eye of some, but further recognition failed. When the service ended, everyone filed out, paying respects to the family. I spotted Mary's parents, both of whom I knew. And I waited until everyone filed out before me.

When Mary's mother held out her hand, and I said, "It's Holly. Holly Hodder," she exclaimed and hugged me.

Times like those strip away the years, and I am a young woman all over again, wanting so much to make a good impression.

In the next second, however, I returned to the present, to the person I am, to the person I like being, and I am happy just to offer condolence, physical touch, a smile, and a memory.

Mary's parents hosted a luncheon at their home, and I made a wrong turn or two, as I drove the three or so miles further inland from the ocean. The high school from which I graduated is probably not more than two miles further, and would, no doubt, result in at least one more wrong turn, if I had been motivated to find it. I was not.

I reintroduced myself, or was reintroduced to people I had not seen in the intervening twenty years. In short order, I discovered that I had not seen these people since the actual day that Mary and Matt were married - their wedding day, in the summer of 1985.

I stood in the family dining room when something hit me. Mary and Matt's wedding day was memorable to me, more for the day afterward. Mary's brother and I were broken up by then, only a few weeks earlier, and I was still in pain. I was fragile.

(Funny, I still devolve into a state of fragility after heartbreak, but now I know that it doesn't last quite so long, and I manage to survive, in spite of myself, time after time.)

But that evening, after the bride and groom had departed, I was hanging on by an emotional thread, at the reception pounding gin-and-tonics, when I was offered lines. Yes, lines of coke. I was no stranger to the drug, having withstood college in the late 1970s, and more than my fair share of nights at Studio, Xenon, and Mudd Club, among others. So I said yes.

And that was the last time I ever used cocaine. A watershed.

That hangover is still memorable, for its pain and duration. My whole body felt as though a tractor had rolled back and forth over it. My mother - I crashed at her apartment - either didn't comprehend, or didn't ask, and I did not return to the land of the cogent or ambulatory for forty-eight hours.

And once I did, I knew that was it. I was done, with so many things, the ex-boyfriend, the drug. I kid around today, and say that I could be surrounded by mountains of the stuff, and I would not indulge. I've had opportunities since, albeit rare, and I stay away, steer clear.

I suppose we're calmer these days. The people who attended that service, those I assume are close to my own age, now seem settled, somewhat fleshier around the mid-sections, conservatively-attired, with upscale but low-key jewelry. They drive solid and safe automobiles. They talked about their families, their children. A couple of fellows told genuinely funny stories.

And yet, I felt apart. I don't live in a pristine family-oriented community. Indeed, I have little in common with married people, raising teenagers.

I could sense the city in the back of mind: "Get back up here already!"

One fellow called me "Holly-lama." That was funny.

Another fellow, one who caught my eye at the church, when we were reintroduced at the luncheon, I asked if we had met before. He responded that he did not think so.

Hmmm. It came to me afterward, after I made my farewells, and drove back to the beach to conjure memories of summers past.

The one and only time I took a hit of Ecstasy was on a date with a guy who (I think?) resembled that fellow. I cannot remember his name. Maybe his family name was an English tradesperson-name, like Farmer or Carpenter. Maybe not. He was from Rumson, and he drank too much, way too much. I think that same guy might have turned up at Mary and Matt's wedding reception - held at a big, semi-private beach club in Sea Bright (Matt told me the place has long since burned to the ground).

When he saw me, he stumbled so slightly, and either reached for or pointed at me, and said, "I'm gonna take that girl home and drill her."

The last two words sounded like "driller," rhyming with "killer." Some things you don't remember, some things you just don't forget.

I know that, even with too many cocktails and my sinuses throbbing, I got out of there, and drove straight to my mother's place.

Funny how the memories of such events are buried, most of the time. I hadn't thought of that night in years, and yet there I was, driving to the surfer beach in North End, like I did when I skipped school, eager to sit my butt on the sand and watch the boys.

The beach is built-up in places now, new condominium complexes, enormous townhouses that abut the sea wall - sure to be destroyed in the next whopper of a hurricane.

It was time to leave the summers behind and return north.

As I drove through the toll gate onto the Garden State Parkway (whoever invented EZ-Pass needs to be canonized), snow flurries blew down and all around me. I was home inside of seventy minutes flat. 

Hit and Run

I saw this happen with my own two eyes.

Last Saturday night, too early into Sunday morning, close to four a.m., I saw a person get run over. And the perpetrator car, or rather, the typical, too-big SUV raced away down the street - my street.

True, I had been out drinking glass after glass of champagne, celebrating a friend's birthday, from Buddha Bar (good food and service, lousy management, very suburban crowd on the weekend) to Double Seven (its last weekend before it reopens in its new location in about two months).

My feet were killing me. My big toes throbbed, and I was desperate to disrobe and crawl into bed. I was downing about a quart of water, plus aspirin and antihistamine, when I heard the ruckus. I looked out the window to see a group of club-stragglers, drunk and staggering, yelling and screaming - like they do almost every weekend.

In the last two years, a handful of third-tier "lounge" clubs have opened nearby. Around four in the morning, drunk (and too often belligerent) patrons stumble around the corner to the nearest garage, where they have parked their over-sized, ridiculous vehicles.

Yes, it would seem as though, despite that most cannot see straight, they get into cars and drive from wherever they came in the first place.

The garage also houses a weekend flea market, so two levels of the place are filled with what generally looks like trash-for-sale. It looks like the purveyors, if they can be called that, ransack dilapidated homes in run-down, former steel mill towns in eastern Pennsylvania, and drive them to my street, in an attempt to sell them at orders of magnitude more than they are worth. I am astonished every weekend that people (it seems that many are western European, for all the nattering of languages I overhear) continue to patronize these junk-ware booths. Warhol is long-gone already.

Anyhow, the flea market retains an off-duty policeman to stand at one of the garage doors, or so I have been told.

Back to the drunk fight. Two women were screaming in high-pitched tones. Lots of "muthafuckas," the only discernible word to travel up six stories.

I noticed that one fellow may have been brandishing what looked like a shiny silver pipe. Then, I saw another fellow lay down in front of (a non-flea market entry-driveway) one of the garage entry ways.

He was on on his back, spread-eagled, on a slight angle, his legs extended into the center of the driveway.

Why was he laying there? Did he get whacked on the head by the guy with the pipe? Or was he the guy with the pipe? Did he just pass out cold? Or was he just playing an over-dramatic prank?

No one moved to get him up or out of the way. Time slowed.

Then, a huge SUV barreled down out of the garage, and bump-bump, drove right over this guy's legs. The SUV veered hard to the left and sped west down the street. Away.

I gasped, reached for my phone and dialed 911. The operator picked up fast, and as I described what happened, informed me that police were coming. In fact, I was not off the phone before police arrived, then an FDNY ambulance, more cop cars, all first-responders.

I hung up and stared down in horror.

Some woman shrieked that the SUV had Delaware tags. Who knows - the car was gone.

The cops ran up into the garage, I presume to grill the attendant about the hit-and-run vehicle. Other cops bent down to the guy on the ground, and what felt like forever, finally wrapped his legs in some kind of stabilizing rods, his head in one of those skull braces. They lifted him onto a gurney, into the ambulance, and raced off.

Pretty much that was it. Cops interviews bystanders, nothing much more.

I wonder why none of the onlookers did nothing to move that guy from out of the driveway.

I felt shaken. I could not sleep, indeed, I shivered hours after. Much later Sunday, exhausted and aching, I did not move off the sofa. My mind replayed the scene over and over.

Yesterday, I tried to search NYC-Manhattan police reports, news police blotters, anything. I could not find a word about the incident.

I often kid that (despite the obnoxious noise from these bottom-feeding clubs) we don't get real crime on my street. Since Law and Order films episodes down here so often, I say that we have fake crime on this street.

But I don't know what to make of this event.   

Neighbors and Friends

I just went up to my roof deck, just in time for midnight and the turn of the year.

The street sounds of the ringing in of 2007 sounded muffled. I expected more noise, given the rash of clubs that have popped up around the block in the past two years. Taxi horns honked, and I want to believe they were blasting away for midnight, instead of traffic.

And then I heard a female voice, "Happy New Year, New York!" (I ought to have written that in all caps, but I avoid such excess.) I heard the whir of helicopters overhead, and looked up. As I did, I saw holiday lights and parties in a handful of apartments among the recently erected high-rises along Sixth Avenue.

I looked south and heard the reverberation of loud booms. Explosions. The fireworks on The Battery. I confess, the sound of fireworks explosions coming from the southern end of Manhattan causes my stomach to start, and the rest of me to stop. I lowered my gaze from the sky and watched in the reflection of a distant glass skyscraper the reds and golds of the fireworks display. My breath caught in my throat. I hugged myself. It was wonderful.

I am not much for celebrating traditional midwinter celebrations. A history of lousy family gatherings, the pressure to act happy, the bloody expectation. Every year, now that I choose to spend the holidays quiet and reflecting, small kindnesses come my way.

This year, neighbors (they were friends well before they bought into the building) two floors below invited me for dinner last Saturday. It was lovely. The next day, the same friends hosted an impromptu brunch, and more of our neighbors joined. There are advantages to living in yep, one of these iconoclast New York City loft co-ops.

The following Monday, a "silver fox" friend invited me to his home on Long Island Sound for dinner and a stay-over. I adore the special guest room where the sound of the waves does nothing but lull me to sleep. What a little slice of heaven, the grilled fillet notwithstanding, or the Prosecco, the artisanal cheeses, and yes dammit, the mashed potatoes. Oh, and the vintage Bordeaux, and all that chocolate. Plus, he recently adopted a dog, a five-month-old shih tzu-poodle. A "shih-poo," or as he said, "a shit-doodle." Roscoe is one cute four-legged, with personality to burn. That pup is destined to have a beautiful life.

All week, more friends were in town from out of town. Among them, a long-time genius friend, performance-artist-turned Burning Man "administrator" (oh yeah). And authors, especially the one who penned Blood Diamonds, with his wife, who was my (yes, my) production chief, for those quick years when our imprint kicked some publishing ass.

These circles, of neighbors, of friends. I am just happy to be surrounded.

Cheers.