June 2007 RantRhapsody
Appreciative Listeners,
THE BROOKLYN RAIL PRESENTS RANTRHAPSODY #11
JUNE 17TH, BOWERY POETRY CLUB, 8:00PM
Summer's on and back we bounce to where it all began for us, the
downtown temple to the word, Bowery Poetry Club (308 Bowery @
Bleeker). The bright lights, the big stage, the beautiful people,
it's all there, and we've missed it, and they tell me they've missed
us too. So this month we shall reunite for a full evening of odd and
insightul stories.Please join us for the edifying, amusing, anecdotal,
analytical, political, polemical, and poignant musings of the
following angry and/or euphoric writers:
Tim Doody, Brevity, Best Gay Erotica 2006
Jean Railla, author, Get Crafty
Sascha Dubrul, Writer, Lunatic, Punk Rock Farmer, Co-Founder of Icharus Project
Leah Ryan, Punk Planet, 400 Words, at work on a novel called The Other One
Jason Wachtelhausen, contributor to Adbusters,WIRED, ReadyMade, Skope, 400 Words
Vanessa Wruble, vanessawithoutborders, at work on book about Sierra Leone
THEY CAN'T STOP US- An Excerpt
Tim Doody
I'm waiting for the sun to set, for my shift to end, so I can pedal into my favorite part of Manhattan, an emerald oasis right in the center of all the concrete canyons. But I'm so not there yet. On Broadway, I steer my road bike between columns of men (and some women) doing the black-suit-shuffle, cut west to pick up my thirty-fourth package of the day at the World Financial Center, turn east to drop off at 120 Wall Street, and then north to an alley in Chinatown, where I climb the stairs to the second floor and hand over a manila envelope to a man who kneads his hands behind a counter. As I wait for his signature, I inhale the incense from a candle-lit Buddhist shrine. Behind him, several rows of women move fabric through the stabbing needles of sewing machines.
I plummet back down the stairs, skipping over every other step, and ponder the sheer number of daily encounters in this city, their anonymity and intimacy, how cultures clash, cavort, merge. Then I'm back in the streets jostling with vendors and taxis and tourists, everybody staking out a claim to space. Sirens scream. New sweat drips down the old sweat that's caked to my face from the last seven hours of exertion and summer heat.
Sometimes, I hate that I get CEOs what they need, when they need it, in death-defying time, for semiadequate wages. Maybe that's why I scream a war cry as I near a crosswalk filled with commuters moving against the light. My voice and my barreling bike part the commuters so fast that one guy's knees jerk up high enough to almost touch the tip of his nose. It takes me ten minutes to stop laughing.
Once I get through Midtown, weaving between cars that stop and go and shift lanes, I drop off my last parcels, radio in to say see you tomorrow. I turn my bike from the four lanes of 59th Street into Central Park, where the noise of the city subsides to a hum. A dozen blocks later, on a footpath, I unhitch the Kryptonite chain from my waist and wrap it around the bike frame and a bench. Finally.
I peel off my T-shirt, stuff it into the messenger bag that's still slung over my right shoulder, and plop onto the bench to watch the sun crouch down behind the Beresford, the twin-towered San Remo, and the other buildings of the Upper West Side. Then I slink along the dirt paths of the Ramble, around its oaks, maples, and glacial rocks, and stop near a footbridge spanning a brook. The minutes slip by, taking the last bit of natural light with them.
A clear night here turns strangers into silhouettes. But on a cloudy night, like tonight, the eternal lights of New York City are captured and then refracted in an orange glow that peeks under tree tops and reveals glimpses: shiny Adidas pants with racer stripes hugging boy hips; a nipple ring glimmering in the light down of a defined chest; a knit cap above a square jaw.
Two guys stare each other down like gunslingers about to draw. I hear footsteps. I glance behind me, see tousled hair and lips forming a soundless coo.
Come here often? the guy behind me says with a smirk and a voice that’s as serpentine as his fingers sliding through my bleach-blond dreadlocks. His hand doesn't stop at my shoulders, where my hair ends, but meanders around my messenger bag and then traces down even further. I suck in summer air, arch my back. He slips his fingers inside my spiked belt and combat pants, snapping the band of the neon yellow spandex shorts beneath.
He leans in closer, till his chest hair tickles my back. I smell sandalwood and sweat. I turn toward him.
Like what you see? he asks.
He steps into a shard of that orange glow: stubbly cheeks, the indent of tight abs. He's Middle Eastern, maybe Latino. It's too hard to tell out here. He wears jeans and, like me, no shirt.
I nod.
I reach down, stroke the rough metal of his jeans zipper. Snake Boy, that's what I'll call him on account of his voice and fingers.
We step off the path, back up against the bark of an oak, and I'm rubbing his rounded biceps. Snake Boy’s biceps are so slick with sweat that my hands glide. I lean in and exhale heat into his ear and massage it with my tongue. He moans and then leans down, closes his lips over my left nipple.
I unzip his jeans and he tugs down my combat pants. And there's that feeling of being exposed outdoors, hips suddenly sensitized to the slight swirl of breeze.
Snake Boy licks my neck, looks up into my eyes, and maybe it's the darkness but his black lashes look like eyeliner.
Here, he says, breathe. He holds a small bottle to my nose. When I inhale, the pungent chemicals burn my nostrils, everything melts, and I'm just a flushed face and a beating heart. And a stiff cock. Which he slides a hand up and down. I'm jerking him off too. Our mouths are locked, the whole world reduced to me and him. We're pulsing flesh, a single heartbeat.
Suddenly, everything turns bright white like the sun just pole-vaulted into the night sky. When my eyes flash open, I see that the light emanates from what must be an electric cop car, the kind with a silent engine. I yank my pants up as fast as I can. Too late. My hands shake. Red and blue lights flash behind the white. Snake Boy grabs my hand and says Run, and he runs and I stumble and then run. Sirens scream and hard-shelled feet clomp the earth behind us and our hands break apart so we can run faster—through brush, I feel stings, know my calves just got shredded, but it doesn't even hurt; up over a steep knoll and slipping, tumbling down the other side; into more brush, Snake Boy's still right in front of me. We're long-stepping rock to rock along a narrow stream and then running on the other side. We duck down into a gully. Angry voices, radio static, the crunch of foliage. These sounds get louder. And recede. My arteries throb, my chest heaves, and Snake Boy has his hands on his knees as he draws in ragged breaths. We stay crouched for fifteen minutes until he says he knows a place where they won't find us.
A year ago, when I was twenty-five, I first stumbled into the Ramble. Since then, I've made it the finale to my evening commute. The Ramble is a micro-forest in the heart of Central Park. Paths grip cliffsides, double back, and meander along slopes. The dense brush and trees provide an infinite variety of alcoves. At its southernmost point, a cock-shaped peninsula projects into Azalea Pond, a topographical totem to the men who have been coming here for over a century. And still they come: uptown boys in do-rags, downtown artists wearing paint-spattered pants, even middle-aged men from the Upper East Side. Just trees and rocks and sky and us.
And, obviously, cops. They patrol in vehicles or wear plainclothes to try to surprise us. Queers scatter under the beams of headlights or, after a big bust, line up in handcuffs.
It's not like I wouldn't have run. I just got totally startled. You should've seen what I did to the cops last month. It was a typical night in the Ramble, and I had just walked down the gravel path of the peninsula. At its proverbial head, this cop shined a light in my face.
Did you lose your dog? he asked me.
I saw a poodle around here somewhere, another cop said.
I turned around to leave and they got into their souped-up golf carts and followed me, the headlights blazing on my backside. My face burned with a blend of shame and rage. They finally swerved away and the night draped back around me.
I remembered reading about a tactic that eco-warriors had used to save national forests from the jaws of timber corporations. They dragged fallen trees and other objects from the forest floor into the logging roads, creating blockades. The logging trucks backed out; the forest lived another day.
So I began dragging rocks, branches, and decaying tree trunks into the paths. Some queers looked over at me with raised eyebrows or walked a wide U around my mounting fortifications.
We have to bash back, I said. Fuck Giuliani. My exhortations were accompanied by the sound of long branches splashing through fallen leaves.
A queen in a leather trench coat and a shaved head stopped and smiled. Girlfriend, she said, you bangin' on the wasp nest tonight, ain't you?
I prayed no undercovers would see or hear me, but I didn't stop. Not until I had erected three barricades along a path that was several feet wider than a car. Unplanned, the barricades went from smallest to tallest. The tallest was over eight feet (a fallen tree with an umbrella of intact branches provided the base). Behind it was the gazebo, the place the cops most love to surprise us—that's where group scenes often happen.
Five minutes passed. Some cops in an electric car drove in to start another sweep of the area. They pulled up to the lowest of the barricades and...a crash, a scraping of rock and wood on metal.
Their lights started flashing and the vehicle remained stationary for a full minute before continuing forward. They were heading toward the next barricade.
Other queers stood in clumps, watching, waiting. Some of them snickered.
The cops hit the next barricade without seeing it, the sound of damage much louder. This time, the car didn't move. One of them sounded the sirens and must have radioed for backup, because an SUV spun down another path, headed toward the gazebo, lights flashing. The driver slammed the brakes right before the third barricade.
Within five minutes, a sea of red and blue lights pulsed along the peripherals of the Ramble as dozens of backup units arrived. I hoped everyone prowling these paths could forgive me for fucking up their night of cruising. But I also hoped me and my barricades were just one tiny episode in a history of resistance spanning decades, and that somewhere, like-minded, more effective others were lurking, anticipating how and when to strike again. I unlocked my bike and pedaled away.
WALKING THE EDGE OF INSANITY
Sascha Altman DuBrul
http://theicarusproject.net
I.
I was 18 years old the first time they locked me up in a psych ward. The police found me walking on the subway tracks in New York City and Iwas convinced the world was about to end and I was being broadcast live on primetime TV on all the channels. After I’d been walking along the tracks through three stations, the cops wrestled me to the ground, arrested me, and brought me to an underground jail cell and then the emergency room of Bellevue psychiatric hospital where they strapped me to a bed. Once they managed to track down my terrified mother, she signed some papers, a nurse shot me up with some hardcore anti-psychotic drugs, and I woke up two weeks later in the “Quiet Room” of a public mental hospital upstate. I spent the next two and a half months of my life there, another couple months in this strange private “behavior modification” program/half way house that my mom put me in, and the next bunch of years of my life trying to figure out how to set my life up in such a way that that shit would never happen to me again. Before the big dramatic crash back in New York, that whole previous year I’d gone off to college and had been living on the other side of the country in Portland, Oregon. I’d lost contact with most of my old friends and had basically spent the school year studying in the library, immersed in academic books and ignoring the outside world. At some point in the Spring, around finals time, I’d gotten sick and gone
to the school heath clinic. The short version of the story is that the nurse gave me a prescription for penicillin and I had an allergic reaction to it and almost died. To counteract the effects of the penicillin, the hospital gave me a hard core steroid called Prednizone which totally fucked up my sleeping schedule and, along with the bit of mescaline and lots of pot and coffee I’d been indulging in early that year, sent me off the deep end.It seemed innocent at first, if not a little strange. Somehow I managed to have this infinite amount of energy – I’d ride my bike really fast everywhere and do tons of sit-ups and push-ups after sleeping badly for two hours. Pretty quickly I slipped into a perpetually manic state, and by the Summertime had this idea to start a food co-op at our school which somehow mushroomed into this grandiose plot to destabilize the US economy by printing our own currency! That was just the tip of theiceberg though. I seemed to have a new idea every couple hours, all involving connecting different people and projects up with each other, and actually managed to convince a number people around me that myideas were really good. We started stockpiling food, putting flyers around town, and building our little empire. Then it got even crazier. I started to think the radio was talking to me and I was seeing all these really intense meanings in the billboards downtown and on the highways that no one else was seeing. I was convinced there were subliminal messages everywhere trying to tell a small amount of people that the world was about to go through drastic changes and we needed to be ready for it. That year in school I’d been studying anthro-linguistics and I was totally fascinated by language and how the words we use shape our perception of reality. I started reading way too much meaning into everything. People would talk to me and I was convinced there was this whole other language underneath what we thought we were saying that everyone was using without even realizing it. It seemed like a big computer program someone had written or an ancient riddle or just some kind of cosmic joke. It always seemed like people were saying one thing to me but actually saying the complete opposite at the same time. It was very confusing. Whatever was going on, it was obvious I was the only one who could see it because no one knew what the hell I was talking about! I’d try to explain myself but no one seemed to understand me. At some point it got to where I couldn’t even finish a sentence without starting another one
because everything was so fucking urgent. There was so much to say I couldn’t even get the words out without more new stuff that needed to be said appearing on my tongue.
One of the things that made the situation so complicated and inevitably so tragic was that no one really knew me well enough to know that I’d totally lost my shit and was about to crash really hard. In 1992 Portland was not the cool anarcho-mecca it is today. The folks around me were just like: “Oh, that’s Sascha – the guy doing the food co-op thing. He’s just a little crazy.” No one seemed to be able to see the signs that I was having a psychotic breakdown and if they did, they were too scared to get anywhere near me for fear I was going to bite them or something. Thankfully I took what I thought was going to be a quick trip to Berkeley and my old friends realized immediately that something was definitely wrong. They called my mom, she bought me a plane ticket over the phone, and they somehow managed to get me to the airport and on a
plane back East. When I arrived at the airport my mom was there to pick me up and bring me back to her apartment. I remember her telling me that in the morning she was going to take me to see “a man that could help me.” I didn’t like the sound of that much and it was obvious that they’d brainwashed her memory clean so that she wouldn’t remember what
an important role she was playing in the grand scheme. She fell asleep around the time the sun was rising and I snuck out.
After I’d been in the psych ward for awhile they diagnosed me with something called bipolar disorder (or manic-depression) and, along with a whole pile of other pills they were shoving down my throat, gave me a mood stabilizing drug called Depacote. They told my mom to get used to the idea that her son had a serious mental disorder he was going to be
grappling with for the rest of his life. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I, like millions of other Americans, would spend years wrestling with the implications of that diagnosis. Manic-depression kills tens of thousands of people, mostly young people, every year. Statistically, one out of every five people diagnozed with the disease ends up doing themselves in. But I wasn’t
convinced, to say the least, that gulping down a hand full of pills everyday would make me sane. Honestly, at the time I thought it was a bunch of bullshit. Their treatment of me on the ward didn’t give me much faith in the medical establishment. The mental ward was like some kind of twisted circus where the psychiatrists would come visit everyday and write our scripts with these huge expensive gold and silver Cross pens emblazoned on the side with the names “Prozac” and “Xanax” while we all sat there, shaking and drooling on ourselves, staring off into space and pacing the white hallways. It was a fuckin nightmare.
I’m not really sure why, but that bipolar diagnosis didn’t last very long. By the time I got out of the halfway house I’d ended up in five months later, the doctors were blaming the whole incident on bad drug interactions: the high levels of Prednizone they gave me at the hospital mixed with all the coffee I’d been drinking and hallucinogens I’d been doing. It had just been too much for my fragile system. It was going to take a while to recover, but I’d be able to lead a normal, healthy life like the rest of the population. That was good news for sure.
For years afterwards that whole period of time was something that I somehow just shelved away into a far corner of my brain cause I never knew quite what to make of it. Somehow it didn’t all fit together. It just became another one of my crazy stories that I’d share with new friends’ sometimes if they were getting to know me. “Yeah, ha ha, I’m kinda loonytoons, for real, man: check out what happened to me when I was a teenager…” But lingering in the back of my mind was always this
fear that somehow I was going to end up getting locked up again.
For someone who had been diagnosed with a “serious mental illness,” the next six years of my life were pretty amazing. I traveled and worked and had big adventures all over the places with amazing folks. The company I kept didn’t stigmatize people who were a little eccentric or weird, if anything we reveled in it, wore it on our sleeves. It seemed pretty obvious to me that my crazy behavior as a teenager had been a perfectly natural reaction to being raised in a crazy environment. You have to understand this part of the story though: I was raised by parents with pretty radical leftist politics who taught me to question everything and always be skeptical of big business and capitalism. I also spent my teenage years growing up in the punk scene which actually glorified craziness and disrespect for authority. Also, from the time I was a little kid everyone always said that I was very sensitive to the world around me and the suffering of others, maybe too sensitive, and I just chalked it up to that. My world view didn’t leave any room open for the possibility that my instability and volatility might actually have something to do with inherent biology. So I went on with my life.
II.
My mom came home from work one early Spring evening to find that I wascurled up on her kitchen floor, almost catatonic, telling her that I was really sorry but I just couldn’t take it anymore and I was going to kill myself. I was 24 years old. My hands were covered in cuts that I’d let get infected because I was too preoccupied to pay attention to what was going on with my body. My clothes were dirty and torn. I was getting lost in neighborhoods that I normally knew like the back of my
hand and couldn’t look anyone in the eye when I talked to them. There was a repeating tape loop in my head constantly telling me what a horrible person I was and that I was a liar and a hypocrite and a coward and I didn’t deserve to live. In fact I was obsessed with killing myself. It was like a broken record – throwing myself in front of a car, jumping out of a window, shooting myself in the back of the head, carbon monoxide in the garage, swallowing a bottle of pills, etc. It was exhausting and horrible and I was convinced it was never going to end, I was living in my own personal hell. The strangest part was that a couple months earlier I’d been on top of the world. Focused and clear and driven, getting up in front of crowds and giving
talks about exciting and revolutionary things – organizing half a dozen projects – I was the model of an activist. I hardly had time to sleep. But at some point in the middle of it all I just crashed. I stopped being able to get out of bed. All the confidence I’d had suddenly disappeared. I stopped being able to focus on anything and I started feeling very awkward around even my oldest friends. All my people were really confused about what to do for me. One by one all my projects
fell apart till they were all just a halo of broken dreams circling above my head as I wandered the city streets alone.
I soon ended up back in the psych ward and then the same halfway house/rehab program out in the suburbs that my mom had put me in as a teenager. I was miserable and lonely. The doctors weren’t quite surewhat I had so they diagnosed me with something called Schitzo-affective disorder. They gave me an anti-depressant called Celexa and an atypical anti-psychotic called Zyprexa. I was in group therapy everyday. There was an organic farm to work on down the road from the halfway house and after a couple weeks they let me volunteer there a few hours a day sewing seeds and potting up plants in the greenhouse. Eventually Iconvinced them to let me live there and I moved out of the halfway house and just came for outpatient care a couple times a week.
It took a couple months, but for the first time I could see that it was obvious the drugs were actually working for me. It was more than the circumstance – it actually felt chemical. Slowly all the horrible noise and thoughts faded and I started to feel good again. I remember watching an early Summer sunset over the fields at the farm and realizing I was happy for the first time in months and months. Once I moved onto the farm full time I would come into the city on the weekends to work the farmer’s market and hang out with my friends. As obvious as it was that they were helping me, I really just saw the
drugs as a temporary solution. They made me gain a bunch of weight. I always had a hard time waking up in the morning. My mouth was always dry. They were relatively new drugs, not even the doctors knew about the long term side effects of taking them. Besides which, the whole idea just made me feel really uncomfortable. How would I talk to my friends about it? What if there was some global economic crisis and instead of running around with my crew torching banks and tearing up the concrete I was going to be widthdrawling from some drug I suddenly didn’t have access to anymore? I didn’t want to be dependent on the drugs of The Man.
But I didn’t worry myself too much about the long-term. I was just happy to have my life back. As the leaves started to change color, I was already planning my trip back to the West coast, to my people in California. There was a room in a collective house in North Oakland and a job in Berkeley with a bunch of my friends waiting for me. I started hanging out with this cool traveling activist woman named Sera and we made plans to hitchhike across the country to participate in the big
Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization. A few days after the frost came and we put the farm to bed, Sera and I had hit the road. And back amidst the familiar, I slowly put my life together once again.
III.
The police picked me up wandering the streets of Los Angeles on New Years Day, 2002. I’d been smashing church windows with my bare fists and running through traffic scaring the hell out of people screaming the lyrics to punk songs, convinced that the world had ended and I was the center of the universe. They locked me up in the psych unit of LA County Jail and that’s where I spent the next month, talking to the flickering fluorescent lightbulbs and waiting for my friends to come break me out..
I was quickly given the diagnosis of bipolar disorder again and loaded down with meds. “That’s so reductionistic, so typical of Western science to isolate everything into such simplistic bifurcated relationships.” I’d tell the overworked white coated psychiatrist staring blankly from the other side of the tiny jail cell as I paced back and forth and he scribbled notes on a clipboard that said “Risperdal” in big letters at the top. “If anything I’m multi-polar, poly-polar – I go to poles you’d never even be able to dream up in your imaginationless science and all those drugs you’re shooting me up with. You’re all a bunch of fools!” And so I paced my cell.
Every time you get locked up it gets harder to put the pieces back together. Physiologically, the brain and body take longer to recover. It takes a lot out of someone to go through a mental breakdown. Picture being bipolar like a pendulum swing with suicidally depressed at one end, delusionally psychotic at the other, and with healthy and stable somewhere in the middle. If you swing over to one end you’re bound to swing back over to the other side. After months of sleepless mania it’s inevitable that some serious depression is going to follow, all your reserves are depleated.
Finally after the month in jail, a couple weeks in a Kaiser psych ward, and four months in a halfway house for people with severe psychiatric disabilities, I finally got it together to be able to move back into my old collective house in North Oakland. I was taking a mood stabilizing drug called Lithium and an anti-depressant called Welbutrin. The ground I was walking on was still a little shaky. I was only just beginning to be able to read after not being able to focus for months and months. I got a full time job really for the first time in my life, started going to therapy and taking really good care of my body. Made
it through my one year anniversary of getting locked up and felt so blessed that I had made it that far.
IV.
Early one January morning a phone call came telling me that my old traveling partner Sera had been found dead floating in the Susquehanna River in Maryland. She’d jumped off a bridge and taken her own life. The news tore me up bad, left me really confused and hurt. She had beenone of the most brilliant people I’d ever known – with a mind that was sharp as a knife and a heart that was full of the spirit of adventure and passion for living. In our travels together she’d helped me so much
in my struggles to figure out why my own life was so valuable. After I heard the news I sat in my room for a week and cried and cried.
And that’s when I finally started doing the research I’d been putting off for so long. After a year of not being able to read I started to pick up the books. And that’s when I really began the internal and external dialog about my condition and began to try to put the puzzle together, make some sense of it all so it wasn’t just a bunch of isolated pieces that didn’t fit together. I started talking to friends really openly and using the regular column I had in a punk rock magazine as a forum to talk about madness and manic-depression.
And that’s when I started really coming to term with the paradox that however much contempt I feel towards the pharmeseudical industry for making a profit off of all of our misery and however much I aspire to be living outside the system, the drugs help keep me alive and in the end I’m so thankful for them.
According to the August 19 issue of Time Magazine, 2.3 million Americans have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Of course, mental disorders are more confusing than so many other illnesses, more based on cultural norms that we’d like to admit. Diagnosis that people get stuck with for life are determined by a set of questions in an official book rather than any kind of concrete blood or piss tests. Diagnosis come in and out of style like fashion designs: it used to be “in” for doctors to diagnose children with ADHD, these days all of a sudden it’s “bipolar disorder.” It wasn’t really that long ago that “homosexuality” was considered a “disorder” which is enough to make you not want to ever step foot in a psych doctors office. Even the real illnesses are so easy to misdiagnose. Someone with bipolar disorder one week, might be considered schizophrenic the next, then “schizo-affective” the week after that. Plus, the drugs work so differently for different people –
that’s why there are dozens of different anti-depressant pills and they keep cranking them out.. We have yet to create a reasonable language to talk about it all so those of us who do talk about it end up with all of these sterile and clinical words in our mouths that feel uncomfortable and never get to the heart of things and very often skirt around the issues. When it
comes down to it, as a culture we don’t understand mental illness so for the most part we don’t talk about it and leave the opinions up to the doctors and the drug companies. In the end what it comes down to for me is that I desperately feel the
need to connect with other folks like myself so I can validate my experiences and not feel so damn alone in the world, pass along the lessons I’ve learned to help make it easier for other people struggling like myself. By my nature and the way I was raised, I don’t trust mainstream medicine or corporate culture, but the fact that I’m sitting here writing this essay right now is proof that their drugs are helping me. And I’m looking for others out there with similar experiences. But I feel so aliened sometimes, even by the language I find coming out of my mouth or that I type out on the computer screen. Words like
“disorder,” ”disease,” and “dysfunction” just seem so very hollow and crude. I feel like I’m speaking a foreign and clinical language that is useful for navigating my way though the current system, but doesn’t translate into my own internal vocabulary where things are so much more fluid and complex. I can only hope that in the near future we will have created better language to talk about all this stuff. But it’s really hard. As a society we seem to be still in the early stages of the dialog where you’re either “for” or “against” the mental health system. Like either you swallow the anti-depressant ads on
daytime television as modern day gospel and start giving your dog Prozac, or you’re convinced we’re living in Brave New World and all the psych drugs are just part of a big conspiracy to keep us from being self-reliant and realizing our true potential. I think it’s really about time that we start carving some more of the middle ground with stories from outside the mainstream and creating a new language for ourselves that reflects all the complexity and brilliance that we hold inside.
THIS NAME
Leah Ryan
I’m not on speaking terms with the man who gave me my name, Ryan. That would be my father. And we don’t speak. But this name Ryan is still my name.
Ryan - we associate this name with liquor stores and corner bars. A Ryan is a guy who erects a scaffolding on your apartment building. He pours you a Guinness. He goes to confession about once a year, give or take, only after he’s had a few. Mr. Ryan is a guy with a twinkle in his eye and a hole in his pocket. He’s a guy with a song in his heart, a joke on the tip of his tongue, and baseball bat in his back seat.
Nowadays there’s medication for guys like Mr. Ryan. In olden times he’d have no choice but to cry in his beer, break his furniture and drive his rusty, unregistered car off the road. Needless to say, even modern science can’t help the Mr. Ryan who refuses to go to a shrink.
In Europe, you can country-hop for pennies on an infamous airline known as Ryan Air. I took Ryan Air from London to Dublin for the equivalent of about six dollars. We were all strapped in and about to take off when the cheery, charming pilot came over the PA to tell us that our vintage German plane had a flat tire. We were advised to deplane and have a drink or two. John or Jack or Pat would have to run over to somewhere or other and get another tire, since they didn’t have a spare.
A flat tire. Only Ryan Air would have a flat tire and no spare. Bernstein Air or Peterson Air or Chang Air would have a real problem, like a complex electrical issue that they’d been lucky to catch, or a bearing that was ever so slightly worn. Ryan Air has a flat tire and no spare.
The friend who I was visiting in Dublin (I feel like I should add that his name is Robert Emmett Finn) was planning to collect me at the airport until he heard I was flying Ryan Air.
“Who knows when you’ll get here,” he’d sighed. “Take a cab. I’ll leave a key under the mat.”
Day late, dollar short. The father I don’t speak to, the father who gave me this name Ryan, stopped speaking to his family, the Ryans, before I was born. From what I understand they laid bricks and drove cabs and broke hearts all over the Bronx. All hearsay. I only have a couple of stories – how they showed up to dinner en masse, each with his or her own fifth in hand, and didn’t eat anything. Another story about Uncle Somebody Ryan, John or Jack or Pat or Frank. Not Liam or Finbar. The immigrants’ names had to melt into the pot. Liam and Finbar reek of dirty sheep and peat bogs and moldy stone floors. So Uncle Somebody Ryan had a brain tumor. He was some kind of union laborer – one of the big unions - and the union doc removed his tumor and also, somehow, took out his frontal lobe. The story goes that his five daughters (Kathleen and Bridget, but no Maeve or Fiona) all split the settlement money and bought five matching thunderbirds. So the story goes.
Where are all these Ryans now, I wonder and have wondered for what seems like forever now, when I find myself in the Bronx. Did they move to Jersey, or to Queens? The Kathleens and the Jacks and the Pats and the Bridgets? Are they in front of me in line at the Sunnyside Post Office, stinking of cigarettes and jingling their keys?
This name Ryan, I tried to stop speaking to it, to leave it by the side of the road, to wave goodbye and move on. To wash my hands. But then, what would be my name? This name is my name, this name Ryan. It sticks to me and I can’t shake it. Day late, dollar short, flat tire and no spare. Leave the key under the mat. I’ll show up eventually.
DINNER NUMBER ONE
Jean Railla
I feel terrible.”
“My throat,” mutters Steve.
“Why didn’t we cancel last night?” I sniffle, clearly sick.
“Why did we drink that last bottle of Lambrusco?”
“I feel terrible.” I moan once again. “I need coffee. Shall we get up and get caffeinated before the savages awaken?” I ask. It is 5:00am.
“OK. “
Steve gets up and puts on his a navy blue Addidas track suit bottoms and a Lower East Side Collective T-shirt and moves towards the kitchen as I curl up under our old comforter.
“Oh, you mean I should make the coffee and you should lie in bed and wait for me to serve you.”
“Exactly.” I rasp to him and start coughing.
Steve sighs.
As Steve goes to the bathroom, I can hear Sebastien mumbling “mama, dada, doo, doo, pee, pee” in the next room. I ignore him, waiting for my coffee, thinking about the dinner party night.
There were signs, early on, that my first stop on this quest to serve twenty-five Sunday night dinners in twelve months, would not go as smoothly as I would have liked. Firstly, Sunday didn’t work for Steve, so we had to host our first Sunday Night Dinner on Saturday. Not a good omen. Secondly, I was planning to launch the whole quest with a meal for my two best girlfriends, Kimberly and Laura, right around the beginning of spring. So perfect! So in tune with the season! So new! But alas, as my sister, the new age guru would say, it wasn’t meant to be.
The beauty, the genius, of having Kimberly and Laura as my first guests would have been that, because we speak almost daily, they understand the intricate details of my life and, as we do with those we love, they work around my eccentricities. For instance, they will travel to the far ends of the West Village/Soho region where we all live, to procure for me, say, fresh horseradish when I call at the last minute desperately pleading into the phone: “There is no way that I can complete the braised short ribs without it!” They will not call and ask if bottled will do or question my need for fresh ingredients. They will dutifully hit Gourmet Garage, Dean and Deluca, and every deli along the way. They also understand that I like to eat with my children, and the kids like to eat early, and that I have a deep fear of not getting enough sleep, and so will endure coming over at 5:00 for dinner at 6:00, and know that when they get in the door, they are going to have to entertain the kids. In exchange for this, I will feed them good, solid food, the kind they rarely have, what with take-out and dinner reservations the standard fare for most people of their class and professional obligation. I will serve them very decent wine, something light and easy––a Dolce de Alba, for instance, or a nice crisp Las Brisas Spanish white that belies its 9.99 price tag. Finally, I will kick them out and send them on their way around 9:00, which, at least the next morning, they will appreciate.
Laura is the godmother to my boys. Kimberly baby-sits our children, even though she always puts the diaper on backwards. They have listened to my endless monologues based on the following themes:
∑ Bowel movement stories: “You should have seen it!”
∑ Self-questioning moments: “Am I a good mother if I don’t spend every second with my child feeding them organic, whole grain, overpriced snacks and making sure they never them watch TV, no matter how sick, tired or hung-over I am? Have ruined them for life?
∑ Tirades against the system: “How can they judge a three-year-old? How can we not be good enough for preschool? Is it worth 20,000 dollars a year to teach your kids to finger paint?”
They have endured my inability to edit myself during my annual night-out with the girls, into the glittery world of New York after-dark, when at some invariably fabulous function, I get overly excited by being out of my apartment and then drink a bunch of cocktails and talk nonstop, either insulting someone without meaning to or, gasp, talking about my kids. All this is to say that these two women, are dear, dear friends. But here’s the problem with single girlfriends: they have disposable incomes, which allow them all sorts of fabulous things that are out of bounds when you are a part-time writer and your husband is a college professor. Kimberly and Laura have exquisite wardrobes, dine at all the best restaurants and jet off to exotic locations just when you need them.
The very weekend I had planned as my kick-off Sunday Night Dinner, both women, through some sort of weird cosmic white-hipster convergence designed to upset my precarious sanity, planned to be in Brazil, staying at the same = jet-set boutique hotel, missing each other by eight hours. Laura was going with a group of good friends who happened to be travel writers and food editors and the they would hit all the best, undiscovered spots, and Kimberly was going to some fabulous Brazilian all-night wedding, having been invited by her trainer-turned-lover, the likes of whom I had not yet met, but had discerned over many phone conversations that he was indeed a decent guy. With flights, stopovers and whatever other weird time zone things I never fully understand, it means that they will both be absent. Now, not only was I going to have to listen to each of them talk about how much fun they had, both individually and collectively, they would not be here for my kick-off dinner.
So while frick-and-frack were getting bikini-waxed and drinking sophisticated and fruity, but not too sweet, drinks poolside, I was sweating in dirty yoga pants and an old t-shirt, getting the house organized, ingredients procured and children napped, with a sore throat, gulping generic Ibuprofen and preparing for my dinner guests: another preschool family. I figured it was time to branch out. Make new friends. Afterall, the whole point of this quest, which I had felt so exuberant about only a few days ago, was about that seemingly clichéd, but all too important, idea of building community. Although magazines and politicians and leaders talk about “It takes a village,” what does it really mean? In a world of fast food and cell phones and blogs and 24 hours news—all things that I indeed like and partake in, but none-the-less can be alienating in their own ways—perhaps this simple act of cooking fresh food for others, for returning to the table, to sit and talk, to commune, if you will, could be my own way of giving back. And yes, political action is important. The environment is important, but in some ways, these ideas are abstract, outside of the day-to-day activities of my life. I am blessed with enough space to host a dinner party in a city where almost no one has them. My family has imparted in me a deep love of cooking and an almost obsessive tendency towards the preparing and consuming of food. These Sunday Night Dinners are my small way of giving back.
There is, of course, another, less selfless motive. As I enter further and further into the world of mom, of soccer, babysitters, Bob the Builder and playdates, these dinner parties are also my safety net to the world of adults and ideas. I don’t want to let the part of myself, the intellectual side, the part of me that is part flamboyant hostess, part provacteur, part social-mixer, die out now that I have children. While some women and men get that type of satisfaction at work, I don’t. As a freelance writer, I work alone, usually at the Israeli café across the street from my apartment, where the only other people there are the strange, slightly anti-social, relatively un-bathed freelancers like myself. We do not form a community.
The family we had invited consisted of Amy and Peter, and their two sons Webber (age 3) and Beckett (age 1). Amy doesn’t eat meat, which was another sign that things might go askew. We had gone over the confines of her vegetarianism in a series of emails where I had to ask my least favorite question: Do you have any dietary restrictions? When she answered yes, however politely; I was crestfallen. See, I am a person of the flesh, in particular, the pig. I come from people of the pig. The French, we like our pork, our ham and our bacon. The reason is simple: pork makes anything tastes incredible. Pinto beans with a ham hock go from good to unbelievable. Broccoli rabe, which is green, a little bitter, and a little crunchy, becomes even electric, greener and fresher, with the addition of a wee bit of pancetta. Call me piggish, but I can think of nothing better for a Sunday night dinner, even one held on Saturday, than pork loin, slathered in Dijon, and roasted with apples. It is cheap, easy and delicious.
On the other hand, I never cook fish, which is the one meat Amy eats. It seems fussy, makes the house smelly (and with four people living in 1000 square feet and an unventilated kitchen, stink is always a factor). I know it’s good for you, what with the omegas and fatty acids, but we take a fish oil supplement, add flax seeds to breakfast cereal, and mostly avoid sea creatures. However, part of this year-long quest is about hospitality, about creating community by serving others. Afterall, the party is not supposed to be about me, but about “we.” Fish would be served.
Peter works for a wine importer so I had sent him the menu a week ahead of time for wine pairing. Changing the plan, one of my favorite pastimes, was not an option. This also meant, that although I was sick, I would still be drinking, because this was the whole point of the night, and let’s face it, I really don’t have the personality to say no to a wine tasting.
So there were some things to feel if not anxious about, well then tentative. The other thing, the real thing, is that Steve and I barely know Amy and Peter. Our kids get along, though, and we seem to move in almost-similar worlds. Amy is a feminist organizer and a writer. We have been at book readings together. Steve, who has been a community organizer in the East Village and Amy know some people in common. As I mentioned, Peter works in the wine industry, which is ostensibly why we had invited them over. I was looking forward to talking about the business with him, hoping to pitch a freelance article on wine importing.
Two hours before they were supposed to come over, I looked around our apartment, which at that moment had about one hundred pieces of Thomas the Tank engines and train track pieces around the living room. I scanned the toys scattered on the carpet. What would they think of the obnoxious Lightening McQueen cars that make loud noises? (Very un-cool in the East Village preschool mindset where wooden, silent, educational toys are de rigueur.) What would they think of our Neo-Victorian, dark-library-style decor and the copious amounts of floorboard dirt we live with?
That’s the thing about having people over—it strikes a chord of vulnerability. In New York, you could know someone for ten years, and never once see the inside of their apartment. They could be hiding a toy soldier collection or chopped bodies—and you would never know. Maybe there is a reason for all this secrecy. Maybe bars, restaurants and cafés help us portray an ideal version of ourselves, one without the self-help books and dirty toilet seats and carton upon carton of Chubby Hubby in the fridge. All I could think about, on the eve of my first dinner party, is that I don’t know if I want to open up our own imperfect lives to Peter and Amy, who to be perfectly honest, I felt a little intimidated by. Amy has an Ivy League education and two hit books and started a feminist foundation and gets paid to jet around the country to lecture at college campuses. Peter is quiet and sardonic, to my loud and needy. They own instead of rent. They have a car. She has a personal assistant. Their children are better behaved then ours and their homemade Valentine’s day cards trumped our homemade Valentine’s day cards, even though I am supposed to be the famous online punk rock crafter and she is the big feminist organizer. I was feeling more and more sick and overwhelmed, and decidedly un-community-like.
At 6:00 the dishes were not clean. Steve was organizing the ingredients for his risotto with asparagus, peas and mint, a recipe from Jamie Oliver, which I thought would be great, but Steve seemed unsure. I was still in my yoga pants.
“Chicken broth? Can I use it?” Steve asked.
“Hmmm,” I stopped what I was doing, wiping a dirty hand on my dirty yoga pants and wiping a few dirty hairs from my brow. A conundrum.
“How about we don’t tell her,” said my husband, the ethicist.
“Well, I don’t know. I mean, the whole point of this quest is about hospitality, serving others,” I answered. “I don’t think we should lie about these things.”
“But,” I continued, knowing the chicken broth would add a richness that water never could, “She did mention she eats the occasional steak, henceforth, the chicken broth is in.” Moral dilemma resolved.
I arranged the cheeses I had purchased at Murray’ s Cheese Shop on a special platter so that they could come to room temperature. Cheese, especially cheese from Murray’s Cheese Shop, is one of my secret weapons for a good dinner party. Murray’s combines a European appreciation for milk fat and bacteria with an American obsession with conspicuous consumption. It was one of the first shops in American to take cheese-making seriously and has imported artisinnal cheeses from around the world for the past ten years. Three cheeses, one soft, one nutty and one slightly funky, are perhaps the ideal way to end any meal—and leave guests feeling taken care of.
I love going to Murray’s. Oh, the cheeses, the delicious, delicious cheeses! Earlier that morning, I had made my pilgrimage down Bleecker Street. In the store, the selection process was difficult, as it always is, with hundreds of cheeses to choose from, but with two kids along about to break a forty-dollar bottle of extra virgin olive oil, I had to be quick and decisive. Since the menu we were serving veered towards the Italian, I went for a creamy, hardly-sharp Gorgonzola, a nutty, almost like Parmesean, Piave, and a wine-soaked Ubriaco.
After selecting the cheese I had gone to the fish store, where the live lobsters entertained my boys and I deliberated over the fish. Steve doesn’t like scallops. Mussels didn’t look fresh. Wild salmon was out of our budget, which I should note; I had already blown at the cheese shop. Finally, with the impatient fishmonger staring me down, I went for the scrod. I would roast it with some herbs and call it a day.
Later, waiting for our guests, we were starting to think bad thoughts. No longer was our couples-only dialogue full of hope and promise, the possibility of a new, cosmopilitanism with our dinner parties. We had drifted from: “OK, we can do this, we really shouldn’t cancel. We always cancel. It’s why we never see anyone.” And landed squat into: “Shit, we already bought the fish, it’s too late to cancel! Why didn’t we call this off earlier! We’re too sick! It’s too much! I just want to watch the new season of MI5!” (For those of you yet to discovered it, MI5 is a fantastic British spy series; a more intelligent, dark and subtle 24, if you will.)
There is a feeling I have when sick and tired, one that has been much more pronounced since I’ve had kids and suffered the sleep deprivation that occurs in the early months with newborns where you never get more than two hours of sleep at a given time, which can only be described as feeling underwater. It’s as if you are floating through your life, watching things go by, but unable to access the part of your critical mind that you desperately need to. And then it is too late. The kids are crying, or the roast is burned, or the laundry wrinkled, or the writing assignment late. This was the feeling I had at 6:15, when I realized we had no parsley, and my children were circling me in the kitchen, like hungry sharks, reminding me that they had not eaten.
For some reason, I had asked Amy and Peter to come at 6:00 or 6:30, which is strange, because I always serve dinner at 6:00, in order to placate my children, knowing that they, intense creatures of habit, will not eat unless the whole family sits down together for dinner and without food, they are prown, as I am, to temper tantrums and melt-downs. We run a tight-scehdule in my perhaps misguided attempts to avoid all psychotic emotional outbursts. However, in my eagerness to be liked, a quality I am ashamed to admit dictates more of my activities than I would like, I had asked them over later because I knew this suited their lifestyle. I wish I could say it was hospitality but clearly it wasn’t, because no one in our family does well at night. We are an early to bed early to rise kind of clan, and without strict attention to these rules, the whole system breaks down, which can be good for no one, guests included.
So in the midst of cooking and getting dressed and wrangling children, Steve and Sydney had to go out for I sent for parsley. I opened a bottle of white wine, and as it slid down my very sore throat, I felt its magic begin to work.
For a little apertivo, I put out salami, olives and a loaf of stirato from Grandaisy Bakery, the most chewy, crunchy, outrageously delicious bread in the world, as good as any we had in Florence. (“This is why we live in New York,” says Steve every time we visit the bakery a few blocks from our house.)
I chopped one small orange chili pepper. Jamie Oliver’s recipe for roasted cod called for the addition of red Thai peppers, but the overpriced, slightly dirty, grocery store next door was out, and I was feeling too sick and overwhelmed to handle the throngs of tourists and black-clad Soho regulars populating Dean and Deluca, perhaps the most fetishized grocery store in the world. (It is white and steal, full of imports, with opera playing, models lurking around with non-fat lattes and milk selling for six dollars a half gallon.) So I settled for the tiny, round Scotch-Bonnet chili at my quasi-ghetto grocery store.
Just then the doorbell rang. They had arrived.
Immediately, Amy offered to help. Like good guests, they brought wine and desert. Steve came back with Syd and the parsley. We opened a bottle of Cascina Morassino Langhe Nebbiolo 03, which was red and smooth, which just the right acidity to cut through the fat of the salami and olives. Exhausted, Steve and I sipped our wine and took a minute to actually talk with our guests. One glass and a few slices of salami later, we realized that it was almost seven and our children still had not eaten; instead they were refusing salami and running around the apartment like a bunch of wild wildebeests, in behavior I would have never dreamed of performing as a child when my parents or grandparents would throw one of their formal dinner parties. Clearly I had to do something. I got up to heat up some leftover pasta for the four boys. Amy, ever-the brilliant organizer, helped out telling the boys it wasn’t that they weren’t eating with us, instead they were having a picnic!
Steve and Peter retreated to the kitchen. Steve started the risotto and Peter to began to handwash the dishes in the dishwasher and dry them because, we had discovered, we didn’t have enough clean ones. The men talked about building stuff and other man-talk while Amy and I shoveled pasta into our kids’ mouths. Somehow, the gender division already began to take its place. I was meant to talk to peter, but more pressing concerns, like warding off evil unfed child spirits became more important.
The problem with our dinner menu, was two-fold: there were not enough appetizers to tide everyone over and both the first and second courses both required last minute work. So while the kids went off racing with their cars and started to throw leggos at one another, the adults ate risotto, and I left mine to go back to the kitchen to rub the oregano, chile and parsely mixture onto the fish, slathered it in olive oil and roasted it for 12 minutes. While I was doing this, Beckett started screaming, needing a diaper change, Sebastien stole Sydney’s train and they started crying and I yelled at Steve to “Go help out the kids, will you!!!!!!”
Finally, diapers were changed, tempers were mellowed and the adults were seated once again. I served the fish with an aioli I had made from scratch earlier in the day, and salad. I took a bite of the fish, excited to finally eat. It was the most spicy, burning, fish I had ever tasted. Peter and Amy politely gave their compliments. I slathered on the aioli and suffer through the fish, while gulping the wine, a lovely white Vigneti Massa Derthona 05' which at this point, I can’t even taste because my taste buds are fried. Amy and Peter are totally relaxed and low-key. They go with the flow, but I still feel uneasy and nervous.
I served the cheeses, my last hurrah. At this point, when I waxed on and on about the gorgonzola, it felt a bit forced. If Laura or Kimberly were over, we would talk about the cheese for at least twenty minutes. The ratio of creamy to funk would be analyzed, and ways to pair gorgonzola would be discussed. I felt as if I was talking too much. Peter opened an amazingly light Sorelle Bronca Proseco, which was cold, effervescent and clean. Steve and I talked about our time in Bologna, the waiters at that one trattoria, the pasta, the sparkling white in carafes.
Then the kids started up again. I suggested a bath, and Amy went to administer it. I tried to remember the last time I cleaned the bath-tub. Steve started the dishes. I went to the fridge to get the Lambrusco I had been saving for a special occasion. I opened the sparkling, super-grapey, red wine and served everyone, including Amy, who was confined to the bathroom on kid-drowning patrol. Finally the kids came out in their jammies, looking so cute, and I turned on the TV for them, asking Amy and Peter first, if it is OK. Wallace and Grommit seemed the most sophisticated thing we had—it’s British afterall––and the parents settled into preschool gossip.
Then it was 11:00, three hours past my kids’ bed-time and two hours past my own. Peter and Amy started packing up the kids, as I sat in my chair, feet up, exhausted.
One down. Twenty-four dinner parties to go.
THE BROOKLYN RAIL PRESENTS RANTRHAPSODY #11
JUNE 17TH, BOWERY POETRY CLUB, 8:00PM
Summer's on and back we bounce to where it all began for us, the
downtown temple to the word, Bowery Poetry Club (308 Bowery @
Bleeker). The bright lights, the big stage, the beautiful people,
it's all there, and we've missed it, and they tell me they've missed
us too. So this month we shall reunite for a full evening of odd and
insightul stories.Please join us for the edifying, amusing, anecdotal,
analytical, political, polemical, and poignant musings of the
following angry and/or euphoric writers:
Tim Doody, Brevity, Best Gay Erotica 2006
Jean Railla, author, Get Crafty
Sascha Dubrul, Writer, Lunatic, Punk Rock Farmer, Co-Founder of Icharus Project
Leah Ryan, Punk Planet, 400 Words, at work on a novel called The Other One
Jason Wachtelhausen, contributor to Adbusters,WIRED, ReadyMade, Skope, 400 Words
Vanessa Wruble, vanessawithoutborders, at work on book about Sierra Leone
THEY CAN'T STOP US- An Excerpt
Tim Doody
I'm waiting for the sun to set, for my shift to end, so I can pedal into my favorite part of Manhattan, an emerald oasis right in the center of all the concrete canyons. But I'm so not there yet. On Broadway, I steer my road bike between columns of men (and some women) doing the black-suit-shuffle, cut west to pick up my thirty-fourth package of the day at the World Financial Center, turn east to drop off at 120 Wall Street, and then north to an alley in Chinatown, where I climb the stairs to the second floor and hand over a manila envelope to a man who kneads his hands behind a counter. As I wait for his signature, I inhale the incense from a candle-lit Buddhist shrine. Behind him, several rows of women move fabric through the stabbing needles of sewing machines.
I plummet back down the stairs, skipping over every other step, and ponder the sheer number of daily encounters in this city, their anonymity and intimacy, how cultures clash, cavort, merge. Then I'm back in the streets jostling with vendors and taxis and tourists, everybody staking out a claim to space. Sirens scream. New sweat drips down the old sweat that's caked to my face from the last seven hours of exertion and summer heat.
Sometimes, I hate that I get CEOs what they need, when they need it, in death-defying time, for semiadequate wages. Maybe that's why I scream a war cry as I near a crosswalk filled with commuters moving against the light. My voice and my barreling bike part the commuters so fast that one guy's knees jerk up high enough to almost touch the tip of his nose. It takes me ten minutes to stop laughing.
Once I get through Midtown, weaving between cars that stop and go and shift lanes, I drop off my last parcels, radio in to say see you tomorrow. I turn my bike from the four lanes of 59th Street into Central Park, where the noise of the city subsides to a hum. A dozen blocks later, on a footpath, I unhitch the Kryptonite chain from my waist and wrap it around the bike frame and a bench. Finally.
I peel off my T-shirt, stuff it into the messenger bag that's still slung over my right shoulder, and plop onto the bench to watch the sun crouch down behind the Beresford, the twin-towered San Remo, and the other buildings of the Upper West Side. Then I slink along the dirt paths of the Ramble, around its oaks, maples, and glacial rocks, and stop near a footbridge spanning a brook. The minutes slip by, taking the last bit of natural light with them.
A clear night here turns strangers into silhouettes. But on a cloudy night, like tonight, the eternal lights of New York City are captured and then refracted in an orange glow that peeks under tree tops and reveals glimpses: shiny Adidas pants with racer stripes hugging boy hips; a nipple ring glimmering in the light down of a defined chest; a knit cap above a square jaw.
Two guys stare each other down like gunslingers about to draw. I hear footsteps. I glance behind me, see tousled hair and lips forming a soundless coo.
Come here often? the guy behind me says with a smirk and a voice that’s as serpentine as his fingers sliding through my bleach-blond dreadlocks. His hand doesn't stop at my shoulders, where my hair ends, but meanders around my messenger bag and then traces down even further. I suck in summer air, arch my back. He slips his fingers inside my spiked belt and combat pants, snapping the band of the neon yellow spandex shorts beneath.
He leans in closer, till his chest hair tickles my back. I smell sandalwood and sweat. I turn toward him.
Like what you see? he asks.
He steps into a shard of that orange glow: stubbly cheeks, the indent of tight abs. He's Middle Eastern, maybe Latino. It's too hard to tell out here. He wears jeans and, like me, no shirt.
I nod.
I reach down, stroke the rough metal of his jeans zipper. Snake Boy, that's what I'll call him on account of his voice and fingers.
We step off the path, back up against the bark of an oak, and I'm rubbing his rounded biceps. Snake Boy’s biceps are so slick with sweat that my hands glide. I lean in and exhale heat into his ear and massage it with my tongue. He moans and then leans down, closes his lips over my left nipple.
I unzip his jeans and he tugs down my combat pants. And there's that feeling of being exposed outdoors, hips suddenly sensitized to the slight swirl of breeze.
Snake Boy licks my neck, looks up into my eyes, and maybe it's the darkness but his black lashes look like eyeliner.
Here, he says, breathe. He holds a small bottle to my nose. When I inhale, the pungent chemicals burn my nostrils, everything melts, and I'm just a flushed face and a beating heart. And a stiff cock. Which he slides a hand up and down. I'm jerking him off too. Our mouths are locked, the whole world reduced to me and him. We're pulsing flesh, a single heartbeat.
Suddenly, everything turns bright white like the sun just pole-vaulted into the night sky. When my eyes flash open, I see that the light emanates from what must be an electric cop car, the kind with a silent engine. I yank my pants up as fast as I can. Too late. My hands shake. Red and blue lights flash behind the white. Snake Boy grabs my hand and says Run, and he runs and I stumble and then run. Sirens scream and hard-shelled feet clomp the earth behind us and our hands break apart so we can run faster—through brush, I feel stings, know my calves just got shredded, but it doesn't even hurt; up over a steep knoll and slipping, tumbling down the other side; into more brush, Snake Boy's still right in front of me. We're long-stepping rock to rock along a narrow stream and then running on the other side. We duck down into a gully. Angry voices, radio static, the crunch of foliage. These sounds get louder. And recede. My arteries throb, my chest heaves, and Snake Boy has his hands on his knees as he draws in ragged breaths. We stay crouched for fifteen minutes until he says he knows a place where they won't find us.
A year ago, when I was twenty-five, I first stumbled into the Ramble. Since then, I've made it the finale to my evening commute. The Ramble is a micro-forest in the heart of Central Park. Paths grip cliffsides, double back, and meander along slopes. The dense brush and trees provide an infinite variety of alcoves. At its southernmost point, a cock-shaped peninsula projects into Azalea Pond, a topographical totem to the men who have been coming here for over a century. And still they come: uptown boys in do-rags, downtown artists wearing paint-spattered pants, even middle-aged men from the Upper East Side. Just trees and rocks and sky and us.
And, obviously, cops. They patrol in vehicles or wear plainclothes to try to surprise us. Queers scatter under the beams of headlights or, after a big bust, line up in handcuffs.
It's not like I wouldn't have run. I just got totally startled. You should've seen what I did to the cops last month. It was a typical night in the Ramble, and I had just walked down the gravel path of the peninsula. At its proverbial head, this cop shined a light in my face.
Did you lose your dog? he asked me.
I saw a poodle around here somewhere, another cop said.
I turned around to leave and they got into their souped-up golf carts and followed me, the headlights blazing on my backside. My face burned with a blend of shame and rage. They finally swerved away and the night draped back around me.
I remembered reading about a tactic that eco-warriors had used to save national forests from the jaws of timber corporations. They dragged fallen trees and other objects from the forest floor into the logging roads, creating blockades. The logging trucks backed out; the forest lived another day.
So I began dragging rocks, branches, and decaying tree trunks into the paths. Some queers looked over at me with raised eyebrows or walked a wide U around my mounting fortifications.
We have to bash back, I said. Fuck Giuliani. My exhortations were accompanied by the sound of long branches splashing through fallen leaves.
A queen in a leather trench coat and a shaved head stopped and smiled. Girlfriend, she said, you bangin' on the wasp nest tonight, ain't you?
I prayed no undercovers would see or hear me, but I didn't stop. Not until I had erected three barricades along a path that was several feet wider than a car. Unplanned, the barricades went from smallest to tallest. The tallest was over eight feet (a fallen tree with an umbrella of intact branches provided the base). Behind it was the gazebo, the place the cops most love to surprise us—that's where group scenes often happen.
Five minutes passed. Some cops in an electric car drove in to start another sweep of the area. They pulled up to the lowest of the barricades and...a crash, a scraping of rock and wood on metal.
Their lights started flashing and the vehicle remained stationary for a full minute before continuing forward. They were heading toward the next barricade.
Other queers stood in clumps, watching, waiting. Some of them snickered.
The cops hit the next barricade without seeing it, the sound of damage much louder. This time, the car didn't move. One of them sounded the sirens and must have radioed for backup, because an SUV spun down another path, headed toward the gazebo, lights flashing. The driver slammed the brakes right before the third barricade.
Within five minutes, a sea of red and blue lights pulsed along the peripherals of the Ramble as dozens of backup units arrived. I hoped everyone prowling these paths could forgive me for fucking up their night of cruising. But I also hoped me and my barricades were just one tiny episode in a history of resistance spanning decades, and that somewhere, like-minded, more effective others were lurking, anticipating how and when to strike again. I unlocked my bike and pedaled away.
WALKING THE EDGE OF INSANITY
Sascha Altman DuBrul
http://theicarusproject.net
I.
I was 18 years old the first time they locked me up in a psych ward. The police found me walking on the subway tracks in New York City and Iwas convinced the world was about to end and I was being broadcast live on primetime TV on all the channels. After I’d been walking along the tracks through three stations, the cops wrestled me to the ground, arrested me, and brought me to an underground jail cell and then the emergency room of Bellevue psychiatric hospital where they strapped me to a bed. Once they managed to track down my terrified mother, she signed some papers, a nurse shot me up with some hardcore anti-psychotic drugs, and I woke up two weeks later in the “Quiet Room” of a public mental hospital upstate. I spent the next two and a half months of my life there, another couple months in this strange private “behavior modification” program/half way house that my mom put me in, and the next bunch of years of my life trying to figure out how to set my life up in such a way that that shit would never happen to me again. Before the big dramatic crash back in New York, that whole previous year I’d gone off to college and had been living on the other side of the country in Portland, Oregon. I’d lost contact with most of my old friends and had basically spent the school year studying in the library, immersed in academic books and ignoring the outside world. At some point in the Spring, around finals time, I’d gotten sick and gone
to the school heath clinic. The short version of the story is that the nurse gave me a prescription for penicillin and I had an allergic reaction to it and almost died. To counteract the effects of the penicillin, the hospital gave me a hard core steroid called Prednizone which totally fucked up my sleeping schedule and, along with the bit of mescaline and lots of pot and coffee I’d been indulging in early that year, sent me off the deep end.It seemed innocent at first, if not a little strange. Somehow I managed to have this infinite amount of energy – I’d ride my bike really fast everywhere and do tons of sit-ups and push-ups after sleeping badly for two hours. Pretty quickly I slipped into a perpetually manic state, and by the Summertime had this idea to start a food co-op at our school which somehow mushroomed into this grandiose plot to destabilize the US economy by printing our own currency! That was just the tip of theiceberg though. I seemed to have a new idea every couple hours, all involving connecting different people and projects up with each other, and actually managed to convince a number people around me that myideas were really good. We started stockpiling food, putting flyers around town, and building our little empire. Then it got even crazier. I started to think the radio was talking to me and I was seeing all these really intense meanings in the billboards downtown and on the highways that no one else was seeing. I was convinced there were subliminal messages everywhere trying to tell a small amount of people that the world was about to go through drastic changes and we needed to be ready for it. That year in school I’d been studying anthro-linguistics and I was totally fascinated by language and how the words we use shape our perception of reality. I started reading way too much meaning into everything. People would talk to me and I was convinced there was this whole other language underneath what we thought we were saying that everyone was using without even realizing it. It seemed like a big computer program someone had written or an ancient riddle or just some kind of cosmic joke. It always seemed like people were saying one thing to me but actually saying the complete opposite at the same time. It was very confusing. Whatever was going on, it was obvious I was the only one who could see it because no one knew what the hell I was talking about! I’d try to explain myself but no one seemed to understand me. At some point it got to where I couldn’t even finish a sentence without starting another one
because everything was so fucking urgent. There was so much to say I couldn’t even get the words out without more new stuff that needed to be said appearing on my tongue.
One of the things that made the situation so complicated and inevitably so tragic was that no one really knew me well enough to know that I’d totally lost my shit and was about to crash really hard. In 1992 Portland was not the cool anarcho-mecca it is today. The folks around me were just like: “Oh, that’s Sascha – the guy doing the food co-op thing. He’s just a little crazy.” No one seemed to be able to see the signs that I was having a psychotic breakdown and if they did, they were too scared to get anywhere near me for fear I was going to bite them or something. Thankfully I took what I thought was going to be a quick trip to Berkeley and my old friends realized immediately that something was definitely wrong. They called my mom, she bought me a plane ticket over the phone, and they somehow managed to get me to the airport and on a
plane back East. When I arrived at the airport my mom was there to pick me up and bring me back to her apartment. I remember her telling me that in the morning she was going to take me to see “a man that could help me.” I didn’t like the sound of that much and it was obvious that they’d brainwashed her memory clean so that she wouldn’t remember what
an important role she was playing in the grand scheme. She fell asleep around the time the sun was rising and I snuck out.
After I’d been in the psych ward for awhile they diagnosed me with something called bipolar disorder (or manic-depression) and, along with a whole pile of other pills they were shoving down my throat, gave me a mood stabilizing drug called Depacote. They told my mom to get used to the idea that her son had a serious mental disorder he was going to be
grappling with for the rest of his life. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I, like millions of other Americans, would spend years wrestling with the implications of that diagnosis. Manic-depression kills tens of thousands of people, mostly young people, every year. Statistically, one out of every five people diagnozed with the disease ends up doing themselves in. But I wasn’t
convinced, to say the least, that gulping down a hand full of pills everyday would make me sane. Honestly, at the time I thought it was a bunch of bullshit. Their treatment of me on the ward didn’t give me much faith in the medical establishment. The mental ward was like some kind of twisted circus where the psychiatrists would come visit everyday and write our scripts with these huge expensive gold and silver Cross pens emblazoned on the side with the names “Prozac” and “Xanax” while we all sat there, shaking and drooling on ourselves, staring off into space and pacing the white hallways. It was a fuckin nightmare.
I’m not really sure why, but that bipolar diagnosis didn’t last very long. By the time I got out of the halfway house I’d ended up in five months later, the doctors were blaming the whole incident on bad drug interactions: the high levels of Prednizone they gave me at the hospital mixed with all the coffee I’d been drinking and hallucinogens I’d been doing. It had just been too much for my fragile system. It was going to take a while to recover, but I’d be able to lead a normal, healthy life like the rest of the population. That was good news for sure.
For years afterwards that whole period of time was something that I somehow just shelved away into a far corner of my brain cause I never knew quite what to make of it. Somehow it didn’t all fit together. It just became another one of my crazy stories that I’d share with new friends’ sometimes if they were getting to know me. “Yeah, ha ha, I’m kinda loonytoons, for real, man: check out what happened to me when I was a teenager…” But lingering in the back of my mind was always this
fear that somehow I was going to end up getting locked up again.
For someone who had been diagnosed with a “serious mental illness,” the next six years of my life were pretty amazing. I traveled and worked and had big adventures all over the places with amazing folks. The company I kept didn’t stigmatize people who were a little eccentric or weird, if anything we reveled in it, wore it on our sleeves. It seemed pretty obvious to me that my crazy behavior as a teenager had been a perfectly natural reaction to being raised in a crazy environment. You have to understand this part of the story though: I was raised by parents with pretty radical leftist politics who taught me to question everything and always be skeptical of big business and capitalism. I also spent my teenage years growing up in the punk scene which actually glorified craziness and disrespect for authority. Also, from the time I was a little kid everyone always said that I was very sensitive to the world around me and the suffering of others, maybe too sensitive, and I just chalked it up to that. My world view didn’t leave any room open for the possibility that my instability and volatility might actually have something to do with inherent biology. So I went on with my life.
II.
My mom came home from work one early Spring evening to find that I wascurled up on her kitchen floor, almost catatonic, telling her that I was really sorry but I just couldn’t take it anymore and I was going to kill myself. I was 24 years old. My hands were covered in cuts that I’d let get infected because I was too preoccupied to pay attention to what was going on with my body. My clothes were dirty and torn. I was getting lost in neighborhoods that I normally knew like the back of my
hand and couldn’t look anyone in the eye when I talked to them. There was a repeating tape loop in my head constantly telling me what a horrible person I was and that I was a liar and a hypocrite and a coward and I didn’t deserve to live. In fact I was obsessed with killing myself. It was like a broken record – throwing myself in front of a car, jumping out of a window, shooting myself in the back of the head, carbon monoxide in the garage, swallowing a bottle of pills, etc. It was exhausting and horrible and I was convinced it was never going to end, I was living in my own personal hell. The strangest part was that a couple months earlier I’d been on top of the world. Focused and clear and driven, getting up in front of crowds and giving
talks about exciting and revolutionary things – organizing half a dozen projects – I was the model of an activist. I hardly had time to sleep. But at some point in the middle of it all I just crashed. I stopped being able to get out of bed. All the confidence I’d had suddenly disappeared. I stopped being able to focus on anything and I started feeling very awkward around even my oldest friends. All my people were really confused about what to do for me. One by one all my projects
fell apart till they were all just a halo of broken dreams circling above my head as I wandered the city streets alone.
I soon ended up back in the psych ward and then the same halfway house/rehab program out in the suburbs that my mom had put me in as a teenager. I was miserable and lonely. The doctors weren’t quite surewhat I had so they diagnosed me with something called Schitzo-affective disorder. They gave me an anti-depressant called Celexa and an atypical anti-psychotic called Zyprexa. I was in group therapy everyday. There was an organic farm to work on down the road from the halfway house and after a couple weeks they let me volunteer there a few hours a day sewing seeds and potting up plants in the greenhouse. Eventually Iconvinced them to let me live there and I moved out of the halfway house and just came for outpatient care a couple times a week.
It took a couple months, but for the first time I could see that it was obvious the drugs were actually working for me. It was more than the circumstance – it actually felt chemical. Slowly all the horrible noise and thoughts faded and I started to feel good again. I remember watching an early Summer sunset over the fields at the farm and realizing I was happy for the first time in months and months. Once I moved onto the farm full time I would come into the city on the weekends to work the farmer’s market and hang out with my friends. As obvious as it was that they were helping me, I really just saw the
drugs as a temporary solution. They made me gain a bunch of weight. I always had a hard time waking up in the morning. My mouth was always dry. They were relatively new drugs, not even the doctors knew about the long term side effects of taking them. Besides which, the whole idea just made me feel really uncomfortable. How would I talk to my friends about it? What if there was some global economic crisis and instead of running around with my crew torching banks and tearing up the concrete I was going to be widthdrawling from some drug I suddenly didn’t have access to anymore? I didn’t want to be dependent on the drugs of The Man.
But I didn’t worry myself too much about the long-term. I was just happy to have my life back. As the leaves started to change color, I was already planning my trip back to the West coast, to my people in California. There was a room in a collective house in North Oakland and a job in Berkeley with a bunch of my friends waiting for me. I started hanging out with this cool traveling activist woman named Sera and we made plans to hitchhike across the country to participate in the big
Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization. A few days after the frost came and we put the farm to bed, Sera and I had hit the road. And back amidst the familiar, I slowly put my life together once again.
III.
The police picked me up wandering the streets of Los Angeles on New Years Day, 2002. I’d been smashing church windows with my bare fists and running through traffic scaring the hell out of people screaming the lyrics to punk songs, convinced that the world had ended and I was the center of the universe. They locked me up in the psych unit of LA County Jail and that’s where I spent the next month, talking to the flickering fluorescent lightbulbs and waiting for my friends to come break me out..
I was quickly given the diagnosis of bipolar disorder again and loaded down with meds. “That’s so reductionistic, so typical of Western science to isolate everything into such simplistic bifurcated relationships.” I’d tell the overworked white coated psychiatrist staring blankly from the other side of the tiny jail cell as I paced back and forth and he scribbled notes on a clipboard that said “Risperdal” in big letters at the top. “If anything I’m multi-polar, poly-polar – I go to poles you’d never even be able to dream up in your imaginationless science and all those drugs you’re shooting me up with. You’re all a bunch of fools!” And so I paced my cell.
Every time you get locked up it gets harder to put the pieces back together. Physiologically, the brain and body take longer to recover. It takes a lot out of someone to go through a mental breakdown. Picture being bipolar like a pendulum swing with suicidally depressed at one end, delusionally psychotic at the other, and with healthy and stable somewhere in the middle. If you swing over to one end you’re bound to swing back over to the other side. After months of sleepless mania it’s inevitable that some serious depression is going to follow, all your reserves are depleated.
Finally after the month in jail, a couple weeks in a Kaiser psych ward, and four months in a halfway house for people with severe psychiatric disabilities, I finally got it together to be able to move back into my old collective house in North Oakland. I was taking a mood stabilizing drug called Lithium and an anti-depressant called Welbutrin. The ground I was walking on was still a little shaky. I was only just beginning to be able to read after not being able to focus for months and months. I got a full time job really for the first time in my life, started going to therapy and taking really good care of my body. Made
it through my one year anniversary of getting locked up and felt so blessed that I had made it that far.
IV.
Early one January morning a phone call came telling me that my old traveling partner Sera had been found dead floating in the Susquehanna River in Maryland. She’d jumped off a bridge and taken her own life. The news tore me up bad, left me really confused and hurt. She had beenone of the most brilliant people I’d ever known – with a mind that was sharp as a knife and a heart that was full of the spirit of adventure and passion for living. In our travels together she’d helped me so much
in my struggles to figure out why my own life was so valuable. After I heard the news I sat in my room for a week and cried and cried.
And that’s when I finally started doing the research I’d been putting off for so long. After a year of not being able to read I started to pick up the books. And that’s when I really began the internal and external dialog about my condition and began to try to put the puzzle together, make some sense of it all so it wasn’t just a bunch of isolated pieces that didn’t fit together. I started talking to friends really openly and using the regular column I had in a punk rock magazine as a forum to talk about madness and manic-depression.
And that’s when I started really coming to term with the paradox that however much contempt I feel towards the pharmeseudical industry for making a profit off of all of our misery and however much I aspire to be living outside the system, the drugs help keep me alive and in the end I’m so thankful for them.
According to the August 19 issue of Time Magazine, 2.3 million Americans have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Of course, mental disorders are more confusing than so many other illnesses, more based on cultural norms that we’d like to admit. Diagnosis that people get stuck with for life are determined by a set of questions in an official book rather than any kind of concrete blood or piss tests. Diagnosis come in and out of style like fashion designs: it used to be “in” for doctors to diagnose children with ADHD, these days all of a sudden it’s “bipolar disorder.” It wasn’t really that long ago that “homosexuality” was considered a “disorder” which is enough to make you not want to ever step foot in a psych doctors office. Even the real illnesses are so easy to misdiagnose. Someone with bipolar disorder one week, might be considered schizophrenic the next, then “schizo-affective” the week after that. Plus, the drugs work so differently for different people –
that’s why there are dozens of different anti-depressant pills and they keep cranking them out.. We have yet to create a reasonable language to talk about it all so those of us who do talk about it end up with all of these sterile and clinical words in our mouths that feel uncomfortable and never get to the heart of things and very often skirt around the issues. When it
comes down to it, as a culture we don’t understand mental illness so for the most part we don’t talk about it and leave the opinions up to the doctors and the drug companies. In the end what it comes down to for me is that I desperately feel the
need to connect with other folks like myself so I can validate my experiences and not feel so damn alone in the world, pass along the lessons I’ve learned to help make it easier for other people struggling like myself. By my nature and the way I was raised, I don’t trust mainstream medicine or corporate culture, but the fact that I’m sitting here writing this essay right now is proof that their drugs are helping me. And I’m looking for others out there with similar experiences. But I feel so aliened sometimes, even by the language I find coming out of my mouth or that I type out on the computer screen. Words like
“disorder,” ”disease,” and “dysfunction” just seem so very hollow and crude. I feel like I’m speaking a foreign and clinical language that is useful for navigating my way though the current system, but doesn’t translate into my own internal vocabulary where things are so much more fluid and complex. I can only hope that in the near future we will have created better language to talk about all this stuff. But it’s really hard. As a society we seem to be still in the early stages of the dialog where you’re either “for” or “against” the mental health system. Like either you swallow the anti-depressant ads on
daytime television as modern day gospel and start giving your dog Prozac, or you’re convinced we’re living in Brave New World and all the psych drugs are just part of a big conspiracy to keep us from being self-reliant and realizing our true potential. I think it’s really about time that we start carving some more of the middle ground with stories from outside the mainstream and creating a new language for ourselves that reflects all the complexity and brilliance that we hold inside.
THIS NAME
Leah Ryan
I’m not on speaking terms with the man who gave me my name, Ryan. That would be my father. And we don’t speak. But this name Ryan is still my name.
Ryan - we associate this name with liquor stores and corner bars. A Ryan is a guy who erects a scaffolding on your apartment building. He pours you a Guinness. He goes to confession about once a year, give or take, only after he’s had a few. Mr. Ryan is a guy with a twinkle in his eye and a hole in his pocket. He’s a guy with a song in his heart, a joke on the tip of his tongue, and baseball bat in his back seat.
Nowadays there’s medication for guys like Mr. Ryan. In olden times he’d have no choice but to cry in his beer, break his furniture and drive his rusty, unregistered car off the road. Needless to say, even modern science can’t help the Mr. Ryan who refuses to go to a shrink.
In Europe, you can country-hop for pennies on an infamous airline known as Ryan Air. I took Ryan Air from London to Dublin for the equivalent of about six dollars. We were all strapped in and about to take off when the cheery, charming pilot came over the PA to tell us that our vintage German plane had a flat tire. We were advised to deplane and have a drink or two. John or Jack or Pat would have to run over to somewhere or other and get another tire, since they didn’t have a spare.
A flat tire. Only Ryan Air would have a flat tire and no spare. Bernstein Air or Peterson Air or Chang Air would have a real problem, like a complex electrical issue that they’d been lucky to catch, or a bearing that was ever so slightly worn. Ryan Air has a flat tire and no spare.
The friend who I was visiting in Dublin (I feel like I should add that his name is Robert Emmett Finn) was planning to collect me at the airport until he heard I was flying Ryan Air.
“Who knows when you’ll get here,” he’d sighed. “Take a cab. I’ll leave a key under the mat.”
Day late, dollar short. The father I don’t speak to, the father who gave me this name Ryan, stopped speaking to his family, the Ryans, before I was born. From what I understand they laid bricks and drove cabs and broke hearts all over the Bronx. All hearsay. I only have a couple of stories – how they showed up to dinner en masse, each with his or her own fifth in hand, and didn’t eat anything. Another story about Uncle Somebody Ryan, John or Jack or Pat or Frank. Not Liam or Finbar. The immigrants’ names had to melt into the pot. Liam and Finbar reek of dirty sheep and peat bogs and moldy stone floors. So Uncle Somebody Ryan had a brain tumor. He was some kind of union laborer – one of the big unions - and the union doc removed his tumor and also, somehow, took out his frontal lobe. The story goes that his five daughters (Kathleen and Bridget, but no Maeve or Fiona) all split the settlement money and bought five matching thunderbirds. So the story goes.
Where are all these Ryans now, I wonder and have wondered for what seems like forever now, when I find myself in the Bronx. Did they move to Jersey, or to Queens? The Kathleens and the Jacks and the Pats and the Bridgets? Are they in front of me in line at the Sunnyside Post Office, stinking of cigarettes and jingling their keys?
This name Ryan, I tried to stop speaking to it, to leave it by the side of the road, to wave goodbye and move on. To wash my hands. But then, what would be my name? This name is my name, this name Ryan. It sticks to me and I can’t shake it. Day late, dollar short, flat tire and no spare. Leave the key under the mat. I’ll show up eventually.
DINNER NUMBER ONE
Jean Railla
I feel terrible.”
“My throat,” mutters Steve.
“Why didn’t we cancel last night?” I sniffle, clearly sick.
“Why did we drink that last bottle of Lambrusco?”
“I feel terrible.” I moan once again. “I need coffee. Shall we get up and get caffeinated before the savages awaken?” I ask. It is 5:00am.
“OK. “
Steve gets up and puts on his a navy blue Addidas track suit bottoms and a Lower East Side Collective T-shirt and moves towards the kitchen as I curl up under our old comforter.
“Oh, you mean I should make the coffee and you should lie in bed and wait for me to serve you.”
“Exactly.” I rasp to him and start coughing.
Steve sighs.
As Steve goes to the bathroom, I can hear Sebastien mumbling “mama, dada, doo, doo, pee, pee” in the next room. I ignore him, waiting for my coffee, thinking about the dinner party night.
There were signs, early on, that my first stop on this quest to serve twenty-five Sunday night dinners in twelve months, would not go as smoothly as I would have liked. Firstly, Sunday didn’t work for Steve, so we had to host our first Sunday Night Dinner on Saturday. Not a good omen. Secondly, I was planning to launch the whole quest with a meal for my two best girlfriends, Kimberly and Laura, right around the beginning of spring. So perfect! So in tune with the season! So new! But alas, as my sister, the new age guru would say, it wasn’t meant to be.
The beauty, the genius, of having Kimberly and Laura as my first guests would have been that, because we speak almost daily, they understand the intricate details of my life and, as we do with those we love, they work around my eccentricities. For instance, they will travel to the far ends of the West Village/Soho region where we all live, to procure for me, say, fresh horseradish when I call at the last minute desperately pleading into the phone: “There is no way that I can complete the braised short ribs without it!” They will not call and ask if bottled will do or question my need for fresh ingredients. They will dutifully hit Gourmet Garage, Dean and Deluca, and every deli along the way. They also understand that I like to eat with my children, and the kids like to eat early, and that I have a deep fear of not getting enough sleep, and so will endure coming over at 5:00 for dinner at 6:00, and know that when they get in the door, they are going to have to entertain the kids. In exchange for this, I will feed them good, solid food, the kind they rarely have, what with take-out and dinner reservations the standard fare for most people of their class and professional obligation. I will serve them very decent wine, something light and easy––a Dolce de Alba, for instance, or a nice crisp Las Brisas Spanish white that belies its 9.99 price tag. Finally, I will kick them out and send them on their way around 9:00, which, at least the next morning, they will appreciate.
Laura is the godmother to my boys. Kimberly baby-sits our children, even though she always puts the diaper on backwards. They have listened to my endless monologues based on the following themes:
∑ Bowel movement stories: “You should have seen it!”
∑ Self-questioning moments: “Am I a good mother if I don’t spend every second with my child feeding them organic, whole grain, overpriced snacks and making sure they never them watch TV, no matter how sick, tired or hung-over I am? Have ruined them for life?
∑ Tirades against the system: “How can they judge a three-year-old? How can we not be good enough for preschool? Is it worth 20,000 dollars a year to teach your kids to finger paint?”
They have endured my inability to edit myself during my annual night-out with the girls, into the glittery world of New York after-dark, when at some invariably fabulous function, I get overly excited by being out of my apartment and then drink a bunch of cocktails and talk nonstop, either insulting someone without meaning to or, gasp, talking about my kids. All this is to say that these two women, are dear, dear friends. But here’s the problem with single girlfriends: they have disposable incomes, which allow them all sorts of fabulous things that are out of bounds when you are a part-time writer and your husband is a college professor. Kimberly and Laura have exquisite wardrobes, dine at all the best restaurants and jet off to exotic locations just when you need them.
The very weekend I had planned as my kick-off Sunday Night Dinner, both women, through some sort of weird cosmic white-hipster convergence designed to upset my precarious sanity, planned to be in Brazil, staying at the same = jet-set boutique hotel, missing each other by eight hours. Laura was going with a group of good friends who happened to be travel writers and food editors and the they would hit all the best, undiscovered spots, and Kimberly was going to some fabulous Brazilian all-night wedding, having been invited by her trainer-turned-lover, the likes of whom I had not yet met, but had discerned over many phone conversations that he was indeed a decent guy. With flights, stopovers and whatever other weird time zone things I never fully understand, it means that they will both be absent. Now, not only was I going to have to listen to each of them talk about how much fun they had, both individually and collectively, they would not be here for my kick-off dinner.
So while frick-and-frack were getting bikini-waxed and drinking sophisticated and fruity, but not too sweet, drinks poolside, I was sweating in dirty yoga pants and an old t-shirt, getting the house organized, ingredients procured and children napped, with a sore throat, gulping generic Ibuprofen and preparing for my dinner guests: another preschool family. I figured it was time to branch out. Make new friends. Afterall, the whole point of this quest, which I had felt so exuberant about only a few days ago, was about that seemingly clichéd, but all too important, idea of building community. Although magazines and politicians and leaders talk about “It takes a village,” what does it really mean? In a world of fast food and cell phones and blogs and 24 hours news—all things that I indeed like and partake in, but none-the-less can be alienating in their own ways—perhaps this simple act of cooking fresh food for others, for returning to the table, to sit and talk, to commune, if you will, could be my own way of giving back. And yes, political action is important. The environment is important, but in some ways, these ideas are abstract, outside of the day-to-day activities of my life. I am blessed with enough space to host a dinner party in a city where almost no one has them. My family has imparted in me a deep love of cooking and an almost obsessive tendency towards the preparing and consuming of food. These Sunday Night Dinners are my small way of giving back.
There is, of course, another, less selfless motive. As I enter further and further into the world of mom, of soccer, babysitters, Bob the Builder and playdates, these dinner parties are also my safety net to the world of adults and ideas. I don’t want to let the part of myself, the intellectual side, the part of me that is part flamboyant hostess, part provacteur, part social-mixer, die out now that I have children. While some women and men get that type of satisfaction at work, I don’t. As a freelance writer, I work alone, usually at the Israeli café across the street from my apartment, where the only other people there are the strange, slightly anti-social, relatively un-bathed freelancers like myself. We do not form a community.
The family we had invited consisted of Amy and Peter, and their two sons Webber (age 3) and Beckett (age 1). Amy doesn’t eat meat, which was another sign that things might go askew. We had gone over the confines of her vegetarianism in a series of emails where I had to ask my least favorite question: Do you have any dietary restrictions? When she answered yes, however politely; I was crestfallen. See, I am a person of the flesh, in particular, the pig. I come from people of the pig. The French, we like our pork, our ham and our bacon. The reason is simple: pork makes anything tastes incredible. Pinto beans with a ham hock go from good to unbelievable. Broccoli rabe, which is green, a little bitter, and a little crunchy, becomes even electric, greener and fresher, with the addition of a wee bit of pancetta. Call me piggish, but I can think of nothing better for a Sunday night dinner, even one held on Saturday, than pork loin, slathered in Dijon, and roasted with apples. It is cheap, easy and delicious.
On the other hand, I never cook fish, which is the one meat Amy eats. It seems fussy, makes the house smelly (and with four people living in 1000 square feet and an unventilated kitchen, stink is always a factor). I know it’s good for you, what with the omegas and fatty acids, but we take a fish oil supplement, add flax seeds to breakfast cereal, and mostly avoid sea creatures. However, part of this year-long quest is about hospitality, about creating community by serving others. Afterall, the party is not supposed to be about me, but about “we.” Fish would be served.
Peter works for a wine importer so I had sent him the menu a week ahead of time for wine pairing. Changing the plan, one of my favorite pastimes, was not an option. This also meant, that although I was sick, I would still be drinking, because this was the whole point of the night, and let’s face it, I really don’t have the personality to say no to a wine tasting.
So there were some things to feel if not anxious about, well then tentative. The other thing, the real thing, is that Steve and I barely know Amy and Peter. Our kids get along, though, and we seem to move in almost-similar worlds. Amy is a feminist organizer and a writer. We have been at book readings together. Steve, who has been a community organizer in the East Village and Amy know some people in common. As I mentioned, Peter works in the wine industry, which is ostensibly why we had invited them over. I was looking forward to talking about the business with him, hoping to pitch a freelance article on wine importing.
Two hours before they were supposed to come over, I looked around our apartment, which at that moment had about one hundred pieces of Thomas the Tank engines and train track pieces around the living room. I scanned the toys scattered on the carpet. What would they think of the obnoxious Lightening McQueen cars that make loud noises? (Very un-cool in the East Village preschool mindset where wooden, silent, educational toys are de rigueur.) What would they think of our Neo-Victorian, dark-library-style decor and the copious amounts of floorboard dirt we live with?
That’s the thing about having people over—it strikes a chord of vulnerability. In New York, you could know someone for ten years, and never once see the inside of their apartment. They could be hiding a toy soldier collection or chopped bodies—and you would never know. Maybe there is a reason for all this secrecy. Maybe bars, restaurants and cafés help us portray an ideal version of ourselves, one without the self-help books and dirty toilet seats and carton upon carton of Chubby Hubby in the fridge. All I could think about, on the eve of my first dinner party, is that I don’t know if I want to open up our own imperfect lives to Peter and Amy, who to be perfectly honest, I felt a little intimidated by. Amy has an Ivy League education and two hit books and started a feminist foundation and gets paid to jet around the country to lecture at college campuses. Peter is quiet and sardonic, to my loud and needy. They own instead of rent. They have a car. She has a personal assistant. Their children are better behaved then ours and their homemade Valentine’s day cards trumped our homemade Valentine’s day cards, even though I am supposed to be the famous online punk rock crafter and she is the big feminist organizer. I was feeling more and more sick and overwhelmed, and decidedly un-community-like.
At 6:00 the dishes were not clean. Steve was organizing the ingredients for his risotto with asparagus, peas and mint, a recipe from Jamie Oliver, which I thought would be great, but Steve seemed unsure. I was still in my yoga pants.
“Chicken broth? Can I use it?” Steve asked.
“Hmmm,” I stopped what I was doing, wiping a dirty hand on my dirty yoga pants and wiping a few dirty hairs from my brow. A conundrum.
“How about we don’t tell her,” said my husband, the ethicist.
“Well, I don’t know. I mean, the whole point of this quest is about hospitality, serving others,” I answered. “I don’t think we should lie about these things.”
“But,” I continued, knowing the chicken broth would add a richness that water never could, “She did mention she eats the occasional steak, henceforth, the chicken broth is in.” Moral dilemma resolved.
I arranged the cheeses I had purchased at Murray’ s Cheese Shop on a special platter so that they could come to room temperature. Cheese, especially cheese from Murray’s Cheese Shop, is one of my secret weapons for a good dinner party. Murray’s combines a European appreciation for milk fat and bacteria with an American obsession with conspicuous consumption. It was one of the first shops in American to take cheese-making seriously and has imported artisinnal cheeses from around the world for the past ten years. Three cheeses, one soft, one nutty and one slightly funky, are perhaps the ideal way to end any meal—and leave guests feeling taken care of.
I love going to Murray’s. Oh, the cheeses, the delicious, delicious cheeses! Earlier that morning, I had made my pilgrimage down Bleecker Street. In the store, the selection process was difficult, as it always is, with hundreds of cheeses to choose from, but with two kids along about to break a forty-dollar bottle of extra virgin olive oil, I had to be quick and decisive. Since the menu we were serving veered towards the Italian, I went for a creamy, hardly-sharp Gorgonzola, a nutty, almost like Parmesean, Piave, and a wine-soaked Ubriaco.
After selecting the cheese I had gone to the fish store, where the live lobsters entertained my boys and I deliberated over the fish. Steve doesn’t like scallops. Mussels didn’t look fresh. Wild salmon was out of our budget, which I should note; I had already blown at the cheese shop. Finally, with the impatient fishmonger staring me down, I went for the scrod. I would roast it with some herbs and call it a day.
Later, waiting for our guests, we were starting to think bad thoughts. No longer was our couples-only dialogue full of hope and promise, the possibility of a new, cosmopilitanism with our dinner parties. We had drifted from: “OK, we can do this, we really shouldn’t cancel. We always cancel. It’s why we never see anyone.” And landed squat into: “Shit, we already bought the fish, it’s too late to cancel! Why didn’t we call this off earlier! We’re too sick! It’s too much! I just want to watch the new season of MI5!” (For those of you yet to discovered it, MI5 is a fantastic British spy series; a more intelligent, dark and subtle 24, if you will.)
There is a feeling I have when sick and tired, one that has been much more pronounced since I’ve had kids and suffered the sleep deprivation that occurs in the early months with newborns where you never get more than two hours of sleep at a given time, which can only be described as feeling underwater. It’s as if you are floating through your life, watching things go by, but unable to access the part of your critical mind that you desperately need to. And then it is too late. The kids are crying, or the roast is burned, or the laundry wrinkled, or the writing assignment late. This was the feeling I had at 6:15, when I realized we had no parsley, and my children were circling me in the kitchen, like hungry sharks, reminding me that they had not eaten.
For some reason, I had asked Amy and Peter to come at 6:00 or 6:30, which is strange, because I always serve dinner at 6:00, in order to placate my children, knowing that they, intense creatures of habit, will not eat unless the whole family sits down together for dinner and without food, they are prown, as I am, to temper tantrums and melt-downs. We run a tight-scehdule in my perhaps misguided attempts to avoid all psychotic emotional outbursts. However, in my eagerness to be liked, a quality I am ashamed to admit dictates more of my activities than I would like, I had asked them over later because I knew this suited their lifestyle. I wish I could say it was hospitality but clearly it wasn’t, because no one in our family does well at night. We are an early to bed early to rise kind of clan, and without strict attention to these rules, the whole system breaks down, which can be good for no one, guests included.
So in the midst of cooking and getting dressed and wrangling children, Steve and Sydney had to go out for I sent for parsley. I opened a bottle of white wine, and as it slid down my very sore throat, I felt its magic begin to work.
For a little apertivo, I put out salami, olives and a loaf of stirato from Grandaisy Bakery, the most chewy, crunchy, outrageously delicious bread in the world, as good as any we had in Florence. (“This is why we live in New York,” says Steve every time we visit the bakery a few blocks from our house.)
I chopped one small orange chili pepper. Jamie Oliver’s recipe for roasted cod called for the addition of red Thai peppers, but the overpriced, slightly dirty, grocery store next door was out, and I was feeling too sick and overwhelmed to handle the throngs of tourists and black-clad Soho regulars populating Dean and Deluca, perhaps the most fetishized grocery store in the world. (It is white and steal, full of imports, with opera playing, models lurking around with non-fat lattes and milk selling for six dollars a half gallon.) So I settled for the tiny, round Scotch-Bonnet chili at my quasi-ghetto grocery store.
Just then the doorbell rang. They had arrived.
Immediately, Amy offered to help. Like good guests, they brought wine and desert. Steve came back with Syd and the parsley. We opened a bottle of Cascina Morassino Langhe Nebbiolo 03, which was red and smooth, which just the right acidity to cut through the fat of the salami and olives. Exhausted, Steve and I sipped our wine and took a minute to actually talk with our guests. One glass and a few slices of salami later, we realized that it was almost seven and our children still had not eaten; instead they were refusing salami and running around the apartment like a bunch of wild wildebeests, in behavior I would have never dreamed of performing as a child when my parents or grandparents would throw one of their formal dinner parties. Clearly I had to do something. I got up to heat up some leftover pasta for the four boys. Amy, ever-the brilliant organizer, helped out telling the boys it wasn’t that they weren’t eating with us, instead they were having a picnic!
Steve and Peter retreated to the kitchen. Steve started the risotto and Peter to began to handwash the dishes in the dishwasher and dry them because, we had discovered, we didn’t have enough clean ones. The men talked about building stuff and other man-talk while Amy and I shoveled pasta into our kids’ mouths. Somehow, the gender division already began to take its place. I was meant to talk to peter, but more pressing concerns, like warding off evil unfed child spirits became more important.
The problem with our dinner menu, was two-fold: there were not enough appetizers to tide everyone over and both the first and second courses both required last minute work. So while the kids went off racing with their cars and started to throw leggos at one another, the adults ate risotto, and I left mine to go back to the kitchen to rub the oregano, chile and parsely mixture onto the fish, slathered it in olive oil and roasted it for 12 minutes. While I was doing this, Beckett started screaming, needing a diaper change, Sebastien stole Sydney’s train and they started crying and I yelled at Steve to “Go help out the kids, will you!!!!!!”
Finally, diapers were changed, tempers were mellowed and the adults were seated once again. I served the fish with an aioli I had made from scratch earlier in the day, and salad. I took a bite of the fish, excited to finally eat. It was the most spicy, burning, fish I had ever tasted. Peter and Amy politely gave their compliments. I slathered on the aioli and suffer through the fish, while gulping the wine, a lovely white Vigneti Massa Derthona 05' which at this point, I can’t even taste because my taste buds are fried. Amy and Peter are totally relaxed and low-key. They go with the flow, but I still feel uneasy and nervous.
I served the cheeses, my last hurrah. At this point, when I waxed on and on about the gorgonzola, it felt a bit forced. If Laura or Kimberly were over, we would talk about the cheese for at least twenty minutes. The ratio of creamy to funk would be analyzed, and ways to pair gorgonzola would be discussed. I felt as if I was talking too much. Peter opened an amazingly light Sorelle Bronca Proseco, which was cold, effervescent and clean. Steve and I talked about our time in Bologna, the waiters at that one trattoria, the pasta, the sparkling white in carafes.
Then the kids started up again. I suggested a bath, and Amy went to administer it. I tried to remember the last time I cleaned the bath-tub. Steve started the dishes. I went to the fridge to get the Lambrusco I had been saving for a special occasion. I opened the sparkling, super-grapey, red wine and served everyone, including Amy, who was confined to the bathroom on kid-drowning patrol. Finally the kids came out in their jammies, looking so cute, and I turned on the TV for them, asking Amy and Peter first, if it is OK. Wallace and Grommit seemed the most sophisticated thing we had—it’s British afterall––and the parents settled into preschool gossip.
Then it was 11:00, three hours past my kids’ bed-time and two hours past my own. Peter and Amy started packing up the kids, as I sat in my chair, feet up, exhausted.
One down. Twenty-four dinner parties to go.
posted by Mark W. Read at 12:14 PM
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