Warning:
JBirdsong and I spent Easter Weekend among a variety of interesting, beautiful, talented, hideous, tedious, hospitable, and/or foul-mouthed people in NYC. Although I usually try to avoid R-rated language at LER, the following post drops f-bombs like diarrhetic aircraft strafing Dresden. If a constant barrage of “f**king sh*ts” and “what-da-f**ks” might offend, I suggest you jettison now.
Still reading? Then, let me be perfectly clear: if you consider yourself a member or the respectable middle class (or even dwelling just outside its outskirts), click here to escape.
One last warning: common vulgarities are just the tip of the floating t**d. Scatology also rears its reeking head below in descriptions of esoteric post-sodomitic phenomena, disgusting excretions that I suspect in comparison might make the alleged outrages of the Biblical Sodom and Gomorrah seem about as obscene as a Redd Fox comedy recording circa 1965.
Okay, you’ve been warned. You have no one but yourself to blame.
Nikolai Maistotov: Sodom and Gomorrah
Apologia
What’as a poor anthropologist to do? Transform Little Richard into Pat Boone? Coyly transliterate into asterisks every U and C sandwiched between every F and K?
As GChaucer, wrote in a similar context:
You'll not ascribe [this post] to vulgarity.
When one repeats a tale told by a man,
He must report, as nearly as he can,
Every least word, if he remember it,
However rude it be, or how unfit;
Or else he may be telling what's untrue,
Embellishing and fictionizing too.
Chapter One: Forebodings
Good Friday 2011
Frankly, bad omens roosted like vultures before our departure. I had humiliated myself at school the day before by losing my cool and buzzing in too early in the student/faculty quiz bowl challenge.
Later that night JBirdsong and I met with our friend and my colleague, the exquisite sports blogger/radio personality VBarbesta, who informed me that another colleague, AHole, had confided in her his fantasy of taking over the school, how he would transform it from an inferior place (i.e., a place where no one likes him) into a superior place (i.e., a facsimile of composite schools in New England). I’d be the first he’d fire b/c I only have a BA and write, according to his reckoning, on the level of a college sophomore . . .
On most days, I would have shaken off this bullshit* the way Obama shakes off shit** like this:
*Mama was right. It is easier to pick up bad habits than it is to pick up good ones. It seems as if New Yorker lingo is creeping into my language.
** ditto.
However, my performance in the quiz bowl match had been so wretched that I had lost virtually all of my confidence.
* * *
Probably, worse, as far as omens go, a dead animal (rat? rats? multiple litters of rats? the rat population of Calcutta?) had for a week now been decomposing in the scant space that separates our bedroom ceiling from the roof. To effete indoorspeople like us, unaccustomed to the acrid hideousness of mammal rot, the stench screamed “Jonestown!”
Jonestown, Guyana 1978
We closed the door of the cryptitorium/master bedroom before going to bed on Maundy Thursday, hoping that our Saisysitter, the exquisite VBarb, wouldn’t catch whiffs downstairs during her stay. A paranoid vision of rotstench creeping down the stairs in a green, miasmic cloud would haunt me throughout the weekend. I imagined it issuing under the closed door of the guest room, awakening the exquisite Ms. V, driving her out-of-doors into the dangerous dark as she screamed for her life; however, given the weakened state of my confidence after the fiasco of quiz bowl and the less than encouraging assessment of my prose style, is it all that fucking surprising that I might succumb to paranoia?
JBirdsong had set the alarm for 4am so we could be at the airport in sufficient time to catch our 6:05 direct flight from CHS to LaGuardia. As far as my consciousness could discern, the fucking alarm’s wake-up NPR static might as well been a fucking tree falling out of human earshot in some fucking stupid abstract forest somewhere. The fucking torrential rains that pummeled the fucking roof, that reverberated like flung pebbles against the fucking picture windows, might as well been the whispering of lovers in Kiev. I was fucking dead to the world, man! Do you hear what I’m saying?
[deep breath]
My long suffering life partner, Judy, of course, did the Joan of Arc thing, trudged downstairs, leashed Saisy, and attempted to lure the usually walk-addicted pointer/collie obamamix outside into the deluge to piss. [secondhand narration warning] Stiffening her knees, Saisy had to be dragged onto deck, down the stairs into the back yard, the rain rippling in sheets, pouring from the eaves in a Niagara-like curtain.
Upon awakening in a downstairs bedroom, I stumbled into my pants to go up stairs to check overnight emails. By the stairwell I could smell it - the fucking rotstench - which worsened with every progressive step toward my study. With a fucking monsoon keening outside, opening the windows was out of the question.
Fuck damn shit piss! - it was later than I thought! Forget arriving an hour prior to the goddamn flight. Making the fucking goddamn flight seemed dicey, especially given torrential rains . . .
No, all of the omens pointed to upcoming disaster. Why in the world had we booked a room in the Chelsea? The notorious Chelsea where Dylan Thomas drank himself to death, where Sid Viscous stabbed to death Nancy Spungen, where, according to a passage I had just read two nights before in Keith Richard’s autobiography, the fourth floor is known as the angel dust floor?
Nick Kushner: Les Crimes De L’Amour (Nancy Spungen as Sex Murder)
Drawing: Pencil, Blood.
Chapter Two: Here Comes the Sun
Fortunately, I have no jack-knifing semis to describe, no unworldly swirl of blue lights to report. The rain, in fact, had slackened by the time I was backing the Highlander out of the garage in a hurry to [cue My Fair Lady song] get me to the [airport] on time.
Not surprisingly, the out-of-town five-thirty traffic was negligible. Traffic lights flashed green down Folly Road like magic doors opening for our convenience.
We breezed down 26, took the 526 exit, and rolled into the long term parking lot. I affixed to the rearview mirror JBirdsong’s temporary post-op handicap parking signaficator, and after disembarking, retrieving luggage, etc, we clicked our heels (visualize DVanDyke/ JAndrews in Mary Poppins) at not having far to walk in the rain. With boarding passes and picture IDs secure, we strolled through the portals of Charleston Intl. airport, gliding through security as effortlessly as Flipper jumping thru a hoop..
By the time, we arrived at Gate B2, the initial boarding invitation was being issued to those (seemingly) fortunate Gold/Platinum bigshot travelers and those (seemingly) less fortunate wheel-chaired bound ticket-holders (who had probably scored superb parking spots as well).
In a matter of minutes, our small commuter jet had pierced the gothic cloud cover, and we were zooming in azure skies up the Eastern Seaboard headed to NYC to help celebrate the nuptials of our artist friends JKlein and SKovacs, who live in Brooklyn.
Uncharacteristically, we were not seated next to pre-Subway Jared
Jared Fogle: Posterman for Eating Fast Food Sensibly
or in front of the Eraserhead baby. .
Planned Parenthood’s Ultimate Posterchild: The Eraserhead Baby
In other words, the cabin culture was benign.
We were crashing Friday night with J & S at their loft and then moving into a “junior suite” at the infamous Chelsea, located on 23rd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues. In flight, I had planned to crank out a set of in-class essays in wh/ my students had analyzed how a novel/play/epic of their choice demonstrates that exile can be terrible but nevertheless life-enhancing. Alas, however, I was too muddy-headed and opted instead to solve Friday’s NY Times crossword.
Also, I was concerned about Valentina’s arrival and the progression of the potentially horrorshow scenario of the rotstench spreading even beyond our house like a black mist slow creeping . . .
Yet, how blue the skies, how nice and rare to have a plane meet its ETD! Who knows, maybe things might work out. The smell could recede. It would sort of make sense.
The hour and a half in air passed quickly. Soon enough we were on the ground, being ushered into a taxi, shouting MapQuest directions to our friendly, witty Ukrainian driver.
When we arrived at our destination, he joked, “How much do I owe you?”
Standing on the sidewalk to greet us was JKlein a cat-and-a-half.
So much for bad bodements. What difference a change of scenery can make.
SKovacs & JKlein
Chapter Three: Sweet Home Away from Home
If young Bob Dylan were hitching from Hibbing to NYC today to seek fame and fortune, he would no doubt be hanging in Williamsburg/Brooklyn. Nowadays, of course, Greenwhich Village is tres cher, its golden age of berets and bongos as dead as Isadora Duncan and Marcel Duchamp.
To riff on TS Eliot, The [hipsters] have departed [. . .]/Departed, have left no addresses. Williamsburg is now Bohemia’s ground zero.
All three personal dwellings we visited during our stay were Brooklyn lofts. In addition to crashing at S&J’s place, we had drinks Friday night at the writer/producer/performer TJessup’s apartment, and Saturday we attended a dinner party at gallery owner RImperial’s loft. What distinguished all three of these former warehouses is killer art, virtually all of it abstract. Here are a couple of peeks of S&J’s domicile.
Entrance
Kitchen and Dining Area
JKlein in His Subterranean Studio
NYC’s Good Friday weather was no better than Charleston’s - worse, actually given that it was twenty degrees cooler. After morning naps, Judy, Jim, and I met Sue in Manhattan for lunch, she having taken half of the day off from her rent-paying Late Empire gig of designing perfume bottles for Donna Karan.
On this Good Friday the City seemed exhausted, if not dead. Honking horns, which I associate with the streets of Manhattan, were infrequent as we investigated four or five Chelsea galleries. The coolest, by my standards, was Cheim & Read’s with a retrospective of Joan Mitchell’s ‘70s painting. Also, Sue and Jim discovered a new artist they liked, Juan Ulse.
Afterwards, we climbed the stairs to the High Line Elevated Rail Park, a relatively new public garden constructed along defunct elevated tracks running north and south between 10th and 11th Avenues.
High Line Elevated Rail Park
Eventually we headed back to S & J’s digs for refreshment, powdered our noses, etc. and were once again on the LTrain, this time headed to Williamsburg to dine at the the Bedford where tomorrow’s party would be held. We had in the early afternoon received a text from Valentina with no mention of rotstench, the pangs of my public intellectual collapse at school had faded somewhat, though I hadn’t quite come to terms with AHole’s bloody icepick back-stabbing. I kept picturing him, his shoulders artificially raised (an invisible set of hands hooking their thumbs under his armpits) the incessant head nodding, the public smile.
I asked myself, What would Jesus do? The Dalai Lama? The Count of Monte Cristo? Charles Bronson?
The Bedford Restaurant
After a tasty dinner, we dropped in on TJessup and his nephew Richard. Later Ted’s girlfriend Barbara showed up as well. Given his resume, it’s not surprising that TJessup is entertaining. He also sports quite a family pedigree and showed me a blown-up photographic image of his great great grandfather in a Confederate uniform, a mere child of 16. It hangs proudly in the bathroom among a number of other curiosities. Nephew Richard is headed to Belgrade with his young wife to teach, so we swapped stories of our classroom adventures, email addresses, etc. A convivial evening, you might say (as opposed to the upcoming Easter dinner lurking 48 hours in the future).
[cue threatening organ fugue]
Despite, the dark frenetic morning, we had spent a leisurely, charming holiday in the city (despite the crucifixion-worthy shitty weather and the occasional dyspeptic drip of worry).
Furthermore, we were happily ignorant of the fact that simultaneously, our younger son Ned was twisting along in a bus navigating precipitous one-lane roads in Albania, the roadway, he later informed, dotted with memorial crosses and sometimes blocked by officials demanding bribes from each of the bus’s passengers. But that’s another story.
Chapter Four: The Hotel Chelsea
Who cares if in Room 1010 the dresser’s* knobs don’t match (and one is missing), or that the corkscrew rotation of its flushing toilet takes place in super-slo-mo.
Perhaps, because it’s situated on the backside opposite of 23th street and on the hall between two permanent resident rooms (one door still sporting Xmas decorations, the other hoo-doo doo-dads), Room 1010 is extremely quiet.
Admittedly, the wifi’s being down from check-in to check-out was a drag, but the linens were excellent, the bed comfortable, and the view interesting.
Best of all, it was on the top floor, so if you took the stairs down, you got to see the whole shabang, the cool-ass avant garde art that hangs from the walls of the stairs.
*No, it’s not made of deal
For example:
and
and
Oops, that be Patti Smith C.1988 sitting on (as opposed to hanging along) the steps of the Chelsea.
* * *
Post-check-in, a stroll down 8th Avenue on Holy Saturday produced this indelible memory:
A tall woman in a short skirt brandishing a chair bursts from the front door of an establishment called the Cuba Cafe, music suddenly amping from within out onto the sidewalk. The woman - no, make that a drag queen - starts lip-synching - plants the chair in the middle of 8th Avenue and starts vamping on-over-under-and-around the chair. Is the avenue blocked off?
No, an abbreviated cluster of cars wait idling at a traffic light up ahead. Pedestrians slow, smiling on the sidewalk, looking back but still proceeding. Another drag queen emerges, less talented, vamping. The traffic light turns green. The cars accelerate. Drag Queen #1 is lying on her back scissoring her legs in the air, the cars slowing, their horns blaring.
Our Liza-wanna-be drag queen picks up her chair, retreats blowing kisses, and disappears through the door of Cuba Cafe.
[cue police siren]
This just in: a cabalistic coincidence of this overlong and nauseatingly self-referencing post’s zapping of software efficiency and an emergency meeting of WMoore’s superego and his leftbrain Financial Control Center has resulted in an order for an immediate shutdown of this post.
We apologize for the third segment of the introductory warning. The Caligula shit has been flushed. There will be no photos of the afterparty pony races in the basement of the Chelsea, no videos of poopnoodle expulsions, no graphic descriptions of the Easter Dinner debaucheries, the fuckyou-shutthefuckup-motherfucking-fucker argument between a transgendered sea hag and RImperial over the cooking of the lamb.
No updates from Folly Beach and the VBarbesta detective caper Who(m) Did Wesley Dismember and Bury (so to speak) in the Attic. No quick asides to Macedonia where Ned is shaking his head no to Gypsy banditti in a godforsaken part of the planet where nodding means no and shaking means yes.
No footage of the trained seal attack on AHole’s house {baby seals balancing beach balls emblazoned with hurtful messages on their noses as they shit all over AHole’s front lawn).
Early During the Expurgated Easter Dinner
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.