when the lights go down in the city

it’s been a quiet week, back in my city by the bay. it’s been good to be in one place at least long enough to do some laundry, catch up on some sleep, check out a Giants game (and miss Bonds’ 756th, or even a hit for that matter, but it was riveting just to see him fly out)… and cook up a storm, as i’ve been deprived of quality kitchen time, what with being away from home.

speaking of which, home is a pretty fuzzy term these days. i suppose for all of us rather mobile young Americans and Canadians, who differ from our parents who settled close to family and wherever work was readily available, home can be applied to any of the places you lay your head long enough to breathe and string together your so-called life as you approach the ever-present spectre of adulthood and its child-rearing, lawn-mowing responsibilities.

i came out here to the West Coast to find home, and i truly believe for the first time in my adult memory that i have found it here in this place. but most importantly, i’ve found – yes, cheesy as it may seem, it’s true – that home has been chugging along inside of me all this time.

but what on earth does that mean? i’ve lived in many places throughout this home-seeking pursuit: Philly and South Jersey was my home that reared me and then spit me out into the world; D.C. was my home for growing up, learning, and exploring myself; New York was my home for trying something new, and losing myself; and San Francisco is my home for finding and reclaiming myself. every home seemed to have a different purpose, and a different time in my life for which it was an appropriate place to be. but does this mean i am destined to juggle these homes, and possibly new ones, and can i ever return to a home i leave behind?

only your heart holds those answers, and my heart often speaks in the language of memory. and in the past day or two, those memories were mired in homes past and present:

it may be odd, but unlike jazz, which makes me reminisce about a New York City that i never really knew, listening to Bruce Springsteen quite visually takes me back to a city that i really did know, and learn to love, albeit grudgingly, and to New Jersey, and to Philadelphia. and not just certain songs by the Boss, but actual precise segments of particular songs remind me of certain very particular places. for example, listening to ‘jungle land’ when the saxophone instrumental chimes in about six minutes into the song reminds me of looking up at madison square garden, having arrived on a train to see my girlfriend, and hopping a bus or the subway or a train to the Upper East Side. fast forward to the last two minutes of Bruce’s heartfelt final refrain alongside subdued piano, and i’m on the F train elevated platform in Bensonhurst, in the dearth of the final throes of winter, late one February afternoon, hands deep in my pockets and my face in my collar to fend off the unblocked wind. play ‘darkness on the edge of town’ and i’m in my 300 ZX speeding down the BQE on a hot summer night with the T tops off, weaving in and out of traffic, swerving to avoid potholes that have been there longer than i’ve been alive; or strolling down 18th Avenue with my aunt, into Dyker Heights, looking at the gaudy Christmas lights that adorn all the mobsters’ lavish houses, with the Verrazzano Bridge glowing blue and orange draped across a star-scraped black ribbon sky; or wandering down 9th Street in Philly, the Italian Market, after dark on a summer evening, cheesesteak in hand, kicking aside milk crates and empty beer cans in front as I walk, all the way across Washington, when warm rain starts to fall and the wind whisks them away from the next impending kick.

surely, for an east coast native who (justifiably) misses the people and places he left behind, it’s easy to despair and let homesickness for a previous home consume you. but that’s no fun, and it certainly plays ignorant to the home-bearing heart inside you. one remedy is to go out and absorb the world around you, and celebrate the fact that it’s your current home. so that’s what tony and i did today, on an outing to Marin Headlands, Muir Woods, and Mt. Tam[alpais], right in our backyard, across the Golden Gate:

i always knew i wanted to live in a beautiful place, and so i’m beyond happy that i can call this my home right now. thanks to the journey, i’ve learned that home is less a place in space and time, and more a state of being. and scenes like this teach you that if you’re not able to “be” in the present moment, well, you might miss something.

listening to jazz makes me miss New York, even though it’s the New York i never really knew.

i sometimes think i’ll end up back in that city.

listening to: Mel Waldron, Steve Lacey

i survived carteret, new jersey, and all i got was a lousy new muffler

carteret is the city that i have driven by probably more than a hundred times in my life, and every time i’ve passed it in recent memory i’ve commented either to myself or my unwitting passenger that carteret looks like what i had imagined Dis, the capital city in the sixth circle of Hell in Dante’s Divine Comedy, to look like. it looks especially sinister at night, with unearthly smokestacks sending horrible blue and orange flames into the smog-filled skies. well, today i had the pleasure of materializing on the other side of those smoke stacks, and i found that Carteret is actually full of Portuguese people, which is not at all what i thought Hell would be like.

i heard an awful noise while trapsing along the Goethals Bridge listening to some electric blues from Peter Green and the original Fleetwood Mac at probably an abnormally high volume. a lot of old folks passed me in a Cadillac and gestured to the rear of my car. i had assumed that noise was some other Staten Island junkmobile but was chagrined to discover that my muffler had been dragging along behind me since the Belt Parkway, sending up a trail of sparks like the space shuttle Challenger. i pulled over at the entrance to exit 13 on the Turnpike and called AAA, only to have them tell me that solely the State Police can respond to turnpike emergencies. that makes about as much sense as the fact that it’s a federal crime to take pictures of the New Jersey Turnpike, about the last thing you would ever want to take pictures of. i will not miss the New Jersey Turnpike, especially the merge that some idiot designed at exit 8A.

for the record, the NJ state police that responded were a bunch of assholes. they seemed entirely unenthused to send somebody else to come and tow me and were disappointed that i couldn’t give my exact location down to GPS coordinates. the Portuguese guy who eventually came to tow me kept calling me ‘white boy’ and said there was ‘a lot more pussy in South Jersey than north jersey’ and that people were nicer there in general. i thought it was odd that a portuguese guy would call an italian guy ‘white boy.’ when he dropped me off at the Meineke in Carteret, he said, ‘these guys look like a bunch of Arabs.’ they were also portuguese. they gave me a decent break on a whole new exhaust system because i spoke a little portuguese and lied and said i had family in Corvilha, the only small town i know in portugal, because i interviewed for a job there once teaching italian and english. i didn’t know the word for ‘muffler,’ and i don’t know if they knew it, either, because they kept saying ‘muffler.’

needless to say, it doesn’t look like Spanish Justice II (for those of you who are unenlightened, this is the name of my 1987 Nissan 300ZX, pictured astutely below) will be taking any long trips anytime soon, or ever again, for that matter. so i think it will have to be Amtrak that gets me across the country. the air conditioner has also forsaken me. now, i am a hardy fellow, one who doesn’t rely on artificially generated oxygen when on the open road, especially with a convertible and a good pair of sunglasses. but i think the AC would be sorely missed, say, in Arizona in June.

i love my car, but she just keeps lettin me down. one thing after another. i think i will write a blues song about my car letting me down. i’ll post it up here.

random brooklyn memory: one day last week i passed the crotchety old lady in the shaded glasses that sits on her stoop chain smoking every morning as her granddaugther orbits her on a tricycle and she complains about the neighborhood changing to a passing hipster who pretends to care. i overheard her talking about the Second Coming. she said, ‘we only get Jesus one more time. that’s it. after that, no more Jesus.’

man. what a bummer.

music: U2, Zooropa
Peter Green & Fleetwood Mac, Live at the Boston Tea Party, Vol. 3

escape from new york, part one

i am halfway home. my tiny car, approaching 100,000 miles, has managed to swallow all of my remaining belongings, as i swing its unbalanced chassis into my aunt’s garage in bensonhurst for the evening, only to regurgitate them tomorrow morning when I arrive at my parents’ place. i’m sure they will continue to appreciate my using their home as a dumping ground for all of my accumulated life-things.

bittersweet, leaving new york city, a place where six months ago, i would have penned of my deep loathing of this place – loneliness, and the temporary breakdown of creative impulses. that’s what caused the most despair. being unable to create. and that is what i set out on this journey to set right.

as a coworker put it, i’m the “boy who cried, ‘last day.’” never really came clean about that with everyone at my office, just sort of threw it on them this week that i was really leaving this time, and probably not coming back. and they threw back at me a whole lotta love in the form of several going away parties, one of which i expect will happen again next week in my absence.

an almost universal response to my plans, or lack thereof:

Anywho: “… you’re doing (x, y, and/or z) for GOOD?”

Me: “I don’t really know what ‘for good’ means. I’m doing it ‘for now.’”

i am alone. zia maria is upstate and joe is finishing his shift driving the MTA commuter bus. he does the same route three times daily, back and forth from sheepshead bay to uptown 5th avenue. he knows the roads and traffic patterns of the city like the back of his hand. but his understanding of the many places he hasn’t visited in all his 50 years here is limited to watching the people in the streets and the neighborhoods change from the driver’s side window as the city rushes, or crawls, by him.

music: U2, October
Sun Kil Moon, Tiny Cities

here are several excerpts from my thoughts in the week leading to my final departure from NYC. they’re pretty short and useless, but indicative of my internal struggle, anyways.

i’m happier when i’m broke.

or, at least that’s what i’m starting to believe. i’ve come to realize that at one point i had what any guy my age would dream of – a stable job that paid me well, awesome coworkers, an apartment in the ‘hippest’ part of the ‘coolest’ big city ever, a beautiful girlfriend, magazine subscriptions, and a collection of guitars and comic books.

then i started hating the hipness, and stop playing the guitars. that’s when i knew i was getting away from myself. then i ended up losing said girlfriend, because i was in the process of becoming a fucking dick. at first i was a dick because of what i had to do to keep from going broke. and i felt the isolation and emotional negligence that comes with living in a big, cool city. so i thought i would let it all go in an attempt to get myself back. this will serve as my guide, or my report card, i suppose.

i’ve got a very limited time to pul myself together. i won’t create a timetable, because in this case that would be making untimely promises.

why now? because i think i’ve found the key ingredient in my own personal recipe for happiness – having an idea, and making it a reality.

funny how the things i will miss most about New York will be the things i have hardly experienced, like long, brisk walks around Central Park in autumn; jazz in nightclubs, and dancing in ballrooms in a tuxedo, with tails. my New York consisted of Vietnamese sandwiches, crowded hipster bars, and never venturing north of 14th Street in Manhattan, except to take the train out of town.

in addition to this fine little notebook, today i bought a first American edition of Tolkien’s Silmarillion for ten bucks. the fold out map of middle earth at the end was still glued in tight, and looks like it was never unfolded.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

a statistical representation of happiness as a ratio of earthly possessions