Hell Has No Courteous Neighbor in the Living

Clogs wait at their Welcome Mat like appetent dogs.

They’ve always worn clogs.

 

Clogs as slippers. Clogs.

Wooden clogs in shower:

 

sloshy clogs. As babies,

they were born with rounded wood limbs,

 

finessed to yield that gravid heel

that gloats on creaking slats of pine:

 

aligned floorboards so dull

they wait,  prostrate,

 

to be downtrod upon.

The glass we hear tossed down

 

we must ignore, or dare

to judge their interludes of mischief.

 

In jealous rages, we suspect

northward habitués of having blown

 

a gasket; hardy har.

We’ll barely note their changing

 

temperaments on purpose.

Let the sloth-feet argue,

 

let them carry on. We did:

the price we pay, condemned,

 

to have dressed our own sure feet

in lead.

Occupy Wall Street

The protesters use the bathroom in the McDonalds across the street and they shower when it rains.

I found this out Friday night while visiting the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Zuccotti Park. The occupier I’d asked was sitting on a cardboard box, flattened to the ground with the ends of words written on it creeping out from under his legs. He thought I was asking because I needed to use the restroom myself, as if I was one of them. He was cordial, friendly, and ended our talk with, “The police won’t give us Porta-Potties. You’d think they would, for sanitation reasons.”

In other words, if left up to them, the anti-corporate protesters who’ve called the Lower Manhattan huddling ground a home away from home will not be leaving any time soon. As one sign put it, “We are too big to fail.”

But fail at what?

Despite viewing some of the protester’s blogs as well as the intense media coverage, especially in light of the multiple arrests and confrontations with the NYPD, I still didn’t get it.

When I arrived, I came with a slew of repeat questions in hopes for some clarity.

“What do you want? How long will you stay here? What does it all mean?”

“We don’t want to pin ourselves down,” said Todd Graham, 42, from Brooklyn, who said he’d visited what the protesters refer to as ‘Liberty Park’ since the first day of its occupation on September 17. “We are trying to be as inclusive as possible.”

Not giving the media a definitive message to represent the group has lent itself to a shifting cause that can be worn on any person’s back in suffrage or in sympathy.

Trolling over crisscrossing yoga mats and mattresses, among dreadlock-sporting white dudes and women with unshaved armpits, I realized there were participators wearing dapper suits, people who’d traveled from across the country and Canada, people in wheelchairs, people who were only there to watch, tourists taking photos, and incoherent sleepers who may have always used the park as a home- who maybe watched their bedroom turn into a youth hostel and maybe want their privacy back.

There were so many different signs and perspectives that I initially found it comical. One man’s sign was a direct affront to the police department. Another woman’s sign told police that the protesters were fighting for them as well.

Jesse Lessinger, 28, was manning a table on the south  rim of the park for Socialist Alternative, a socialist organization. He was pushing pins and literature and his neighbors were a food cart and a table selling New York souvenirs. Mr. Lessinger was an outsider, trying to work his way into the group, or possibly trying to steer the group toward his understanding of a solution to their grievances.

“This is not a socialist movement. We want to build a socialist movement,” he said, eyes fixed on several potential customers thumbing through the merchandise. By “we” he meant Socialist Alternative. “We support what’s happening because it’s people standing up to Wall Street.”

I asked him what he would do if he didn’t succeed in making Occupy Wall Street a part of the socialist movement. Would he go home?

“In my view, the only way to ultimately solve the problem is through socialism,” he said before getting into a shouting match with a camper about how to appropriately use the word “oligarchy.”

Cameron Conable, 22, was a registered democrat-turned-socialist before he arrived at Zuccotti Park. He’d driven seven hours with hopes of staying several days. He’s been unable to find work in computer science, his field of study at SUNY Geneseo.

“I think people are getting angry,” he said. “People are realizing that it’s the people at the top who are really holding people down.”

He told me he’d been working at the same McDonalds for seven years and had never received a raise past his minimum wage earnings of $7.25 an hour. He said that none of his coworkers had ever received raises, either. He expressed the frustration he felt watching the owner of his McDonalds drive around in new luxury cars every few years and take extended vacations to Aruba.

“A lot of the people I work with don’t see their potential to fight,” he said.

Protester Teddy Kurtis, 39, a managing director for a green energy company, stood out among the protesters in a $600 suit, a crisp tie and coiffed hair. He indulged me in a lengthy conversation about why he’d visited the park every day in support. He hadn’t yet spent the night, however. His “above 100K” salary affords him an apartment in Manhattan.

“Really, it’s about the revolving door between the Federal Reserve, the banks and the politicians,” he said. I admitted my ignorance about all things Federal Reserve so he tried to explain the “Ponzi scheme”. Befogged, I asked him whether rallying around such a complicated issue might be a turn-off to Americans who weren’t as versed in currency issues as he was.

“I think this needs time to grow,” he said of the movement. “There will have to be demands.”

Leaving the park for a minute, I noticed a steady trickle of men in suits leaving One Liberty Plaza, across the street from Zuccotti Park. I was denied comment from several, which I found odd. One would think that having to muscle your way to work through a throng of adversaries week after week would inspire the desire to express contempt publicly.

One man whom I trailed several blocks at a swift New Yorker’s pace from his office building wouldn’t give his name but at least let me write down his below-the-breath grumbles.

“They’re harmless, but I think they’re a little misguided,” he said. He told me he works for a “company that is involved in financial services.” When I asked his salary, he rolled his eyes and quickened his pace. “I take the train to work like everybody else.”

William ‘Bo’ Vastine, 46, an employee at Bloomberg Financial, spoke freely. An admitted six-figure-salary recipient, he said he was shocked that a pretty lady like myself was having a hard time encouraging businessmen to put their opinions on record.

“My observation is this,” he began. He was a good six inches taller than I was, but grew even more stately when he tried to break it all down.

“They don’t have the credibility because it’s more of a spectacle than a legitimate statement. What are they looking for?”

Then he offered his advice: “If they’re really trying to speak to corporate America, don’t call us evil.”

After giving me his card, he turned and left, followed by a smaller man toting an iPad who had been smiling and nodding at the both of us through the entire interview.

Back in the park, I approached a woman in the encampment whom I recognized from earlier media coverage. Attractive and stern-faced with shoulder-length blond hair and intense eyes, Katie Davison was as close to an authoritative figure as I’d found that evening.

A commercial director from Los Angeles who typically votes democrat, Ms. Davison, 31, told me she’d been in New York since she took the red eye flight out on September 16th. She’s taken time off from work to film a documentary on the American Dream and to participate in the occupation.

Bringing up her involvement in the press coverage I’d seen prior to arriving, I asked if she was a spokesperson.

“I can’t speak for the group,” she said, backing away from any claim to power. “Everyone is on the same level.”

When we discussed the take-away she hoped an observer would receive, she admitted their struggles.

“The list of demands is on everyone’s mind. Finding a strategy is one of the most difficult things, but how can you expect us to come up with a solution when our politicians and the intellectual elite have not been able to.”

Drawing my attention to the camp, she explained the democratic process that governed the protesters thus far. She was proud of the system they’d developed to inspire the group, which loosely calls itself  “the 99%.” No decisions are made without a consensus.

“If something could come out of this movement that would exert the kind of political pressure on the left that the Tea Party has for the right…”

She trailed off into innocent reflection, then acknowledged the criticism she and the other occupying members of Zuccotti Park have received.

“I don’t think we can actually define what we are. This is the creation of something that hasn’t been done before,” she said. “I would like to see us draw up something more like a Declaration of Independence than a Constitution- a new value system because what we have now is not working.”

As the march on One Police Plaza wound its way back to Zuccotti Park, the large mass of people began to filter down from the thousands of sign holders to the few hundred who were occupiers. Dinner was being served – pizza, pasta with peanut sauce, corn on the cob, apples- all donated.

Heading home, I passed a man with a very dissatisfied look on his face. He was eating the free dinner from a paper plate, and couldn’t help but pass on advice about the food to anyone who would listen.

“Don’t do the peanut sauce, tastes like crap, but the barley and beans is alright.”

He said he needed a meal and wouldn’t give his name because he didn’t want to sound insulting. It was unclear whether he was a devout protester or a passerby in need, but the distinction, I figured, was irrelevant. He was there, adding to the numbers, and that alone was worth remuneration.

that in-between place

My old house was on a very busy road in a small town of a state that was too far north.

Across the street was a graveyard. My bedroom was located in the front of the house and had a view of commuters rushing this way or that, always going too fast for my taste, always making that seaside whooshing noise that started with a hum and ended with an echo. But if I looked past the two-lane highway, I saw a metal fence. Through the metal fence were gravestones. Beyond those gravestones were more gravestones, a few obelisks- for policemen or town officials said their inscriptions- and plenty of sunken pauper’s graves mixed in, their edges eaten up by grassy weeds.

But there were no ghosts in there. And if there were, they never bothered me. In my home, what I thought were ghosts but couldn’t know for sure was the grumbling furnace that lived in our basement. It lurched on and off forcefully in moments of complementary quiet; volcanic, explosive-sounding belches that drowned out the television for a few seconds or the person on the other line of your phone conversation. Our furnace was a monster from a Stephen King book, always threatening to send us sky high in a ball of flames if it exploded, making me an unhappy Dorothy with no Toto for comfort.

But the house was too big and drafty to substantiate its removal. We needed heat. Everybody needs heat. We are human.

The door to the basement was in the dining room. It was locked at all times and led to short steps made for people with very small feet. The house was more than a hundred years old; the people must have been smaller in the 1800’s, or else maybe there was a shortage of wood and short, thin planks was all they had left when it came time to put in the basement stairs.

“I hate going down those stairs,” my mom would say whenever we lost power and the circuit breaker needed to be reset. Her biggest fear was of falling down steps and hitting her head. It was not my biggest fear, but I doubt I would enjoy it.

When you were alone in the house, you never felt alone, and it laid the backdrop for paranoid thoughts and overambitious childhood fantasies of scary stuff.

One night, I was lying in bed. I couldn’t sleep. My brother was asleep. His bedroom was directly across the hall from mine and his door was closed. My mother was asleep; I could hear her snoring from her bedroom at the other end of the hall. My father was not home, but working a night shift.

I closed my eyes. I opened them.
I closed my eyes. The furnace boomed and woke me.
I opened my eyes, and decided I needed to use the bathroom. I pulled my blankets off, releasing myself from their weight and their warmth.

When I entered the hallway I noticed my mother’s bedroom light was on; a yellow glow peaked out from behind her closed door.
Reading. She must be reading, now. I did not hear her snoring anymore.
I will say hello, I thought, as I walked past the bathroom and headed toward the yellow.
I knocked, and started to turn the handle before she could reply.
Inside her room, she was lying in bed. Without looking in my direction, she said, “Hello, sweetie.”
“I can’t sleep either,” I said, noticing suddenly that the yellow light did not come from her lamp, but from a television set in the corner of the room.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” said my mother as her lips widened into a thin, uncomfortable smile.
And then I remembered.
My mother didn’t have a television set.

I’ve had dreams like that all my life. Dreams where everything is the same as my reality, save one, small thing. The presence, however, of this one small thing sends a shiver through my sleeping self, and I begin to try to waken.

Every sleeping second after that becomes a race to escape the realization that I am not awake, but asleep and dreaming. The fear comes from the knowledge that in dreams, anything and everything can happen.

The Big Bad Wolf

I spent my first nine years living in a seventh-floor apartment on the Upper West Side. When I turned nine in 1990, my family moved to a two-story house in New Hampshire.

If there was ever a storm in the 1980’s, I do not remember it. I do not even remember rain. When I looked out my bedroom window, all I ever saw were buildings. Nighttime: buildings in macadam shadows. Daytime: buildings so visible I could comfortably leer at their inhabitants.

If there were trees in New York City, I never saw them move. Trees were just as fixed as buildings were. They grew from the concrete, like fire hydrants and homeless people. They didn’t sway. They were guarded by fences like castles, but didn’t have moats.

And if the wind ever blew, it didn’t ever rustle my feathers.

But there is a picture of me as a toddler in a bright pink snowsuit, cheeks rosy, surrounded by snow drifts several feet high. This is proof that my memory serves me wrong. So why didn’t my brain register weather as a child?

I think it is because there were no trees that were seven-stories high.

In New England, nothing stood still. Our house, a relic of the late-1800’s, creaked each time a cloud passed by. The shrubs scratched the windows on blustery afternoons. The trees were not trees but whole forests of leaves that weltered, confused, trying to obey the Gods as best they could lest they be torn from their branches sacrificially.

As a nine-year old girl, New Hampshire was a wild and obnoxious land and it terrified me. I was especially frightened of the wind. My bedroom was on the second floor of our old house. Outside my window, on inclement evenings, a wire would slap against the rotting shingles, keeping me awake. I would only breathe sometimes.

When I heard the wire, I would pull back the curtain and stare at the American flag that marked the entrance to the cemetery across the street. If the flag was horizontal, that was It, that meant the end, and I became a frozen statue. I could not take my eyes off of the whipping reds, whites and blues, willing them to be less brazen. I never succeeded and watched the wind wake the sun countless times.

When Hurricane Bob ventured further north than anyone expected, I created a fort made of stuffed animals and pillows behind the recliner in the living room and stuck my fingers in my ears. I hummed loudly while my family lit candles and mouthed the words, ‘Don’t be afraid.’

But I was afraid, and it didn’t matter to me that I didn’t know why.

When I returned to New York in 2002, I lost my fear of the wind. In fact, I was taking a nap when a tornado came to Queens last year. Perhaps I missed the storm of the decade because of all those sleepless New England nights.

When I have children, I will introduce them to the wind. We will say hello to it. I will walk my children through parks and say, ‘That tree is not bowing down; it is actually putting up a fight against the angry air. As long as its roots grab the earth it is winning a battle against its most versatile predator.’

It’s even possible my parents said those words to me. Perhaps I was simply unable to grasp the concept of unseen forces.

Now, my fear has begun to creep back and I am stuck somewhere in the middle of my former selves. If I see trees move I become tense. If I am home, I pull back my curtains to watch the sky. And then I remember that I cannot will the weather away, nor can I manifest anxiety if my drapes, and eyelids, happen to be closed during the onset of the Apocalypse.

where do you put your nightmares?

I wake with my dreams. There’s no reason to leave them behind. Me and the woman with the high-pitched screams and the man with fleas and the giant, growing ever larger, fumble into coherence hand in hand, sleep passing out of us, ears now perked to mundane sounds: the radiator, those very same morning birds- or so you imagine- someone in the shower.

Sadly, only I’ll survive this brighter world. My friends, or demons, only waste away. My mind will harbor what is left, will try to reconnect with them in consciousness, but they shouldn’t have handed me their fate like that. My lunch plans erase them from existence.

It’s possible they’ll flicker through my purview when I gaze into the mirror or when I let the clicking of the keyboard saturate the air around me until I’m back in the thick of my brain with them and the air is sweating, too close to breathe, and I’m gasping for real air, sane faces, and one more opportunity to live in normalcy with the rest of the world, instead of stuck inside my mind where the gallows are, where men with rumpled-up faces make no apologies for stealing your lucidity.

I do not know my neighbors’ love

I wasn’t as drunk as everyone thought I was. I never am.  The conversation, or my part in it, was finished so I assembled my things. My coat was over there, hanging on a hook. My bag was on my lap because I was afraid to hang it- I had already lost a pack of gum that night, or perhaps it was stolen by a very feisty quick-handed hipster on Bedford Avenue- they steal for fun and not out of necessity. I believe they exist, like leprechauns. Hipsters are not to be trusted and I’ve never had the chance to meet a rainbow’s end so the possibilities are endless on both fronts.

I wrapped my scarf too tightly around my neck. I zipped up my coat. I put on my gloves. I walked away. But I didn’t make it to the door for at least another hour.

The bar had two rooms; it was a very large establishment. I had spent most of my time that evening sitting at one of many picnic tables. I felt like I was either camping or in the fifth grade all night. The second room, the one I entered into from out of the freezing night, contained the bartender, bar stools, drinks, people laughing-as they should, and in the corner there was a swing band.

Bingo.

They weren’t there when I’d arrived but they were there now and they were, ah, fantastic! Fast scratchy drum thing played on one musician’s lap while he bobbed his knee up and down. I do not know its name and I am embarrassed. Was there a stand-up bass? I think there must have been. There was a clarinet player Benny Goodman would have been proud of, a singer with a fast tongue, and, of course, a trumpet player.

Recipe for delight on a Saturday night. But, oh, it just kept getting better. There was a couple swing dancing in front of the band. Fast feet, she bounced all over the place, smiling and whimsical. He also smiled, and men rarely smile. He tossed her left and right, his knees bent as the trumpet popped, simultaneously, as if planned. Their elbows bent in rhythm and each step was a surprise.

I was leaning against the wall, close, but watching as if from afar. My hood, I hadn’t realized, was still on. My hands were in my pockets. I was sweating and I looked out of place. Why doesn’t she sit down, stay awhile, I felt the crowd asking as time elapsed. I would have if I could have told them why: Because I was frozen in ecstasy. As each song ended, I grew teary- is it over? And then the singer leaned forward again into the microphone and that scratchy washboard rattled like a snake in the grass and then whap! The trumpet joined the tune and the dancers started in with an endless energy that made me feel so alive.

They must have been in love, he and she. I studied his face and I saw an old high school classmate of mine whom I was never close to. I studied her face, and I saw a current co-worker of mine, though it was not them. My mind made them familiar, was all.

I imagined their bedtime whispers while they danced. I imagined them walking to get coffee in the morning, hand in hand. They were the perfect couple, but mostly because they were not perfectly in step. When his foot would land elegantly, her’s would hit staccato, pointed. When he stepped to the side, he kept his leg close to his body, a small step was all he could give. She, his asymmetrical mirror, stepped further from her body, though her body was smaller, as if she wanted to spread herself all over the dance floor like a skater on ice. But they hit every note ensemble, never missing a beat, similar but different; a lesson for all mates: ‘Be one with your lover while maintaining your identity.’

And then the music stopped, the band took a break, and the woman released her partner’s hand and walked away. She left him. She did not look like she was coming back and while I watched she never did.

My heart was broken. They were not in love. I looked down, confused. I sent a text message to my boyfriend that I would be returning home soon, and when I looked up again the man was grabbing another woman’s hand. She, like me, had been watching the dancers all night. Unlike the other woman whose hair was a bouquet of red curls, her hair was long, black, and straight. Her eyes were dark, her body slightly larger.

The music started up and the new couple started dancing and I almost fainted- their movements matched perfectly. He was smooth, and she was smooth. Elegant, liquidy, buoyant; there were not two figures but one gliding creature with four feet and four hands and one heart.

The true couple, alike, and in love.

Strangers in the Night

While walking down the street late one December evening, I crossed paths with yet another New York City cad. I was carrying three bags of groceries. Comfortably encased from my calves to my cheeks in a long winter coat, I felt like an anonymous winter warrior.

Two bags were slung over my right shoulder; one over my left; I was tilted to one side like a granny and could have been anywhere from 19 years old to 92. But I was 29 and almost home when a van drove slowly past me. The driver’s window was rolled down like it was July and his left arm filled the space where the glass should have been.

“Hola, sweetie,” he shouted. I looked around and I was alone. He was talking to me. He was assaulting me in two languages, just to make sure I understood his prurience.

I kept walking. He had slowed to a stop just two cars back from the traffic light on the corner. I was still within his sights. I crossed the street and walked past my apartment building so he wouldn’t see where I lived.

When the light changed, he drove straight away, down the block, maybe turning right or left, I couldn’t be certain, and my thoughts drifted back to dinner plans: mashed potatoes, a small steak, some onions, something simple because money is tight.

He didn’t come to mind again until yesterday afternoon, when in broad daylight I crossed the same street headed home. The sun was high, it was almost one o’clock. I’d just had coffee with my best friend; also 29. We talked about men, one-night stands and varicose veins. We poured honey in our cups, getting sticky, both avoiding sugar for different reasons. I’d had a fine time, chatting as women do about nothing and everything all at once. I was feeling about as content as any woman could in a cold January.

And then I remembered van man. I remembered how men who holler from vans can always tell that you are a woman even though your only visible body part is your forehead. I remembered how I was neither bothered nor terribly upset after van man shouted at me. I remembered how what he had said had seemed stranger than the fact that he had said anything at all. Hootin’ and hollerin’ is normal; men can be a lascivious lot.

When I was in my early twenties I used to smile when I received ‘compliments’. I even referred to comments from men I’d never met as ‘compliments.’ I suppose I was encouraging them without realizing it.

When I was 25 or so, I tended to yell back. Once, a pack of teenage boys were shooting insults at my best friend and me from behind us. So first we walked to the other side of the street, not far enough away in hindsight, then we started flinging insults back. Almost ten years older than they, we females were outnumbered and therefore in danger. Or that’s what the boys wanted us to believe. One encouraged me to suck his dick. I said, I would if he had one. We’d never met before that side street and yet so much hate was tossed around that we might have seemed to yet another stranger to be bitter ex-lovers reunited by fate or hard luck.

But van man and I had a mutual understanding. Once van man’s stare returned to his dashboard, his grubby steering wheel, the turn signal, we both moved on. Though I’ve turned his words into dialogue, I know for certain he will never read them, and even if he does he will almost positively never hear my voice. He never saw me, actually. Not my love of Nerds and recycling; not the two or three gray hairs that have started to grow from the center of my forehead.

He saw woman. He saw weak.

Nor did I see him. His love of –, his addiction to –; all assumptions. Nor did I weigh the possibility that he genuinely felt some love for me in that moment. Perhaps that was his good deed for the day. Perhaps he normally throws in some profanity. Perhaps he was being nice.

We looked beyond each other, through each other, seeing others like statues or place markers of individuality.

His ears do not register “woman” and I sing too sweetly for the dogs.