the days of the gramophones

in the old days, the grammy phones were as beautiful as the young women who used them. they were shiny but rounded, painted and elegant with patterns of flowers and hearts and love, shaped cutely in compact blobby cubes. The colors! The colors were chosen every season by haute couture industrial designers--men and women in tuxedos and tophats and curly mustaches grown (or pencilled) in, who would step forward and crank the grammyphone's handle as the room of guests and afternoon by hostesses leaned forward in anticipation.

The young men of good families would give these treasures to the young women they pinned--presenting the gifts in feathery pastel boxes crammed twice sized with lavender, teal, and fuschia tissue paper. The young girls with bobbed curly hair squealed as was the proper show of affection and dedication, and then they would set out the machines on small stands in their foyers--every time a caller came, he or she would set his card respectfully in front of the machine. "I recognize that you are valuable enough to have won the love of so-and-so," these cards said between the lines. "And we are really so happy for you! Thank you for sharing this information with us."

In the young women's later years she would take out the player tenderly and be reminded of many things that were no longer so. The smells in the morning of her parent's house, the excitement she felt standing in front of the mirror waiting for men to come by and ask her to dance, the feel of gowns bulging out and pressing gently against the legs of a boy standing next to her. Playing the old dancing songs she'd be reminded of her youth, and she would turn and twist to an invisible partner, holding her old, withered hands out to the empty air.

All of the years inbetween that time and now evaporating, inconsequential. With them flew the weight of the screaming, the anguish, his brazen lovers appearing about town in broad daylight with him--and the pain of her marriage--and then the eventual indifference in their later years as they spent less time together. Her children all gone, confused and upset; the houses lost and burned, her parents dead and gone, the boulevards of her youth gone, everything now a confusing jumble of lewdness and without class. Even the colors of the dresses women wore were different; violent reds and yellows and black instead of the floating gowns and long gloves that had made her so beautiful to him.

sharks in the hudson

my three friends and I were walking along the river in the middle of the night in a way that's enough to make you a little queasy--but then you realize that it's OK, and it's so romantic how the park lamps glow at night, especially in balmy weather. We were walking in the darkness so that we could barely see the shape of each other's bodies; and only our voices drifting across to us, ghostly. I could smell the fresh smell of cut grass, the rotting of the dead plants along the water. I always forget how lush New York is; that most of the island was once like this thick green forest too.

we passed dark shadowy men night fishing in a suspended disbelief of the state of the river. i thought of what someone told me: that the Hudson River when you fish things out from the bottom drips soupy and black full of all sorts of menacing unnaturalness. and here it was so dark that you couldn't see anything, so maybe that's why they fished so late. Or maybe just because it was Friday night. They smoked and sang in Spanish and listened to little portable radios, smiling broadly at us and I could see their white flashing teeth.

We drifted down ten feet and then realized one of us was missing.

"Maybe he fell into the river and died, and now we have to drag him up from the bottom, how thoughtless," one of us suggested breathlessly.

"No, he's still here. He's a takes a licking and keeps on ticking type." I said.

"Hey, hey!" he ran after us shouting. We were all instantly ashamed of being annoyed at him for dying. "Someone caught a shark!"

He led us back to one of the fishermen's spots, where a small gray fish flailed in the grass. The men spoke to us in Spanish and reminded me abruptly of my father and my uncles, who all have a mania for fishing when they can do it. I remembered crabbing in San Fransisco and the big clattering rusty crab traps, and driving home with fish barely alive in white wet plastic buckets.

"Quite amazing, it's quite a small fish," my friend said.

We stared, entranced.

Then the fisherman debated whether or not to throw it into the water. Someone said, wouldn't it be cool to carry it home and put it in an aquarium? Right after that the man swooped down gracefully and sliced the shark's head off, red and glistening. The two girls were shocked and danced back nervously.

"Why are you so scared?" a boy chided. "That's where fish come from."

"It's just so...brutal."

"Eating is brutal."

The fishermen chatted a bit and then politely left us to go back to their work. I could smell the shark's blood, mixed in with the smell of salt and rotting things, and followed my friends home back into the blackness

married at 14

i remember there was this girl in my grade when I was 14 years old, and she was already married. She had a poise and confidence that was out of place in our school. It was too undistinguished a place for such a feat. Married! So young! And no creepy signs of abuse or weirdness--no bruises, no crying, no weird family history (actually we didn't know anything about her family history). just her, sitting in the bleachers kind of dreamy-eyed with her flyaway brown hair pinned back with barettes and her smart rolled up white jean jacket sleeves sitting her straight up into perfect posture.

She was glowing, radiant. yet not aloof. She'd talk excitedly with anyone who listened about her new husband, "Joe", who was about twelve years older and was a truck driver. She would pull you close to her, wrapping her fingers around your forearms so that you could see the shiny ring, and flutter, "Joe and me, we got a new couch!" or "Joe, he bought me flowers. It's so romantic!" She wore lip gloss and shone, literally, out her face, her bright white teeth flashing with joy.

She wasn't very pretty. She had squinty little eyes and a smattering of acne, but she was radiantly gorgeous in that space of time. Sitting on the bleachers and pulling her ring back and forth nervously. Everything was so new! Everything was so wonderful! Why hadn't anyone told her about all of life's little surprises waiting around the corner for her? We couldn't understand, but she didn't look to us in contempt, like other more experienced girls did. There were more waiting around the corner for us and like a wise older sister she wanted to tell us just how good it was going to be! Really!

and i think of her every time i see a new woman in love. that's how it is, how women in love like to talk to the rest of us. They have a present they can't wait to open and they want to share it all with us, the beauty of it. they bounce back and forth, swinging their hips, letting the pleasure of sex the night before push and jostle their good moods forward through the daytime.

"Oh God, man, I just didn't even know!" she'd say over and over again, shaking her head. "Nobody ever warned me. But since I didn't expect it, man, you think it feels twice as good!"

little old ladies know more

think of 2 squat little old ladies with still-black long hair that they wrap in twisted rolls on each side of their heads. they sit at a rickety old table, the table with a plastic tablecloth with browny gray and blue patterns of flowers and babies. The ladies hold onto the rickety table pounding, pounding on their dirty gray blue linoleum floor. They hold identical coffee mugs full of pitch nasty stuff gone cold, and they stir sugar from time to time to make the taste more bearable. Everything in the room is gray and blue shadows and gray and blue flowers past their prime.


"Color, life, all that. Red and pink and green. Those are garish shades I've closed a while ago. Now I act as fits my age," the sister to the left says.


The other sister, rocking the table back and forth, murmurs, "Our hopes are dimmer, but at least we scale back. See, it's you with the problems, always asking for more than you deserve, looking outward. That's why you're so fucked-up all the time. Us, we know our places, and we know not to wear ourselves out and we laugh at you, wearing yourselves thin."


They sit there chuckling and rocking with squinted eyes.

chalk friendships

i leave my mark, and walk away


you come ten minutes later day by day


every time I scrawl a heart


you leave behind twenty frowns

it's pretty strange


don't you think


how our eyes never meet


as we lay our chalk round and round



and infinitely repeat


our loves and sorrows a trembling mound


a neverending feat

come see my world


it's not too scary


or different from your own


come see inside my head


my dear


as i draw upon this stone

subway scene :: she couldn't take it

"She quit, she just couldn't take it."

"Why?"

"I dunno, she just couldn't take it. She quit cuz she didn't wanna do it. She just didn't wanna do it."

"Was she making enough money?"

"She wasn't making enough money. She just didn't wanna do it and she couldn't take it. She just didn't wanna do it. She just really didn't wanna do it."

"I guess she didn't wanna do it!"

"She couldn't take it. After three weeks... she had to borrow money to pay for the taxi. She wasn't making money! And... she didn't... she really didn't wanna do it!"

"I guess she just couldn't take it."

"You got that right."

The two guys were young and spiffed up, in nice baggy clothes. Their baseball caps were new, tilted just so. Shaved and washed. Prepared, even so late at night, not looking a little worn out like everyone else. Even though it was going-home time they had nice, smelling-good bodies and didn't even smell like smoke. Maybe the car going on the going home train was going somewhere for them, and they were travelling away from home as we were hurtling toward it.

The shorter one, shrugging jerkily at the end of every sentence, his palms turned out, as if satisfied as knowing "why she quit" but perplexed still with the answer.

"I just don't know. But I do. I'd do the same thing, but, you know how it goes."

"Yeah... what can you do?"

I tried to imagine what she was doing that was so horrible. For some reason I thought of all those weird jobs people have, like professional dog walker for wealthy people, although I guess it's not such a bad job. I always hear about wealthy people offering a room in their big posh upper east side pads in exchange for a permanent caretaker for Fifi the Poodle.

Or, as if to explain the inhumanity of all these Doberman Pincers and Great Danes being stuffed into tiny New York apartments, a defiant retort that these dogs were happier than dogs in the countryside, who often were abused and neglected despite all the grass and green around them. Don't give me that look, the Upper East Side with the mammoth Golden Retriever would snap. I've got a fucking professional taking care of Baby 24 hours a day. So she's happy in my apartment. She goes to the park, so it's not what it seems.

There'd be the girl, being dragged along by a gigantic arctic husky exploding out of the building's doorway (the doormen snottily stepping aside and noting how trashy she looked), as she ran jerkily behind it. On the park, her admirers (two boys in new Calvin Klein shorts and Tommy Hilfiger t-shirts) watching wistfully and kind of fumbling forward to help her. She'd decline, no, it's ok, not even noticing them. She was so miserable anyway... it was all she could think of, how she couldn't take it, damn the free room, and not notice how absorbed the two boys were, tagging along after her. One day she'd stomp her feet in humiliation in that park, in the rain, realizing she was late for the dog's training school appointment and flushed would ask to borrow money from one of the boys, to take the dog & taxi home. She'd slink out that night with a big bag, leaving behind most of her stuff, and never come back, too cowardly to tell Fifi's mommy what she had bravely screamed in the park a few hours before.

One of the boys shook his head knowingly. "Yes, she couldn't take it... but... damn! She had a nice ass."