FEAR, LOATHING AND HANGOVERS IN TEXAS [part three]

05.17.12

Click here to be sent to Part One.

Names have been changed but this story is a work of creative non-fiction and is meant to recount actual experience as accurately and completely as memory allows.

Revelry became a central part of the routine of life in Houston. As the work droned on, we went out in order to let go of the working life a bit. We went out to feel a taste of the power derived from pulling a few bills from a large pile and slapping them on a bar. We went out so that we might roll the all-too-familiar dice of trying to get laid and see where they'd land. Mostly, we went out to get away. And what we were trying to get away from, above all, was Jake.

On one Friday near the middle of the 23-day Rodeo, we arrived at the storage space at around 3pm, driven from the house in a group in Jake’s seven-passenger Suburban, just like any other day. The only thing that made this day any different than the other 22 was the torrential rain. We thought it might let up. No such luck. 

After waiting it out for an hour or so, the day was called. It would be our only day off. Held captive by the downpour and our collective lack of any way to get around other than Jake's truck, the whole crew staying at the house had no choice but to go with the flow. And the flow, of course, was controlled by Jake, who wanted to go to Hooters.

It's true what people say about the chicken wings at Hooters: they're really, really good. It's also true what people say about the misogyny: much like the cleavage, no one tries to hide it.

Jake was a regular at this Hooters location. Our waitress seemed to know that she should keep him at an arm's length, literally and otherwise. On this night, he limited his groping to putting his arm around her when she came by the table and he kept his idle chatter with her G-rated. Okay, maybe PG-13. The X-rated stuff was carefully meted out with a childish smirk when she wasn't around. 

He left a huge tip when we left. That was one thing about Jake: he tipped well. Sometimes ridiculously well. It went along with his notion that loyalty, respect and affection were earned through the display of power or the appearance of it. For Jake, that often meant things like $300 bar tabs.

The next stop was a favorite bar of Jake's. He had a DUI but drove every day just the same. It was Houston, after all. When he was out drinking, Jake showed uncharacteristic deference with regard to getting behind the wheel. He insisted that someone else drive—irrespective of their level of intoxication. He would just hand over the keys and bark "you're driving" with a stern, yet genuinely fraternal pat on the back. There was to be no discussion. Least of all from those in a position akin to modern-day indentured servitude.

Jake leapt from the truck as we arrived at the next stop. I didn't know why until I saw the bar lined with seven shots of cheap tequila and seven Lone Stars. Women who get hit on in bars by dudes like Jake often give in to an unspoken code of etiquette that says they should reciprocate by accepting the drink, and talk or dance with the guy buying it for them. Or maybe by sleeping with him (to hear Jake tell it, he batted pretty close to 1000 when at this game).

In this case, we were reciprocating by continuing to get blown in whatever direction the wind of the evening, in the person of Jake, might choose to blow. I'd have been grateful for the round of drinks if I didn't already have an idea of the kind of evening it was all in the service of creating. 

Jake had no real friends, because everyone hated being around him. He'd made enemies of essentially every pedicabber I'd ever known him to have interacted with. So he wanted desperately to manufacture at least the appearance of a substantive social life, and would at times bestow some of us with his peculiar brand of closeness. On another night, wasted, he gave me a five-minute speech about how we were gonna be great friends, how I was getting the hang of life in Houston and how he liked that I was being “less of a retard.” He slapped me on the back. The slap left a bruise.

As we left the bar, Jake was starting to get mean. He'd abdicated driving duties and turned the helm over to the only sober one among us, Jim, a 19 year-old kid from Dallas. Jim had no idea where he was going. Jake was sloppy enough not to notice when one of us had the idea to instruct him to drive around town aimlessly for 45 minutes in a bid to kill some time before the next stop and, the hope was, stave off the tornado that accompanied a grossly over-served Jake. 

It backfired. Jake, already sporting a familiar maniacal grin that rendered breathalyzers unnecessary, was delivering unprovoked jabs in the back seat with Thomas. Thomas was the only member of the out-of-town crew who was roughly as big as Jake. And, the word on the street was that he could fight. 

Jake had been talking about challenging Thomas to a fight. To get Jake to fight a man, all you had to do was start with a base of Jake and one similarly-built adult male, stir in excessive alcohol, sprinkle in a few choice words, and, for best results, add a dash of cocaine.

Fists flew. The truck swayed. Jim clutched the wheel, half-terrified, half-amused. He kept driving.

Thomas ended up subduing Jake in a choke-hold before any blood was shed. We all caught our breath and, as if nothing had happened, it was on to the next stop: a packed after-hours night club that was part of Jake's regular circuit.

None of us wanted to pay the cover. We'd had enough fun for one night anyhow. We found our own way home.

Back at the house, a handful of us reconstructed the night's events, unaware that the main event had yet to happen. 

Jake rolled through the door with his typical middle-of-the-night clamor a little while after the rest of us got there. He was on a tear. 

"What're you faggots doing?," he barked at myself and another housemate. I knew that it was time to go in my room and close the door.

I cupped my hands to the door and pressed my ear up against it. I heard Thomas and Jake talking, and it didn't sound like a brotherly exchange. 

"So you think it's funny, huh?," Jake slurred.

I later learned that the matter at hand was the small amount of vomit one member of the group had had the gaul to spill on the outside of Jake's truck. It might as well have been that Jake didn’t like Thomas’s shoes. Puke was a convenient excuse.

Thomas did not instigate him. He had nothing to prove. 

It took about a minute and a half before the two were rolling around on the floor, trading the initiative as they traded blows. We all knew better than to try to break up the fight. After about two minutes, Thomas had Jake pinned with his arm contorted in some kind of very painful-looking hold. 

"Are you sure? Are You sure you give up?," I heard Thomas ask, breathing heavily, his voice thick with resentment that it had come to this.

Jake stormed off to his room, barking something at Thomas. We all waited for Thomas to emerge from the bathroom after cleaning out the gash on his head and the rug burns on his arms. 

"He's insane," Thomas declared. As if none of us knew. 

Jake burst back into the living room steaming and bloodied.

"That's it. Get out. You're outta here. You can keep riding with us at the Rodeo. I want you to be out on the bikes. But you can't stay here. Get your stuff and get out."

Thomas said nothing. In past years, Jake had kicked visiting pedicabbers out of the house in the middle of the night for offenses less severe than kicking his ass in front of six people.

"GET THE FUCK OUT!! Do you want me to get my gun?! I'll get it right now."

Jake went back to his room. He returned within a few minutes. By then, most of us had gathered in a bedroom, ready for just about anything.

Jake didn't have his gun with him when he stomped back into the living room. In the restrained tone an abusive husband might use with his wife in an attempt to convince both her and himself that he didn’t mean to hurt her, he told Thomas that by the morning, he had to be out, that he'd fight him again any time to settle the score, and that it wasn't personal. 

Right. Of course it wasn't personal. The housemates had a meeting to determine what to do next. We debated whether to all move into a hostel with Thomas and even whether to skip town altogether.

I damn near went for the leave town option. Dealing daily with this guy was too much. It wasn't so much that I thought he'd try to fight me. I was too small. (Although one night outside of a bar, he had sucker-punched a kid about my size as the kid sat in the passenger seat of a car, on his way home with a girl Jake had his sights on.) But biting my tongue and swallowing my distaste for everything about the guy was a mentally burdensome endeavor, and I wasn't sure how long I could keep it up.

The whole thing blew over and the next day Jake claimed he'd blacked out and didn't know how his lip had been split. Whenever his behavior went beyond the pale, this was his attempt at a summation. Who knew if there was any truth to it. Who really cared?

But one thing you had to give Jake was that he had principles—and a man who had principles would have a hard time telling a lie that bold. He screamed at nearly every pedicabber at the Rodeo for the smallest or largest infractions, from going around orange cones or for charging customers when we were supposed to just say we worked for tips. He did not hold back. And I rarely disagreed with his stances with regard to our actual work. It was his methods and his whole personality and outlook and alpha male attitude that made him unpleasant. But what made him intolerable was when he drank and you didn't know what the hell he'd or who he'd blame it on.

My remaining days in Houston would be characterized by holding on for dear life, continuing to make a killing, and setting my sights on a pilgrimage to a Hipster Eden known as Austin.

To be continued...

FEAR, LOATHING AND HANGOVERS IN TEXAS [part two]

05.09.12

Click here to be sent to Part One.

Names have been changed but this story is a work of creative non-fiction and is meant to recount actual experience as accurately and completely as memory allows.

The work eventually got underway. The first money I made in Texas was at the Mardi Gras celebration in Galveston, a beach town on the Gulf of Mexico, about an hour and a half outside of Houston. A little-known fact outside of the South: Mardi Gras isn't just a New Orleans thing. It also happens all up and down the gulf coast in Louisiana and East Texas. 

Getting out of Houston for the first time since arriving felt great. Netting $370 in a night felt even better. In this small city, Mardi Gras involves much of the Dionysian excess we associate with its much larger counterpart in New Orleans, only in Galveston there's a beach nearby and none of the streets have French names. Drunk isn't good enough for these people or this occasion. If you can stand on your own power by night's end, you haven't done your job. 

That's where I came in. Alcohol, you see, can be a pedicabber's staunchest ally and closest associate. 

We worked for tips, which means we didn't set rates. "You pay what feels right to you," I'd tell my customers. Turns out, what feels right when the bills in your wallet all look pretty much the same, is usually quite a different thing than what feels right the rest of the time.

At the end of the night, we would all give Jake a share of our take—ostensibly one third of the average among the riders—but as one might guess, deception can play for both teams in a game that's set up like that.

Things got off to a slow start that first night, but it began to feel like Texas would do good things for my finances at about the time two perilously intoxicated women handed me $70 for taking them about five blocks. Sure, there were $5 rides over about the same distance, but on balance the tip system—the same one we would use once the Rodeo started—worked well for us riders.

It worked to dazzling effect when I came across an affluent couple in their early 40s who wanted me to take them most of the way across the city to a condo in a swanky new high rise. Tony handed me $60 and slurred, "if you geddusthere I got more cashforya." He and Charlotte had been on the prowl for a cab for some time and walking home didn’t look like much of an option for them. Hop in, I told them. I got you guys.

The 45-minute journey led us by a sampling of Galveston's gingerbread Victorian houses and past colonies of wayward drunken zombies who might or might not find their way to slumber in actual beds that night. As I pedaled on, Tony's lisp gained in prominence, and Charlotte's commentary regarding my muscled calves picked up steam. I noticed the two weren’t behaving quite like a couple in the most traditional sense of the word. With whatever excess mental energy I had, I began wondering what possible motives, other than transportation, might be circulating in the minds of my passengers. Or at least in the mind of the one who had to be physically kept from grabbing my ass.

In the distance, a gleaming glass and concrete tower graced a black horizon like the Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz, each pedal stroke seeming to bring it further away. I hoped the additional payment would materialize.

It did. I was invited to come up to the 21st floor condo that the pair used as a weekend getaway from their main digs in a fashionable part of Houston. We sat at a granite-topped bar and made small talk. They offered me coconut water, German chocolate cake, a sandwich and some Jagermeister. I needed the sandwich. The other stuff was good too. They praised my perseverance. I said the place looked nice. We toasted to the occasion.

The invitation for extra-curricular activities that I'd half-expected, never came. What did come was a wad of bills with Andrew Jackson's face on the front, plucked in a blind haste from Tony's wallet. And for good measure on the way out, another Jackson from Charlotte. That Jackson and I would get along splendidly in Texas.

But it would be a strained relationship. Once I was back in Houston and the Rodeo was underway, expanding and contracting wads of bills in my pocket left a nagging sense that at least some of those wads ought to be spent, lest a hole be burned through my bulging pockets.

So I bought a used bike for getting around town. In a city and state so fixated with the notion of freedom, it seemed that whatever was meant by that particular F-word didn't extend to the car-less.

The bike would be used primarily to get me to the one place in the 656 square-mile calamity of Houston where I actually wanted to spend whatever free time I had: Montrose. 

The Montrose neighborhood is a two-square-mile amalgam everything Houston isn't. It’s the place in town where you'll see young people getting around on bikes, LGBT pride flags in some of the store windows, and a precipitous decline in the number of pickup trucks relative to the rest of the city. The neighborhood even has a "mayor" who has, by way of photocopied pamphlets, declared marijuana legal within its porous and ill-defined borders. I saw scant evidence that the Houston Police Department had enforced his order with much diligence.

I became well acquainted with the Montrose bar scene. Wednesday nights: $1 Lone Star at Cecil's. Monday nights: $1 well whiskey at Boondocks. Sunday nights there was some other excuse to drink more than the occasion warranted and wander home disappointed, thoughts turning clumsily toward the toil of another day in Texas.

Early in my stay in Houston, I arranged to meet up with Brett, a permanent resident of the warehouse I was staying in. He worked as a bouncer at one of the bars in Montrose and the plan was to come by during his shift for a few drinks. That was the plan, alright.

Brett was an asshole. And I say that with genuine a soft spot for the guy. He would do things like come to his own place of employment on a night off, cross-eyed drunk, turn to face the solid wooden wall that lined the outdoor patio with his back to a dense crowd of tattooed twenty-somethings, calmly unzip, and take a piss. They were all too far gone to notice. Unless it splashed. But I don't think it did. Brett was slick like that. Despite his considerable faults (he had a habit of coming home black-out drunk, grabbing his rifle from the lockbox in his room, and shooting it into the air at 3am), he meant well.

On the night I met him at the bar, Brett was sober enough to be somewhere this side of belligerent. He was working. I wasn’t.

It would become enshrined as a pattern. We would finish the day's work at the Rodeo and return stiff as boards to the storage space where the bikes were kept, stretch half-heartedly, wolf down whatever calories were most accessible and wash them down with Gatorade and then cheap beer. Usually Lone Star. Something nicer if the day had gone especially well. We would endure about twenty minutes of insults and harassment from Jake ("Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you people? Are you fucking retarded? How fucking hard is it to stack a 150 lb. tricycle vertically? What did I do to deserve a bunch of retards working for me?!"). We would give him his money for the day. And in a ritual aimed at reclaiming some agency and independence from the grip a life that seemed to relish taking those things from us, a handful of us would race to the bar by midnight—two hours before close—heaping hope on top of hope that Jake wouldn't show up. Usually he did.

But not this night. 

I did pretty well at first. I got a couple phone numbers. I was a lucid and astute conversationalist, checking in periodically with Brett and getting intelligence reports on who was single. It all seemed alright.

Seemed, it turned out, was the operative word. 

At closing time, I had the honor of hanging out at the bar with Brett and a few faithful regulars as the bartenders counted back the night's returns. It was at about this time that it hit me. By "it," of course, I mean the ten shots of cheap whiskey I'd consumed in two hours' time.

I passed out at the bar, my Brooklyn cycling capped head slung uselessly over my limp left bicep. Apparently I’d had the presence of mind to stumble outside before depositing all ten shots of whiskey—and then some—in a spattered pile in the parking lot. That I would make it back home to the warehouse was not at all a foregone conclusion.

Brett got me in a cab, I was later told. What a guy. I was also told that the manager of the bar, who'd found my difficulty adapting to local customs and alcohol tolerances to be quaint, had taken it upon himself to saunter up to me in my state of self-imposed oblivion, cup his hands to my ear, and yell—not whisper:

"Welcome to Texas, BITCH!"

 To be continued...

FEAR, LOATHING AND HANGOVERS IN TEXAS [part one]

5.02.12

Names have been changed but this story is a work of creative non-fiction and is meant to recount actual experience as accurately and completely as memory allows.

Texas is a strange place. Everyone knows this. Even most Texans seem to. When I left Chicago I didn't know a whole lot about what I'd be stepping into there. It would be my first time in the state, save for the sterile embrace of an airport. I was told it would be lucrative and warned that it wouldn't be very fun, that I probably wouldn't care much for Houston as a city, that the work I'd be doing would be relentless and physically taxing. The bit about the ex-con and certifiable sociopath I'd be living with and working for was mentioned. Briefly.

In hindsight, there is nothing that could have prepared me for the ordeal of riding a bike taxi for the 23 days of the Houston Rodeo.

But I needed money, and I'd been assured by a reliable source back home that nearly a month of shuttling Rodeo patrons between far-flung parking lots and a massive indoor arena on oversized tricycles known interchangeably as rickshaws, bike cabs or pedicabs, would bring home the bacon.

With every mile of the journey up I-45 from Hobby Airport to my temporary home, a landscape thick with pickup trucks and massive highway interchanges conjured a deepening sense that Houston would provide no small amount of culture shock.

That sense was all but confirmed as I arrived at the apartment/pedicab garage that I would reluctantly call home for the next five weeks, to the site of flashing police lights. A woman was outside, alleging she'd been attacked by Charlie and Mabel, the two large Weimaraners who served as the shop's guard dogs. I spent the first ten minutes or so at my new home wondering whether I'd made a terrible decision, and pondering whether there might be a back door out of which I could flee.

But eventually the cops left and I was told to make sure the dogs stayed inside. I found the room I'd be staying in, cracked open a beer, and turned my thoughts to preparing for the weeks ahead.

The next day, I met Jake. A real bro's bro, Jake stood no taller than my five-foot eight, but his soul patched lower lip, deep-set eyes, reasonably athletic build and girth for two men, made him a presence to be reckoned with. Even at a glance, it didn't seem like a stretch that the guy had done a Federal bid.

He'd gotten into the pedicab business in his native Southern California, after bouncing from gig to gig following a tour in the first Gulf War and, later, an eight-year prison term. Just how he'd ended up in Houston was never made explicit, but Jake was not shy about copping to his ongoing legal troubles and personal beef, so it almost seemed redundant to infer that he was, legally or otherwise, persona non grata back home. Now half-owner of a fleet of pedicabs halfway across the country, he ran the place with a drill sergeant's menace and a prisoner's conspicuous lack of sentimentality.

On my first full day in Houston, I made my way past Jake's bedroom to the garage, where I found him installing lights on one of the bikes. I watched for a time, as he went about the work with a sense of frustrated urgency. Once aware of my presence, his productivity yielded to what at first felt like a nice late-afternoon bull session doubling as an extended introduction. But in our very first face-to-face interaction, Jake found a way to tell me he didn't like the way I nodded in agreement, that my skinny jeans were gay, that my facial hair was gay, that I was a fast-talking arrogant New York hipster, and that I ought to shut the fuck up and be more "normal."

I couldn't wait for the Rodeo to start. 

But the Rodeo wouldn't start for more than another week. Before myself and the five other out-of-towners staying at the house could be licensed to legally ride a pedicab for hire in Houston, we'd need to spend about a week schlepping all over the city, paying assorted fees and filling out paperwork.

As the bureaucratic scavenger hunt commenced, something I'd always heard but never quite believed, was slowly borne out by experience: in Texas, everyone is fucking nice to you. This was almost always the case—and whenever it wasn't, I found, I was usually dealing with a transplant from somewhere else (and wrestling with the question of why anyone would move to Houston on purpose). But it was true: even at the DMV—normally the locus of hating life and taking it out on everyone you deal with, on both sides of the counter—these people were nice to you. And they weren't faking it, so far as I could tell.

At the office of one local bureaucracy, I was sent to the desk of a white guy, probably in his 50's. I remember telling myself to cool it with the droning internal monologue of judgements about Texans and just listen to the guy's schpiel about the license I was applying for with a mind free of fast-flowing contempt for all things Southern. Because after all I'd heard about how vile the South was, I kept finding reasons to grudgingly accept that Southerners—even white ones—are actually a pretty a nice lot. This guy in particular was warm and avuncular in disposition and did his very best to help me navigate the winding road that linked one government agency to the next. He looked over my application.

"So you're from New York. Whereabouts?"

"Well, I lived in New York City for a while, and—"

His face contorted in disgust.

"—And I'm originally from Chicago."

The disgust turned more quizzical without waning in intensity. He looked me in the eye and let a sly grin find its way onto his face.

"You any kin to the President?"

"No, sir." (I was proud that I'd remembered how to properly address an elder.)

"But I know where his house is."

"Well," he leaned in a bit and glanced to either side. He lowered his voice.

"S'pose you could tell me where it is, cause, uh, a lotta folks around here don't much care for 'im, and uh... Well. Anyway."

He flipped my application around, slid it toward me and leaned back in his reclining chair.

"Sign by the X.”

Click here for Part Two.

Around New York in Eight Apartments

 4.25.12

I recently went back to New York City for the first substantial visit since moving away almost eight months ago. I borrowed a friend's camera and went around to every single apartment I lived in over my six-year stint in the five boroughs. The sound of a shutter opening and closing was a necessary and cathartic one. So was the sound of fingers hitting keys.

157th Street

I could swing $350 a month, and I had a vague sense that in this city, that was a "steal." Even if I'd have to share that 10x14 foot room with another dude. At twenty-two, this was the time for something like this if there was to be one at all. I showed up with six bags—the most Amtrak would let me take on the train. I shipped two bikes from Chicago. One of them was delivered to an apartment in the building across the street from my new home, where a Dominican woman gave her utmost assurance that she and her grandson knew nothing about a bike. The bike that was delivered to their apartment. The day before. The surviving bike would suffice as transportation and solace from a four-bedroom apartment with seven twenty-somethings, no cross-ventilation and a constant sense of frenzied urgency brought on as much by the city itself as by the frenzy of a life I came there to live.

Edgecombe Avenue

The thing about that whole if-you-can-make-it-here-you'll-make-it-anywhere thing is that it's true. It's true right down to the simplest of things, like finding (and keeping) a place to live. It's tough to find a place. It's tough securing it once you do. It's tough paying for it. It's tough to not get screwed into paying more than what the place is worth. It's tough to even know what a place should be worth. I made it all happen with a three-bedroom on a hilltop in Harlem. First New York lease with my name on it. Nice view, decent sized place. Not the fanciest but my own room was a huge step up from what had come before. A hop-skip-and-a-jump, like so much of this city, from more gems than can easily be listed—in this case they included the Apollo, the brownstones of Convent Avenue, Yankee Stadium and Manna's Soul Food. The place was even pretty affordable. Movin' on up. To a third floor walk-up. It would fall apart as roommates flaked and the impermanence of the ink on the dotted line at the bottom of the lease revealed itself. No biggie, I'd tell myself. I knew the drill by now.  

Washington Avenue

You can't beat $150 a month in New York City. But you wouldn't have a hard time beating a year sleeping on a mattress on a living room floor. That was my arrangement the first stint I did in this apartment. The other was a bit later and was a short-lived stay in the tiniest New York City bedroom I'd ever seen—a former servant's quarters with its own itty-bitty bathroom. What can really be said? I lived a worker-bee life with other worker-bees whose lives and livelihoods were subordinated always to The Struggle, The People, The Movement. My own movement around this city and its possibilities was tethered to the dictates of superiors and to those of pure conscience. Which of those it was at any given time varied. A moral mandate that said everything about our society was out of whack and that we needed a whole new one, is what had pulled me to New York—or had in any case been the pretext for succumbing to my own polarity and letting the magnet pull me in. And it was in that tiny bedroom that a decisive move would be made, the most important decision of my life: I'd leave, move out, find a new life with new friends and new influences in what would come to feel like a new and very different city.

Bartlett Street

"Dude, you home?"

"Yeah, what's up?"

"What happened to the kitchen?"

"Oh. That. Yeah, I made some stew. Want some?"

"No, man, that's okay. So what's, um... what's all that stuff in the shower?"

"I'm soaking some pipes in a solution for my friend's art installation. It'll be like that for a couple more days."

"Huh."

Suydam Sreet

I think I tried to embrace living in the belly of New York's Cool Kid Beast. But Bushwick was just a perch from which to set off on rides to a girl named Julie's apartment or into Manhattan for school or work or friends. I went to some of those loft parties on McKibbin Street. I cruised up and down Bedford and Bogart, noticing familiar bikes before making out the faces steering them. I did the thing. I did the starving-but-not-really-starving, twenty-something Cool Kid, forties on the roof in the summer, get around on two wheels, spend student loan money on tattoos, nurse hangovers at the Whole Foods buffet, thing. Half-heartedly. Not having what could really be called a room didn't go far in making the case to stay in Bushwick. And I'd be lying straight to your face if I told you I wasn't driven out of there at least in part by the mice, whose chatter somehow not only carried but was literally amplified through the apartment. The traps never worked that well. Maybe it was that I wasn't putting them out the right way. You learn as you go.

24th Avenue

Well, this seems cool. These guys are mellow and nice, a screenwriter and a stand-up comic. And the neighborhood is great. Real old-school but not in a bad way. I mean, the landlady's name is Blanch, for cryin' out loud. She lives downstairs with her husband and they check up on the place and if we ever wanna throw a party they said they'd be cool with it as long as we tell them first and invite them up for a few beers. That deli down the street is pretty legit. The famous Astoria Beer Garden is right down the block. Kids stream out of there at close, singing "Bohemian Rhapsody" at the top of their lungs. But it's Queens. Who'da thunk it. Ah, but a month in, you've found interesting ways of telling me you hate me, a vice I've projected self-ward. Don't worry: it's mutual. I'm as guilty as you with my bike parts strewn about and open disdain for doing dishes. Notes are way more satisfying to tape to your door than words are to say to your face. I don't even remember why I hate you so much, but god! Damn! I can't stand it when you stand up in the kitchen and eat spaghetti—how dare you?! Watching the Daily Show?! Again?! You ASSHOLE!! Pretty sure I'm gonna stay in bed til about 11 today, since you leave for work at 10:45. Jesus Christ, I need to use the fucking bathroom and you've been in there for half an hour, you prick.

179th St.

Never has the term Concrete Jungle found a better home than in Washington Heights. The front yard: a 12-lane mega-highway headed straight over a cliff to Jersey. The back yard: a nameless, sunless concrete slab in a canyon of six-floor walk-ups where a lone sycamore grows (or just sort of hangs onto life?). One roommate will be making two-hundred grand in a years' time, pride of Columbia's MBA Program. God bless him. The other has all the common sense of a catnip-high Tabby and commutes four hours a day to Brighton Beach to take classes at a community college, in preparation for certain stardom in film production. I'd stop at the Chimi trucks on Amsterdam daily if I wasn't struck by food poisoning on go number one. I'd have stayed in the place if I wasn't unhappy from day number one.

East 16th Street

Walls painted red, a plunger for the bathroom and—check this out—a full set of cutlery. First apartment sans roommates, first bona fide crush on a neighborhood. Ditmas Park was a nexus of Gentile and Jew, in-the-know and down-and-out, "emerging adulthood" and whatever's next. It was an island of Victorian houses improbably tossed into the biggest urban heat island I ever loved. Half an hour from anywhere by bike, half a block from the choicest black-and-white cookies Brooklyn itself could offer. A place where you have all you need and the reasons to ever move again blur, fade and drink themselves dry. Here, I'd give belated adolescence one last go, once upon an August, jobless, with not a lot to show for all the name-dropping in the borough where the anchor had dropped loudest and with the biggest splash. Here, swimming upstream against ambition, there was revelry without cause or cease, happily screwing with circadian rhythms. There were wakeful dreams of staying here long enough to watch the old men in the neighborhood age and die as I got on with whatever there was to get on with, painting the walls again as needed.

Dear _______,

 4.20.12

Today, the long stretch of inactivity on the site ends. I've been traveling, working, and soaking up new things to write about as well as spending no small amount of time talking about how all that will eventually find expression as new writing for this site. For now, I'm posting a letter I wrote to a dear friend some time ago. It gets to the heart of what time away from home and time in homes past can conjure. Soon, look out for belated dispatches from a very odd place called Texas, a photographic and written re-hashing of six years in New York and more thoughts on cities and on being back in Chicago.

Dear ______,

I think a transplant's zeal for a place like Brooklyn at a time like this is a tough thing for a native New Yorker to embrace (and tougher for one with reason to look suspiciously upon the heaps of privilege that have done so much to make the place what it now is). I suppose some kid from Des Moines who drops anchor in Pilsen and after a year starts "repping" the South Side... well, that might piss me off, too.

But try to embrace the good side of the mania that overtakes a newcomer to that incredible place (Brooklyn and all the rest of it)--and grasp that, like most good things, its full self emerges with maturity, despite the fact that its nascent stage makes even the most patient among us cringe and disavow a place that rightly stains our lungs and spleen just a bit because it tears up our hearts like it does.

Let me tell you something about being young and moving to a place and getting knocked on your ass for love of it, and then getting kicked into the dirt of the familiar soil and gum stains and pot holes of your old home. (And no, I'm not talking about how I couldn't afford to stay in New York right now; I'm talking about living there for half a summer at age 21 and then having to move back to the drab old Midwest.) The thing is, it grabs you, that New Place, and it shakes you and it screams in your face, sometimes in open defiance of prudence and some of your own desires:

"This is your home now."

And maybe you should listen to it.

Shit, I did.

But for those of us who can love a city at least as much as any one person and it may be fair to say more, part of the pain of loving and losing, is a perceived loss of the old love, the old city--yours, with its lopsided oddities and its grided symetries and its boarded-up squats and its eight and one half million takers of the human pulse.

Coming back after you've breathed new air, smelled new funk, walked at a different pace, can take everything that once irked about your long-time home, and make it ache.

I know, because I've been exactly there. About 800 miles west of exactly there.

But those young souls who scream Brooklyn from the rooftops... they're you and me and every kid who's had their world spun in circles by getting lost on gorgeous new streets and marching to a different drum. Most of them sped up. You slowed down when you made your Pilgrimage to New Orleans. But you're them and they're you and nobody keeps the perfect time til they've practiced the dance for a while.

Cities don't care as much as the people in them may, about promiscuity. You can have two. (Shit, I think you can probably have five or six that are close to your heart... and I aim to, one day.) But it takes time to set that up. It takes some physical travel back and forth. For me, it took some healing from the shock of the first burn of head-over-heels and the yank back to the grind of day-to-day in the land of thicker pizza and a big lake instead of an ocean, before I felt right again. And you need to feel right again with both places to be able to love either the way you should.

It'll happen.

And let me say this, too: I know this is about more than two collections of buildings and intersections and sidewalks and bridges. I know there are individual people and I know there is love. And I know that's as important to these cities as trash on the sidewalk and rats on the subway tracks and po' boys and open front doors leaking dueling notes and chords.

All that interpersonal stuff, though, you'll navigate all that just fine. I can't speak to all that right now.

I don't feel it's my place.

I love you.