Of Disney Trips, Moving Sisters, and the Importance of Lighting

Another road trip to Orlando has passed.  Becky and I helped her sister and two other girls move in to a third floor apartment... with no elevator.  Mattresses and dressers be damned, all it took was one huge, leather sofa to make my arms into jello the rest of the day.  Our labor was paid for by Patron Silver, Bud Light, and $5 hot-n-ready Little Caesars; I feel no shame.   

Apart from a buzz and the excuse to slam slices of cheesy greasy goodness, two things made the sore muscles worthwhile.  Sister Q’s roommates are both moving out of their parent’s homes for the first time.  In the family kitchen, one proud poppa couldn’t believe I drank my coffee black, especially a young guy like me.  

“What are you, like 22?” he asked.  Sister Q said she could hear Becky and I laughing all the way from the driveway.  He admitted to guessing low to make me feel good, but he kept repeating 38?  38? in tones of heightened incredulity rarely heard outside of a bad romantic comedy.  

Apart from learning I could blend in with college students in the right light (i.e. nine am in a kitchen with no eastern-facing windows), Becky and I got a free day at Disney World on Tuesday.  

Which park did we do?  ALL OF THEM, BABY!  Again, I feel no shame.   

We started with Test Track, Soarin’ (why not “Soaring”?  Does the missing “g” mean more fun?), and Captain EO at Epcot Center.  We moved on to Animal Kingdom’s Maharajah Jungle Trek so Becky could greet the tigers, and we rode Expedition Everest twice.  I’d never done Expedition Everest before, and it gives more sustained stomach butterflies than any other Disney ride.  At Hollywood Studios we took in Toy Story Mania, the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, and Aerosmith’s Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster.  We would have ridden Tower and Rock ‘n Roller twice each, but butterflies have a way of turning into queasiness for me, so we decided not to press our luck.  

Then on to Magic Kingdom for the usual Pirates of the Caribbean-esque, Haunted Mansion-ey, Space Mountain-laden,  Big Thunder Mountain-drenched fun.  We also found time for Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin, and I somehow managed to keep my motion sickness under control long enough to ride the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party Teacups.  

I don’t know if people normally crowding Disney were whooping it up over at the Wizarding World of Harry Potter or if it was just February first, but there were no lines.  Rides that said ten minutes barely took five.  The longest wait was Toy Story Mania, which claimed 40 minutes but took fifteen.  On Pirates, we just walked in and didn’t stop until we were looking at an empty boat.  We were so accustomed to waiting we just stood there.  Finally, the woman expediting the ride encouraged Becky, me, and our fellow guests to board.

This slowness also meant no parade.  As hundreds of people sat around the usual route and the guys pushed their carts full of glow-in-the-dark tchotchkes, Becky read from the program that the parade was limited to Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.  People within hearing distance got up and left.  Becky and I walked out feeling superior to the hoards of saps who hadn’t realized that the parade was not late, is was just not.

Another benefit of the slowness?  Disney recommends reservations for Canada’s le Cellier - located in Epcot’s World Showcase - be made 180 days in advance.  Becky snagged us a reservation five hours out.  It’s a steakhouse, and I’ve never been anywhere in Canada approaching that level of expense, but it lived up to the hype I’ve been hearing the last few years.  

It was a day to die for, topped off with a meal to die for, with a woman who makes me glad to be alive.

We've Created a Monster

When we moved to Madrid Street, Dylan had a tough time sleeping alone.  While we stayed together at her parents' place, Becky and I read to him, then we'd turn the lights out and settle in to his bed.  When Dylan fell asleep, Becky and I would leave.  He had curled up with Becky and I a few times in the middle of the night, but I didn't know it was a "thing." 

In Dylan's mind, the three of us slept together the whole night.  Waking up alone was disorienting and frightening, so he'd come down the hall and cuddle with us.  Until we shared our own roof, I didn't realize those nights Becky and I spent alone were nights Dylan slept straight through.  Getting used to the new place must have been difficult for Dylan; he joined us every night.

I couldn't sleep.

He's squirmy and kicky , but that's only part of it.  I'm used to the feel, sounds, and smells of a woman in my bed, but a six-year-old was a different kettle of fish.  His presence felt strange.  Time would change that, but I also had silly concerns which I didn't know were silly, like. . . what if I rolled over and crushed him?  What if I popped a woody and he noticed?  Was seeing his petite little mom sleeping with this two-hundred pound lummox scarring his psyche?  Laying awake and worrying sucked most of the night away.  I'd be forced to my old day bed to catch a few quick hours before it was time to get up and write.  

I decided Dylan was old enough to sleep alone, and Becky agreed.

Rather than ask my own parents, or my siblings with grown children of their own, for advice, I Googled to see what had worked for a bunch of strangers.  Maybe that's just a symptom of modern living.  Maybe I'm embarrassed over my lack of knowledge, or for getting such a late start relative to my relatives (even though I'm sure my family would be thrilled to help).  Anyway, I emailed a list of techniques and suggestions to Becky.

That night at dinner (one of Becky's strengths is that she doesn't talk or plan something to death; once she decides, she acts)  Becky told Dylan he'd better spend the whole night in his own bed, otherwise the Sleep Fairy wouldn't visit him.

The Sleep Fairy barely merited mention in the stuff I sent to Becky.  Truthfully, I thought the idea was lame, but I wanted to be thorough.  Becky, however, knows what works.  

Dylan's eyes grew wide.

"What's the Sleep Fairy?"

Becky explained that the Sleep Fairy visits houses and leaves little gifts for children who spend the whole night in their own bed.  That night, after being tucked in, Dylan suddenly sat upright.

"I love you, Sleep Fairy!" he called.  "I believe in you!"

He's slept on his own ever since, and all it costs me is some Star Wars miniatures I had when I was a kid.  As Becky says, parenting is bribery and broken promises.

Google promised the Sleep Fairy would gradually fade from our lives as Dylan no longer needs her, which is true.  Google didn't mention that she was married to Santa Claus ("What about Mrs. Claus, Dylan?"  "Mrs. Claus is the Sleep Fairy."  Duh.), or that she would morph into the Finish Your Dinner Fairy, or the Don't Have an Accident in Your Pants Fairy.  When Dylan refused to eat, or "forgot" to use the toilet, the Sleep Fairy got a note and Dylan got nothing.

But lately Dylan seems to have forgotten the Sleep Fairy.  He's finished his dinners, kept his underwear clean, and managed to listen just enough to keep Becky and I from blowing up.  I've left a one-inch die-cast metal Han Solo and a Luke Skywalker in the usual place, and they've gone untouched. 

Thursday night, looking at broiled chicken with a side of corn risotto, Dylan wanted to know what he would "get" if he finished his dinner.  How about good nutrition?  How about you don't get sent to bed?  How about Becky and I don't get upset with you, and we enjoy a nice evening together?  That meant nothing to him.  

I suppose we could blame ourselves, but I'd rather blame that stupid Sleep Fairy.

Moving Day

My fever broke but I have the energy level of a sloth. I feel like I could close my eyes and sleep for a month. It’s Friday, the moving truck is rented for Saturday, the Quiroga house is rising at eight to load it up, and the Treehouse looks like a bomb went off.




My angel, my Becky, comes over and packs up all my books after work while I nap. Box after box, she’s relentless, playing beat the clock until it’s time to pick up Dylan from his after-care program.



I don’t know if it’s the nap, Becky’s inspiring presence, or the knowledge that tomorrow I will live with the woman I love, but I manage to stay awake for four hours and pack. Most of the food in the cabinets is a loss due to the leaking roof, which makes me angry over the waste yet grateful for one less thing to pack. I sleep as best I can, rise at seven, and get to work. I manage to finish everything just as the Q’s hit the road. While they drive, I have time to scarf a box of raisins.



I feel guilty for not being there to help them, but I’m also feeling a burst of post-illness energy. Before the day ends, Becky and I will share a home, and we’ll have two days to make that home livable for Dylan.



The move is not effortless, but it’s made easy by many hands and decent planning. We get everything inside before the afternoon rains hit. Becky’s mom feeds us sandwiches from the bakery down the street. The sandwich, the new place, wherever the second wind comes from, now the fun begins – Becky and I get to play with furniture and decide what goes where. We had grand designs on that first night; a bottle of wine chilling, christening every room… but I feel too ill to drink and we’re on a deadline, so tipsy naked time will have to wait.



I feel better but the coughing has begun in earnest. I go to the doctor, as I promised the Q Family I would, and she prescribes antibiotics and a cough suppressant to treat my bronchitis. She can’t tell whether it’s related to the mold I’ve been breathing in the last couple weeks, but she said that “probably didn’t help.” I haven’t had bronchitis since I was seven.



The weekend is a blur, but Becky and I manage to make Dylan’s room, the kitchen, the dining room, and the living room livable.

Welcome home.

Someone Left the Treehouse in the Rain

If you don’t remember the move from separation to singledom, let me remind you that the three-week cleanup of the Treehouse was complicated by a leaking roof.  Perhaps it’s appropriate that on the way from singledom to cohabiting, the leak has returned.

Before going to Orlando to celebrate Dylan’s birthday, I called the landlord’s son to let him know the closet was leaking again.  At that point, it was a small drip, avoidable by scrunching my clothes to the side and putting a bucket down.  After ten days of back and forth, the roof became about as effective as swiss cheese.

My clothes, shoes, and spare linens have been removed from the closet, where mold grows luxuriantly in the back corner and water trickles from several spots.  The closet fixtures I purchased and installed are now rife with mold.

The kitchen ceiling also leaks from several spots.  The sound of dripping water is so loud, it wakes me at night.  Of course it keeps me up, but that’s not what I mean.  I’m saying I finally manage to drop off despite the wet stench of the place and the frustration of having everything I own piled into half of a tiny studio, and the sound of rain inside the house is loud enough to wake me.

If you’ll remember, the water damage in the kitchen is not new.  Clearly, the prior tenant experienced similar problems, as the new wall panels and rusted drip pans on the oven can attest.  And their realtor has the nerve to call me and ask what the landlord can do to keep me from moving out.

The house was built in 1925; it needs a new roof, not more handyman patch jobs.  That’s the minimum which needs to happen to make the place livable, and my landlord could pay for it with by selling the Escalade he drives in Miami (he lives in San Bernardino, CA) or the chunk of gold around his wrist.  Meanwhile, I no longer feel safe in my own home.  I’m sleeping with a bat near my bed.  I know that makes no sense – what am I going to do, beat the water to death? – but it helps me get a few fitful hours of rest.

1200 Wallace Street in Coral Gables, FL, 33134, reeks of mold and festering water damage.  It’s August in Miami, but I’ve opened the windows to let the stench escape.  Since it’s rainy season, the ceiling never stops dripping.  The water went from brown to white, laced with glue from the tar paper the well-meaning, ineffective handyman keeps layering up there.

There’s no Becky.  I can barely stand the conditions here myself, and I’m not about to subject her to them.  We’re getting through this because we know we’ll share a home soon, and we’ll be able to discover each-other all over.

I can’t masturbate, even though I’ve got all the makings of a first-rate prison fantasy.  You know the one, where I’m a guard at a women’s prison?  That’s caged heat, baby.  The dripping water, the smell, it’s like special effects.  When it rains, I can imagine Becky and I getting hot and heavy on the front porch of some tropical hut during a rainstorm.  But there’s no way to reconcile disgust and self-lust, so even that momentary peace is lost to me.

Now I’m run down and feverish just when I need to be packing up.  Ever cleaned your dishes in the bathroom sink, rinsed them in the shower, and dried them in your living room, while running a fever, as roofing glue drips down your neck?  It’s exactly as fun as it sounds.

Mr. Rojas, the keys to your Escalade wouldn’t get me to stay in this dank hole another day.  If you have an ounce of humanity, you will replace the roof before you give the key to the Treehouse to some other poor sap.

Oh, and stop charging the poor woman who just moved in below me rent.  All that water flows downward, you know.

I Love it When a Plan Comes Together

Days were dark. Becky and I wanted to move in. We had the place all picked out, and a landlord willing to cut us the deal of a lifetime. What we didn’t have was first and last month’s rent. My lease was expiring, and all we had were dreams.

To top it off, Dylan’s father didn’t want Dylan to transfer schools. Dylan’s current school was five minutes away from him and DF refused to make the drive. DF said he would agree to the transfer if it was what was best for Dylan, but he never did the research. Miami Shores Elementary is a decent school, but Coral Gables Elementary is top 30 in the state, top 10 in Miami Dade County. Even better, Coral Gables Elementary recently became Coral Gables K-8 Preparatory Academy, a public school teaching grades K-8.

DF didn’t see it as beneficial for Dylan’s education, he saw it as doing a favor for Becky, trying to make her life easier just because she has a new boyfriend. A forty-minute commute was out of the question, never mind that Becky had been making it for two years.

There’s a reason for clichés. In this case, it’s always darkest before the dawn applies.

Cleopatra Pater – a teacher whose opinion DF still respects – spoke with DF. Cleo Pater made it clear that moving to Coral Gables would be a huge advantage for the Monkey. DF agreed to the transfer.

The same day Becky spoke with DF and found out he’d agreed to make the commute, I spoke with our landlord. Carroll agreed that Becky and I could move in with first month’s rent plus whatever we could put toward a deposit of last month’s rent. We’d pay extra each month, until she had her deposit. When Becky called me with the good news about Dylan, I told her my good news about the new place.

Suddenly, Dylan was slated for a much better school and we had enough money to move.

No matter how badly a day begins, it can still end well.

Rent to Own

I’ve been a renter since I left my parents home at the age of nineteen. My Aunt Jeri rented her apartment in Syracuse before moving back to the reservation. She had nothing to show for paying forty years of rent, and she upbraids me for renting from time to time.

When I ask friends who own houses and condos what they pay monthly on their mortgages, it’s always a fraction of my rent. I know I’m making fiscally unsound choices, but try coming up with a 10% deposit on a house, or 30% deposit on a condo (chuckleheads with homes have prevented me from getting one of my own because of their stupid choices; Florida homeowners tried to use condos as income-generating second properties during the housing boom, then defaulted on their loans in droves, so banks require 30% of the selling price to buy a condo; 10% on what a condo costs is feasible, but when I learned banks want 30%, I stopped saving; if I had 30% of what a condo costs, I’d use it for 10% down on a house; now for the end of a sentence interrupted so long ago, you forgot the beginning) on a bookseller’s salary.

There’s freedom in renting. If the air conditioning breaks, you call the landlord and he or she has it fixed. If a hurricane destroys your apartment, you rent another that’s still standing. If the roof leaks… well, never mind.

As a renter, you can bob and weave. I’ve experienced Miami in the peripherals of Kendall, the very heart, and now the Spanish garden that is Coral Gables. I’ve always wanted to know what it feels like to wake up, take a walk, and do yoga on the beach. I haven’t made it to Miami Beach yet, but who knows what could happen down the road?

Renting also comes with a number of perks. You get the voyeuristic, felonious thrill of opening mail for people who aren’t you. You get to play detective with carpet stains. You get to find layers of paint around electrical outlets and speculate on the previous tenant’s design choices.

You also get neighbors living in much closer proximity than with a house, folks with whom you’re not obligated to actually speak. Get into a volume war with every sound system in your complex, because at least your music doesn’t suck. Hack into your neighbor’s wireless internet connection without worrying about the signal strength, and do it guilt-free. Masturbate to the sound of your neighbors fucking and imagine they are gorgeous supermodels because you’ll never have to see them.

Oh, it’s a glamorous life, my friends. But please, home owners, don’t be jealous. After all, you get to fix your own plumbing problems.

Money Didn't Matter Yesterday

One of my mother’s favorite stories is how I told my kindergarten teacher my parents were old, “Like seventy.” The teacher assumed I was being raised by my grandparents, until my mother’s first classroom visit.

“Wow, you look great for seventy,” the teacher laughed.

All I knew was that my parents were old, and seventy was old, so my parents were seventy. Dylan is no different. Becky is twenty seven, and he keeps saying she’s seventy two because there’s a seven in the number. I could be eighty, thirty, or sixty, whatever feels old to him that week.

He’s the same way with money.

For someone who has never cared about money, I’m thinking about it way too much lately. Making money was nice, but not nice enough to keep managing at retail chains. Maybe I don't think much of making money because I didn’t make enough. I sure didn’t save anything. Eating beans two meals a day and refusing myself purchases is one thing, but Dylan is five (well, six today).

I read about one mother who explained to her son that she would love to buy him a new video game system, but doing so would require money she didn’t have. “I’d need to work harder to make more money, and I’d have less time to spend with you. Would you like that?” The boy choose mom’s presence over the Okama Gamesphere, or whatever.

Becky and I tried to make Dylan see the connection between taking him out to lunch, and buying him toys, and taking him to Universal Studios in Orlando for his birthday, and throwing him a Star Wars-themed party on the actual day of his birthday (although now it’s Dinosaur-themed), and buying birthday gifts, and saving up for us all to live together.

Dylan promises to help. He has enough money saved to buy himself a pink mustang and me a red mustang, and Becky a Jeep, and for all of us to go to Orlando. Fifteen, maybe twenty dollars. If we buy him a toy for being angelic at work (every day in the summer is bring your child to work day at Books & Books, because what bookseller can afford daycare?), and throw him a huge party, he will pay for the trip to Universal.

He’s six and he wants the world, and what six-year-old doesn’t? Tears over not getting his way I can handle; it’s the bargaining that breaks my heart.

A few years back around Thanksgiving, my siblings and my cousins were telling stories about our shared childhood. The “toe-curler” came up, as it always does. Five of us on the floor, held in place by a blanket so thick it curled our toes, while my sister – the Princess – got the couch.

Five kids sleeping on the living room floor under a blanket.

“I think we were poor,” my cousin Shannon said, and we died laughing.

We didn’t feel poor, of course. I just need to get over it, and by “it” I mean Miami. I’ve lived here long enough that I’ve forgotten the shock of moving down and seeing how people measure their lives in toys and titles, in bank accounts and designer labels.

You may have tangible wealth untold;
Caskets of jewels and coffers of gold.
Richer than I you can never be–
I had a Mother who read to me.

-Strickland Gillilan,The Reading Mother

In that sense, Dylan will be a sultan.

Divorced

Last week I was very excited to have scheduled a date to sign my divorce papers. As a matter of fact, I was happy about it right up until the night before. Of course I also felt nervous to see Andi.

Cruising the internet a while back, I saw a video of her performing with Exit 19. The sound quality was shit, as sound on phones and digital cameras always is, but that wasn’t the problem. Even with poor sound, I would have been mesmerized if we’d still been together. With the months apart, it was like looking at a stranger.

Along with my heart, she broke my love goggles.

I once used the metaphor of an athlete being confined to a wheelchair to describe what losing Andi was like. That felt right for a while, but it doesn’t anymore. I’m up, I’m moving forward, and being with Becky is the best kind of freedom.

Now I feel happy and sad at the same damned time. There’s the person who promised to love Andi for the rest of his life, who meant it with all his heart, and who expected to die in her arms. Well, he did die. He died alone (more accurately, surrounded by friends, but not the one friend he expected to be with) and I don’t mourn his passing, but I mourn his innocence, his world view, his absolute self-assurance in matters of the heart.

Clearly, I needed to be knocked down a peg.

I miss our friendship, but looking at her fills me with sadness. The undying lover has been replaced by a man who wishes her nothing but the best, and means it with all his heart.

The home I shared with Andi in Oasis Condominiums only exists in my memory and in some great pictures, but it will never be again. While I mourn the official end of this era in my life, I’m also looking forward to what happens next. I feel pain and excitement, sadness and relief, regret and love, all jumbled together.

Becky and I have picked a place in the Gables, where our studios will share space, where Dylan can have his own room and attend an amazing school, where our family has room to grow. Like Oasis, the Gables home with Becky only exists in my mind, in pictures, and in dreams, but it’s no less real.

I still don’t have a word for all these emotions; it’s just what happens now. Close one book and open a new one. Let one thing go to pick up another. Say goodbye to the defining relationship of your life to make room for the love of your life.

They Have the Best CVS There...

There are people who scan the radio and stop when they hear something they know, and people who scan the radio looking for something they’ve never heard before. The joy of vacations should be living in that second mind-set for a while. Yet more and more, a sameness is creeping across our country. As much as I love Starbucks, seeing one in New Orleans made me angry.

I guarantee when you get home from vacation, no one says, “I love Portland! Did you check out their Target?”

The axiom “no matter where you go, there you are” is starting to mean more than just a statement of the human condition. Now everywhere you go, you’ll find you can’t escape yourself, Payless Shoes, and Olive Garden. You can't escape strip malls. You can’t escape retail villages, huge feeding troughs of consumerism which look like children resulting from a corporate gang-rape of Norman Rockwell.

Working at an Indie bookstore, it's easy for me to get upset. I wonder what I’d do if a Café Du Monde opened across the street from Books & Books. Turn my nose up at it because it wasn’t in New Orleans, or gain five pounds the first week it opened from grubbing on those sweet beignets?

I often say your money is your message, as in, if you like Books & Books quit spending your money someplace else. But as incomes dwindle, our buying choices have little to do with what we like and everything to do with what we can afford.

Coral Gables, Bal Harbour, Grand Cayman Island, these places aren’t hurting for money. Miami Beach is a captive audience, since they’d have to leave the island to browse. We’re opening a Hampton store in July. Is Books & Books only standing because of the zip codes we choose?

If my money is my message, then I love me some Swedish modular furniture. I Ikea’d the hell out of the Treehouse when I moved in. It looks amazing in pictures, but none of this furniture will become heirlooms. It’s made to be disposable, as different from the weighty dresser I helped a friend pick up and move from Biltmore Way as Ke$ha is from Leonard Cohen.

I had a bed. Should I have lived from boxes while I slowly built up enough money to buy the right “pieces?” Maybe. It would have been tougher to bring myself back from being emotionally devastated by the break down of my marriage if I’d been surrounded by more mess in my home, but maybe the process would have built character.

That’s what America (and Americans) is losing (and lacking) – character.

Racism: Not Just for Northerners

Here’s what makes the racial tension in Miami different than the racial tension up north. Growing up in central New York, I knew I was enlightened because only southerners were racists.

Forget my seventh grade science teacher, who said there were no instances of absolute black hair in nature, then pointed to where I sat between a black girl and a Chinese boy and said, “Well, maybe that table, but that’s about it,” in a dismissive, let’s-get-back-to-the-point tone. Forget that for me diversity was the two black kids, one Eskimo, and the handful of Asians and Latinos I went to school with. Forget that we few dusky faces came to represent the entirety of our respective races as we were called upon to answer our classmates’ often confounding questions about what, where, when, and how. Forget that co-workers and I swapped “the first time I saw a black person” stories as part of our getting-to-know-you routine (apart from Liz Ramirez, who, when it was her turn, smiled and said, “The first time I saw a white person…”). Forget that our northern enlightenment depended on how effectively we kept our racial populations segregated. Forget reality and learn the “truth.” School taught me northerners like us ended the Civil War and conquered racism, that racism itself was a southern problem.

Then I moved to Virginia. Interracial couples walked hand-in-hand all over the place, and the only one staring was me. I saw a wedding between two white people where the best man and two bridesmaids were black - and it wasn’t a movie. Black people ate next to me at restaurants. They shopped with me and worked with me.

By the way, I don’t know how folks I’m calling black feel about being called black but it’s my shorthand for telling this story. I hate the term “Native American.” I’m not saying dislike; I’m saying hate. I wasn’t invited to the vote that determined when I was supposed to stop calling myself Indian, and I don’t give a damn that the name is based on faulty navigation. That whole wave of political correctness grates on my nerves because the default setting, the given, is American, and it’s meant to be synonymous with white. Therefore I can’t bring myself to use African American, sorry. If we need labels, I tend to prefer “people of color,” but it doesn’t really speak to my point because I’m taking about one particular color.

Anyway, back to seeing lots of black people every day of my life for the first time in my life. I realize I’d been fed bullshit for twenty some odd years. The enlightened, tolerant, wishy-washy lack of racism I grew up with relied on keeping all people of color invisible.

Moving to Miami blew the definitions I’d learned all to hell. Someone who could be identified as African American in a picture would really be South American or Caribbean or European. Ditto the white folks. You might think that girl’s Spanish, but guess what? She’s Greek. Or Indian. Or Middle Eastern. It’s all a mish mash and ultimately it won’t matter, if we keep loving on each-other until no one knows who’s what.

I’m not sure how to feel about this. Racism is a blight on society and it’s dehumanizing to individuals. The world will be better off when it’s gone. But is homogeneity the only solution?

I want my Eskimo families gathered around a seal and ripping its raw flesh to pieces for sustenance. I want my gentile southerners and upper-crust northerners taking cocktails at five and calling it Attitude Adjustment Hour. I want my Haitians speaking English, Spanish, French, and Creole, and I want theirs names to be an exotic confusion of genders and verbs not normally lending themselves to proper nouns. I love our differences, and would prefer we celebrate and not eliminate them.

Places like Miami, New Orleans, Richmond, places where different races lay cheek by jowl, we have to get along. We rely on a rainbow coalition of colors to get us through our days, regardless of if we like each-other, whether or not we want to need each-other.

My solution to end racism? Forced proximity for people of all races. It’s way too much effort to hate the people who live with you.

And if you make that kind of effort, you deserve to die alone.

You Can't Serve Both God and Mammon

When I try to come up with how many years it’s been since I moved to Miami, or how many months I’ve lived in the Treehouse, I realize I’ve measured my days and years by my relationship with Andi. Those sixteen years are frozen in time, and I'm constantly surprised that life has gone on.

Tax-time. Married, filing jointly? Married, filing separately? The question carries an emotional weight it never has in the past.

Like good little troopers who will never see the kinds of salaries some take for granted, Andi and I planned for our retirement early. The money you save in your twenties is worth exponentially more than the money you save in your thirties, etc. etc.

What a scam.

We diversified, we took expert advice, and our retirement funds were only worth 64% of what we paid into them. Planning to retire at age 55, we lost 46% of what we could have saved just stuffing the money into a mattress.

Only we didn’t lose 46% percent. Because we dissolved our retirement funds early, we were penalized by losing almost half of what our account was worth. Andi and I were left just 38% of the money we gave our broker. We split it 50-50.

What else would you do in a divorce with money you’d been saving together for a mutual retirement? Say, let’s not touch that money and hope we can tighten our belts for the next few months getting set up on our own. See you in twenty years and we’ll split the proceeds. I’m sure financial advisors do the math on divorce rates and salivate rather than advise separate retirement accounts.

Ameriprise Financial made everything look so good on paper. Ultimately, we lost 62 cents of every dollar we gave them. This doesn’t include interest we would have made with the money in a plain old savings account.

If I’m less up in arms than perhaps I should be, there are two reasons. First of all, there’s a measure of guilt. We swam in deep waters, waters beyond our scope. We should have left investment portfolios to the six-figure folks who understand them.

Whether this is true or not doesn’t matter; the feeling of foolishness is real.

Secondly, I used percentages because the actual amounts involved are less than impressive. A percentage allows you to view my frustration with investments which didn’t pan out through the lens of your own financial strata. In truth, after first-and-last-month’s rent, a security deposit, and filling the Treehouse with Ikea, I had a thousand-dollar cushion in the bank.

I worked my way into middle-management, basically all you can get with on-the-job experience that doesn’t require a college degree. I stepped out of it to devote more time to writing, and I became much happier. Poorer, but much happier.

I just sometimes wish I had a little bit more greed in my makeup.

My First Publication

I was first published in Junior High. My family was going through counseling for problems associated with alcohol abuse – my parents in Alcoholics Anonymous and Adult Children of Alcoholics, my siblings in Ala-Teen, myself in Children of Alcoholics. Families rarely undergo real change; this period as much as any explains my adaptability.

The poetry I wrote at this time was a few degrees removed from stream-of-consciousness emotive rants, but one or two of them inspired others in the program. COA’s empathized. Their parents understood what they were putting their children through, sometimes for the first time.

The lead counselor was Paul Curtin. The new Phaidon rep I met this week, I couldn’t remember his name for love or money, but Paul? I haven’t seen him for twenty years, and I didn’t even have to think.

I wonder when I became so anti-therapy.

Paul wrote a book and used two of my poems, crediting me as an anonymous child of an alcoholic. As part of the publishing business, I now understand that no one would mistake Paul for John Gray, but I still think of this as my first published work.

All the attention felt good, but I couldn’t see what the fuss was about. I just wrote what I felt and prettied it up a little.

My second publishing experience was an opinion piece on racism that I wrote for the Herald-Journal in High School. This was also my first experience with the editing process outside of a classroom. The man who ran the teen section of the paper, I can’t remember his name but his fingerprints are on Sweet with Fall and Fish. To this day, part of my editing process involves taking out all of the “I thinks” and “to mes” and “I feels” to strengthen my voice and streamline my message.

I was proud of all the work I put in, proud that a photographer came to my house to take a byline photo, proud of having an entire third of the front page of the section.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get a pass before the column was published.

My final paragraph began, “When people look scared passing me on the street, I try to believe it’s my age group or because I’m so tall rather than my features.” As part of strengthening my voice, the Herald Journal removed “I try to believe.” Give that line another read without “I try to believe” and you’ll see the whole meaning is changed. It made the struggle to ignore racism that I’d outlined in the preceding paragraphs into childish puling.

Take a look at my photo. I have no idea how you perceive my race, but as a man moving from central New York to Miami I’m qualified to tell you that you’re only as ethnic as the people around you. I may seamlessly blend into the cultural mash that is Miami, but in East Syracuse I was once mistaken for black.

But my point is not whether or not I was subjected to racism as a child, or that you should have final approval on everything you publish; I wrote this blog because the Herald reporter told me that if I ever had something else close to my heart which I felt like writing about, I should give him a call. I thought contacts and opportunities like this would be available my whole life. I figured any time I wanted to express myself, someone would be there to bring my words to a larger audience. Charmingly naïve, or just naïve?

Beyond these two early brushes with writing success, there were awards and recognition for my art and backstage work, IQ tests, my SAT and ACT scores, a scholarship to a school I didn’t want to attend. Daily, I heard that I would do amazing things with my life. What I want to know is, when does an individual’s promise become promise unfulfilled?

Cassandra Wilson didn’t put her first album out until she was forty-two.

When do people stop encouraging you to follow your dreams and tell you to be realistic?

Julia Glass was forty-six when she published her first novel, the best-selling, National Book Award-winning Three Junes.

When does limitless potential become limited choices?

Ben Fountain was forty-eight when his first book Brief Encounters with Che Geuvara stormed the literary world, the mighty Charles Bukowski's first book wasn’t published until he was forty-nine, Alfred Hitchcock didn’t change cinematic history until an amazing string of films beginning at age fifty-four, pieces Cezanne painted in his mid-sixties are worth five times the art he painted in his twenties.

Artists who don’t have children are judged less harshly. If I decide to live in a Treehouse with few amenities and a fiscally tenuous position in the hope that I’ll someday work at something better, it affects no one but me. Meanwhile, parents are admonished to think about how their decisions affect their children. This is valid, but only part of the story.

I’d rather teach my child to work for his or her dreams than for a paycheck.

Looking Back

For a long time, I tried to pretend Andi didn’t exist. How could I go on living knowing there was this perfect person out there for me, but we couldn’t be together? As best as I could manage it, she had to disappear.

This was self-preservation. As resolute as my actions have been on the surface, denial still swam in the depths. As much as loneliness, denial goaded me to find another woman - more specifically, another relationship - to read desire into every waitress’ flirting, to pine like I haven’t pined since middle school, to make mere mortals into Anastasias and Cleopatras.

It can’t be luck alone that Becky was waiting behind Cleopatra. There have been times over these last three months that I’ve felt mad, when my skin has crawled and my thoughts have been like flakes in a shaken snow globe when Becky and I couldn’t be together. Being with her barely helped. Scant minutes, hours, days; however long we had, it was never enough.

I still can’t get enough but the craze that comes with newness has subsided. The love remains, but what’s replaced the madness is a deep affection like nothing I’ve felt. Friends want to know if it’s like it was with Andi. The simple, confounding answer is: yes and no.

Settling into a new relationship has given me the comfort to look back a lot lately.

Andi and I didn’t come together well. She fought hard to win me, then grew ambivalent when I quit the (admittedly awful) relationship I was in to be with her. We lived together in Syracuse after seven months. We fought, including one memorable night when her screams and fists flurried around me and I slapped her, once, in a moment I’ll take to my grave. The fact that I pulled the slap and Andi doesn't even remember it make it easier to take.

She treated me terribly for a time, culminating in a couple horrific weeks in Miami when she told me she had never loved me, and never would.

I asked if she was testing me. She told me no, but with tears in her eyes. I told her not to test me too hard, because I could fail. She broke down sobbing and admitted she didn’t know how to be with a good man. I held her, and things got better.

We moved back and forth between Syracuse and Virginia. She was diagnosed with IGA Nephropathy, an incurable kidney disease. She broke her neck in a car accident in Buffalo, a C2 fracture, what they call a Hangman’s Fracture. When she got out of the halo, we decided to open our relationship to outside dating. This lasted years. We moved to Miami and closed our relationship again. She had a kidney transplant. We got married. She confessed she’d been seeing a man for some months. I said it was a symptom of a problem with our relationship and not the problem itself. I cut back my hours at work. She rejected the transplant. Things got better. She started dialysis. I told her not to put her life on hold waiting tables, waiting for another kidney. She went back to school. She got her degree. She told me not to put my life on hold, waiting for her to get a kidney. I spit out the bitter medicine of my own advice and went back to school. I didn’t get a degree but I learned what I wanted to do with my life. She had a horrific first year in the classroom. She let me take a large pay cut moving from salaried to hourly to have more time to write. Our summers off were the stuff of romance novels. We fought over reality as our relationship matured. We stopped needing to share one mind to be happy. Things were great. I fractured my pelvis, sacrum, and ribs in a car accident. Instead of saying hurtful things, I spoke to the destructive emotions beneath. I learned to put a name to my fears and concerns to diffuse them. She got more schooling and became an Itinerant Vision Teacher. Things became amazing.

And then.

How much of what went wrong last year had to do with mishandling the infidelity ten years ago? I gave her a pass, told her it was my fault for being a workaholic. It’s true you can’t have much of a marriage with one of you working seventy to eighty hours a week, but she could have just have easily said that to me instead of fitting me with horns.

My grandfather used to beat my grandmother. My father promised himself he would never. He kept his promise and became passive-aggressive instead. How did I lose everything my junior high therapist taught me about breaking this legacy? I forgot I could get angry and the world wouldn’t fall apart. I couldn’t rail, I couldn’t tell her how badly she’d hurt me. I got the details thinking they would help (they didn’t; at all), glossed over the hurt, and jumped right into rebuilding.

I told people the separation would be easier if there had been a precipitating event (“What happened?” was the question; “Beats me,” was my answer). I thought our relationship had a shelf-life, that it had fallen apart so quickly because it was a living thing, and living things die. It turns out my precipitating event happened a decade before. Last year, I saw all the signs. We talked everything to death. I suppose I could have done more, although I can’t imagine what. Some grand, romantic gesture.

She wanted ultimatums. She wanted me to impose limits on her behavior. I knew doing that would be the death of us. It’s easy to ignore your conscience when it comes in the form of a spouse wagging a disapproving finger. I wanted her to realize for herself all she was turning her back on.

Don’t test too hard, I warned Andi all those years ago. I might fail.
My own words, my bitter medicine. In my refusal to act as her parent instead of her lover, I was finally testing her back.

It didn’t turn out like I had hoped. But I suppose it turned out as it had to.

You Should Read Elmore Leonard

“You asking me,” Catlett said, “do I know how to write down words on a piece of paper? That’s what you do, man, you put down one word after the other as it comes in your head. It isn’t like having to learn how to play the piano, like you have to learn notes. You already learned in school how to write, didn’t you? I hope so. You have the idea and you put down what you want to say. Then you get somebody to add in the commas and shit where they belong, if you aren’t positive yourself. Maybe fix up the spelling where you have some tricky words. There people do that for you. Some, I’ve even seen scripts where I know words weren’t spelled right and there was hardly any commas in it. So I don’t think it’s too important. You come to the last page you write in 'Fade out' and that’s the end, and you’re done.”
- Elmore Leonard, Get Shorty

My preferred method of recommendation is quoting an author’s work. As you can see from the paragraph above, Elmore Leonard is funny, real, and spare. He’ll never come up with a line so poetic that hipsters want it tattooed across their shoulders, but if there’s another writer as masterful at revealing character through dialog, I’m taking nominations. Whoever you want to bring forward, it would still be called the Elmore Leonard Dialog Award.

He’s created some of pop culture’s most memorable characters, folks who populate his fiction and film. Chili Palmer. Karen Sisco. Ordell Robbie. Of course, for every Out of Sight and Jackie Brown, there’s a Big Bounce or a Stick.

As is so often the case, you’re better off with his books.

More than providing hours of page-turning entertainment, I have Elmore Leonard to thank (or blame) for buckling down as a writer.

When Andi and I first moved to Miami, I was a mess. Looking for the job with the least amount of responsibility long before Lester Burnham, I’d gotten a job as a dishwasher at Bennigan’s some years before. Why go to school to teach yourself to be an artist? What did it matter what you did to keep food in your mouth and roof over your head? The work mattered, not the job.

Of course, this was before I knew what the work would be. That fundamental weakness in my pursuit of art led to a lot of late nights, LSD, and – most shamefully – to my spinelessness when presented with a dollar raise. I forgot my job was a necessary evil and not a calling

Airbrushing supplies gathered dust. T-squares collected cobwebs in corners. Paints dried up. The writing was dump and flush, amateur hour, the drivel of a dabbling dilettante (yes, I know that “dabbling dilettante” is redundant, but who can resist the alliterative pull? Say it five times fast, drivel of a dabbling dilettante, drivel of a dabbling dilettante… might make a better blog tagline than that if I care how others perceive my passions stuff. I’ll change it after I change the About Me section of my profile to “twat with a Tank Girl tattoo.”).

When Elmore Leonard pushed me into the writing life, I had the day off from my management job at Borders. I was watching a DVD of Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, which is based on Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch. I’d seen it so many times, just watching the movie wasn’t enough of a distraction. I decided to watch it with the text commentary.

During the scene when Samuel L. Jackson's Ordell Robbie shows Robert DeNiro's Louis Gara a video called “Chicks Who Love Guns,” these words flashed across the bottom of the screen:

Elmore Leonard’s Rules of Remaining Invisible:

1) Never open a book with weather.
2) Avoid Prologues.
3) Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
4) Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said.”
5) Keep your exclamation points under control.
6) Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”
7) Use regional dialect sparingly.
8) Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9) Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.
10) Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

All these rules have exceptions but the most important thing is- if it sounds like writing, rewrite it.

I hit the pause button on the DVD remote, sat up on the couch. The first draft of my first book opened with a prologue in which a person with a thick northeastern / reservation dialect talks about the weather (and how I heartily wish that was a joke). Clearly I had a lot of work to do. I ejected Jackie Brown from the DVD player and got to it.

I printed Elmore Leonard’s Rules for Remaining Invisible above my desk, imagining them posted above typewriters and computers across America. I started a program called “Mind Pissings” with the words what to write when you have no idea? Mind Pissings became my journal, my drawing board, the place where I wrote every morning at five am before my judgment bone woke up and stopped the circulation of my imagination.

At a Books & Books appearance some years later, Augusten Burroughs told aspiring writers to write every day, and on the days when they had nothing to write about and no ideas, they should write about having nothing to write about and no ideas.

It’s the habit. Like pushups and sit ups before bed. Switching fried food for salads. Thinking before speaking. The tiny, healthy steps which, in the fullness of time, will get you where you see yourself. It takes build up to make big leaps.

Thanks, Mr. Leonard. I build my room in the Tower of Babble by your grace.

Ants Dig Cold

There’s an entomological adjustment involved with moving to Miami. If you’re easily startled, you brace yourself when flicking the lights on, mentally prepared for the mahogany sheen of a cockroach the size of your thumb, sometimes frozen, sometimes running for its life.

Cockroaches run on two legs. Just so you know.

You might shake your coat or clothes out before you put them on, or snap your shoes sole to sole. Okay, maybe you did that up north for spiders, but did you rattle your front door before you left so cockroaches squeezed between the door and the jamb didn’t fly into your face?

Cockroaches can wriggle through a crack the thinness of a dime. Just, you know, FYI.

And Florida cockroaches fly.

If you don’t want an ant problem, you make sure your counters are spotless. You keep your pantry items – the cereal, sugar, flour, corn syrup, bread crumbs, etc, etc – packaged in gallon bags. Even that isn’t always enough.

My first job in Miami was in the kitchen at Bennigan’s. I’d transferred from the Syracuse Bennigan's, where I’d worn the same pair of work boots. When I went to put them on for my first shift in Miami, the boots swarmed with ants. Northern bugs were apparently too sluggish to find the bits of food ground into the treads.

I tried hosing the soles down when I left work for the day, but it didn’t help. The tiniest bits drew crowds. Eventually, I ended up putting my boots in plastic bags and hanging them up when I got home.

To heat my place during the recent cold snap, I closed all the windows and opened all the blinds. I turned on every light in the place. Ants gathered around my lights and died. This is something I’ve never had happen. I’ve fought trails of live ants, but coming home or waking up and finding their corpses in droves around heat sources is new and frustrating. It could be the bug spray. They’re attracted to the heat but they have to pass through lemon-scented death to reach it, so all I find are ant corpses. Or maybe the cold is already killing them when they come inside and the light bulbs just delay the inevitable. Whatever the reason, I got tired of wiping or sweeping them up three times a day.

When the cold snap ended, I went into full-on spotless mode. I basked in a home without little black dots drifted everywhere for a few hours, then went out for dinner. When I returned, there was a cockroach near the coffee table (toe up and struggling, thanks to Minime, who provided torture but couldn’t be bothered to finish the job) and a silverfish on the stove. Damn.

You’ve heard that man plans and God laughs? In the Treehouse, Aaron cleans and Mother Nature sends small, hairy, armored guests.

My Girl is Home (at Last)

I want to smooch her fury face.

Minime’s fuzzy little presence makes the Treehouse home.

I feel about my living quarters the way I feel about my job.  Unless I’m signing a book deal, never again do I want to sit across from a stranger, presenting some limited version of my best self, trying to convince her / him that I’m worth his / her investment.   Likewise, why bother moving unless it’s for something really great?

Up north they call it a FROG room, for Front Room Above Garage, but “Treehouse” fits.  Except for the tile floors and bathroom walls, it’s all wood.  It’s shaded everywhere by a variety of Coral Gables’ foliage.  The name also gives my dwelling a little je ne sais quoi.

I’ve hidden all sorts of fun things in the Treehouse for myself.  There’s a Hopper print, a signed Palahniuk poster, my 2nd-place cook-off ribbon, and a Bright Eyes concert poster taped inside various cabinetry.  A framed Tank Girl picture hanging in my walk-in closet.  A typewriter by the door is my mezuzah. There are tiny stone turtles and large dream catchers in the windows.  As a little bit of cheer to ease the transition into living alone, the name works.  I’ve only realized now that the name has allowed me to avoid saying “home.”

I used to have artwork from Cake CDs in the archway between the kitchen and the living room, but I took them all down this week. They stopped looking cheery and started looking like clutter. I must be more acclimated to my own space.

I also realize why I waited three months to bring Minime here; she is tied into my past with Andi.  Of course she is, you vacuous, imbecilic moron, I hear you saying (I’m just kidding; we rarely think thoughts as hateful of others as we think of ourselves), what’s your next keen insight? Teenagers are hormonal? Chocolate is yummy?

When I was packing up to move, some of the things I left behind surprised Andi.

“Are you trying to eliminate any trace of me?” she asked, only half-joking.  As if I could.  If I stripped naked, tossed all my possessions, and moved to a new city, my tattoos would follow me.  I don’t have “Andi and Aaron Forever and Ever” tattooed on my heart or anything, but we used to go to Zopie’s Caffeine Fix together.  Does that reminder of Zopie's count as a reminder of Andi?  What about the time we were tripping our balls off, making fun of the Tank Girl tattoo on my thigh, which barely looks like Tank Girl’s tattoo?

This is my problem with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; “Go through your house and take away anything which reminds you of her.”  It’s a neat idea for a story.  Charlie Kaufman looks at mementos of past relationships and thinks, what if one could use these objects to map the human brain and eliminate memories?  There is no collection of objects which can contain a person, and no way to remove all traces of a person from your life without removing yourself.  The way every song speaks to you when you’re falling in love, it works in reverse when you’re falling out.  Even if I had those tattoos removed, our sixteen years together would remain in me.

Is Minime a stronger connection to the past than my CDs, DVDs, clothes, dishes, shoes, and sheets because she’s alive?  Is it harder to make new memories around a fuzzy, pink-nosed baby than an object?  If Minime hadn’t scratched a little girl's eyelid badly enough to warrant a trip to urgent care, how much longer would I have dragged my heels?

Both my delay in bringing her here and the motivations behind that delay are obvious in retrospect. Most likely, they were obvious to an outside observer.

It makes me worry about what other obvious things I’m missing.

A Couple Years Back, Another One Bit the Dust

Growing up, my best friend Jason lived within easy walking distance of my house and even easier biking distance, two and a half blocks away. We waited at the same bus stop for school in the mornings, ate lunch together, messed around in the afternoons, shared dinner at each-other’s houses, had sleepovers. In summers, camping, biking, going to different playgrounds, gaming, and movies were common activities. People constantly took us for brothers; Jason called us identical twins born six months apart.

It’s safe to say we were Geeks. Nerd, dork, and loser all raise my hackles, but I can embrace Geek. Even the coolest people in the world geek out over something. The rock star with her model trains, the artist with his encyclopedic knowledge of orchids, the sports star with the screening room showing black and white films reel-to-reel. Since Jason and I were little more than a collection of odd obsessions like these, we were Geeks full time. Whether enjoying books, movies, music, candy, soda, games, school, or (eventually) girls, we brought the same level of obsessive, life-or-death intensity.

In eighth grade, Jason’s family moved and carted him off like luggage. My family didn’t own a car. He only lived forty minutes away but it may as well have been another world. For a few years, we saw each other when we could. Then life continued.

I lost my best friend when all the cliques had already formed, and I didn’t have the social skills to make inroads. In some ways, I never recovered.

I didn’t have another best friend until ten years later. George and I worked together at Starbucks. He was gay, hilarious, disheveled, and pretty. Shai Lebouf, if Shai Lebouf was tall and Cuban. He volunteered with developmentally disabled kids. He chain smoked. He collected dolls and action figures. He had five cats and lived with his boyfriend’s family.

When I lost my job, he and his boyfriend moved in with me and my wife. It was tight quarters - four people and seven cats in an apartment sized for two - but we needed their income to survive. Living together strained our relationship, but it was still strong. When I had no way to afford it, George used connections to get me a free flight back home for our week-long family Thanksgiving bacchanal. In fact, he got tickets for all four of us.

This grand gesture killed our friendship. George invited a childhood friend to come along. Meredith paid for her own ticket and flew separately. She and I did not get along one iota. Hate is a strong word, but our mutual animosity skirted damned close. The trip veered between exhilarating fun and torture. When we returned home, Andi and I asked George and Jose to move out. We loved them, but we were afraid our friendship would die if we continued living with them.

They claimed to be fine with this decision. We continued being friends, although we didn’t see each-other as often. Then George and Jose broke up, and George moved in with Meredith. I imagine she spent her days speaking ill of me. George and I grew further apart. The last time we got together it was stilted and horrible.

The loss of that friendship was more devastating than losing Jason. High school was terrible and I didn’t have the best home life, but I was young and I survived. Miami is a tough town to do alone. It feels like a party is always happening somewhere, and if you’re not part of it then you’re just a loser. After George and I parted ways, I stopped trying to join the party.

Eventually, through whatever means these things happen, I found another group of friends. I was the oldest by several years, but I felt comfortable with them. I also had the good sense to appreciate them.

I particularly remember a trip to Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios in Orlando, the third year we’d gone. On Sunday, we had our traditional Cracker Barrel breakfast, pushing three tables together to do it. Bellies full, we talked over coffee and food sculptures made from leftovers, laughing until we choked. I stepped back for a moment. The late morning sun slanted on our table, horizontal blinds making ladders on their smiling faces. I realized I would never have a group of friends like them. So many coming together so often and so well, it never lasts. Others friends would gather around other tables, but not the same faces.

I’m glad that I took that moment.

One of the people at Cracker Barrel was Gabriel. Over a space of years, he became best friend number three. Gabriel and I mostly sat around and watched TV. Still, I was completely myself around him. He fit the bill in a way no one else did, and he moved to Seattle.

In My Big, Fat, Greek Wedding, the character of Ian Miller asks the actor Ian Gomez (on whom he’s based) to be his best man.

“I’m touched,” the actor Ian Gomez says. “I had no idea you had so few friends.”

In Tombstone, a stuntman who trained the lead actors in gun play asks Val Kilmer’s Doc Holiday why he’s doing all this for Kurt Russell’s Wyatt Earp.

“Wyatt Earp is my friend,” Kilmer / Holiday says.

“Hell, I’ve got lots of friends,” the stuntman says.

Kilmer / Holiday answers, “I don’t.”

Since my shared language with Gabriel has mostly been movies, I think using these shallow examples to express deeper emotion is appropriate.

It’s possible Gabriel had no idea I considered him my best friend. It’s even probable. The virtual age disconnects what we feel from what we express. In my case, compound that by my being a writer. To write that I love him is easy, and I’ve told him before, but I don’t know if he understood how much losing him hurt.

Moving has made him a better person. He taught himself to cook, he exercises, eats better, climbs mountains, and has become something of an environmentalist. I admire him for knowing himself. I admire him for his candor. I admire him for being the spark in a party that others gather around. He is my friend and I have missed him dearly.

Of course, a tiny, selfish part of me hates him for leaving.

I don’t know who my next best friend will be. I already know I’ll never have another friend like Gabriel.

The Maria Show

Maria Clara Ferri has shown up in two stories of mine, “Drunk Talk” and “Happy Halloween,” and in one nonfiction piece, “Karaoke.” For a variety of reasons, some people can’t be contained on the page. There’s something about them which is beyond words, like trying to capture the beauty of dust motes in sunlight or a plume of smoke in a velvet room. Maybe your emotions about them are difficult to identify. Or maybe the difficulty is simply trying to describe something which needs to be experienced to be understood, like hearing their voice or feeling their skin. Sometimes metaphor helps. In any case, you’ll recreate these people as fictional characters again and again because they fascinate you, and you can’t pin them down.

We call Maria “The Maria Show.” The problem pinning her to page is that she’s too large. Her over-the-top personality – the kind which makes people comfortable using the word persona - can’t be captured by anything as trivial as words. Some people light up a room; Maria turns a room into a disco ball.

I’ve always enjoyed spending time with her, but during my separation she’s stepped up to blow the dust from the corners of my mind and shake me into action, she’s listened to my rambling phone calls and offered some of the best pieces of advice I’ve gotten. I’ve attached myself to her coattails, or rather the length of her flowing summer dresses, and my social life has blossomed by proximity. If Maria hadn’t kidnapped me a few weekends, I may have reached out to someone else, or someone else may have reached me, but more likely, I would have wallowed. I can’t imagine these last months without her to see me through.

And she left. She left Miami, and she took her charm, her laugh, her smile, her understanding, her candor, and all the wonder of The Show with her.

I wish her luck. With her twenties behind her, I hope she finds the man she wants. I hope she builds new friendships as deep as the ones she’s made in Miami. I hope she gets back all the happiness she gives.

And I wish Atlanta luck in trying to hold her back.

Reflecting Pool

The road is blurry. My legs are pumping hard, trying to get the bike home as quickly as possible. Breathe, I tell myself, breathe through it. Legs pumping hard. Get home, get home, get home.

I can barely see the staircase, my hands on the keys, the knob. I manage to get inside before the tears fall, barely. I pull my sweaty clothes off. I’m naked, sobbing on my twin daybed, wishing I was curled on the floor because the daybed feels too high and I should be curled in the corner but that would involve getting off the daybed and right now my body feels like lead and I’m crying too hard to move anyway so it will have to do.

I’ve been biking to work for two years. Both years, summer snuck up on me. The first year, I was biking home in July completely dehydrated, black flowers blooming in front of my vision under a brutal sun. Instead of taking it easy, my solution was to pump harder, to rush home before I passed out. I stripped and collapsed on the same daybed when it was just one of our two sofas, when we had three bedrooms and two and half baths, when there was still a we and an our.

How did that man become this man, in such short order? He was wiser than the first dehydrated biker I was last summer. Obviously not wise enough to replenish his fluids before biking home in ninety-eight degree weather under peak sun, but he’d been experiencing the slow release of love from his marriage for months. I won’t say he was learning what it felt like for love to leave his marriage, because that would imply a larger perspective. A fish in a tank doesn’t know his stagnant water is running out of oxygen, he just feels the effects. He doesn’t even know he’s wet. It’s all clear in hindsight. Blood dripping from a slashed wrist, air hissing from a slow leak in a deflating tire.

These two men, him and me, we share a similar physicality. But I’m thinner. I have more grey in my hair. My eyes are slightly rougher, because he slept sweetly night after night, content, accompanied, well-spooned, while I . . . don’t.

There are environmental differences, too. Compare the aforementioned condo with the many rooms and baths of the first man with the studio in which I live. Oh, the decorative palettes all that wall space offered him! I’m surrounded by wood. Wood is my power element. I looked at a lot of places but kept imaging myself in what I’ve come to call the Treehouse. That man had his LEBO paintings, I have my uncle’s artwork, my friends' photography. That man kicked his feet up to watch TV on a sofa which has become this man’s bed. That man’s furniture was Asian eclectic, dragged from New York to Virginia to Miami and picking up new pieces along the road. Most everything I have is new, white, and Swedish modern. Ikea is a hell of a drug.

He’s been living the DINK life – that’s Double-Income-No-Kids – since he was a teenager, while I’m living MAW; Me Against the World. He had a retirement fund and disability insurance. I have prayers I never get sick. Letting go of TV, internet, satellite radio, and a car leaves room for the things I need to be happy. Buying decent food. Going out to eat. Books. I couldn’t tell you what he spent his money on all those years, with so little to show for it in the end.

Sex . . . well, he wins. By a lot.

Besides sex, I envy him one thing. He read and wrote fiction almost exclusively, while I seem hopelessly mired in reality.

When my wife and I separated, I thought of my heart as layers of something brittle, a dried cigar or a dusty rose. I worried I would never love again.
As I biked home, blinking tears away, my heart felt like glass. Not a glass onion, and not a piece of delicate blown artwork. A solid, hefty chuck of glass dealt a heavy blow. Cracked through, separated into several large chunks, parts ground to powder at the point of impact. I will love again; I have too much not to give. My concern is how to put my heart back together. Will it be melted and remolded into a heart, looking brand new but slightly smaller because of the missing pieces? Will it be an ugly, damaged thing, the cracks plainly visible to anyone who gets close? If I can’t mend it, what happens to the pieces? They’d only be good for cutting myself and others.

I’ve begun to realize how people die of broken hearts.

It’s too soon to know what shape my bachelorhood will take. I could hide my emotional turmoil beneath unrequited crushes or too many drinks or a strained smile. I could end up married to the first person who tosses me a pity-fuck, or in jail for beating a certain ex-high school boyfriend Facebook predator into a coma. I could also follow my original plan and go monastic, keep exercising, surround myself with books, push the cursor hard, tell the stories which are my real life work and the only way I know to serve God.

Wish me luck. Sometimes the road is blurry.