I want to live intentionally. In other words I want to act with intention. I don't want to keep stabbing at any old hole, scuffing my knuckles against the wall, hoping wildly to connect. I want to choose exactly what I mean to do and go about it with the right tools and precision.
I slide my alan key deftly into the slot and with focus on the task at hand I tighten the screw exactly the amount of turns it needs to be snug. Simple.
So unlike life as it comes, this ideal, so fantastic a desire in the face of love.
The best I can do is hone my will to kindness, and try not bang every extremity as I walk through this next door.

As One

The Devil was caste down from Heaven and rightly so...

Yet, there are days when God feels less than Whole, and staring in the mirror, they agree to meet on Earth and play again as One.

At these times all the world shudders in disbelief...

Drowning

.

I was along the edge of a tall cliff in Hawaii, navigating the crumbling precipice and I didn't want to go farther. My older, more adventurous brother kept pushing me.. "Just around the corner is that beach you love." But as we got there a small wooden shack was blocking our path. We had to enter as the waves were beginning to swell and crash at our feet.

When we got inside there was an old deaf mute woman who lived there.. and my father who has been gone almost a year.

She pointed to the only window facing outwards, and coming towards us taking up the whole horizon was a gigantic green glacier, churning the ocean up in heaving violence. "Alaska is so trippy." said my brother, and my father said, "I'm going to sleep now." and laid down.

I looked at the old woman getting smaller and I said "We're dead, aren't we?" She nodded yes as the tide took us out.

We all have to return to the ocean eventually....

How I Lost My Virginity and Almost Died Part 4

I've always had an iffy relationship with cars. I can remember when I was around three my sister Lauren came home from the hospital wrapped like a mummy in bloody gauze and bruised beyond recognition. She had been run off the road by a group of local boys in a truck while biking home from school on our rural road. I was horrified by her injuries and I can still clearly hear her tearfully recounting what happened... "they pushed me right into the ditch and drove off laughing, they didn't care if they killed me, ma! It was like a game to them."

Our family station wagon had its own frightening and contradictory set of connotations. My father would pile all six of us kids in for a trip to the beach or into town, and it would always start out in the spirit of a rambunctiously goodnatured jaunt. We lived on an isolated rain-forest clad mountain top, up a dirt road from the idyllic, orchard spotted Henderson Valley, and as every child in a large family knows, each journey was huge effort to get together. By the end of the day nerves were frayed and the pressure cooker of that sealed and steaming torture chamber tearing through the night was the stuff of nightmares. My father had temper issues, and when challenged in this situation, he knew he was in control and it would bring out the worst in him... "Do you want to see us all die?", he'd scream. "I swear woman, I'll drive us all off the cliff if you don't shut up!" To prove his point he would lurch the car at high speed towards the precipice of our gravelly road, only pulling back at the last second. We never knew if someday he might just take us all over, and the arguments ended quickly, but the helpless and silent terror of those evenings lingered far beyond childhood.

When I looked at my father since in moments of true anger I always wondered who that man was that could contemplate offing his whole family and himself over a disagreement... Who was that demon that possessed him and what made him stop before the edge? ... Was he a cruel and bluffing bully ... or was he just crazy and really meant it?

Regardless of his psychology, I still clench when someone gets upset while driving. Sometimes I just blame the car and the feeling of power that comes with being a driver, and what makes me shiver when I think about it now is how easily his trick could have gone horribly wrong. The gravel on the road was loose and produced a hydroplaning effect on any car going over 20 miles per hour. His threats could have easily been realized by mistake, but he must have known that and got off on it.

On the other hand I maintain that I'm a great driver -even when angry!- and I have many warm memories of my Dad setting me on his lap and teaching me to shift the gears and steer up and down that same windy gravel road as he worked the pedals.

I just never developed the love of cars that many boys my age did. I was incurious about how they were put together and was actually pretty unsteady about most things on wheels. My best friend Phillip Coppins and his older brother Michael lived about a mile down the road, and when I tried to fit in with them by collecting hotwheels toy cars or wobbling down their driveway on a banana-board, they would laugh and laugh. "It's a skateboard, not an airplane, stupid!" Philip howled, arms outstretched ridiculously, mocking my awkward attempts at balance.

They knew I would rather be building tree forts or weirdly talking to my stuffed animals, and that set me apart from the world they were born into and were forming their identities in.

My parents were good parents and they set us on the path of independent thinking and healthy bodies by not having tv or sweets at home, but they were also dedicated academics and were always working at the university. Some traditionally important things were never passed on. There is a heartbreaking story from my dad's collection of memories where I ask him at age six to go throw the ball out back with me. "I'm sorry son, I can't," he writes wistfully, "because my father never taught me." Supposedly at this point I offer to teach him how, but I have no memory of it. I suspect the story has been romanticized in it's re-telling over the years because we never got around to tossing that ball, and I can remember a strange gap in father-son relations from my early childhood. Later on we bonded over Joe Montana and the 49ers but this was borne from exhaustion over our constant conflicts . To this day I credit the healing salve of our mutual hatred for the Dallas Cowboys for keeping us from killing each other during my teenage years.

When the Korean War draft was instated my dad was eligible, but as a Quaker he made a conscientious objection, breaking his own father's heart. He was assigned as an orderly at a military hospital stateside and his drill sergeant father scoffed, calling him a 'wet-nurse' and a 'sissy'. Nevertheless, I believe it was a positive stage in his life where he learned many useful disciplines that he tried in vain to pass on to his children. He could make a bed that you could bounce a quarter off of in ten seconds, and he gleefully trained us in the joy of cleaning the toilet bowl without gloves, but I never once saw axle grease on his hands.

My image of the Coppins' dad is that he would generally be parked under the hood of his jalopy in the driveway, tweaking this or that and causing mysterious and caustic trickles of dark liquid to chase us down the hill. The boys always kept a careful distance until their father called them over to inspect some accomplishment or fetch him a tool. They'd rush over with reverent heads bowed, yet brightly alert, eagerly waiting for the latest gem of knowledge to drop from the secret world of men and their cars. I recall feeling distinctly uninvited.

Bill Zurich's panel-beating workshop would have been like an adult playground to those boys, but to me it was a baffling array of shit I knew nothing about. On prominent display in the office was a toy model of a '56 Chevy, and Bill would point out the subtleties of the paneling and paint job like an art lover describing how Monet renders light. "Look at that chrome work!", he enthused. "It's like classy jewelry on a beautiful woman with a smokin' figure. I'll tell ya Ricky, It's all about the detailing." I was more focused on the details of the naked ladies caressing power tools adorning the walls, but clearly there was some common ground to work with.

One of the things we shared was a love of marijuana, and while coffee was the officially sanctioned drug during work hours, once the day was done the blinds would be shut and the bong pulled out.

It was on one particularly grueling day that Bill and I were finishing up with one such hard-earned smoke after several hours of overtime. We had busted our asses to get these projects done and a special sense of fellowship permeated the office along with a thick weed haze. In those days repainting a car involved sanding an entire panel down to the metal and then doweling in fiberglass filler called 'bog' to fill the dents. On this day we had moved several of the cars outside to sand in the sunshine, but New Zealand weather is changeable, and as any chemist knows when it rains on bare metal, rust envelops the surface like an instantaneous skin cancer.

Like all good stoners we were reactionary not precautionary and we had failed to bring the cars in before our session, so when the rain came suddenly down we panicked at the sight of the giant dollops of wasted man-hours pummeling our precious panels. Rushing outside to a red Honda hatchback I couldn't tell you whether I put my right hand on the broken headlight to push, or right above it and slipped, but either way in one instant a half of my wrist was gone. The next few minutes were like watching a horror film, frame by frame.

I raised my arm and a perfect arc of thick red blood burst from my artery and flew four feet through the air splashing across Bill's face and chest. His eyes grew stark white behind a red mask and he ran into the office grabbing a dirty towel and instructed me to bind the pulsing wound tightly. We walked quickly-not running-to his car in the parking lot, along the way realizing that all the other shops in the cul-de-sac were closed and we were the only souls there.

As we got into his sporty Mazda I noted how clean the interior was compared to our office and I laughed to myself ruefully about how that was all gonna get fucked up. My boss turned to me in shock, looking like a blood-streaked zombie.. turning the ignition on, he said almost to himself, "It's gonna be ok, yer gonna be ok..."

And then he fainted.

At that moment I had to laugh. Here I was with my boss out cold, bleeding to death with no hope of rescue. Remember kids, this was way before cellphones, and for some reason I thought it was too late to run back to the office and try and call someone. I couldn't even remember what number 9-1-1 was in New Zealand. Figuring I was a goner, I sat there with my gushing wrist in the air for a few seconds, and what came to me was the memory of a fumbling and embarrassingly brief encounter with a girl on her period a couple of years before.

As a thin smile stretched across my bloodless face I blissfully resigned myself to the one thought in my seventeen year old boy's mind that made it okay for me to die at that moment...

"At least I'm not a virgin."

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...