...And of the son...

After seven years in Italy, I learned something new today, driving around town (Rome) and everywhere I seemed to go, hot guys were making the sign of the cross. It was done in a superstitious way, the way Italians do things sometimes strangely serious all the sudden – like how they used to be famous for grabbing their balls to protect them against the evil eye – just a quick, reflective benediction followed by a cursory but sweet kiss of the slightly curved tips of the fingers of the hand that crossed themselves.

Strange in itself that hot guys make the sign of the cross, but they kept doing it as I crossed up Via Vitellia, over all of Via Leone XIII and right down Via Anastasia II (well, maybe not only hot guys, but frankly those are the only ones I noticed since and I like ‘em short and swarthy Rome is chock full of them). –Ah, there it is again! One guy even crossed himself in front of a McDonalds. Then I turned off and realized I had been driving two cars behind a hearse the whole time. Just another one of those holdovers from days when faith ruled, which has lingered beautifully in this modern age of doubt and cynicism, like a cheeky great uncle who always insists on passing the maitre d’ a twenty when you can just reserve the table.

It was only a few months ago that I learned why all those hot guys (again, probably not only, but the rest aren’t worth mentioning) were giving me those keen-eyed looks. Alas, it’s not because they found me irresistible after all! One day recently, I put it together that each time I got a look like that, we were toasting glasses. Oh damn. Of course, this suddenly shattered many of the assumptions I’d been making over the years here; many of these assumptions, I had made about my self, and they were of course very fragile to begin with. It turns out that when Italians brindisi – ‘cin cin’ with their glasses – they look at each other strait in the eye, deeply, inquisitively, but revealing nothing (why this is so, I’ve no idea). But it’s not like they hand you a how-to book with millennia of traditions, superstitions and assorted cultural baggage when you enter the country; half the time, they don’t even bother to stamp your passport. So I didn’t know.

Now imagine all the hilarity that’s ensued over the past seven years owing to that failure to understand this simple communication. I kneel humbled before you – even a culture as similar to mine as this has been impossible to crack. And it becomes even stranger when you do.

Yesterday, I took my youngest child for a hearing test. The Dr was a Norse god: an affable Dutchman around my parents age, as strong and vital as a young man, but with the wisdom to say, ‘Let’s be patient here. We don’t want to hurt this little baby, so we’ll take our time’. To paraphrase, he then told me (after asking me numerous questions about our decision to live in Italy that I had taken to be ice breakers): ‘Your bad president is gone. For the sake of your children, their education and their livelihoods, it’s time to go back to the United States. There is no reason to stay here, where everything is so difficult’.

And still after all this, we don’t even know why we came. I remember our goodbye party seven years ago in New York – what was I expecting from all this? Maybe it was simply hotties making cute little signs of the cross and looking me strait in the eye as they toasted. Here, Caravaggio and all the masters of old are as alive and vital as you and I, and given to drinking strong coffee all day and copious amounts of wine throughout the evening. Next to them, we too feel strong and vital. Next to them, we are young. And strangest of all, we feel safe hidden among all these ghosts.

Post-Op

Being alive is such a drag - that’s what our newborn baby would say if only she could talk or even have a burst of cognition so complex (at this point, it’s all about digestion). And what a sham we had to perpetrate even to conceive her; this illusion of human dignity and beauty, of physical attraction. Any woman who has had a caesarean birth – or anyone at all who has been cut open under their own watchful eye, understands the reality that we are all just pieces of meat – bloody and full of spilling guts, and not at all beautiful at that except for above the thinnest, superficial layers of skin.

And yet we go on believing in our own sexuality and the allure of others’ thin sheets of skin, eyeballs, eyebrows, lips and the like, which barely conceal all the bloody gore that lies within us; flushing these realizations out of our minds for the very purpose of deceiving ourselves as to the true nature of humanity. Why? When this illusion is enough to grab us by the (proverbial) balls and erode any sense of decency we had, shattering our egos (the ego is also an illusion, but this does not make it sting any less) and leaving us in ruins. This very same illusion also causes us to, after spending our most precious, personal, intimate moments with another human being, suddenly become a stranger to that person and isolate ourselves completely from them, thus suffering the even more painful illusion that all these critical moments of attachment – of joining of souls – never even happened (indeed they didn’t, but this again does nothing to ease the pain).

After all, what are we but two especially tough pieces of meat, projecting our ideas of what a human should be onto each other. There is no way out of this double conundrum – except, except, except. Our children give us a reason to be together: we must team up to raise them, even when we feel that we have absolutely nothing in common and would rather not embrace each other’s rank, bacteria-filled, meaty bodies, we have reason at the end of the day to bunker down and hold onto each other as the universe (with all its flotsam and jetsam) flies by. And finally – most importantly – life is so filled with pain, if you really think about it, that our children’s smiles are the only things that pull us together and keep us sane amidst all the insanity.

This wasn’t supposed to be about you, my love, but it turned out to be. Perhaps because I too got caught up in the grand illusion and didn’t give you your due. You on the other hand have seen my utterly bleak humanity, the ugliness of my desires and my absurd projections, and decided to love me anyway. And sometimes, at the end of a long day, you still crouch in next to me in bed and just hold me – blood, guts and all, though I’ll never be able to figure out why.

bottomless cup of coffee

On this cloudy July 4th morning, even the birds had taken a holiday;
you remembered where you were and who you were. All down Beethoven Street, the crows fell silent. Up on the North Side, the plant belched its visceral black soupy smoke cloud, mixing with the stagnant mass that hung perpetually over the sky. To the east, the folks in the mutated Victorian mansions-turned-tenements along Murray and Oak Streets would be climbing out of their hovels over broken beer bottles to their pick-ups and off to another long grind at the factory, never knowing that their make-shift homes were once responsible, in a different form, for the coining of the town, "The Parlor City".

I had come here a student so long ago I'd lost any sense of time, so study Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University, one of the foremost in the nation for this field. This sad city - it's hard to believe that so much has passed here. Somewhere on the South Side, I'd met a professor of mine casually at a theater performance and he'd asked me for a beer afterward and 10 cent wings at the Sportsman's Pub, which seemed innocent enough. But two hours and several pitchers of Yuengling later, I'd suddenly fallen for the shaggy old guy. We'd since made some heroic journeys into the nearby hills, stocked with magic mushrooms, some pot and a sense that the rules of the universe didn't apply, but of course each time we'd found ourselves back on dingy Main Street at the end, talking and screwing in his rusty car with the local Jazz Station that he ran blaring his blessed Coltrane at our sorrows.

Unwilling to abandon this current wife and family - another former student, who was by now his third - for fear of being labeled 'an old lecher'(as he put it) by his peers, my professor offered to rent me a room in his pretty old house overlooking Rec Park, with its strange 'historical' carousel, a polygamy of sorts but it worked well enough that with babysitting and light cleaning (these for his wife) I hadn't been charged any rent and no one had asked any questions. Somehow the PhD never came any closer to being complete, but I had never really considered anyway what would come next, so I was in no hurry for change. These were the days of no responsibility, the days when Mom and Dad still sent checks every month, still hoping their little girl would get her nose to the grindstone and graduate as someone on the cutting edge of a burgeoning field - any field. In the humid Upstate air, everything had hazed over and past, present and future little seemed to matter.

Every so often some friends and I would pile into a car and rumble out to Cleveland or Buffalo to catch a Dead show, but as for the major metropolis just three hours southeast, it was as if New York didn't exist, so cut off were we from the relevant world outside the Rust Belt. Here your basic needs were met - there was plenty of sex, plenty of drugs, tons of intellectual banter, and somehow a stability in the midst of all this rot of a crumbling society. Down at the Hancock Diner they had the best peanut-butter pie known to man. And somehow interminable afternoons spent sitting in vinyl booths sipping bottomless cups of coffee with the professor and eating this sublime pie made me think that I had made it - and maybe I had, because in the many years since, in which I have traveled widely and achieved a great deal, I have never had a greater feeling of warmth, of happiness, or felt more secure in my self and what I believed in, than those waning afternoons.

Why this would be so with the professor remains a mystery to me. A Brooklyn Jew, he had long ago come Upstate and been whitewashed by the stale degree of academia in this toxic wasteland, gotten tenured, and immersed himself in potsmoke, jazz, gin and tonics - and his female students - for the good part of 20 years. All this had made him a pretty decent conversationalist, which is very rare in this world, and had given him a thorough understanding of the region's industrial past. None of which had anything to do with Artificial Intelligence (or did it?), but unlike many of his fawning students, my attraction to him had not been as a wise professor, but as a diversion from the hallowed halls of the academy and the bleak university campus. He seemed to sense that somewhere out there beyond the dormitories, beyond the crumbling smokestacks; the graffitied abandoned buildings, the redneck make-shift tenement houses and polluted waters of Binghamton's two rivers, there was something else - something unexplained out there, sometthhing perhaps created through the dumping over the years of all that radioactive waste.

Or perhaps it has been there much longer, since before the place was inhabited by stupid white men, factories or even humans. I for one felt that he was on to something, and maybe he was. We never really found out conclusively, for within two years of my settling in to this unholy (holy) life, it was all shattered by the professor's stroke. After what I had seen, I had not the fortitude to go out there alone. Still, it was time for a change, and after his failure to convalesce quickly I gladly moved on to another life amid the mindless chatter of New York City, closing a chapter but unwittingly leaving a gaping hole in my non-conscious brain that would haunt my tracks for years to come, drowning me, until I finally had the courage to turn around and face the ghosts we had awoken in the frenzy of our mushroom cloud.