Why I Am So Quiet

N.C. has thumbs calloused by sixty years’ work as a tailor. He stands in his little shop off Madison Avenue and flips through the paper patterns of bigshots’ bodies – the late-night talk show hosts, the rulers of industry – while talking about the work that goes into making a bespoke suit. At his feet, a couple hundred dollars’ worth of fine cloth soaks in a plastic barrel of cold water (to remove the manufacturing chemicals); in a few hours he’ll remove and dry it, and then begin to cut. “There are more tailors in New York than in Italy,” he sighs, running through why his art form is a dying one.

Sixty years ago, he started an apprenticeship, sewing along with a few dozen other boys whose fathers pushed them to learn a trade. These days, though, no 10-year-olds seem to want to spend sixteen hours a day in a hot and windowless space, practicing the same tiny hand motions over and over again, learning the ins and outs of the perfect two-piece. He shows off stitching along the inseam of a pair of tuxedo pants that apparently made a lesser tailor blanch, when the tuxedo’s owner came to the latter for alterations. “They have to send it back to me,” N.C. laughs. “It’s my hand.” Not to mention his giant pair of shears.

Four yards of cloth go into a suit. At nearly a thousand dollars a yard, plus labor, this means it costs nearly the median salary of an American worker to afford one of his suits. But they fit you like a second skin, and you can never wear a made-to-measure suit again.

N.C. is one of the last of his breed. The only thing you can tell about old and worn men is that they’re survivors.

To dedicate yourself to something, even if that something is a perfect 1/16” slice through a piece of super-160 wool. To transform your mind and body into a tool that is more than a tool – to try to harness the spirit within a process, the ghost within the machine.

--

“What are you thinking about?”

“Tailoring.”

“Why?”

“A second ago I was dreaming about talking to tailors.”

“That’s an odd thing to be dreaming about, two in the morning.”

--

Standing in the rain on Amsterdam Avenue, you think about old men – the survivors. And the ones who didn’t make it – the friends and colleagues and family eaten by cancer, or dropped by a heart attack, or who put the .38 to their temple and said why not; those who died in stupid car smash-ups and druggy stupors and at the hands of Minnesota psychopaths, left to dissolve under the woodsy backwoods loam. The rain comes down and you think: I have no right to be happy. The rain comes down and you think: In the face of all that, the only thing that matters is being happy, for as long as possible. The rain comes down and you think: Wow, I’m being pretentious again, and I need food.

Why I Am So Sunburned Today

Speeding on a too-short and rusty bike through Brooklyn, from Williamsburg wearing its coffee-house pretensions on hipster-thin shoulders to the high-rise ghetto by Pratt to the brilliant greenery of Prospect Park; zooming past gaggles of black-clad Hasidic Jews and packs of gang-bangers and aviator-wearing parent-supported artists and tattooed moms with double-strollers and painters sunning themselves in front of waterfront warehouses. Readying to reply to the inevitable passerby shout of “Whatchu doin’ on that tiny bike?” with:

“Practicing for my circus clown career!”

Too-short and rusty bike having been custom-built for A. means my knees jackhammering near my chin as we breeze the wrong way down one-way streets at a healthy clip of speed, A. on her roommate’s bike grinning back as we dodge everything from school-buses decorated with Hebrew script to shining-rimmed Cadillacs. Collapse on the grass in Prospect Park, opening my eyes to a blazing blue sky and a random fuzzy puppy peering down at me, drooling on my forehead.

Three hundred miles to the south my friend lies in a hospital bed with his bones fractured and morphine in his bloodstream.

--

Walking into the Post Office across from Madison Square Garden, in search of a suitable box to mail K’s possessions back to her. With J. in tow, because we plan to grab food afterwards, explaining the car-wreck of the last couple weeks. J., for the record, is laughing his head off.

“Dude, totally, listen, in the envelope for the check, just put a photo of you giving the camera the finger or something. Like, Ha! I’m keeping the money! Combat pay! Show that grubby little –“

“Be nice, man.”

“You are a wimp.”

No boxes on view can accommodate a hair dryer and a shoebox of feminine products. This presents potential issues. “I’m just looking for a little good karma,” I say.

“Then send her the stuff. Save the money. Contribute towards an Xbox 360.”

“I said I’d send it.” I look around, as if appropriate-sized boxes will suddenly manifest themselves in one corner or another.

“Um, so?” J. bends at the waist to not-so-subtly check out a passing woman. “You don’t owe her crap. Besides, you paid enough already.”

“You’re becoming my jerk conscience, aren’t you?”

He grins. “I aim to save you from yourself, bud.”

Why I'm Wearing the Same Shirt As Yesterday

Last night straight out of ‘Traumnovelle’ – featuring yours truly as a scruffy and increasingly disheveled Doctor Fridolin. Chelsea warehouses filled with new art (splattered Francis Bacon wannabes, ironic-kitsch flower displays, giant gulping fish projected onto walls in small rooms), viewed by relentlessly circulating groups of angel-headed hipsters; warm sake; an underground club off a cobblestone street, empty except for two people dancing. An old dream becoming real. Waking up naked on a mattress in a blank blue room, early morning sun streaming through a skylight high overhead; washing my face in a strange bathroom filled with hemp soap, olive oil-derived shampoo, iron dragonflies; trying to find my bag in a loft filled with contorted and gaudily dressed mannequins, as if the ashen of Pompeii had died with their party gear on; and onto a Queens street, kids running past shrieking, school buses rumbling down the road.

Never A Dull Moment

First thing Thursday morning, A. emails and asks if I want to go to a party with some of her friends. And I’m thinking sure, why not; only so many nights you can head to the gym, do freelance stuff, read James Agee, maybe stare at the wall for an hour in existential ennui. Unbeknownst to me, however, this party was:

a.) At an adult toy store.
b.) At an adult toy store in the Village
c.) At an adult toy store in the Village advertised as ‘singles welcome.’

Hours later and I’m bracketed in by two massive pipe-workers describing in loving detail their technique for ‘tapping hos’ while in the background two toothless obese geriatrics with fanny packs grind to an 80s pop hit, in a room filled with all manner of buzzing/leaping/twitching plastic items whose function could only be properly delineated by reading a three-page instruction manual in poorly-translated Japanese. The mind, out of self-preservation, simply refuses to comprehend. Here I was thinking a West Side Chicago bowling alley was the world’s most dysfunctional location after midnight, but that was before some androgynous hipster with enough metal in her face to give a TSA employee a panic attack tried to solicit me for acts that get you burned at the stake in Kansas. Meanwhile the rest of my crew found themselves approached by a variety of men who made Stuntman Mike in Death Proof look like a model of clean mental health; lacking tasers, we almost had to arm ourselves with oversized Rabbits (no, don’t ask) to battle our way out of there.

Then we went for fries.

Afterwards, on the subway, an orange-haired Chinese woman decides to engage me in some sort of dialogue. It is 2am and I am simply not in the mood. “Coney Island!” she yelps.

“Yes. Coney Island,” I say, pointing to the floor of our train, before turning to point at Coney Island on the wall map behind us.

“Coney Island?”

“We’re on the right train. You’re fine.” I smile and nod.

”Coney Island.”

“You don’t understand a word I’m saying, do you?”

“Coney Island!”

“Swearengen! Swearengen!”

“Coney Island.”

“I have a full bladder. If I start giggling I’ll leak piss. Please, stop.”

”Coney Island!”

The train hisses to a halt, and the doors slide open. The Chinese woman shoots bolt upright, staring at the platform. A couple of construction workers are hunched there, beating on some oily piece of machinery with their tools. Something clicks in her mind; one-point-five seconds later she’s off the train and heading for the workers as fast as her generously plump legs can carry her, her last bellow of “Coney Island!” lost in the ding and boom of the doors mercifully sliding shut again. As we plunge back into the tunnel my last glimpse is of her trying to explain whatever predicament to a burly Brooklynite whose eyes say that he’s seen it all before.

Travels

Miami, from a helicopter. Miami, from five hundred feet in the early morning air, buzzing soccer fields and trucks loaded with migrant workers and azure-blue bays flecked with sailboats, half-built skyscrapers glittering in the rising sun. A sudden burst of wind, tilting the ‘copter ever-so-slightly, as we dip over the beach. The sound of rotor blades muffled by Bose headphones; the pilot grinning in the face of twenty-mile-an-hour winds and saying, “Well, this isn’t so bad at all.”

Afterwards, a party at the Havana Club. Trying to wrestle down a fine cigar, rolling the ink-bitter smoke on my tongue and switching the increasingly hot stick from hand to hand. The kind of view out the window that you’d see from a low-flying plane. A cosmonaut training suit in one corner, like a prop from a Ridley Scott movie.

Then you’re back in New York. Waiting on a cold Newark train platform, already trying to assemble the story in your head. Juggling it with twenty other things, still.

--

“Quick, say something fucked up.”

“Everyone you kill on Christmas has to serve you in the afterlife.”

“Thanks. Things were getting a little too normal around here.”

--

Connecticut. Bitter little post-industrial towns, boarded-up factories and sad little houses, rising condos and pillbox bars, lone cop cruisers parked in the middle desolate parking-lots. New Haven, and out. The bitterness gives way to fields and hills still brown from winter-cold. An Old World weekend of red meat and interrogation, the sense that everyone is on borrowed time; a church service; a croquet game; three generations under one roof.
--

My Book Dreams Limping Along

So I have an agent – sort of.

Isn’t that like being ‘sort of’ dead?

Well, said agent read the book, and really liked the book, but pointed out major structural issues that impede the book from being all the book could be. Specifically, the book veers from, first to third act, “interesting, intellectual thriller to gruesome-but-quirky shoot-'em-up violence” without a consistent spine. If I fix this, apparently, she thinks she can sell it. All in all she handed back maybe three pages’ worth of notes; but if my revisions aren’t up to snuff, then it’s all for nought.

So it’s not like you’re signed or anything.

Yes! Nothing is easy these days – particularly over the last week.

How long will these revisions take?

Oh, about three months.

Guess who’s living like a monk until Independence Day!

Shut up. I have a knife.

Tell them about the other not-so-fantastic thing that happened!

Relationship fall down go boom?

No, not that, the other thing!

Oh yeah, I failed to make the semi-finals in the Gather.com First Chapters contest. I’m tempted to make a disparaging comment here about chunky antisocial Renaissance-garb-wearing motherfuckers having more World of Warcraft battle-buddies to vote on their abysmally structured Harry Potter rip-offs than I had actual people giving me constructive criticism, but my intention from the beginning wasn’t to win (although it might have been nice); I just wanted to get high enough in the rankings to give me leverage and visibility for my own literary-world designs. Argh!

More about Miami, Connecticut, etc. upcoming…