A Breather

A few things before I move on from the last week of posts.

1 - Blogger has been spotty since Tuesday.  I had no intention of leaving that misery up for an extra week, unbuffered by book reviews, navel gazing, and cooking tips, but I couldn't log on.  Watcha gonna do?

2 - I went out on a weekday this week and it didn't even involve my book club.  I stayed up past eleven, because I'm a rock star.

3 - Becky and I are impressively happy, I promise.  I offer this link to our wedding website as proof, 90% of which was created post-Fester.

Mothers Day, 2011

I see that "Long Time No Post" has creeped up to #2 on my all-time most-read list.  That's almost enough to make me remove the "Popular Posts" feature from my blog, the fact that some meh about why I haven't posted in a while is the second-most read item I've ever written.  It doesn't even have a picture.  Still, I've watched its steady climb from #6 to #2.  Again, watcha gonna do?

On the writing front, our fledgling Writers Group missed a month, but we've set a date in stone.  Going forward, this should be a great opportunity to talk shop.  I've promised myself I'll continue my homework by submitting stories to two publications this week.

On the reading front, TC Boyle's The Inner Circle, Tina Fey's Bossypants, Glen Duncan's The Last Werewolf, and Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes (still) all have been or currently are treating me very well.  I've got an Advanced Readers Copy of Diana Abu-Jaber's Birds of Paradise that I'm very excited about. I think I'll also start writing about my book club here.  Page Against the Machine is awesome, and it's another excuse to talk about books.

On the biking front, my tires are flat.  Or rather, the tires on the bike I borrowed from Mitchell are flat, a situation I hope to remedy with my next paycheck.

On the home front...

The truth can always be questioned.   Religious beliefs, moral convictions, love, it's all worth examining.  It's important to examine these things because we live our lives by them.  If they can't stand the scrutiny, if defensiveness and hostility meet these questions, than the answers are damn shaky.

I taught a six-year-old to tie his own shoes on Friday.  The first knots he's ever tied, one for each foot.  After a few frustrating evenings of trying to teach him how to tie his bathrobe, I was surprised it finally happened for him.  The satisfaction, love, and fear (yes, fear, because he's listening, and what if he inherits my bad along with my good?) flooding me made it almost impossible to function, but I managed to get our lunches together and get us out the door.

In the days after Uncle Fester, Becky and I have found our love is even stronger.  We were being ourselves before, but now we're relaxing into our relationship, into each-other.  There's a playfulness that can only come from confidence.  More than trust, which is a necessity in a building a relationship, confidence only comes from sharing your days.  The more you share, the stronger it becomes.  The trick is not letting that confidence become cockiness.

We faced dark days and came out better for them.  I didn't think it was possible to love Becky more than I already did, but there you go.  

As always, thanks for reading.

I Quit the Gym

The One with the Ballroom Dancing

Examining my monthly spending to see how my income can better suit our family’s needs. . . was how I originally began this post.  Truthfully, I don’t think about money all that much.  Well, that’s not accurate either.  I think about money indirectly all the time, as in I’d love to go out / visit your aunt in California / see an opthamologist / update my wardrobe, but after rent and groceries there’s not much left.  I didn’t “examine” anything, though.  There were no pie charts or graphs involved, I just got rid of things I didn’t need.  This fiscal spring cleaning led me to cancel my membership to Bally Total Fitness.

My relationship with Bally goes back to 1996, when I saw pictures of myself on Virginia Beach and realized over-eating every meal wasn’t the giggle it used to be when I was seventeen.  I joined Bally when I got back to Syracuse, and it only cost me $50 down and $35 a month.  

I stayed long enough to lose the jelly roll and stop feeling like my limbs were filled with lemon juice instead of blood after every weightlifting session.  Three months at Bally cost me $120.

Then I moved to Miami and saw pictures of myself papering cars for Starbucks short-lived Tiazzi frozen tea beverage.  True, the big green apron wasn’t doing me any favors, but I’d skipped Billy and Stephen and gone right to Daniel Baldwinsville.  I spent $250 on a Premier Membership, with access to a trainer, a supply of some kind of legal speed pep pill, and the promise that my monthly membership fee would only be $15.  

Bally had gotten smarter.  They locked me into a one-year contract, so I paid them $430 for my second go around.

On the plus side, you’d be amazed what those pep pills will do for your motivation.  I dropped back into the 190lb area in no time.  Unfortunately, the motivation only lasted as long as the free pep pills.  I didn’t want to spend money to buy more legal speed, so I stopped going regularly after two months, and completely after three.  Through the magic of automated debit, my payments continued.  When this contract expired in 1999, I’d paid Bally’s a total of $550.

1999 was also the year I got digital cable.  Apparently, sitting around watching TV and eating potato chips doesn’t burn calories like you’d hope; it was the heaviest I’ve ever been in my life.  

This time I wanted to do it right.  I was tired of putting down huge sums every time I got fat.  I wanted a low monthly payment I could live with the rest of my life, so if I ever caught the workout bug again, the cure would be as close as the nearest Ballys.  I became a Premier Fitness Plus Member because the monthly payment dropped to a mere $5 after a year of $15 payments.  It also came with a trainer for six weeks, plus free training consultation whenever I wanted it, for as long as my membership lasted.  It also came with a humiliating body measurement session, eight weeks of legal speed, protein supplements, and the promise that I could go anywhere in the world and always have a Ballys nearby to keep me in shape.  

The big pimpin' package cost me $499, bringing my total Bally payments (as of August 2000) to $1,229 dollars.  

I’ve been a Premier Fitness Plus Member since 1999.  Unlike some of the horror stories I’ve heard, my monthly payment did indeed drop to $5 after a year.  This lasted until 2004, when it went up to $8.  Since 2006, my monthly payment has fluctuated from $11.41 to $10.15, every other month.  I’ve no idea why.  

After the millennium, I read Critser's Fat Land and Schlosser's Fast Food Nation.  I eliminated high-fructose corn syrup from my diet, and ate every couple of hours.  I started doing yoga.  Gradually, over the course of a few years, I became comfortable with my eating habits and my weight.  Before the car accident I was very into yoga.  Post-accident, as soon as I was able, I was back in the gym at my apartment complex, and biking to and from work.  

What I did not do was set foot inside any Bally Total Fitness, anywhere.  

But I kept paying that $10.15 to $11.41 every month.  If I ever decided to blast my body into shape again, I didn’t want to lose a huge down payment.  Trouble was, that didn’t work for me.  I need exercise that fits with my schedule, and biking to and from work and is it.  Finding time to travel to a gym is not.  

I’ve paid Ballys $2,178.44 for very little of my time.  I could have travelled.  I could have bought clothes.  I could have bought a used car.

Anything but exercise.  

I Wish I Had Your Life

Re-watching Sex and the City on DVD had made me realize why I loved the series in the first place - it’s funny.  I laughed out loud more than I remembered doing the first or second time around.  Yes, it’s stuffed with hokey puns, but those are some of my favorite parts.  Of course, for every stellar “paper beats rock,” there’s a cringe-inducing “You take a nap-a, you don’t move to Napa,” but when you love something, you forgive its flaws. 

If you don’t get those references, feel free never to pop in a single SATC DVD.  In fact, why not hate fun the rest of your life?

Sex and the City is artificial, and a lifestyle I would still judge harshly even if I could afford it (and I’m talking about “help” and $500 shoes, not fucking and drinking), but whoosh it’s a good time.  To criticize Charlotte, Miranda, Samantha, and Carrie as being gay men in disguise is to miss the frolicking point of the series.  It’s a comedy, a comedy with occasional pathos that celebrates friendship above all else.  Besides, creator Michael Patrick King is a gay man, but of the 20+ writers, only 5 are men (that 5 includes King and someone named “Ollie,” which I’m assuming is short for Oliver rather than Olivia).   

No one would ever accuse the series of being a feminist beacon, but let’s not confuse the financial power and considerable draw these four women (five, if you include Patricia Field) enjoy in life with the characters they portray.  You might not like the choices and behavior of Charlotte, Miranda, Samantha, and Carrie, but you have to respect the clout of Kristen Davis, Cynthia Nixon, Kim Cattrall, and Sarah Jessica Parker.

Speaking of clout, here’s the news which inspired this post: Kristen Davis read Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project and liked it so much she decided she wanted to play Gretchen Rubin in a TV series.  So yeah, that’s happening.  I’d love to be able to plot the course of my life with a phone call, wouldn’t you?

So I can continue to love this series, I’m pretending the second movie didn’t happen.  Something needs to be horrifically bad to cancel out the brilliance of its inception, and Sex and the City 2 is exactly that bad.  I laughed once (thanks, Samantha) but only because, as The Editing Room put it, “we had to set the movie in the Middle East because it’s the only place left where we can pretend that being sexually liberated in 2010 is groundbreaking.”

I’d like to see them grow old gracefully.  Enough with the Botox, for fuck’s sake.  If Michael Patrick King really does go ahead with a third movie - and #2 is over $300 million world-wide so they just might - it needs to be clever as hell to end the story of these four characters in a way that honors rather than exploits what has come before, and at the same time erases the shit storm of the second movie from our minds.  It’s impossible, really.  But here’s hoping.

Remember when Sex and the City was a book?  I finally read it last year and mentioned it briefly.  While I still bristle at the “Bicycle Boys” chapter, the book is sexier and darker than the series (another thing re-watching showed me was how many of the sex scenes were played for laughs), and while it’s not as funny, it has a lot more substance.  It’s straightforward and straight up, a shot of vodka to the series Cosmo cocktail.  If you’ve been finding other things to read first, like me, it’s definitely worth your time.

So fair warning, Mrs. Davis.  Have fun with your series, but the book is always better.    

The Four-Year Anniversary

If you can find the cracks, you should go to medical school

On February 23rd, 2007, I could have died.  

This statement is as close to meaningless as you can get.  I could have died on December 1st, 1982 or August 15th 1996.  I could have died yesterday, I could die today, and I could die tomorrow.  But could have died feels more honest than saying I almost died.  

True, fire rescue doesn’t airlift you to a trauma center specializing in car accidents and gunshots for fun (or for free), but when I hear “almost died,” I think of heart attacks and strokes, sudden collapses, defibrillators and emergency surgeries.  If the other car had been going faster, if he’d struck my car at weaker point... but those thoughts end with could have.  Almost feels like an exaggeration.

Semantics aside, what I want to talk about this anniversary is pain.  

Doctors told me most breaks heal in 6-8 weeks, which is not nearly specific enough when parts of you are sweating pain.  I spent much of late April and early May of 2007 Googling broken ribs.  Nothing I found encouraged me.  Most posts began with, “I broke my ribs a year ago...” or “I broke my ribs two years ago...” and the posters were still in pain.  

Yes, there’s still pain in my ribs.  No longer a constant arthritic ache, it comes and goes depending on what I’m doing.  Sit up straight in my chair at work for too long and the rib I broke up near my armpit feels the pressure, like a throat that can’t quite clear.  Slouch too long and the rib I broke down by my stomach feels the pinch, like an over-tight belt.  Ignore the discomfort long enough and it will deepen and stretch into a dull thrum.

When I imagine my hip, I always think of a wide-faced gremlin gnawing the end of one of those state fair ostrich legs.  It crackles on and off throughout the day; only rarely does it shoot all the way down to my knee.  

Even more rare is the dull nutcracker feeling clamped around my pelvis.  That doesn’t seem to have a trigger, it just throbs up every now and again to say, you broke me too, remember?   

Winter, even such as it is in Miami, intensifies both the level and frequency of these aches.  The rainy season is just as bad.  It’s a steady hum, like a chorus of strings, occasionally deepening to a throb of brass, every once in a while punctuated by a quick clatter of drumsticks over cymbals or the plaintive moan you might hear in a Pink Floyd song.

My body has aged beyond its years, but I’m less concerned these days with how all this will hang together on the seventy-year-old version of me than with how it’s affecting me now.  Recovering from the accident, when I could barely move, I promised myself I would never take my healthy body for granted again.  Well, guess what?  I’ve been driving to work more than I’ve been biking, and it shows.  It shows in my waistline, in the longer recovery time once I get to work, and my negative attitude.  

Getting back on the bike consistently this past week has meant more than a rush of endorphins and sweat, it’s told me that my aches and pains are not as bad as I think they are.  Just like when I pushed myself to start riding in the first place, the ache is temporary and the reward goes on.

Some lessons I need to learn again and again before they sink in.  That’s why the pain it still here.  Its most important lesson is that each day is a gift.

After all, I could be dead.     

Just When You Thought She was Into You

Lisa Ann M_ [I'm reading Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes] came into the store with the kind of forceful personality which is either intensely annoying, indefinably charming, or the magical combination which comes across as Holly Golightly on speed.  Like a heavy current, you realize you could be swept along, so you let it wash over you and try to remain upright.  

When I leave the buying office and register work distracts me from my agenda, I do my best to be civil.  The customers don't realize whoever should be on the register is AWOL, and they're the reason there's a roof over my head, so I resist the urge to vent my annoyance at my job situation on them.  Sometimes, I even manage to fake enthusiasm.  In LAM's case, her joie de vivre was catchy.  

LAM purchased a copy of Les Standiford's Last Train to Paradise, explaining that she liked to read about the places she travelled.  I gave her points for being a paying customer, for her boho chic outfit (fashionable isn't my thing but stylish is, and the look suited LAM) and blocky black glasses, and for loving Books & Books.

"Are there any cool places in this city?" she asked.  "You know, for people who love books?  Events, or somewhere special you like to go?"

I asked how long she planned on staying.

"I'm leaving Miami as soon as possible," she said.  

In that case, not really.  

"Is there an Art Deco district?  I've heard about all the cool Art Deco architecture.  I saw some on the Beach but it looked pretty run down."

If you've been to South Beach, that's about it on the art deco.  I mentioned Wynwood and the Design District, but since I couldn't offer directions I was fairly useless to her.  

When I first moved to Miami, I would have commiserated with the numerous negative things LAM had to say as I rang her up, but I'm done bad-mouthing The Magic City.  I've lived here long enough to see Miami, to love this town and adopt it as my own.  By this time, Becky had come by.  She wasn't cock blocking but she was certainly present.  Lurking, I guess you'd say. 

"Are you a biker, by any chance?" LAM asked.

I allowed as I was.  

"Because I biked here by Venitian Bridge.  Do you know Venitian Bridge?"

She meant Venitian Causeway, one of the few bike-friendly places in Miami.  

"Once I got off it, there didn't seem to be anywhere to go.  I got honked at a lot."

I told her apart from Alhambra, there wasn't a street in the Gables with a bike path.  The best you could do was bike carefully.  

LAM refused a bag for her purchase, instead tucking Last Train into the bag over her shoulder.  She plucked a copy of Tim Gautreaux's The Missing from her bag to make space and asked if I wanted it.  She'd just bought the book in New Orleans, finished it on the train, and wanted to travel light.  I told her I was familiar with The Missing and had intended to read it since it was published.  I thanked her, wishing I had something to offer in return.  

According to Becky, Lisa Ann M_ was flirting.  I might agree, if not for the following.

"I can't really get you back to Venitian," I said.  "That's out of my six-mile radius."

"Six mile radius?" 

"Yeah.  All social engagements need to be within a six-mile radius of my house.  Otherwise, I don't go."

"What it that, a Miami thing?  Or an old-person thing?"

She may have meant "is that an old-school thing" or "a classic rule of living" but I wasn't about to find out for sure.  I said it was my thing which I'd adopted from a friend, wished her luck on her travels, and bid her goodbye.

I may not have gotten an ego boost out of it, but at least I got a free book.

Falling in Love with a Six Year Old

The first time Dylan and I shared the day alone, we biked around our new neighborhood looking for a park Becky and I had passed some months before.  Dylan and I looked for it using the time-tested directions of "somewhere around here."  Just when we were about to give up and head back home, Dylan looked up and said, "What's that sign?"  Turned out to be a playground sign.

Not much of a park, though.  Huge banyans, benches, and much-trodden grass.  A park for romance, not play.  Still, we spent a few hours making up games and had a blast.

Sunday, on our second day alone together, I discover it wasn't so much of a blast.  Biking toward Salvatore Park, Dylan calls over his shoulder, "That last park wasn't any fun, right?"

Ouch.  

I politely disagree.  

"But it was just a field."

"I thought we had a good time making our own fun," I say.

"I like playgrounds with lots of stuff to do."

Salvatore Park makes his jaw drop to his chest.  Tennis courts filled with couples and families to watch, monkey bars, swing sets, running paths, hopscotch, fake animals to climb, and a field thrown in for good measure.  Families play everywhere.  I get to make awkward small talk with the parents; "Look, our children are talking.  Let's you and I talk.  Actuary?  That's what you do, really?  I like your Polo shirt.  Excuse me while I elbow myself in the chin."    

Dylan meets neighborhood children.  We snack.  We pretend he's a dog and we drive around the park searching for his lost puppies.  I hold him while he flips over the parallel bars, does a handstand, and crosses the monkey bars.   We race laps around the park.  We see a couple of high school boys doing backflips off the wall.  The one named Andres is trying to teach the other student how to do acrobatic stunts out doors, but children keep pestering Andres to do tricks for them instead.  

"Can you jump over those bars without touching them?"  "Can you jump from that railing to the top of the swingset?"  "Can you do a back flip off of the monkey bars?"

Andres teaches Dylan to do a somersault without bumping his head.   

I also learn a valuable lesson: don't tell the child his father is on the way.  Until you actually see his father pull up, there's always the chance he'll bail at the last minute.

Never having kids in my life, I had a vague notion of what makes them so great.  They look at the world with (childlike) wonder, they're not jaded, they're always ready to have fun and try new things.  Guess what?  Not so much.  Dylan still believes in Santa Claus, but when I tell him that Indians are cleaners, booksellers, and dentists, he doesn't believe me.  Even at six years old, Dylan can wake up on the wrong side of the bed, his first words of the day being, "I want you to leave me alone."  Getting Dylan to try a new food is like getting the Pope to okay birth control.  He'll whine about anything and everything for sympathy, to shirk responsibility, and to stay up one second longer.  

It's not what I expected at all.  I love him because when we pass surveyors X's on the sidewalk, he jumps off his bike so we can dig for treasure.  I love him because he wakes up at midnight and thinks his giant, stuffed Very Hungry Caterpillar is a pit pull and he needs me to show him everything is okay and tuck him back in.  I love him because he forgives easily.  I love him because he loves hugs.  I love him because he believes in the Sleep Fairy, dances to Michael Jackson, and his favorite color is pink.

"Aaron, you watch me when my Mom doesn't watch me and when my Dad doesn't watch me.  Are you my family?"

I'm not sure how to respond, because technically...no.  I ask him what he thinks.

"Your last name is Curtis.  You're not my family.  You have to be a King, or Quiroga."

Ouch, again.

"Okay, Dylan."

"Except from now on, there are three names in my family.  You have to be Curtis, King, or Quiroga."

I can definitely live with that.

Stranger Danger

“Dylan, what do you do if a stranger comes up and tries to talk to you?”




A sexual predator had moved into Miami Shores and Becky was just being a responsible parent, making sure Dylan was instilled with a healthy fear of strangers. Her question made the bottom drop out of my stomach. I looked at Dylan and couldn’t even imagine him coming to harm.  How could anyone - ?



I’d known him a few scant months at that point. It’s one more thing Becky has carried as a mother, but she’s probably only allowed those thoughts fleeting attention as he's grown up; I got mine all at once, over breakfast.



A few weeks later, Dylan and I were playing in Becky’s kitchen when he suddenly turned serious.



“Aaron, do you know Adam Walsh?” he asked softly.



Dylan had hidden in a clothing rack at Sears to trick Becky a few days before. She’d freaked out, of course. She told him about Adam Walsh, who’d been his age, and taken from a Sears, and murdered.



Matching Dylan’s conspiratorial tone, I told him I didn’t know Adam Walsh, but I knew who he was.



“Is it true someone took him away from the store and killed him?”



“Yes,” I said.



“Is it true they cut off his head?”



Becky gave me two rules in helping raise her child. 1 – never hit him. 2 – answer anything he asks truthfully.



“Yes.” (He was obsessed with this detail for a few days, and Becky had leisure time to repent what she’d told him in the heat of the moment)



Dylan got that faraway look which indicates his little mind is churning; then we played Pirates some more.



He just turned six years old, the same age as Adam, taken about forty minutes north of where I’m typing this. Whether I can fathom it or not, there are people out there who would like to harm him.



As the youngest of three, or six if you include the cousins, I’ve often said that I envy Dylan’s childhood. I grew up with hand-me-downs and a third (or a sixth) of the attention, while he is lavished with the gifts and love of an entire family.



But his is a different world than mine. Fear of strangers is as much a part of Dylan’s life as Nintendo.



Yesterday, we took our first bike ride through the new neighborhood. We used the sidewalk in deference to his age. Another biker passed us in the road, coming in the opposite direction. I said hello, and instructed Dylan to do the same.



“Hello!” Dylan cried enthusiastically. The mustachioed, sunglass-wearing man smiled and nodded in passing.



“Why did you make me say hi to a stranger?” Dylan moaned.



Oops. I’m learning all about Stranger Danger from my six-year-old.

Rude Awakening Two: Someone's Knocking at the Door

There’s a certain pounding on the front door which can only be the police, or someone filled with righteous anger. I do my best to wake at 5am during the week, but not the weekends. It’s Sunday, five in the morning. Becky and I ate a delicious dinner of my famous chicken quesadillas, drank chardonnay, and fell asleep early in front of “Friends” on DVD. Still, there’s no call for this. The pounding is like being shaken awake by parents who overslept, having them yank you out of bed and yell at you to get dressed and brush your teeth because the bus is coming.

Over the pounding, we hear a man yelling.

“Move your car, bro, I gotta get to work.”

I pull on some clothes and open the door to find a man with a shaved head on my stoop. He’s shorter than me but thicker, fit. I think this is Henry, the new neighbor renting the main house. He looks a lot different smoking and drinking on his front step in the evening with a friend than agitated and alone at five am on a Sunday. I thought he was friendly when he introduced himself. Now, he looks mean.

“Huh?” Best I could do at the time, excuse me all over the place.

“Is that your car, bro?”

He points. A car I’ve never seen before is parked against the bumper of his jeep. The woman below me drives a green car much older than this white one, Becky drives Mr. Roboto, a maroon Scion, and I don’t own a car. I shake my head.

“Your girlfriend’s car? Whoever, I got to go.”

“That’s not my car.”

“You don’t know who’s car that is?”

“Sorry, no.”

We discuss our neighbor’s green car, the rudeness of someone who doesn’t live here appropriating our driveway, and speculate and how big of an asshole he / she must be. He eventually accepts that I can't help the situation, and apologizes for disturbing me.

“What the fuck?” Becky says as I close the door.

Sleep is impossible. Every time we start to drift off, thinking of that knock brings us back.

“It that your car, bro?” I say.

“Bro, move your car, bro,” Becky says, “I gotta get to work, bro.” Making fun of the way many native Miamians express themselves doesn’t get us to sleep, but it makes us feel better. We decide to make the most of our early rise and drive all the way to Kendall for a big breakfast at The Original Pancake House.

I should’ve reminded Henry that my “car” is the Schwinn parked at the bottom of the stairs; he’s never seen me ride anything else.

I haven’t mentioned the Schwinn? Well, after my bike got stolen, Stacy and Jim found me another (which turned out to be Andi’s old bike). I used it for a few days, then my boss gave me his on permanent loan. I miss the Rusty Nail, and I always find myself checking out bikes and wondering – is that my old..? But it’s nice to be biking again.

As far as the mystery car, Henry took a dump on the windshield, and we never saw it again.

Well, not really, the post needed an ending. Happy Friday!

First Do No Harm

I’ve been tempted to return to my Starbucks job for the health insurance, which cost me $30 a month (I heard it’s $52 right now, but I’m not sure). Before Starbucks, there was Borders, Cheesecake Factory, and Bennigan’s. Corporations might be the reason our economy is unbalanced, but they love to throw health insurance your way on the cheap.

Books & Books offers health benefits to full-time employees, and to certain folks labeled part-time who average enough hours to qualify. We use a local HMO, Florida Health Partnership. Because FHP's rates increase every year, our insurance payments have increased every year. Books & Books matches our monthly contribution, but without a raise to compensate, my take home pay keeps diminishing.

The most recent hike just happened. If I stop the insurance, I’m looking at an extra $2,490.54 a year. This merits serious consideration.

How can you not have insurance?

If I was going for my yearly checkups, I might care. But my doctor was in partnership with another doctor on the beach. FHP included Beach Doctor on the list of approved Primary Care Physicians, but not my doctor. When the partnership dissolved, so did my yearly visits.

I'm a biker, remember? It’s much easier catching a ride to a house party on SOBE than a doctor’s visit. If I’m not getting checked up, I’m flushing money down the toilet.

Yes, but what if Something Happens?

Well, something did. Geico covered the bills because it was a Motor Vehicle Accident, plus I had FHP to back them up. Well, la-dee-frickin’-da. Once I left the hospital, I made follow-up appointments for specific dates and times. Those follow-ups consisted of showing up at nine and taking a number like it was a deli. It was 3pm before I looked around and realized I’d been looking at the same faces all day. I didn’t take a number with other folks scheduled for nine; everyone scheduled on that day, insured and uninsured alike, took a number and waited.

Oh, those payments really came in handy while I was sitting on hard plastic for seven hours with a fractured pelvis, sacrum, and ribs.

If something catastrophic happens (and having just finished Portnoy’s Complaint I really want to write “God forbid”), a hospital will treat you. So what if you can’t pay?

For several years, my ex-wife had three different forms of insurance. No matter how many times, or to how many different people, we gave information on our primary, secondary, and tertiary accounts, hospitals still smacked us with thousands of dollars in bills (my ex is a transplant patient; it took a phone call to the Miami Herald to finally stop the nonsense; don't tell me newspapers are irrelevant). When situations arose where folks saw thousands in unpaid hospital bills on our credit report, we were told time and again that, “we look at medical bills differently” than other debt.

Who cares if my credit rating sucks? If I want to buy a house, or a car? Twice this summer I’ve eaten beans two meals a day to stretch my funds until the next paycheck. I don’t see myself pulling my new vehicle into a home I own any time soon.

Carl Hiaasen wrote that the human body rarely offers up any good surprises past the age of forty. As I approach forty, regular check-ups will become more important. I know this. Of course I won’t cancel my health insurance; I’m just worried about supporting someone besides me and looking for extra income.

As far as the accident, even if hospital debt is “different,” getting demands for payment in the mail is still stressful. I have to balance the couple hundred I paid for a helicopter ride, prescription co-pays, and a walker (“For patient’s comfort” so not covered, never mind that I couldn’t walk without it) vs. the $30k I would have owed for the hospital stay.

Still, I look at that $95.79 I could be saving from my paycheck and think there’s the month I wanted to spend in Italy for my fortieth birthday, there’s the cushion I’m supposed to have for emergencies, there’s my robot butler.

France is looking better every day.

Deadline

Come, the text read.  Live with me for three weeks in a house that isn’t ours. Please.


Becky lives with her parents.  For some people, this is a deal-breaker.  I remember when I worked at Starbucks.  My fellow baristas swooned over dark, handsome, buff, triple-grande-four-sugar-nonfat-latte after he left.  They watched him walk through the parking lot and stand at the bus stop, and a collective so-much-for-that wind blew through them.

“Really?” I asked.

“Yeah, pretty much,” one of them answered, while the others laughed.

I was new to urban life and Miami, unaware that the rules of attraction are entangled with economic success to the point where personality is an afterthought.

Now when I read a chapter of Sex and the City called "Bicycle Boys," I know exactly where I stand with a certain type of woman, a woman who is everywhere in places like Miami.

Thankfully, Becky is not that woman.  She’s also not the deadbeat who can’t move out, or the child who refuses to grow up.  She’s in a class with a few of my friends, people who flew solo for a time and crashed into relationship wrecks, or career derailments, and found themselves moving back home.
Miami is an expensive place to live.  You either need a place smaller than the living room I’m typing this in (like the Treehouse) or you need a roommate.   And what roommate in her twenties wants a five-year-old tagging along?

I’m typing this in a place bigger than the Treehouse, Becky’s parents’ living room, because Cleo Mater and Cleo Pater are traveling the Mediterranean for three weeks.  This gives Becky, Cleo Junior, and me a taste of what living together would be like.  Apparently, I would bake more and write less.  Much, much less.

“You’ll never live with me after this,” she told me.  “I’ll destroy your writing career.”  Which might be true, if I had a writing career.

“It’s an adjustment,” I told her.

I need my discipline back.  I can’t afford to snooze when Cleo Junior comes curling into my lap before seven (I suppose I could tell him I’m busy, but who the hell wants to be that guy?).  Two hours might be all I get, a world of time in the right circumstances.  I also can’t afford to watch DVDs into the night, unless I want to be a zombie the next day.  These are habits which can be adjusted, ironed out.  If the home is filled with love, everything finds a way.

Still, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t worried.

When reading at Books & Books a couple of years back, Jodi Picoult laughed when asked about writer’s block.  She has a gaggle of children (one of whose poor health inspired My Sister's Keeper), and any spare minute to write that she can squeeze into her day isn’t spent wringing her hands over ideas.   Diana Abu-Jaber recently adopted a child, and she’s been grilling writers on how they get anything done.   Waiting for author Chris Cleave to begin speaking about Little Bee, I saw her writing longhand on a legal pad.  I could be them soon.

Thankfully, I haven’t been lazy.   I’ve pushed the cursor hard, and I didn’t put my life on hold to do it.

Looking back, I probably put in all those hours in preparation for this time, when I’d need to make every available minute count.  I’ve always done my best writing pushing against something, be it a job, a deadline, or a self-imposed goal.  When I look back on these three weeks, I’ll realize this was the turning point, when a string of zero-snooze days stopped feeling like a victory and became habit.

More importantly, it will be the time I tasted my future and found it sweeter than anything I’d imagined for myself.

Bicyle Thief

My bike was stolen yesterday. The Rusty Nail was a gift, a garage sale hulk that weighed a zillion pounds. I bought two new tires for $50, a new seat for $90. I’m not sure what I spent on a pump and a red and orange safety light with three settings. The halogen headlight with three settings was also a gift.

After I wrote the above paragraph, I researched prices online. If I only paid $50 for two new tires and tubes, then that was the deal of a lifetime. At the same time, I couldn’t find a bike seat that looked like mine at $90.

Maybe that’s how memory lies, $50 a way of saying the tires were cheaper than I thought they’d be, $90 saying that I spared no expense on a seat that would keep the blood flowing to my penis. Then next time I buy tires and they turn out to be $40 a pop, I’ll be like, “Fuck, these are way over-priced.” My next $65-dollar bike seat will be like, “Wow, what a bargain.” As David Mitchell's Ogawa Uzaemon observes in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, “Memory is tricks and strangeness.”

Anyway, a ballpark of the bike’s worth is $192. What it’s saved in gas and burned in calories over the last two years, I don’t have the inclination to measure or guess. I’m sure it’s impressive.

I’ve been airport run-man lately, taking Becky to the airport and keeping her car while she was out of town, taking Akimbo to the airport and keeping her car while she was out of town. With all this motorized transportation at my disposal, the loss of the bike hasn’t really hit me.

I've missed the ride from my old place, nice and long so I had plenty of time to think my thinks. Walking to work once and a while has been my replacement. Walking to work because I have no choice makes me question my whole existence.

A pause.

Before I rant, I want to make it clear that I have options. Friends have proven more than willing to chauffeur me around. Friends have also offered indefinite loans of brand-new bikes and gifts of old bikes. But it’s been a shit walk home and I’d like to vent, you got a problem with that?

Rant on.

Wet from the constant drizzle, covered in spiderwebs from industrious arachnid workers who string the sidewalks from bush to tree (and taking refuge inside passing umbrellas), dodging oblivious drivers who pay more attention to their cell phones than pedestrians at the ends of their driveways or near stop signs, wet ground stealing my flip-flops every tenth step because Old Navy decided to do some weird wavy shit with their cheap flops this year which creates suction more than cushioning, this has not been the most pleasant forty minutes of my life.

Picture me in the dark, standing on the sidewalk in the drizzling rain, staring into these palatial Coral Gables homes. Am I so unworthy? Have I lived my life so poorly? It’s getting to the point where I want to walk up to the biggest house I pass, knock on the door, ask the owner what they do for a living, and start doing that- be it biomechanical engineering or high-yield bond speculation, drug dealing or white slavery, corporate law or political lobbying.

I’ve always been an A student, excepting a few partying semesters of college. I could live in my sister’s attic, attend Syracuse University for free, and see what the job market is like when I’m forty-five.

Normally I tell myself how young thirty-seven is in a literary career, how all my life I’ve been a late bloomer, and I sleep the sleep of the hopeful.

Brushing webbing out of my hair when I get home from work makes it a tougher sell.

2.23.2010 - The Three Year Anniversary

A friend of mine was mildly disfigured about the face in a car accident some years back. I say “mildly” because I think the scar is sexy, but I’m not a young, gorgeous woman, so what could I know about wearing it? And missing teeth are never sexy, except on hockey players. Anyway, she wrote her obituary afterwards as a cathartic exercise. After my own accident, she suggested I do the same.

Resisting the powerful urge to edit, I present the obituary as I wrote it forty-eight days after the fact:

On February 23rd, 2007, Aaron John Curtis of Miami, Florida lost his life in a traffic accident at the age of 34. Paramedics airlifted him to Jackson Memorial Hospital’s famed Ryder Trauma Center, but he died on route due to injuries sustained at the scene. While Aaron eventually settled in Miami, he also lived in Richmond, Virginia, Syracuse, New York, and Akwesasne (the St. Regis Mohawk Indian Reservation). Had Harper Collins published the book he finished but never quite liked, or had he finished the two books he liked very much and published them, or had he started the two potential Fantasy and Mystery series and had them published, any one of these places may have fought for the right to bury him rather than forgetting he had been there at all. In addition to these unseen works, he also never produced four scripts and never published 29 essays and 30 short stories of varying quality. Aaron is survived by everyone in his family he had known since he was born (except Uncle Fran and Grandma and Grandpa on his father’s side - and what a crazy fucking thought that is, considering all the white trash and filthy Injuns out there who are related to him), each relationship also of varying quality. He met his wife of eight years in 1992 and they never stopped loving each-other, so at least he did something right. Maybe the important thing.

Three years ago today, I knew I was going to die. The car came at me and color bled from the day as God took me out of the equation for a few moments. I didn’t know I’d be back. I didn’t see my life pass before my eyes, I felt my entire emotional life happening all at once, every friend and family member I’ve ever loved and who ever loved me. It was a moment that seemed to last forever, but I didn’t even have time to finish a single thought before the world went white.

If only- I thought, then nothing but white.

Given decades instead of milliseconds, I don’t know how I would have ended that sentence. Maybe the rest of my life is the end of that sentence.

I’ve rewritten my obituary a few times. Once, when I lost some time around an MTBI while biking (that’s Mild Traumatic Brain Injury, which is what they’re calling a mild concussion nowadays), I made that the inciting accident, but usually I just edit the emotional truth.

Let me make clear, I’ve never lived on Akwesasne. I’m a halfbreed, and we often have chips on our shoulders about not being Indian enough. I was up there a lot as a child and I’m closer with my mother’s side of the family, but I never lived there. I find it odd I’d want to die on a lie. Let’s call it dying on a wish.

I mentioned Harper Collins because they were looking at Scratch the Dead Places. At the time, it was still called Skritch Skratch Man. My cover letter was a chatty invitation for coffee with every cover letter cliché and mistake an aspiring writer is supposed to avoid. I even asked Stacy for some craptastic cover art. Of course they didn’t publish this unpalatable, unpublishable mess. Brimming with excitement at meeting my personal goal of writing a book, wildly optimistic when our Harper Collins sales rep offered to bring it back to the New York offices with him, I subjected an industry shaker with the insult of a first draft.

It was a difficult time for friends and family. To know me was to be subjected to three hundred pages of what amounted to a writing exercise.

“All the white trash and filthy Injuns.” From the litany of unpublished works listed in the obit, it’s clear I was worried no one would see and appreciate my work. My resentment at not having the right publishing pedigree manifested itself in this lame attempt at self-deprecating humor.

There was a question written on the back wall of my seventh grade English teacher’s classroom; “Will it matter that I was?” I think Mr. Genarro wanted to inspire us to greatness, not haunt us for life, but what are you gonna do? Since I almost ended, I was worried about my legacy.

Yes, getting outside notice feels good. Yes, I could use the validation and the money. Yes, it’s largely luck and who you know. But opportunity is luck plus preparation. I’m fortunate enough to love a profession which, all trumpeting over wunderkinds like Zadie Smith or Dave Eggers aside, embraces late-bloomers. Right now, I’m happy enough preparing.

The obit ends with the one thing which made me know I’d lived my life right; my marriage. Well, I still think I did the important thing right, warts and all. Love with your whole heart in this life, or get busy dying by slow degrees.

I suppose the only satisfying ending, the only fitting ending, is a three-year anniversary obituary.

Maybe later. Sorry to be a blog tease, but that sounds pretty fucking morbid.

Back at the Bottom of the Pyramid

When you meet someone at nineteen and manage to keep them until you’re thirty-six, people look at you a certain way. You must know some trick of love or life that they’re missing. You’re happy in a way they’ll never be . . . if you’re speaking of your love in a certain way, of course.

Something I missed in this post which is important to clarify because people who didn’t know us as a couple are starting to read this blog, Andi and I were that couple. We genuinely enjoyed each-other’s company, made our decisions as a team, always had each-other’s backs, and spoke in glowing terms about our partner and our relationship. People admired what we had and, I flatter myself to think, wanted it in their own relationships.

I remember a few years back, three of us men were in the stockroom at Books & Books. Guy talk, you know? My friend (who we’re calling) Graham is about twelve years older than me, married for twenty years. My other friend JC is a bit younger, and had married only recently.

Even though he’s a house-husband, Graham belongs in a sitcom from the fifties. He was bitching about his wife using the most clichéd clichés. Because I’d been with Andi for thirteen years at that point, Graham tried using me as an example to back up a point he was making with JC.

Graham wanted to know I felt about my wife.

“I love her more with each passing day.”

JC and Graham braced themselves, waiting for the punchline. I looked back and forth between them.

“That’s it,” I said.

Graham shrugged off this minor hiccup and continued to say how he’d rather masturbate than have sex with his wife, or whatever the story was at the moment. Then he paused, returning to me.

“Wait, do you have kids?”

“No,” I said.

“That explains it,” he said. Like, have kids and then talk to me about married life.

If you believe Graham (and Bill Cosby), married people without children can’t talk about married life, the same way people with one child can’t talk about parenting to people with multiple children.

Maybe that’s true, but the Smug Relationship Pyramid topped by wrinkled oldsters celebrating fifty years together, surrounded by gaggles of children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, that pyramid was built by sad sack singletons who think anything beyond a few years is worth memorializing in a power ballad.

It’s important to distinguish Power Singles from Sad Sack Singletons. Most Power Singles I know are women in their forties and fifties. Some of them have been married, but not all. The thing which unifies them is they’ve had their men and it didn’t impress them all that much. They’d rather have their own space than share it with someone sub-par.

To Sad Sack Singletons, there is no greater glory than marriage. To anyone.

When I became a member of the recently-separated, people handled me like an egg. Little did I know, that was only a stop on my way to becoming another statistic, another story, another failed marriage. Yeah, you’re marriage busted up. Score one for you, now get over it.
I refuse to categorize my marriage as a failure because it ended. Everything living dies, which is the tragic beauty of life. I’d rather drop dead of a massive stroke when I’m biking at eighty-five than linger until a hundred and five and be unable to remember my own name.

Scratch that; I’d rather have a massive stroke in my sleep at a mentally vibrant hundred and five than linger to a doddering hundred and ten.

Since I won’t be part of a wrinkled couple celebrating fifty years, I’ll never know whether our marriage would have been a tree forever sprouting new growth, felled only by one of our deaths, or if it would have looked healthy to an outsider, yet have been riddled with years of rot inside. Either way, I’ve got to let it go.

What’s bothering me lately is how my world view has been rocked. The loss of Andi as a person is incidental to the loss of my marriage as the defining thing in my life, and to realizing that love doesn’t conquer all.

I've heard I could ruin the present worrying about the future. Too true. Ditto, mooning over the past.

Coldest Winter Ever

I lived in Syracuse until I was twenty-five. It’s the lake effect snow that gets you, storms which come off the Great Lakes dropping fat flakes at a rate too quick for windshield wipers and snow plows. Those storms are the reason we have pictures of shoveling through several feet of snow dated in May, but that doesn’t necessarily mean April was anything more than slush that year. I can count the number of times it snowed on Halloween on one hand. It’s impressive to claim snow eight months out of the year, but those were banner years. Only January through March was it guaranteed to stick.

What’s cold in a place like that, when you’re not impoverished? Staying out too long for snow forts and snow men, shivering your wet clothes off in front of the radiator, stripping down to long underwear and running upstairs as fast as you could for fresh socks, sweatpants, and sweaters, leaning over a hot chocolate or a Campbell’s tomato soup that mom had waiting for you. Yes, your toes were numb, ditto nose and fingers, but it was in the service of fun. It made getting warm that much more comforting.

Waiting at school bus stops, dancing from foot to foot, hands stuffed in pockets, head ducked turtle-like in collars, it wasn’t the puffy flakes you worried about, it was the wind. Wind chill could make ten degrees feel like twenty below. But the busses were coming, Cheese Boxes heated with religious fervor. Your toes might not be dry by the time you reached school, but your hat and gloves would be off, your jacket zippered down, hairline dappled with sweat. We were too old to take a change of footwear without looking like dorks. If you were rich, you wore Timberlands. If you were not, you wore knock-offs. Either way, you waited until second period for your toes to dry.

College classes could get nasty. For the transplants, walking around Syracuse University – the Hill – revealed the crucial difference between Manhattan Smart and Survival Wear. For the natives, Onondaga Community College’s lack of foliage and low industrial buildings offered no protection from the raging winds.

Yet coldest I’ve been in my life was during this past cold-front, in sunny Miami.

The way few homes up north have air conditioning to keep cool during the couple months they may actually need it, few down here have heat. To keep warm at night, I had my usual sheets and blankets, plus a couple of fleece throws which Algonquin Books had sent as a promotion with paperback copies of A Reliable Wife, along with three pairs of socks, a toque, three t-shirts - two short and one long – pajama bottoms, and underwear. I hate sleeping in underwear. If I wear underwear to bed, you know it’s cold.

All this would have been fine. Nostalgic, even. Except the buying office at Books & Books doesn’t have heat. The Westin Colonnade across the street blocks our sun. Books & Books rents three of these offices, one for buying, one for marketing and events, and one for accounting. The architects who own the building occupy a fourth space, and the fifth is currently unoccupied. The architects worked from home a lot that week.

Why are we paying rent, exactly? They could have at least offered us space heaters. Instead Mark and I hunched at our desks, fingers white, noses dripping, toes numb, cracking jokes about Scrooge and coal and Bob Cratchit.

If you northerners think we’re weak, step outside and have a seat in the shade next November or December, whenever it gets down to the thirties in your neck of the woods. Sit there for eight hours. Believe it or not, typing doesn’t get the blood flowing like you’d think it would.

I walked instead of biking. The wind on your face in spring or fall? Delightful. This week it burned.

I was in a car a few times with the heat blasting, and the children’s section at Books & Books was toasty warm. Other than that, I froze my ass off the entire week. I used to say I preferred cold to the heat. It’s not so bad up north, I’d say. You can always add more layers, but what are you supposed to do down here? You can only get so naked. That’s logical.

But when you’re getting dressed in front of an open oven in a vain attempt to feel your feet, logic doesn’t keep you warm.

My First Christmas

When I wrote this previous post, in the back of my mind I knew there would be other firsts. Not in those terms, exactly, but I knew it was just the beginning of my separation. I had already made it through Andi’s birthday and I had a plan for mine, but I hadn’t even considered the holidays.

Andi has missed Thanksgiving a couple times before, and she rarely took off as much time from work as I did. It’s not like her absence up north was unprecedented, it was just a new kind of absence.

When I asked why no one had mentioned Andi this year, my mother explained, “We wouldn’t say anything because if you got back together it would be awkward.”

Ah.

“Even then, we wouldn’t say anything,” Mom said.

“We’d just look at her,” Aunt Jeri agreed, demonstrating her flinty-eyed stare.

I told them about Becky.

Friday the 25th, I woke up alone on Christmas Day for the first time in my life. I didn’t play music. I made myself a mushroom and cheese omelet. I opened the Christmas gifts from my Aunt Jeri (and the Starbuck’s gift card from Uncle Nicky), who’d drawn my name this year. I brewed coffee and read for several hours. I showered and walked to Books &Books, not to work but to use it as my personal Kinkos.

It was a blindingly gorgeous day, Christmas served up Miami style. Not cold yet, but cool. Periwinkle skies, fluffy clouds. Jeans and t-shirt weather. I passed three fathers helping their sons ride the bicycles they’d just received, one boy far too old to be wobbling on his first bike. I couldn’t help but think of the bike Santa had brought Becky’s boy on Christmas. I also thought of learning to bike myself.

I remember my father jogging behind me. I’m not sure how long I’d been biking, weeks or months, but the training wheels on my hand-me-down bike were raised maybe an inch off the pavement. Dad urged me to go faster, jogging behind me while he held the bike seat steady. Everything clicked. I found my balance. I left dad behind like I’d been shot from a cannon. I remember him trying to keep up for a couple of steps, then giving up and just watching as I biked to the end of the block and back.

I’d like to put a smile on his face, add some triumphant shouting, but all I remember is his hand, letting go, and those two jogging steps he took before standing still. He was wearing jeans.

Walking alone under Miami’s sun, I realized how lucky I am. I’ve gone directly from a family-filled home to a girlfriend’s house to another girlfriend (and eventual wife)’s house. Every year of my life, I’ve woke on Christmas in a home filled with love. This year, I woke alone. But that was important to do, so I could realize the first part.

At Books & Books, I printed some things out and wrapped some gifts. Becky called. Her son’s second Christmas at her ex’s had begun; was I ready for our private Christmas?

“Nah, I’m enjoying my solitude,” I said.

Right. Solitude is great when it’s a state you know will end soon, but you can’t end solitude alone. I told her I’d race her to the Treehouse. I hopped on my bike (which I’d left at work before), the day so perfect I wanted to take a few extra laps around the gorgeous houses on my block. Instead I got home, showered, cleaned up, and ate a bowl of vanilla ice cream drizzled with one of the syrups my aunt had given me.

The syrup gift set wasn’t on my Christmas list, but it’s the things you don’t expect which make the best surprises.

Becky and I exchanged gifts. I thought she was a mind reader, but apparently she had asked what I wanted for Christmas while we were drifting off one night and I sleepily gave her the rundown. Along with all the fun stuff, we exchanged some personal gifts upon which we could hang the memories of our first shared Christmas.

Get your mind out of the gutter, I’m talking about the stories I printed out at Books &Books, which she’d been after me to give her for some time. She says lingerie is a gift more for the giver than the receiver, but really, giving her those stories is a selfish gift. She might enjoy my words, but I enjoy her reading them more.

Becky also drew me a picture and had it framed, a pencil drawing of us together on the beach in Sarasota, enjoying the sunset and each-other’s company. I hadn’t thought I could look on those days with any more fondness, but she proved me wrong.

This was a Christmas I'll never forget.