New York Stories II – Popeye and the Leaning Tower of World Trade

Popeye and The Leaning Tower. Of World Trade-

There are many well known things about New York City. It's people are abrasive, the rats are legendary, almost everything is way overpriced, and it's a horrible place to drive or own a car.

But take the time to walk around the corner from the $50 breakfast joint, and you might find the soft and pleasing underbelly of the worlds most ambitious and inclusive big metropolis.

Dollar pizza slices! A perfectly designed and beautifully efficient public transportation system! Every language, cuisine, musical style, and sub-culture is represented in New York. Wander into the East Village on a Saturday night and 'melting pot' doesn't begin to describe it.

And walking and biking. All New Yorkers do it. Fast and purposeful, the life spirit and blood of the city flows on street level. One of the more common sights down here are the two thousand or so brave -and some say crazy- bike messengers tearing up and down the avenues or bustling in and out of midtown skyscrapers, all geared up and on-task, like steely-eyed urban insects.

New Yorkers abhor a delay, and due to a state of perpetual gridlock on the island, all major Manhattan businesses depend upon bike messengers to get important items across town quickly. I became a messenger in the winter of 93-94, and that job sometimes sent me downtown to the World Trade Center.

Whenever I delivered to the WTC, I could feel it was a death trap. Most buildings in the city bear the weight of history with a sort of weary patina, but in the towers there was a palpable tension. Due to the recent bombings in 1992, entry required that you go through metal detectors. To a bike messenger, time is money, and the long lines at security and between elevator banks made me lose commission every time. Some buildings you could get around the messenger access rules if you knew the doorman, or clients could call down to the front desk, but at the WTC there were no exceptions for anyone. You and the CEO of JP Morgan were both just workers in a hive, and everyone had to wait in the same queue. That made all of us equally pissed, and feeling cornered.

I've always suffered from a mild sense of vertigo, and one of the most disturbing sensations I've ever experienced was feeling the bottom drop out from under me when I finally did get into those high speed elevators. It would take at least a full minute to get up to the sky lobby on the 86th floor, and I imagined it as sort of a reverse Day of Rapture, that balls-up-into-your-stomach feeling as you realize you are being shot straight up to hell in a metal tube.

But those feelings of claustrophobia were less intense than what the busboys and other staff of the famous restaurant on top of the North Tower experienced daily. It was called the 'Windows On The World', and at one time it was the top-grossing eatery in the United States. My friend Popeye was one of those busboys.

Popeye had about 15 different jobs in the city. Everything from bike messenger and construction worker to male stripper or wedding DJ. A soft, memory-stricken smile spread across his pale and boyishly aging face, as he recounted what it was like to work in the restaurant on top of the world...

“Y'know I couldn't take it seriously, and I only lasted about 8 months. I mean, this was an old-school, high-class joint with a strict dress code and the owner was very proud of that image. The manager -we called her the 'Dragon Lady'- would line us up every morning in our uniforms like catholic school boys, and then inspect us for dirt underneath our fingernails.”

“Some days I'd go out the edge of the revolving dance floor, by the windows and stare at all the twinkling city lights spread out below and reflected on the East River snaking uptown. You can see the bridges and avenues laid out in order, and then look a 1/4 mile down onto the street at the toy cars and ant people crawling around. It's a feeling of sheer terror...

"They designed the buildings to sway about 15-20 feet in the winds, and when they keep blowing the towers lean ominously towards and away from each other, making all the tourists seasick and clearing out the restaurant, leaving the poor band playing Sinatra standards all day to an empty room. The Dragon Lady insisted that the show must go on, and she would never let us take a break. Even if there was nothing to do, the busboys would get their knuckles rapped if we were caught leaning on the furniture..."

"I'll never forget the eerie scene of the musicians diligently banging out 'My Way', this-time-with-feeling, as the bored and immaculate wait staff tried to look busy on the sides ... the slowly swaying towers keeping time.”

Popeye's a squatter on the Lower East Side and we talk about where we were on 911. I tell him about how I went to work at my bike collective in Santa Cruz that morning and was shocked and dismayed by the -“They Deserved It.”- sentiments expressed by some of my co-workers. All I could think of was the feeling of being trapped inside those buildings, and what a horrible way to die that would be.

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” remembers Popeye, “when we were watching the towers fall from our rooftop, some people were shouting -“Death to Capitalism”- and I had to tell them to shut the fuck up. All I knew was that my friends were burning to death, right there in front of us.”

All 72 employees and managers of The Windows On The World died that morning because they were trapped above the impact zone of American Airlines Flight 11. The owner wasn't there that day, but afterwords he set up a fund to help the victims families. The controversial picture of 'The Falling Man' plummeting to earth face down to escape the smoke and flames was identified as restaurant worker Jonathan Briley.

Today there is a gleaming new 'Freedom Tower' under construction where the World Trade Center once stood. As workers have built to the 107th floor they've reached the height where employees of Windows On The World looked out and saw the jumbo jet hurtling towards them.

Some say that up there on a cold night, you can still hear band playing 'Fly Me to the Moon' on the wind blowing in from Hoboken.

'Fly me to the moon, let me play among the stars ~ Let me see what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars. In other words .. Take my hand..'

After all, the show must go on.


--

The Old Trashman's Lament

The first butt falls so much harder
than the twenty-third....
One by one
Lined up by brand
Salem, Parliament, Marlboro Lights...

Clustered around the safety of eachothers litterbugs
Always returning to the same, pristine spot...
Where someday, a thinking person
might place a tin can.

How I lost my virginity and almost died... Part 3

Psychologists tell us that we replay old stories in our lives by assuming and projecting three archetypical roles onto ourselves and all those with whom we interact. They have identified these players as The Victim, The Hero, and The Villain.

What role you play or put on your friends and family depends on what is most convenient for your ego and it's twisted rationales for your behavior-- hell, all human behavior. These scientists hypothesize that we are constantly reinforcing these categories upon situations in life in order to feel safe within the familiar. That the only way to discover our true identity and to grow as a human beings is to recognize these preset roles, and try to live beyond the boundaries of their constantly recurring stories.

Some shape-shifters can comfortably toggle between identities or find clever combos to play with, but to me the purest and most interesting moments in life are when you have no idea who you are. When you head out into the unknown without any story to rely upon.

The morning when I rolled into the dark cul-de-sac of my new job at Bill Zurich's workshop was one of these moments. The sun hadn't risen yet and the dank mist buzzed at the flickering streetlights as if trying to invade their cracked domes and shut them down for good. Noone was around so I checked the wind up alarm clock perched on the peeling dashboard of my $100 jalopy. 6:55, five minutes early.. great start!

Not knowing what else to do I sat my butt on the cold concrete in front of the roll-gate for workshop #C and waited. Half an hour later the deafening roar of an approaching Harley split the silence. Hairy Mike pulled in, and it was like the world parted to make way for his motorcycle. Perfectly scuffed boots planted firmly in front of me as he pulled off his helmet. Even though there weren't obvious patches on his leather you could tell by his carriage and grizzle that he was affiliated. My best friend's father-in-law had claimed to be with the Ghost Mountain Riders back in the day, but you could tell he was lying. In Mike I had met the real deal and he was instantly my hero.

“Parkin' on that wet concrete'll give ya piles, yank.” he snarl-chuckled. “Get off your ass kid, it's time to work. The boss'll be in late.”

When Bill did arrive it was with full bluster, as if we hadn't been waiting half the morning for him but rather, “why the hell are you standing around, and where is the coffee?” I could tell by Mike's smirk that this was the norm, and I soon learned that keeping the coffee pot full and bubbling was the most important thing in the shop. Whatever happened in the the two years I worked there, the boss's answer to was to proclaim, “Well! Time for a cuppa then eh, Ricky? Get on that.”

This ritual was useful either as a celebration of a job well done, or to break tension after a disaster, but mostly it was our only escape from the endless top forty blasting from the radio in back and the acrid paint fumes searing into our lungs all day.

My first job was something we might call an initiation, but really it was the shit work no one else wanted, or could be paid to do. This is a good job description for any apprentice, but someones gotta do it, and its true that you must learn how to crawl before you fly. An old Aston Martin had to have all it's rusty paint taken off and the most toxic paint stripper was required, something akin to agent orange but more vile. All the sleeves to my jump suit had to be sealed with rubber bands that also cut off the blood flow to my extremities forcing me to loosen them halfway through. When my putty knife would scrape one of these dollops of toxic waste into my sleeve I would scream out from under the car and dance around like a circus freak trying to get the burning chemical cinders out of the suit and off of my blistering skin.

Needless to say, this provided immense amusement to my co-workers, raucously cheering me on and dubbing me “Michael Jackson” due to my “smooth moves.”

As I hacked up streams of green paint at the end of the day, Bill shook his head and looked derisively at my attempts on the car. “Well, I guess we know what you'll be doing for the next couple weeks,” he chirped.

Bill Zurich was the perfect mentor for me at the time, his juvenile demeanor, yet adult standing provided the perfect paradox for me to ponder how this all works. He was of the Yugoslavic tradition which dictates that all boys are Mama's boys until they get engaged. He was in his mid twenties but still lived at home, and on the days he was actually at work he would call his mother and demand loudly that she deliver him lunch without a shred of embarrassment.

In the world of men, power is measured in inches if you know what I mean, and one of the best ways to compare is how women treat you in front of other men. This flagrant display of culturally arrested development did nothing for our respect for him, but I gather in the Deli world it is the perfect example of how to be a man-- at least until you get your wife to become your mother.

Bill wasn't necessarily a good business man, none of his projects were finished on time and he was never in the shop, but he was a good boss in that he was fun to be around, and he invested in us the knowledge and encouragement that we needed to get the job done-- then he would trust us to do it well. Unfortunately, he was terrible at spot-checking our work and human nature as it is, we often took advantage.

After a couple of months a routine developed where Bill would roll in mid-morning, bluster about for a couple of hours, then declare that he had to go look at a car or something and take off. Hairy Mike would finish off his obligatory minimum daily quota, and then split, instructing me to finish prepping all the cars he didn't want to.

Gravity being as it is I knew that shit rolls downhill, and if the jobs didn't get done I would receive a heaping of abuse, but a seventeen year old apprentice is not equipped to run a body shop on his own, and I would often find myself helplessly facing the purple rage of customers who had come by to see WTF was going on with their car. After a while whenever I would see feet approaching the office I would scoot further under the chassis of whatever car I was working on and start furiously grinding away, hiding behind a shower of sparks and flying metal until they left. If they caught me in a vertical position, I would point at my respirator and goggles as if they were locked onto my face and there was no way I could talk to them.

At some point I could no longer dodge them all, and this became the worst part of my job; not the grinding of rusted metal centimeters from my face, not the inhaling of colorful, cancerous fumes all day.. but the cloying disappointment of these unsatisfied customers, desperate to extract from me some assurance that all was well with their babies entrusted to our care.. that they weren't being lied to and avoided.Of course that was exactly what was happening and I decided that I couldn't effectively cover Bill's tracks by my attempts at looking busy, so I had to follow his lead and find a way to disappear myself during the middle of the day when people would walk in.

One day I went to get some supplies from the storage loft above the shop. The area was obscured from view by long hanging sheets of opaque plastic and as I rummaged around the corner of one wall of stacked boxes I discovered my boss's secret Shangri-la. Behind a pile of rags was a bong and tin of weed, and next to an oddly placed throw pillow were a dozen or so Penthouse magazines.

Jackpot! I wasn't gonna steal his marijuana, but I had my own and I knew that noone would smell it over the chemicals. Also from this vantage point I could see if anyone was driving into the cul-de-sac and recognizing my boss's tires I could run down the stairs in time to get back to work. As I gleefully pulled a smut mag off the pile, I set about my first experience in getting paid to smoke and jack-off. Good work if you can get it.

The most harrowing part of this whole scam was putting everything back exactly the way it was afterward so that I wouldn't be discovered. Every flake of ash had to be blown away, the Penthouses stacked in perfect order, and the pillow placed back in it's weird starting position. Every time I would enter our scummy little oasis I would scour the area for minute changes that I imagined were subtle traps set for me by Bill to expose my activities. The more I smoked the more paranoid I became that he was on to me, yet anything was better than facing the random customer outrage below, so I soldiered on.

I don't know if you have ever read Penthouse Forum. It's the section where readers supposedly write in about their outrageous sexual experiences, but it's really written by professional smut smiths, and was a staple of many an adolescent boy's first wank sessions at the time. The letters always started out with premise of two strangers meeting in public, eyeing each other up, and then slipping off to have sex in the most craven and implausible way possible. Or perhaps a bored couple agrees to get a third party involved and of course it goes incredibly well the first time out. Heavy on the “oh fuck me with your gigantic rod, you hot stud,” etc... Good stuff for the first few times-and it sure beats scraping paint-but after a while the stories all blended together and became less of a turn on. I began to look for any deviation from the formula, devouring the advice columns for hints of perversion beyond the ol' in-and-out.

I came upon a letter that was definitely different. In it a man described his confusion at being attracted to his best friend, how they had gotten drunk together and somehow ended up in the bathtub. He talked about there being a moment of looking into his friend's green eyes and realizing that he had to kiss him deeply.. that nothing could stop what was happening. He then went into a graphic description of their 'love-making' that was far more romantic and exciting than anything I had read in porno up until then. I think this must have been before the AIDS crisis because the letter was obviously written to appeal to a bisexual audience. I doubt you would ever find anything like it in Penthouse today, if it still exists.

There was a glitchy pattern emerging. I found my sessions starting out with the usual fodder to get going without guilt, and then always returning to that one page of the magazine towards climax until it became well-worn and dog-eared. After ejaculation I would become immediately wracked with remorse and OCD, attempting to smooth the pages over and over so that noone would ever know.

One day I climbed into what I now thought of as my spot, and turning to my favorite letter I discovered in horror that it had been torn out. Panicking, I scanned the surroundings but nothing else was out of place. Sick to my stomach, I realized the jig was up and that my relationship with my boss would be forever changed. But fight or flight is a funny thing and at the same time I grew amazingly empowered with the knowledge of all the things I could blackmail him about. I also resolved then and there that I would never be embarrassed of who I fall in love with, whether they be a woman or a man. I don't think you can choose, and not giving a fuck is golden.

I never went back into the loft after that, and my boss never mentioned it, but we were soon to clash in the most heterosexual way you can imagine. Over a beautiful woman his own age, and he never saw it coming...

How I lost my virginity and almost died... Part II

Shortly after turning 17 I began to worry that I wasn't gonna make it to adulthood. Among other problems I had developed a bony growth in the middle of my forehead which I joked was my third eye exploding, but when it grew alarmingly fast and started throbbing I knew something was up.

My parents made an appointment to have it removed but I was nowhere to be found, hiding in a stupor somewhere. The hospital charged them a hefty cancellation fee and when they did finally catch up with me everyone was furious.

Of course, like any good nihilist I thought the whole thing was hilarious, making jokes that they were taking away my alien brain as they dragged me into surgery. In fact what they removed was the size of a walnut and did look remarkably like a little alien brain, with two distinct halves and it's own capillary system.

I was informed that it was a benign cancer called a bony growth, and no I couldn't keep it, as it was now the property of 'science'. I thought about my sister who had miscarried a year before I was born. If she had come into this world alive my parents would have stopped at six kids, essentially denying my existence. I imagined this -along with my extra row of bottom teeth- as a spectral echo of her lost being. My supplanted, semi-parasitic twin, reminding me of how close my soul had come to oblivion.

After this incident my parents broke down and decided that I needed an intervention. This came in the form of a stern sit-down and an ultimatum:

“Son, we're afraid you're gonna hurt somebody, we're afraid you're gonna hurt yourself. So we're gonna send you to live with your brother in New Zealand where you can get the perspective you need and learn to earn your own way.”

I could tell by the way that they looked at me that I didn't have a choice. It was get out of Santa Cruz or die.. and I knew it.

This was their old-fashioned way of caring, tough love and all that. “You gotta throw 'em outta the nest before they can fly”. They couldn't have forced me to go, but agreeing to take the one-way ticket and get on that 15 hour flight was the best decision of my life thus far.

Upon arriving, I settled into the converted chicken-coop that I was to stay in, and the enormity of my isolation began to sink in. Here I was on an island at the bottom of the world, a million miles from anywhere, with no prospects or money, and a brother that needed rent right away. I had grown up on the same rural property as a child and I remember having fun wandering the rainforest and building tree-forts all day, but as a teenager, living out in the boonies was just a pain in the ass. Somehow the five miles I used to cheerfully barge to school every day on my stubby little child legs, now seemed an interminable distance to get to work. I needed a car, and quick.

In desperation I called my Grandmother to ask for a loan of a couple hundred dollars for transport to find a job. Her response shocked me into reality and was one of the best doses of tough love I have ever received.

“Dear, when I was your age it was during the Great Depression *insert Grandson sigh* and I had a job as a kindergarten teacher to put myself through college.” I was exasperated and whiny. “But Grandma, you already had a job. I'm trying to get one.” She wasn't listening. “Well, I had to bicycle all the way to my job and I remember having to scour the dump for spare rubber to patch the tires. You know.. rubber was very scarce in those days and...” as her words faded into my disappointment I stopped listening, but the lesson of what she was saying hit like a thunderclap. “Young man, you are on your own.”

There is a great Doc Watson song 'Walk on Boy' ~ “Walk on boy. Walk on down the road. Ain't nobody in this whole wide world gonna help you carry your load...”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikW8D4fncoI

I didn't know about Doc Watson at the time but when I listen to it now, it always reminds me of that moment in my life, when I felt so sorry for myself and angry, and yet empowered by the dawning realization it was all on me. No one was there to commiserate with and coddle me, or to kick my ass into gear. If I was to survive, I had to turn my downward spiral upside down.. all by myself.

Luckily, Henderson had a pretty good unemployment office, and within two weeks I was placed as a hole puncher in a sheet metal factory that manufactured BBQ parts. Hole punching was the least dangerous part of the assembly line, and after you had mastered the art of piercing and stacking thousands of sheets a day, they moved you to the massive sheet folding machines, where one wrong move could easily leave you missing a finger, either by the angry, stamping presses themselves, or by the ever-slicing razor-sharp sheets of metal flying around. The company required work gloves but it was impossible to pick up the sheets fast enough to make your quota while wearing them, so you just acquired dozens of fresh cuts in your hands every day. Always the foreman was screaming at someone to get their numbers up, and the endless.. Bowmmp!.. Screee!... Shssss... of the sheet metal folding machines and their fingerless, humpbacked attendants contributed to an environment that I imagine approximates hell.

Every Friday the manager would gather us in the office to give us our checks, but before that happened there were cases of beer lined up that you could buy directly from the company. It was a tradition to polish off quite a few cases before heading home for the weekend. This system insured that the company owner would keep the workers in his pocket, and some of them went to the factory solely to pay off their beer debts to him. This was my first real eye opener to cut-throat capitalism. Keep 'em down, keep 'em indebted, and keep 'em addicted to your supply, and you've got the next most profitable thing to slavery.

My brother's friend Terri saved me from that job, and along the way saved my spirit from shriveling. He and his wife Vicky who lived with their infant son Rueben in the property rental cottage took me under their wing and smoked me out when I would be just dying after a day of pounding metal. He would load up a round of 'tips' into his honeybear bong, crack some beers, and slip some cerebral New Wave into the stereo. As a hardcore punker I hadn't really opened my ears to some of the artsier music going on in the 80's, but Terri's influence broadened my tastes in a whole new direction with bands like The Cure, Joy Division, and The Art of Noise.

Vicky soothed my soul in a different way, insisting that I help her tend and learn everything about her immaculate veggie garden out back. To this day I am thankful for my friendship with her as I remember to use every inch of garden space for my family's sustenance.. as I slow down my day to a merciful crawl with the perfect meditation of pulling weeds.

They had a friend, Bill Zurich, who owned a panel-beater business, which to you yanks is auto-body work, and he was looking for an apprentice full time for $150 a week. I had never heard of such fantastic money, and not knowing anything about the job, I was excited to sign up.

Kicking my dilapidated and uninsured Datsun into gear, I headed out into the cold morning full of naïve promise. Little did I know that this workshop would be the unforgiving forge of my early manhood, as well as a cauldron of workplace and social hazards conspiring to kill me...

from me to you

If I held your heart with mine..

I'd protect it with my life

And if I had your heart for just one day..

I'd hand it back to you a bigger size

I'd pour my love into your soul

allowing you to just let go..

Knowing you are safe with me

And this is all that's meant to be.

The madness of love turned inside out

reveals the truth we seek

The depths of which we know no fear of

for trust in both our hearts we keep..

Part of an old song I wrote recently called "Compassion and Indifference."

I was forced to believe

it was if she had died

even though we still walked the same streets

and our eyes were forbidden to meet

and unkindness a strength that we keep

in defeat of ourselves.

And all the old stories retold...

How I lost my virginity and almost died.

At sixteen I was embittered, probably not more so than any other teenager, but less than I was at fourteen or fifteen. It was my senior year, and I had achieved a sort of a cheerfully jaded outlook. I knew the system was set up to squash my freedom and kill my spirit, but I also knew how to work it.

Because I had started school in a foreign country I was a year younger than most of my classmates, and as a son of academics I was precocious as well. This served me well in middle school when I was still adjusting to American culture and I could retreat into my studies, but by the time I hit high school I was just a small, nerdy loner who didn't know how to spit or fight, two skills apparently essential to manhood in the USA.

I went from a small country school to an institution of thousands completely socially unprepared and unfamiliar with all the cultural touchstones, as my family did not 'believe in' TV. In a way this was perfect preparation for my future life as an outsider.

About halfway through my freshman year I realized that all the algebra, chemistry, and literature classes were ancillary to the real lesson I was supposed learn here. 'Conform or you will be bullied.' This had the opposite effect on me, and awakened my inner rebel. I refused to be cornered and I figured the best way to work the angles was to simply not show up to class.

When you go to school, but not to class, a whole new world opens up for you. A shadow world populated by stoners, perverts, and retards, not jocks and socialites. This was a world where maybe you could get laid by accident, without all the stupid games. It was also possible to be raped, or at least repeatedly scammed.

This was the school of hard knocks, the best school, and the one that made me who I am today. We would show up early, meeting in the smoking section, and take inventory of our pilfered goods from the night before. All was shared as we panned out across the landscape in the general direction of away from the compound-like classrooms and hallways.

Some would head up to the hills to steal marijuana crops, some of us would make out in sports equipment sheds, hiding in forts we had built from the gym mats. Still others would simply torture the resident narc all day, luring him out on long chases in his ridiculous golf cart.

This was my tribe, the punkers, misfits, and scrotes. Not the bettys and the barneys. Of course running with a bad crowd brings violence, and in order to survive you had to sub-sect. My crew was the gutter punks.

This was the 80's, before Hot Topic and the commercialization of punk, so you could still get bottles thrown at you daily for sporting a mohawk. Punkers were reviled by every group including other outcasts like the metal-heads, who teased their hair all day and wore make up, but still held you down and called you faggot while ritually punching you in the neck.

Survival meant running in a pack, which I hated, so me and my best friend would hide out off campus instead, engendering more cat calling and bottle throwing from the jocks as we slunk off from the lunch tables every day.

When my best friend turned into a junky and disappeared into that world, I discovered art, and the continuation school (name redacted to protect the innocent) I had ended up in had many free materials and no real adult supervision. In fact the school was so loose that the art teacher had been busted for selling mushrooms to her students and still kept her job.

This was ideal, I could show up to school frying on acid and just hang out by myself in the art barn, painting with expensive oils all day. And this is how I achieved my high school diploma. Perhaps through some deep seated academic guilt I still have nightmares that I have to go back and actually pass algebra, but I think just showing up for the last year of school was enough to get that stamp on my forehead. I do remember having to swallow some force fed American history about how Nixon was really a hero for opening up China, and we were made to watch the Columbia shuttle disaster live over and over again. But other than that it was all just a blur of swirling colors.

Needless to say this left me with no clear direction for my adult life, and as the youngest of six, my parents, over it, promptly kicked me out. I spent the next six months careening into homelessness and alcoholism, just trying to keep up with my peer group. We didn't know any other way to have fun. This was a very dark period of my life, pregnant with many cautionary tales, but the result was that by the end of that winter I was the most haggard sixteen year old you ever met. While other kids my age were busy getting laid I was hanging out under bridges with people you wouldn't want to touch with a rubber glove on. I had played around with some girls in school but had never been with a woman.

All of that was about to change...