Lost Weekend

He sat slumped over on a couch in a Back Bay apartment overlooking the grimy Gainsborough Street alley, his eyes pushed upwards in his sockets, and he was gone, off on a journey from which he’d never return.

We crammed into a borrowed car for the drive down from New Hampshire for a long weekend of drinking. Someone had given him a pill. And then everything changed. By the time I drove us back to Manchester in the hung-over grayness of the next day, he was physically with us but his silence was unlike him, and we were all too stunned to break that silence, too unformed in our youthfulness to question it, or to offer insight or an intervention.

We sobered … Read more »

30 Day Travel Series: Pork Nostril and Sticky Chopstick

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Okay, Julian was eating absolutely everything on our trip. It was scary sometimes, because he was eating stuff like raw pork and random things he couldn’t identify. Once he ordered this bowl of food that looked like noodles and pig nostrils. We think, upon reflection, that it was intestine, not nostrils, but either way it was super hardcore to try and eat. I just watched in awe and try not to think negative thoughts, like that he was going to die.

One of the worst times was one night when we were walking down the street in Hue and he was on a mission to try Bun Bo Hue. A Vietnamese friend of his back home, Jenny Ton, had told him he absolutely … Read more »

Worthy

When I was in the fifth grade, I was one of two students representing my school in a city-wide spelling bee. My mother, who was a teacher at another school, prepped me for weeks beforehand. I could spell up a storm.

On the night of the competition I was nervous but confident, feeling fully prepared. I made it through the first round. Then I went up to spell my second word. The announcer said: "worthy." I drew a blank. He didn't use it in a sentence. He just repeated the word: "worthy." Still nothing.

Hesitantly I croaked "w-o-u-r-t-h-y," spelling my doom. Incorrect. As I left the stage and slinked to a seat … Read more »

Blips.

Memoirs.Remembering:
I don’t remember losing any of my teeth, or learning how to ride a bike. I don’t know what theme my seventh birthday party was. I remember when my best friend’s little brother was hit by a car. He died the same day even though they sent a helicopter. My best friend called me and I told her that she shouldn’t joke like that but she wasn’t joking. I don’t remember how old we were. Third grade, maybe. The last time I ever saw him he was jumping on the couch telling me how excited he was to go to the first grade. I don’t remember my first day of school.

I remember the first time I learned about the word “fuck.” I … Read more »

The Wall Walker

The following is a piece I was asked to write about what it feels like to be the father of an autistic child.

When I wake, I am curled up under a somber and overcast sky. It is the same colored heaven that I lived under yesterday and the countless days that have come before it. I stretch out on the brown grass for a moment to piece together my reality. It only takes me a few brief moments to remember my job. I have to walk the wall…just like I have done the past 11 years.

I sit up and take a deep breath. I hold it for a moment while I close my eyes. This is one … Read more »

Breaking

The first time it ever happened was when I was 7. Too young to know that what he was doing was wrong, and too scared to tell anyone. I had been beat. Struck across the face with the ferocity of a wild animal. Sometimes it would just be a smack, and others it would be a kick to the ribs or a bruised windpipe. Nobody saw the bruises. He forced me to wear long sleeves and high neck blouses. Mother paid no attention to it whatsoever. She thought it was just a fashion phase I was going though. I only wish it was so simple.
We were a family of three. My mother, myself, and the monster. My mother had been with the monster … Read more »

Accidents Happen

My memory of my father’s accident is faulty. I don’t remember the time or what I was wearing or where exactly it happened. I remember bits of it from the day, like the fact that I was sitting and doing some math problems while my tutor stepped outside our little library for a smoke. I remember him telling me that my father had had an accident and I remember laughing a laugh of disbelief because my father was superman. Superman barely gets hurt on krypton, let alone earth.

What my mother was going through that day or months afterwards, I have no clue. She was there around us, managing things, figuring out how to get my father to a hospital without worsening his spinal … Read more »

Blue Tambourine

A house in my neighborhood had a basket of assorted small toys hanging on the garden gate, with a sign inviting passersby to take a toy or donate one to the collection. I often passed this house on my walks and enjoyed looking in to see the changing array of toys in the basket, which was always full. One day a blue tambourine caught my eye. I wanted it right away but didn't think a grown-up should take a kid's toy. I left the tambourine alone. Days went by as I continued to walk past the basket while keeping an eye on its contents. The blue tambourine was still there.

Finally the day arrived when I … Read more »

The Shoe Department

She walked around the floor not exactly as if she owned the place, but more as if it existed solely for her benefit. She seemed unaware of the forest, but focused instead on the trees--each pair of shoes was given its due attention. She carefully scrutinized them, mentally discarding those lacking character or oozing practicality. The ones in vibrant colors were the draw, particularly reds and yellows, and high heels appeared to be a must. At each of the various tables a favorite would be chosen, and she would pick them up, bring them down to the floor, and slide her small feet in (whose feet actually fit the floor models, I wondered to myself). She would glance down for … Read more »

Why Do We Kiss?

I am typing this feeling better than I have in a very long time. I am sitting on the porch of our cabin with only the moon lighting the woods in front of me. I am a little freaked out that Bigfoot might come bounding out of the dark and play the popular monster game called “Make The Little Man Wear His Lungs Like A Hat”. Other then that fear I am as peaceful as my soul has been since before Scott Baio was a reality star.

In many ways I worry way to much. I am not just a “glass half empty guy“. I am a “glass half empty, and the other half is filled with anthrax” kind of guy. I jump to … Read more »

Remembering Smokin’ Joe

"Here, take this," he said, slipping a five dollar bill into my small hand. I hesitated, not sure if it was alright.

It was 1977, when five dollars went a lot further and it seemed like an awful lot of money to the five year-old me. The man handing me the fin was my father's friend, Bishop, on account of his name being John Bishop. He had one of the most distinctive voices I have heard in my life, his laugh as distinctly hearty and husky.

"No, it's alright. Take it. Get those guys some street clothes," said the tall, black Bishop, bent down on one knee, reassuring me, so that I might take the money.

While I did end up taking … Read more »

My Mother Wanted to be Betty Boop

What is this thing between mothers and daughters, this primitive compulsion to make totems of each other so that we can appear before each other’s eyes as the larger-than-life-caricature of everything we hate and fear? Pendulous breasts, jutting buttocks, lidless eyes, the teeth of the devouring monster spitting blood through lips that close over the helpless prey. Hi, mom. Hi honey. That you? Yeah, it’s me, is that you? Then we kill the creature, and we’re done with it. Until the next time, when it can rise up and be killed again. —Mary Gordon

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My mother wanted to be a dancer. In the living room when I was a kid we danced to “Stop In The Name Of Love” by The Supremes … Read more »

And it's not over yet.

He'll tell you he knew he wanted to marry me when I got lost and walked into the kitchen instead of the bathroom at Joseph's Pizzeria. As I shuffled back into the restaurant, hoping he hadn't noticed, he watched me and smiled and just - knew.

For me, it was earlier in the night, when he called to say he was outside of my apartment. Actually, he was standing across the street - he'd never been there before. He didn't see me right away and I stood there for a second before getting his attention. He looked different than he had before. We'd seen each other off and on as children and teenagers, but something had changed in Nathaniel since the last time we … Read more »

When The Dance Becomes the Dance

When the Dancer Becomes the Dance
Donya Feuer Oct. 31, 1934 – Nov. 6, 2011

On my 40th birthday a true legend died.

A few years ago while I was working on my dissertation “Pure Artistry: Ingmar Bergman, the Face as Portal and the Performance of the Soul” Harvey Lichtenstein at Brooklyn Academy of Music, a man whom I didn’t know personally but who knew I was interviewing various of Bergman’s collaborators, encouraged me to contact Donya Feuer in Stockholm. I came to understand that in the Swedish and Norwegian dance worlds, at least among the members of those Nordic countries’ cultural intelligentsia and to some extent also in the U.S., Feuer had become something of a legend due to her mastery of … Read more »

Rescued By The Osmonds

Being stuck in a dirt-poor family with a devout Mormon mother and an explosive, absent dad wasn’t what I had in mind for my life.

Between daily home church sessions to save our souls, regular trips to the church welfare office to beg for food, and irregular visits from my dad that often ended in screaming fits, kicked-in walls and broken furniture, I had reached my breaking point and started fantasizing about a way out.

At age nine, with nowhere to run, I adopted a daily mental escape ritual that consisted of locking myself in my attic room, laying down on the stack of mattresses that constituted my bed, closing my eyes and dreaming about my real family--the Osmonds--who would soon come to … Read more »

Ode to my mini-van

Today, I traded in my silver Toyota mini-van with a dent in a rear panel and 40 bumper stickers all over the back of it for an “almost new” used Toyota Camry. The Camry is a sea green, blue color, “aloe green” they call it. It is not a “mommy-mobile” like the mini-van and now that my youngest is 7, we are all ready to say good-bye to the cheerios all over the car. But, like any kid, I struggle with the desire to let go of who I was and grow into the person I was meant to be.
I am an accountant by trade. I was a CPA for 20 years. I am a practical, organized person as a result of some success … Read more »

Looking down at my younger brother’s feet in the beach parking lot, I thought such whiteness existed only in the dead.

SHELLSHOCKED

Looking down at my younger brother’s feet in the beach parking lot, I thought such whiteness existed only in the dead. It was a reminder that he didn’t get outdoors much, and this made me, an avid open-water swimmer, sad.
Fred “went away” to the Willowbrook State School for the Mentally Retarded at the age of four and from the age of twenty has resided in a group home for people with disabilities. Mom and Dad were his connection to “typical” life until their deaths. And I was always his hero. But probably because of a childhood of Sunday visits “to take Fred out,” I focused on career as a young adult and we became acquaintances. Becoming his guardian in my 50’s, … Read more »

Surprise revolution took away my cartoons

I was in Rangoon to atone for my sins.

It was the Fall of 2007, the Jewish High Holidays, and I had gone to Burma to do some research on the small Jewish community that had been there for about 200 years. I planned to celebrate the High Holidays with them, observing Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement for the first time in about fifteen years. I did a little sightseeing too—a temple that held a hair of the Buddha, the 12th century ruins of Bagan, the floating villages on Inle Lake, a monastery filled with cats trained to jump through hoops. There was nothing political about my purposes in Burma, yet politics was in the air.

Around the time … Read more »

Middle School Lesson on Life

In sixth grade I had a nerdy, homely teacher for first period—Mr. Pennington. He wore diapers. Naturally, as 13-year-olds do, we made fun of him. Sadly, I participated. Most people whispered and giggled and some did so blatantly to ensure he could hear. He never flinched.

One early morning the class had pushed all of the desks to the perimeter of the room and everyone sat on the floor drawing, cutting, coloring, and gluing decorations for one holiday or another. We all chatted and laughed loudly at who liked who and who we didn’t want to sit with at lunch while Mr. Penninton stood precariously on a desk—one foot on the seat and the other on … Read more »

I Just Want to Be Successful

July 22nd, 2011. San Diego, CA. Comic-Con is now on its second day. I woke up in the morning with a backpack filled with items and a head full of dreams rushing through my head. “This could be it DJ, you could meet the person that is going to change your life”, I kept thinking to myself.
Around the summer of 2010 I had an epiphany, and that epiphany became my sole purpose of living. This girl I met in my sophomore year of high school had a lot in common with me… We both loved celebrities, and I was addicted to E! News; from watching E! News, it was evident from there that I knew I wanted to become a celebrity correspondent/TV host … Read more »