WISH I WAS A HEADLIGHT ON SOME WESTERN TRAIN

READING NEXT WEEK

This is a nonfiction reading I'm curating at STOREFRONT'S Literary Thursday next week! Four graduate students (three nonfiction writers and one social worker) will sweetly read aloud to you.




THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 4TH AT 7:30 PM

Tim Gomez
(an MFA student in creative nonfiction at Sarah Lawrence, staff writer for Cinemablend.com, taco lover)

Stacey Kahn
(MFA student in creative nonfiction at Sarah Lawrence, assistant editor of nonfiction at Epiphany literary journal, license plate tallyer)

Kathleen McIntyre
(social groupwork student at Hunter, editor of The Worst zine, an absolute phoenix)

Cynthia Ann Schemmer
(MFA student in creative nonfiction at Sarah Lawrence, Habits of Being zine, biggest sweet tooth around.)


* STOREFONT is located at 16 Wilson Avenue, Brooklyn. *

BLACK & RED EYE

Lauren over at Black & Red Eye has been producing some new and completely rad work lately (of things other than me giving sassbrows), and you should go check it out!

LETTING SUCH THINGS HAPPEN

Mindy jumped off the balcony that summer. She flew three stories to the parking lot below and laid herself out like a cherry pie smashed on the blacktop. I watched from above as my boss peeled her warm fuzzy body off the ground, my eyes like two Red Hots. We would have to build a higher fence. We would have to call her owners. We would have to say, “Your dog is dead,” but we would not say, “We train dogs with behavioral issues, not self-esteem issues.”

In weeks to come, Linda, the owner of the boarding and training business she ran out of her Sunset Park apartment, would also lose Willy, the Weimaraner, on the Upper East Side; he would bolt out of the back of her mini van and up Third Avenue. She would try to step on his black dragging leash, but would instead trip and fall to the pavement. “Somebody grab him! Please! Grab that dog!” she would yell. I would make colorful flyers showing Willy with his big gray elephant ears that would read, “HAVE YOU SEEN THIS DOG?” But no one called.

I decided I did not want to work with someone who, although relatively well-known in dog training, was capable of letting such things happen. Linda’s apartment was small and ill-equipped: the dog facilities were larger than her actual living quarters, the two spaces often colliding. There would be dog hair in the dinner bowls and coffee mugs, urine on the floor of the bedroom, and old dog food bags filled with granola for breakfast.

Linda was built like a bulldog: shoulders thick, jowls swinging and stubborn as hell. She expected me to clean up after her, like wash her crusty dishes that mingled with dog bowls in the sink and launder her menstrual covered bed sheets. I ignored these requests daily and told myself I would quit when I had acquired enough of my own dog walking clients in Manhattan and rid myself of the unrelenting days of putting up with her miserable Ibizan hounds. There were three of them, a gangly gang with impossibly long legs and ears like fennec foxes. They would taunt the smaller dogs and try to bite me as I shooed them into their crates. Linda barely lifted a finger while I was there. She mostly sat in front of the computer brushing her long black hair and managing to get more mashed potatoes on the keyboard than in her spitty mouth.

The day finally came when I had no choice but to quit when I saw Linda’s breasts. I refer to this moment at the “boob pop,” a defining moment in my self-respect through someone else’s humility. I had been out on the balcony hosing away the dog shit, the smell of bleach stinging all the openings of my face, when I had started to cry. My mother had only died two months before, and since I worked six days a week, I had little time to see my family. I dropped the running hose and went to find Linda. She was inside, sitting at her computer, in nothing but a lavender terrycloth robe and her wet hair making curlicues on the sides of her face. When she saw me crying she invited me into her bedroom where she sprawled her large body across the bed with one of her hounds on top of her, with his body between her legs and his head on her stomach. She rubbed the dog’s belly as she told me she knew about the death, but she was waiting for me to come to her. I asked for some time off, thinking there was no way she could deny me grieving time. Unfortunately, she told me, things would be way too busy in the upcoming weeks to allow me any time off. She would say this to me completely deadpan while I stood before her, smelling like bleach and dog shit, and could feel myself about to lose control. That was until the dog abruptly leapt off the bed, flinging Linda’s robe open to expose her two gigantic breasts like a second set of merciless eyes between us. I stared at them, and then at her, and let out a laugh that I could only imagine resonated with her for weeks to come.

I quit then and there, and a few weeks later I would hear that she let another dog turn into pie.

OH, ALRIGHT.

THE LONG CUT

WHEN YOU ARE BEING SWALLOWED

The conductor breathes into the microphone:

KSHHHHHHH We are being momentarily held at this station while authorities come to remove an unclaimed duffel bag from the train. We are sorry for any inconvenience and will be moving shortly. KSHHHHHHT

And then the ding of arrival. The jarring sound of automatic sliding doors opening and closing repeatedly. But we aren’t moving. We’ve been ‘momentarily’ held at this station for a half hour. I tell myself that inside the duffel bag is a puppy, not a bomb, and what is all the fuss about? I try not to think about a bomb strapped to a puppy as I drink my coffee.

“There is no bag!” yells a man at the back of the train car. “If there was a suspicious bag, authorities would have shown up already. I call bullshit!” He is small, like a survey pencil, and being subdued by a bigger man in a brown leather jacket.

“Taaake it easy, pal” says the leather man.

“You take it easy, pal,” says the mini pencil as he pushes his way off the train.

An attractive older fellow in a business suit sitting to my right makes eyes at me, and we smile at each other as we shrug. I take a bite of the bagel with cream cheese in my lap and suddenly feel self conscious about eating on public transportation. I put the bagel back into the brown paper bag and close my eyes. I think about Baudelaire and fall asleep.

*
“Holy shit, look at that!” yells the woman sitting in front of me. My eyes open and we are moving. We are passing over the Harlem River Bridge now and gray smoke is billowing from below us like the dirty cotton insides of a stuffed animal. In a matter of seconds, I cannot see.

“Wow,” says the woman to the elderly man sitting next to her. “This is something. I wasn’t here for 9/11, so…Wow.”

“Oh, fuck you,” I mutter under my breath.

“Excuse me?” The woman’s yellow frosted head pops up over the back of her seat to get a better look at me.

I look out the window and the gray fibers begin to pull apart.

“I said, excuse me?!” Her arms push down on the head rest as her upper body lunges toward me, but I ignore her. Through the gray I can see water and I can see fire; hundreds of blue and orange arms maniacally waving at our train, a little too excited to say hello.

HABITS OF BEING ON RE/VISIONIST

One of my interviews (along with some photographs) from Habits of Being has been featured on RE/VISIONIST, an online publication created by the students of the Sarah Lawrence College Women's History Graduate Program! Excitement!

You can check the article out here: Sister, Fear Has No Place Here.

THE JUMP

Here's a video of me and two friends jumping into Lake Sacandaga from a 60 ft. bridge! Apparently there's a lost city at the bottom; we didn't find it. Thanks to Jeff for documenting my summer dream!

The Jump from Jamtron on Vimeo.

RECENT BLUE HUES

THE BIG SHE-BANG NEXT WEEK

This is a week from tomorrow, next Saturday, and it's going to be better than ever! It's the first time it will be hosted in Brooklyn, which is really exciting, and there's a small chance, depending on my nerves, that I will be reading from HABITS OF BEING. No promises there, but I can promise that this is going to be a really good and important time!

HABITS OF BEING ZINE

HABITS OF BEING is a combination of oral history interviews and personal writings that have a common theme threaded throughout. The idea is to blend the personal with the historical, to explore the past, and to compare our habits of being. This first issue includes interviews with three women from SuBAMUH (Ohio women's intentional community) and three related personal stories.

Send mailing addresses for a copy!

habitsofbeingzine@gmail.com

SAVE THE DATE!

I JUST CAN'T

CITY OF FAMOUS STAIRWAYS

AFRO-PUNK SCREENING THIS SUNDAY

APRIL 18TH 2010

It’s a well-known fact that female praying mantises bite off the heads of males during intercourse; they fuck them and immediately kill them. It’s considered sexual cannibalism. I consider it a sane reaction to an insane situation. The males pump more vigorously after they’ve been beheaded, which makes me hate them down to their gooey core. The truth of the matter is that the females would rather be eating, so the males often engage females in a courting dance in order to change their interest from devouring them to mating with them; it’s a manipulative distraction. As if they have any idea what’s good for her, or any idea what they are getting themselves into.

* * *

Where I am now is in the woods of rural Ohio. No one is allowed on this land but women, so I don’t mind so much that I have to co-exist in a cabin with thousand of ladybugs. The place is covered in them, their little red cloaked bodies moseying along every surface or hurrying through the air with rice-paper wings. They wait up for me to come home, nestled on my pillow until I gently brush them away and turn my back. They guard the screen door that’s falling off its hinges. They swim in the toilet, meeting their ultimate end in a swirl of piss and shit, and they congregate under the sponge on the sink. I look out the window and there they are, spying on me from the outside. They must expect to have meals with me because every time I go to pour myself some cereal they are awake and waiting at the bottom of the bowl, or resting on my avocado, or getting impatient on the lid of the almond butter. As I sit with my laptop, they crawl across the screen and stop right in the middle. You never pay attention to us anymore.

In the UK, they are called ladybirds. How much more delicate and classy! Yes, I like that name so much better. The name is derived from paintings of the Middle Ages that depicted the Virgin Mary wearing a red cloak. The spots are said to represent the seven sorrows and the seven joys of the Virgin. The ever-virgin. I see nothing but fourteen sorrows there.

I sit at the small table in the cabin and reread Rebecca Solnit’s book, “A Field Guide To Getting Lost.” I open to the page where I left off last and find a ladybird’s carcass between the words, “blue” and “distance.” The blue of distance. It refers to the blue that lingers on the horizon, that moving blue that’s the color of longing and desire. It represents the things we will never obtain, the changes we’ll never see, or perhaps the things we already have and are willing to discard in order to hold on to that feeling. We can travel through the sky, but we can never live in it. Herein lies the reason we love tragedies more than comedies. You can never touch the blue on the horizon, and you like it that way. We linger on; some thing’s are always far away.

I spot a baby praying mantis crawling across the kitchen table and close the book. She’s the length of a toothpick and visibly nervous, crawling slowly among a congregation of ladybirds. She’s uncertain how to behave in front of the other ladies knowing that she will inevitably sin, according to their standards. But she will do whatever it takes to survive: abandon, destroy and hope for the best. With no idea what’s to come, she lives up to her name: She raises her front legs and prays.

EAT HER DUST (revised)

We formed a hushed audience to the absurd spectacle in the parking lot of the funeral home where the service for my great Aunt Margie was held. Her sons and daughters, my aunts and uncles, stood in an anxious circle waiting to grip a handful of ashes from the swindled urn. Someone, an uncle I presume, had stolen the small gold box from the altar when no one was looking. Someone else, a logical aunt perhaps, catered the impromptu event with small white conical paper cups from the water cooler. Huddled together, a grieving football team, they shouted and elbowed over her dusty parts. My father whispered, almost completely silently mouthed, all of his words to my mother: This is your family. A freak show! A dozen grieving lunatics scooping their souvenirs like Italian ice. My mother nervously sucked her thumb, a habit carried over from infancy. My eyes expanded like inflated balloons. We would have watched with our jaws dropped, but we feared the swirling ashes. We didn’t want to accidentally eat the remains or be unwillingly spoon-fed by the wind. We just didn’t want to taste her. When my mother removed the finger from her mouth, glistening wet, she took my hand and walked me towards the car. I could feel the warm saliva pressed inside my palm as I counted my steps, a nervous habit carried over into adulthood. I climbed into the backseat and smoothed the skirt of the black crushed velvet dress with a slick palm. The clinging gray flakes (maybe her pancreas, maybe her heart) smeared across me like finger paint. My words were never whispered, never mouthed, and only thought: I've never touched anything so dead.

& LATELY

TRUE BLUE BOOK

Here are some photographs of the book I had made of the interview with my father. Also, I had to remove the Fortune Society interviews for the time being. They first need to be cleared with the interviewee before being made public. Eventually!

HER HOME

The exterior is completely the same.

Picture this: Purple crocuses with open mouths spewing yellow stamens, huddled close and side-by-side, grow in front of bushels of evergreen shrubs. They have grown in the finely manicured front yard since I can remember, pushing their way into the soil like thumbtacks to protect the ground from the effects of gravity. The front walk leading up to the purple guardians looks like the aftermath of a quake. Bricks that read "Hanson," "Potomac," and "Lifetime" awkwardly bubble from the ground, trying to fit in, trying to find a comfortable space amidst the chaos of weeds and roots. The walk leads to the door, accompanied by the weathered gold address of 254 hanging diagonally on the rainbow of brown bricks covering the front of the house (the 4 is uneven, always has been, always will be). On one of the bricks, in between the front door and the gold letters, is a thin-lined wavering heart, scratched in with a safety pin years ago.

The interior is nothing like I remember.

My childhood bedroom, up until I was thirteen, was on the first floor of the house and regretfully located between my parent's room and the bathroom. It was painted a pink antacid and adorning the walls were plastic balloons forever suspended in artificial flight. Against the back wall towered a wooden canopied crib, in which I slept for longer than I’d like to admit. I had an issue with falling, with waking up on the hard wood floor; my hands were always tucked under my chin as I lay curled and bruised. In the mornings I found my toes stretched out from in between the bars at the foot of the bed. I would often wake to a Schnauzer licking each toe as if they were ice pops melting in the summer sun, his tongue working furiously as if they would soon disappear. Or my father’s thick fingers, like scarred breakfast sausages, tickling each toe mercilessly. Or, I would wake to a debilitating cramp.

And every morning I would have to climb out of the crib. On my better, more adventurous mornings, I would pretend as if I were an escapee bound for freedom. Sometimes I had to flee the grips of a snarling witch; other times a prison guard, and once even an unwanted lover. I would grip the bars and exclaim, “Somehow, someway, I will leave this place forever!” or “You’ll never get away with this!” or, to prince charming on the other side of the bars, “Please wait for me!” (And he always did). On my more irritable mornings I would shove my chubby legs in through the bars and cry out for help, pretending I was stuck, vying for attention. The Schnauzer, Barney, would scamper in and gently set his wet mouth down on my foot, his yellow teeth softly gnawing on skin and bone. A love bite. Apparently, I wasn't yelling loud enough (something’s are always far away).

Eventually, the canopied crib was replaced with a day bed: white flowered tubing with pink and blue painted flowers hugging a single mattress. It was here I would discover what a self-induced orgasm was at the age of six years old; I thought I was a genius. Here my mother would walk in on me masturbating to a cassette tape of janet. by Janet Jackson ("Throb," track 10) with my pale pink ballet stockings around my knees. Here I would write numerous notes to my parents in the event that I should unexpectedly die in the middle of the night. "I'm Sorry Mom, I'm Sorry Dad," they would read. Here I would pull a pillow down on my face until I came up for air choking. And here I would take out my self hate on a blue stuffed bear by punching him in the stomach repeatedly because he would never be as good as the pink stuffed bear. Never.

(The room has been torn down and joined in lavatory matrimony with the adjacent bathroom to create a larger space to shit, piss, whatever. My father’s new throne.)

When I turned thirteen, the last of my two brothers had moved out and I was given his bedroom on the second floor. Large and baby blue with nooks and spotlights, I decorated it with lyrics written in Sharpie marker on the wall. The black ink read, “Is it wrong to wish on space hardware? I wish, I wish, I wish you’d care,” or “My cunt is built like a wound that won’t heal.” There was an L-shaped desk with filing cabinets and a typewriter on the surface. In the corner lay a box spring and a mattress (I still only sleep on a mattress on the ground) covered in green sheets and a husband pillow while sheer tapestries of bright green and venetian red billowed from the ceiling above like lime cherry clouds floating over me while I dreamed. It was in this room I lost my virginity, a clumsy five minutes of figuring out the simultaneous motions of two bodies. It was here an ex-lover tried to kill himself with a pair of black fabric scissors, spitting and crying as I bear hugged him to the ground from behind. It was here I truly fell in love for the first time, seven years ago, and still haven’t completely fallen out of it. And now it is here that I dread. It's the one room that hasn't been renovated. The walls still have the lyrics, the desk still has the typewritten pages, but the room itself is now used for storage: boxes of faded photographs, a plastic Christmas tree, birthday cards and elementary school paintings, my father’s endless towers of coins. Some things will never, ever change.

* * *

Here is something: I visit with my father recently, absorbing the changes I dread and the changes I pray for. I don’t go upstairs; it’s only filled with terrible specters of the past looking to squat my brain. I piss in a spot where I once used to sleep and I move like a praying mantis through the unrecognizable. As I am about to leave, my father tells me a story (he’s good at that). There’s a young priest, an old friend of my brother, who has a twin brother, although I am unsure who is who. He probably feels the same way about me, although I am just one. The priest calls my brother, after not seeing him for a few years, and asks if my father is having construction done on the house. The priest had a dream, like we all do, except he remembers his: my mother, in all her ghostly lucidity, came to him and told him to tell my father she really likes the changes being done on her home.

TRUE BLUE: FONZI TYPE HOOD

Earlier this month, I had a paperback book printed up of the True Blue interview to give to my father for his birthday (and he loved it). The website I printed the book through, Blurb, lists the book on their website so anyone can buy it. What do you know! You can check it out here.

* * *

Cynthia: Before we get to the police stuff, tell me about how you met mom.

Dad: Oh, I met mom in junior high school. H. Frank Carey High School. Actually, I met mom on Valentine’s Day. It was a Valentine’s Day dance at St. Catherine’s of Sienna in Franklin Square. I wasn’t Catholic, I was Lutheran. Mom was Catholic. She just stood out of the crowd. She was the one woman I was looking at, a young lady, she was fourteen-years-old and I was fifteen. I asked her to dance and we were dating ever since. We dated all through high school. Junior high school and high school. I was twenty-two and she was twenty-one when we got married.

Cynthia: You got into a lot of trouble in school. Can you talk about that?

Dad: I used to cut class a lot. I hated English, now I love English. I love history. At that time classes just didn’t interest me. I think boys mature at a much slower rate than women do and at my age, at sixteen or seventeen, the only thing I was interested was pretty girls. So I was out of school a lot. I did graduate, though I was in a lot of trouble. I got suspended several times. And (laughs) I remember my assistant principal saying to me one day, he says, “Well, you don’t look like you’re college material, but I bet you become a cop! Most of you hoods, you Fonzie-type hoods, become cops.” (Laughs) And sure enough, I did.

TRUE BLUE: THE WORKS

Cynthia: Did you work during the crack epidemic in Brooklyn?

Dad: Crack, heroin, you name it. It was going on.

Cynthia: What was that like? Having to arrest these people who were high as kites?

Dad: It wasn’t bad, in a respect, except if you had somebody holding a lot of drugs. The laws of Rockefeller when he was governor, he imposed some heavy duty jail time to drug dealers. It had to do with certain weights of drugs. If they were holding a larger quantity of drugs, they would shoot it out with you rather than give. Some of them were facing life in prison if they were caught. So if they killed a cop they were going to jail for life anyway. Either way, they were going to shoot it out with you. The main thing you worried about was a heroin addict and when you had them under arrest the first question you would always ask them is, “Do you have any works? Do you have any needles?” What they called “works,” like hypodermic needles, in their pockets. They would always tell you no and you would have to ask three times, really emphasize that if you stick your hand in their pocket and I get stuck by a hypodermic needle, the chances are they’ve already contracted hepatitis c, hepatitis b, you’re gonna catch it. Or a venereal disease or whatever they have in the blood system. You would have to emphasize it, say, “Listen, if I get stuck I am gonna beat the crap outta you. I don’t want to bring this home to my family.” Most of the time they would tell you yes, I’ve got works in my pocket. That’s all. That’s all you wanna know. You take the works, smash them up, throw them down the sewer and lock them up for possession. That was probably the worst part; you didn’t want to get stuck by a hypodermic needle.

We had a situation one time (laughs), me, myself and Danny, we went to an overdose. We got called to an overdose and the parents were beside themselves. It was an African American man and they discovered him in the morning. He must have tried shooting up in the middle of the night because rigor mortis had already set in. The limbs were stiff. So he was dead for several hours. The sergeant, Carson Wright, another Afro-American, nice guy, come in and he saw the state of shock the parents were in and he said to me and Danny, he says, “Schemmer! Lunt! Work on him,” meaning give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. (Laughs) We looked at the sergeant and we said, “Serg!” I mean, his arms were reaching up. It was stiff. You couldn’t bend it down. Rigor mortis was set in and there was all sorts of vomit and foam coming out of his mouth. The man was dead several hours and I says, “Serg, come over here. We gotta talk! I am not putting my mouth on that dead man. There is no way I’m bringing him back!” I says, “I am not Jesus Christ and there is no way I am bringing that man back to life. He’s been dead for six hours!” I says, “I’m not getting down there and putting my mouth on his mouth!” I mean, if the guy’s alive or still warm, you do it. And I’ve had situations where I’ve given mouth-to-mouth to a six year old who stopped breathing in Bedford Stuyvesant. We brought the child back three times on our way down to Brooklyn Jewish Medical Center and the kid had spinal meningitis. They kept us overnight for two nights in the hospital to make sure we didn’t contract it because it’s very contagious. The kid didn’t make it. Even though it was a child, well, you gotta do it on a child, but after that you gotta think twice. They didn’t have any medical gear; you weren’t supplied with any type of medical gear that would go between the patient’s mouth and your mouth. Now they have plastic inserts. You know? And a lot of times when you give mouth-to-mouth, people don’t realize that since you’re pumping air into their chest cavity and into their stomach, alright, and then you press on them, they vomit. They spit it back up. The air comes back up. So not many people are gonna get down and do it, let me tell you, to avoid that backflow of vomit. It’s nasty.

TRUE BLUE: BIG PUDDLE 3 AM

Cynthia: Tell me about your partner, Danny.

Dad: Danny Lunt worked in the 103 with a guy named Charlie Baesel, and I was working with another policeman named Richie Murphy, and we got involved in a stolen car chase at two o’clock in the morning down by Springfield Boulevard. and the guy bailed out of the car and starting running and we had him cornered between myself and Danny. So Danny was chasing him towards me and Danny said he was going to drop kick him to stop him, but the guy ducked and Danny drop kicked me. (Laughs) so I figured, before this guy kills me I better become his partner.

Cynthia: I know you and Danny got into a lot of trouble together. Tell me about one of those times.

Dad: (whistles) There’s a lot.

Cynthia: (laughs) Okay, well tell me about the first one that comes to mind.

Dad: Okay, there was a time in the 113 precinct. We were chasing a stolen motorcycle. A motorcycle is pretty tough to chase because they’re maneuverable and they can accelerate so quickly. But it was about three o’clock in the morning and we were chasing him up and down the side streets over by Baisley Park, over by Old Creek Boulevard close to the airport. And we just had a torrential downpour and we had lost sight of the motorcycle, so now we’re scouring the side streets for it and I hit a side street that had a big dip in it, like a valley. It was deep and the bottom of the valley was full of water. Danny said to me, “Don’t chance it. I don’t know how deep it is.” I says, “Well, I have to get to the other side. I think we can catch up to the motorcycle!” So I hit the (laughs) valley where the flood was and it was deep alright, because as soon as I hit it I saw the water come over the hood of the police car. There was a waterline on our windshield and Danny was 6’5” and he hated being embarrassed. It was three o’clock in the morning. Now he’s looking at the side window and cursing at me! There’s a waterline on the side window and the water’s going into the channels of the door, filled up the inside part of the door, and was coming up into the car from the channels through the window. So now the water’s filling up in the car. The car’s stalled. We’re stuck in this giant lake. Big puddle. The water’s actually coming up over the front part of the seats (coughs) and we find ourselves sitting on the headrests bent over. Him being 6’5” and myself being 6’0”…we’re not looking too good at three o’clock in the morning. What we didn’t know was that when you short out a police car it’s wired so that the siren and the dome lights go on automatically. So here we are, three o’clock in the morning, stuck in this puddle, the car’s filling up with water. If we open the doors the water’s just gonna come flooding in. All of a sudden the car shorted out. The dome lights went on and the siren started going WHOOOOOO-WHOOOOOOO. Well, this woke up the whole neighborhood. Everybody started coming out of their houses. There’s people looking at us and Danny is saying to me, “When we get out of this, I am going to kill you!” (Laughs) He said, “Turn the key! Turn the key!” and sure enough it turned the starter motor just enough to turn a flat wheel, and we kinda inched our way out. We got out, we had to get a tow truck, people were just shaking their heads and Danny’s really embarrassed, but you know, sometimes you make a judgment call.

TRUE BLUE: THE "YOOTS"

Cynthia: So tell me more about the area back then.

Dad: Well, that was just before Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. I was there when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and the riots. And I remember them putting us on Nordstrom Avenue and down towards Atlantic Avenue for crowd control. There were three of us. The emergency service truck came around and gave everybody 200 rounds of ammunition. Fifty rounds in a box. They gave everybody four boxes of 38 caliber bullets, those were the guns we carried, 38 revolvers, and we said, “Why do we need all these bullets?” Well, about a half an hour later, there were wall to wall people coming up from Fulton Street rioting. Bats, rifles, bricks, breaking into stores, turning cars over, starting fires. And there must have been about 1200 people, estimated, coming up, looking at us. And there the three of us were standing, there were just three of us, I don’t think there were four of us, there were three of us there. We said, “There’s no way we’re going to stop them.” (Laughs) So we all got together and we thought we should do a tactical retreat. We went down the side streets, found a school, and got into a school and barricaded the doors, because there was no way we were stopping 1200 people. They had more guns than we did. So, that was the Martin Luther King Jr. Riots. And there were several riots in Brooklyn. They use to do them every summer. It was just an excuse to break into stores and loot. Liquor stores, furniture stores… and it was usually the youths, or the “yoots” as they say in Brooklyn.

UNDER THE ROSE ZINE: CALL OUT FOR SUBMISSIONS

Under the Rose: A Compilation Zine on Unknown New York is an idea that's been floating in my brain for a while now. The post-industrial wasteland of the city has always been a romantic notion of home to me, but I wouldn't consider this zine city-centric by any means. I'm also interested in the stories beyond the tri-state area, the places you sought soundless refuge or idiosyncratic secrecy, that make up what you call home.

undertherosezine@gmail.com

TRUE BLUE: BUBBLE GUM MACHINE DOME LIGHT

I conducted an hour long interview with my father about his time on the NYPD in East New York from 1968 - 1989. I'll be posting chunks of the interview as I continue to transcribe it.

* * *

Me: Tell me about your first week on the job. What was that like?

Dad: Oh, it was horrible. Coming from Long Island, my first week they stuck me in the 8-0 precinct, my very first precinct, in Bedford Stuyvesant. I worked with a guy on a night shift, which was midnight until eight in the morning, and his name was Freddie Holmes. Really nice guy. Black cop, well seasoned, and he had about 5 years on the job. We had all dark blue uniforms then. I remember him stopping for some ribs on Pacific Street and Nordstrom Avenue at about 3 o’clock in the morning on Saturday evening. Bedford Stuyvesant on a Saturday night at three in the morning is jumpin’. Everyone is out partying. So he left me in the police car...the old green white and black ones with the bubble gum machine dome light… and he went in to get some ribs. And an elderly drunken women, it was in the middle of the summer, come up to the car, my window was down, leaned in the car, grabbed me by my police shirt, and planted a kiss on my lips (loud kiss sound) and she says, “Honey, you’re new here… and their gonna kick your ass!” And I was ready to quit, I was ready to quit. I says, “If she knows I’m a rookie cop, the guys on Nordstrom Avenue are really going to kill me…” So, that was my first week on the job. And Freddie came out of the rib place, kicked her in the ass, and told her to get on her way. And I was ready to turn in my shield and gun. I said, “I ain’t gonna make this. I am not gonna live in Bed Stuy."

MONOLOGUE OF A PROTAGONIST THAT ISN'T TOTALLY ME

I recently found out that the reason blue eyes are more sensitive to the sun than brown eyes is because the blue irises scatter and transmit more unwanted light into the retina than brown irises. Those first five minutes of walking into the sunlight are hard as hell. I shield my eyes, groan, and complain to my brown-eyed friends. They always respond with, “If only I could be so lucky…” and I think this is an interesting choice of words because good luck never looks my way.

I inherited blue eyes from my mother. Her eyes are currently sewn shut, dried out, and six feet under ground (are they even still blue?). Every morning when I wash my face and look in the mirror, I can’t tell if I’m looking at my eyes or hers. I brush my bangs out of eyes and say, “Oh, there you are. Good morning.” I then pull open the cabinet mirrors so that they are facing each other to create an infinite amount of mirrors that line a never ending hallway. Have you ever tried that? It’s like looking into another dimension. It’s terrifying. I like to do this and think about what is going to be at the end of the hallway: an open doorway spilling light, an alternate version of myself doing the exact same thing, my mother. But you can never see the end.

I also recently discovered that the blue pigment is created by means of Rayleigh scatter, which is the elastic scattering of light by tiny particles that are smaller than the wavelength of light. I hardly know what that means, but basically it’s the same optical phenomenon that makes the sky blue. With this information I think of my eyes as puddles, left behind after a harsh storm, rippling the blue skies above. Or the eyes above.

LIKE A DRUNK IN A MIDNIGHT CHOIR

NOTEWORTHY

I found this little note on the street this past Friday:





I found this second note Saturday morning taped to my car. I am curious to know how this stranger knows so much about me, and more importantly, if they could please let me know about this "nanny parking lot" because it sure would make my life a lot easier.

TWO FOR TUESDAY

My post about Alison Piepmeier's book Girl Zines on the For The Birds blog was linked from NYU Press's blog From The Square. You can check it out here!

* * *

The Dance
(an excerpt from a much longer piece I've been working on)

In the blue-black shadow of the backyard, a piece of gutter hung from the house like a hang nail. It bounced playfully in the wind at the top of the backdoor. Next to it leaned a ladder. The gutter shared custody of the ladder with the unlit Christmas lights that limply hung over the front of the house. He looked up at the house from where he had collapsed in the cool spring grass after trying to sucker punch his son.

“You’re killing her, Dad,” his son had said before the blow. “Did you see her on that goddamn ladder? You’re working her into the grave while you just hide in your office.”

His wife had little to say except to shake her curls at the ladder. His daughter ripped handfuls of grass from the ground as she sobbed. The gutter wailed as it was pushed away from the house by the door being opened and he walked underneath his inadequacies.

He dragged his suitcase, filled with clothes still on the hangers, into his office and slammed the door. He stared at the doorknob and cursed its absence of a lock. He thought of his daughter, constantly employing the lock on her bedroom door every time she walked through it. That sound of metal twisting on metal broke his heart daily. He opened his office door, but only a crack.

The clock read 2:29 AM when he heard moaning in the backyard. He got up from the computer and parted the blinds with one finger. The palpable shadow of his daughter was stretched across the yard in the wake of the motion censored light. She lay face down in the black grass, and as he looked at her the window pane seemed to be streaked with rain, but it wasn’t raining. He picked up a screwdriver from his desk and began removing the door to his office one hinge at a time, the sound of metal on metal like a sonnet.

FOR THE BLOGS

The NYC feminist collective and distro I am apart of, FOR THE BIRDS, has recently started to up our blog game in a serious way. As most of us are in graduate school or touring the country, we can't commit to as many events as we once could. We'll still be out there, distroing zines and music, but we are also trying to maintain active conversation and visibility on the internet.

Today I updated the site with my first blog post, in which the author of the book I discuss totally commented! The internet is literally a tangled web, and a small one at that.

You can follow the blog posts I author here !

WILL YOU FALTER?

SCOPING YOU OUT

SPITTING RESOLUTIONS

I often have a reoccurring dream and it goes like this: I am with someone significant or need to say something important. I open my mouth to speak but my mouth is completely filled with either bright pink chewing gum or a dough-like mucus. I begin pulling the substance out of my mouth, but I can never get it out completely and I begin to panic.

According to my "extensive" research on the internet, I've learned that to dream about chewing gum suggests that you are unable to express yourself effectively, that you feel like you may have said the wrong thing, or that you feel vulnerable.

To dream about not being able to remove the gum from your mouth suggests you are experiencing some powerlessness or frustration. You may lack understanding in a situation or find that a current problem is overwhelming. Maybe an inability to digest a dilemma. Or possibly some negative force in your life that you need to get rid of.

Last night I had this very dream, but for the first time I was able to completely remove all of the dough from my mouth. I spat hard to be sure I'd removed any lingering pieces. I woke and saw that I had spit clear across my bedroom; a pool of glistening excretion on the ground.

THE SYNDROME

The air tastes like cutlery and salt. It lay smooth and cold on a furry white tongue that he runs over rows of cluttered teeth. His mouth is a crowded room, a subway car during rush hour, a deadline. He presses the third floor buzzer and then slips his hands into the pockets of his sweatshirt to hold them there and feel the beads of pulled material accumulating; the wear and tear of every day that sneaks by. Everyday that is exactly the same as the last. When he breathes out, he breathes out smoke. When he breathes in, he breathes in savory metal. He runs one hand over the back of his neck as the door opens and the warmth inside hits him like an air bag.

* * *

The window in her bedroom is open, even though there is frost crystallized like cracked glass on the window. She lay belly down on her bed, a mattress in a corner, reading from a book that she’s been trying to finish for months. She places the book on the ground, lays her head across her forearms, and begins to mentally play out a conversation she would like to have. Before she gets to the crux of the internal dialogue, a cool stream of wind whistles down her spine and the apartment buzzer sounds. She flies off the bed to answer the door, but stops cold as she glimpses a shadow escape through the window. A shadow so palpable she could have run the back her hand along its cheek, licked its teeth, pricked the bottom of its foot with a needle and sewed it back to a body before it could fly out into the piercing dusk.

NOTES FROM DIFFERENT COASTS

Joint blog with Laura Long; writing letters to each other, coast to coast, of reasons why we shouldn't have left/shouldn't have stayed.

SO YOU WON'T WANT TO LEAVE

BETTER DAYS ABOUND, NO MATTER WHAT.

2010 WINTER MIX TAPE: WHETHER WE LIKE IT OR NOT

A.
The Beatles - And Your Bird Can Sing
Kyle Gilbride - The Flood
Josephine Foster & The Supposed - Jailbird (Heart of Sorrow)
Bonnie "Prince" Billy (Sing the Greatest Palace Music) - New Partner
Marked Men - Ditch
Allergic to Bullshit - I'm Not Ashamed
John K. Samson - Utilities
Straight Street Holiness Group - Come On
Cara Beth Satalino - Good Ones
Aphid Ant Constructions - Track 5 (Off their Winter Tour E.P.)

B.
The Wedding Present - Brassneck
Bob Dylan - Simple Twist of Fate
Grass Widow - To Where
Deertick - Diamond Rings 2007
Bratmobile - Throway
Otis Redding - Let Me Come Home
P.S. Eliot - Incoherent Love Songs
Husker Du - Terms of Psychic Warface
Neil Young - Lotta Love

A cold weather airing out, of sorts. Or, cold songs for colder weather & feelings.