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Wednesday, December 29, 2010

The First Thing Green


I planted Brussels sprouts this past year.  The greenhouse nearby, you know the one I mean, with its hay bales outside and rows of potted mums, had a perennial sale in the spring.  Must have been sometime in June if I recollect correctly and if you bought one tray of plants, you had to take the second along for free.  I couldn’t get out of there.  Every time I reached for something, I was forced to take an additional pot with the other free hand.

Anyway, I ended up with a tray of Brussels sprouts.  Not cause I wanted them, but because I was strong-armed into the deal.  At that time there was no room in the regular vegetable garden, so I cleared some space in a particularly anemic row of blueberries and put them in.  Well, they grew, but don’t ask me how.  The soil had been amended with enough acid to fill a battery.  The blueberries were already responding, but I had no idea the sprouts would do well in such an environment.

They filled out.  I don’t know if you’ve ever tried them, but those sickly little cabbage plants grow past their awkward looking stage pretty quickly and before you know it, you have these stalwart plants with guts and glory and the like.  The first forming cabbages look like marbles along the sides but it takes well into September and October before they beef into the sprouts you and I see in the store.

There were bugs.  Chewing kinds and some other kind that left a frass on the lips of each lime colored head.  Then came the first frost and though the pumpkins collapsed, the sprouts held their ground.  There were mornings that the entire landscape looked like it had been carved out of ice and though the leaves of the sprouts laid low, each day as the sun warmed, their regular turgor returned.

Christmas has come and gone.  Red ribbons and fancy paper peak out of the tops of black trash bags and wag in the wind.  At this point, we’ve had enough freezes and blizzards to fill a Dairy Queen.  I can go into the field and pull some of those frozen cabbage heads off of the plant…maybe snap off a couple of crisply frozen leaves of kale along with them, come inside and watch them return to their normal texture within minutes.  Both can be chopped and thrown in a pan with pasta and cheese, or the kale can be stirred into a chicken broth with beans and sausage for a delicious soup.  It’s as though the freezing has sweetened them, yet each keeps it’s crispness and original texture.   Put it alongside a piece of peach pie made back when August held reign and you have yourself a plate of bounty.


In the melting snow and thawing land, the mustard and nettle rise again.  The first taste of the fresh earth born, the first thing green that nourishes and wakes.  Spring comes soon in the collapse of cold, in the warm gaze of my grateful eyes.  A buttery taste, a shake of salt, and a long wrapping time of warmth.

Sunday, December 12, 2010

The Diner's Open!



When I first moved up here, I had this idea that I would open up a diner.  I saw the alarm clock read 5am; I smelled coffee brewing in an urn; I saw hand written orders hanging from a stainless steel roundabout; I saw me talking through a window into the kitchen over the sound of sizzling eggs to familiar faces at the counter.  I’d say, “Hey!  Any of you farmer Mary’s want to have a piece of fresh pie?”  And I’d hear the rough crowd roar, “Sure! Count me in!  I’ll take one to go!”

My secret boyfriend’s name is Arthur and he’s a game warden up here.  Nice build on him; wears a tan, tight fitting policeman’s suit; has a gold badge and carries a gun to shoot poachers.  Every day, he pretends to nonchalantly drop in for a something, coffee, pie, cup of white bean soup, then he’ll look for a reason to talk to me.  “Didn’t you tell me you were from New York way?  I heard on the radio you people are supposed to get one hell of a storm down there.”  Or  “ You said you heard coyotes out at your place?  You know you have to be careful if you have cats.  Those coyotes will eat cats.”

I say to him.  “You know, the next time you’re out by my place, you should drop by.  There is something shitting on the rocks in my stream, right next to a hole a in the side of the hill, and I would love for you to look at that crap and tell me what kind of animal laid it.”

He says, “Oh that’s probably a muskrat.”

And I say, because I want to wow him with my outdoorsiness, I say, “You don’t think it could be a mink or an otter?”  

And he says, as though that didn’t faze him a bit, he says, “Nah, probably just a muskrat.”

I get this idea now, while I watch him blow over the top of his coffee and measure off another portion of peach pie with his fork.  I have this idea that I’m going to talk this cocky son-of-a-bitch into my bed and fuck him with his legs up in the air.  I work him over one more time with my eyes and take a moment to wipe up the counter space next to him.  When he looks up at me, right into my eyes and says, “You ever seen a muskrat?”   then smiles a big, illegal grin, I know that it will all come true.

Once I had sex with a trucker.  I stopped off at some rest stop somewhere, don’t ask me where the hell I was, and I went into use the john and there was some thirty-something guy in one of the cans, sitting on the crapper and jerking off.  So while we peered at each other through the crack in the metal door, we somehow made this agreement through finger gestures and head bobs that we were going to see each other outside.

The next thing you know, I find myself climbing into the cab of a big semi.  It was the first and last time I’ve ever been in one and I was shocked to discover that behind the front row seat, they have a whole bed in the back!

 So we start fooling around and the next thing you know, he wants me to fuck him.  Well you know me, I’ll try anything once, but when he pulled off his overhauls, what did I find but him in a pair of pink girl’s panties! And he starts moanin, “Oh fuck me, officer, fuck me for speeding.”  I don’t know where he came up with that one.  The only thing about me that looked like a policeman that day was some leftover powdered donut on my shirt from the Krispy Creme in Clark’s Summit.  But anyway, he’s going on,  “I don’t have the money for a ticket, so you’ll just have to fuck me for speeding.”  Then he proceeds to pull off those panties and I can see why he made up the speeding part, because tracked down the center of them was a thick, brown racing stripe.  I mean, this Mary might have been speeding, but god knows he put on the brakes and left some pretty wide skid marks before he got to me.

Even then, I was ready to forge ahead. I had been driving for about 4 hours and had another 2 to go and I needed something to relieve the monotony, but just as I was about to go down, I was hit in the face with a smell that was packing almost as much cargo as that truck.  I haven’t smelled that much shit since I saw the last Mamet play on Broadway.  Then he wiggles around, and honestly this was the part that made me run screaming from that cab, he wiggles around and put that pink, pimpled ass of his up in the air and all I could see was hole hair and shit smears.  I tell you, that was it. Good Night Irene.  You could have forced me to drive another 2 hundred miles.  I would have done every inch of them within the speed limit just so’s I wouldn’t have to take another look or have another whiff of that sewer.

But you know, now that I have the diner and Arthur, I have no need for rest stops and truck cabs.  I’m fine with him, flawed though he is.  Happy to watch his four wheeled drive, all-terrain Wrangler pull up the road and watch him fuss over any dog hair, Peter, our Labrador leaves on the seat.  I built a bench on the hill overlooking the stream and Arthur and I sit there at dusk looking down into the ravine to see if we can catch sight of the Kingfisher that’s built a nest down there or watch a hawk dive from the pines to catch a small, sharp meal.  We sit there sometimes almost an hour, before he says he’s got to go to bed or wants to watch something on the TV.  His favorite shows are cop show.  He likes to sit on the sofa, neat as a pin, and glue his eyes to the NYPD or Los Angeles Police Force and watch the drama unfold.  When I catch him like that, from my vantage at the kitchen counter…leafing through a seed catalogue or fingering the handle of a coffee mug... I think to myself, ‘boy oh boy, can I pick ‘em’.


Saturday, December 11, 2010

Before He Goes Down


This Monday, I found out that Uncle Bob died.  I spoke to his children on the phone, my cousins, who seemed grateful in that way you do when an illness goes on too long and your nerves are tied up in balls; when after tripping over anxious moment after moment, the news finally arrives, the body sighs, and the silence settles in.

I didn’t go to the funeral because the scheduling and driving would have been bad.  Too much coffee, too much bustling, too much forgetting, too much strategizing…all so I could tell cousins I haven’t seen for years that I cared.  I called them instead.  They seemed grateful of the fact that there was one less person they had to thank for condolences that they really…that no one really ever wants.

So instead of going there, I pretended that Uncle Bob was with me all day on Tuesday…a funny thought because trotting around with a gay New Yorker is the last thing that U. Bob would have done.  Still, death must have loosened him up because I felt a distinct presence.  We drove together to my account in Long Island and with his help I turned an incredibly bad situation around.  After that, I came back to the city and enjoyed two successful business calls, a quick stop at the gym, and some productive, smart work on the computer over a martini and a small meal.  Then, like cards played out in a perfectly stacked deck and the evening was magic

I’ll tell you a short story, but I’m not sure why.  About three years ago, I met this cute jew-boy.  Couldn’t have been more than 20.  He’d been flirting with his homosexuality for years and I was his first plunge.  After a day of laughing and fake spars and too many touches that were supposed to be casual, he was back in my apartment and we were kissing very softly.  After a few minutes, he took my hand in his and held it up next to my face.  Then as though being lowered into a pit, he slowly sank to his knees.  He never stopped looking at me and that look I’ve never forgotten nor really ever understood.  A challenge?  A plea?  I don’t know.

Back at the farm, I’m watching my dog trot merrily through icy fields.  In her mouth she carries the bloody entrails of a recently gutted deer.  The paradox is disturbing.  The golden, morning light reflected not only off each white, frosty blade and her own truly satisfied self, but off the rust-red and dried blood of these ripped guts. For all I know, that deer once trotted those same fields, maybe as recently as one week ago, and now this upside down, inverted turn of events; this implosion of life or what we think is life:  same trot, same field, same guts, entirely different happening.

I have read that once decapitated, the head remains alive for a bit, staring, blinking, wondering at it’s own bodiless self.  I think about Uncle Bob come to live for a day in New York City and me in bed lost with a man who feels like a woman.  In the end, how will the others and I be?  The same march of petulant thought, the same clamor of squalls, but this time through the back of our eyes and through ways inside we never thought possible.

Monday, December 6, 2010

Summer Plants in Winter



Before I moved here, too excited to think, I bought a number of tropical vines I thought would look good draped over the outside balcony.  Unfortunately the construction dragged on and by the time the vines were ready to do their spreading, they were forced to stay indoors in their dry pots and enjoy the outside world through the sterile distance of window glass. 

Not to state the obvious, but there’s something unnatural about green plants in the winter.  Firstly, they never look like they’re comfortable with the situation.  They always look a little dry and dusty, a little burned and browned around the edges.  They sit in salt stained pots, in dirty dishes that catch water.  For all the reasons we seem to want our greenery to last the winter through with us, they give us none of them. 

Maybe in our efforts to keep those plants alive, we are in a way wishing someone would take care of us.   Not necessarily allowing us to thrive, but survive the coming cold and live again to see warmer, embracing air.

In addition to my desiccated vines, I’m forcing some bulbs that are on track to be blooming by the 1st of the year. There’s another inexact science.  I have 10 or so in a ceramic window box and another ten in an antique chamber pot.   There’s gravel in the bottom, a good deal actually, and a healthy dose of compost.  I even gathered some fresh moss to put around the top so I could make each pot ‘floral grade’.  Still, they have erupted unevenly and I wonder…is it something I’ve done?

The other day a woman drove up selling fall bulbs for her daughter’s gymnastics class.  She had the girl in tow, a malnourished, bespectacled child with tape on her glasses.  The conversation was hard as I could see that the woman was trying her best to snoop.  I bought a bag of 10 crocuses and called it a day.  I planned on putting them in between the stones of the patio, but the weather took a cold turn and there was no way to get all the bulbs in on time, so I decided to force them.

Fall bulbs like crocuses have chilling requirements, so you just can’t pot them up and expect them to sprout, they have to be exposed to a certain amount of cold first.  The pot I had was ceramic, so there was no chance I could just leave them outside.  The first freeze would expand the moist soil and crack the pot, but I didn’t want to live with a pot in my refrigerator for the next 6 weeks either, so this is what I did.

I potted them up, then put them in a box insulated with Styrofoam (it was an old vaccine shipment box I had lying around).  I then stuffed straw around the pot, closed the lid and buried it in the fresh manure pile I have next to the barn.  The manure is ‘working’ so once I dug down deep enough, I could feel the heat of the living microbes.  I placed the box in the warm hole and covered it.  This morning when I checked, the outside of the pile was frozen, but I know that inside, that pile is still working and the bulbs are probably snug in a 40 to 50 degree environment.  I’ll unearth them in early February and bring them indoors.  They’ll be perfect on a windowsill of hot, spring, white light. 

Those flowers won’t be unnatural against a white back drop of flying snow, but the first marching steps towards warmth and the summer they insist will come. 

Saturday, December 4, 2010

Winter Vacation

Do you know what I was thinking about last night?  I was thinking about those times when you’re a kid when your parents take you to Florida or the Outer Banks or a trip to Canada to go fishing.  They wake you up in the middle of the night to get ready.  Did that ever happen to you? 

I would have a difficult time falling asleep initially because of all the anticipation, but the next thing you know its five in the morning and mom is harshly whispering in the darkness of my room,  “Get up, it’s time to get going.”  She would even flip the light on.  She had no mercy.  I had one of those hard, domineering mothers you hear about when discussing the parents of gays.

She was probably hung over.  My mom was an evening drinker. After a day of concentrated housework in which things were cleaned with discipline and regiment, she would settle into a five o’clock cocktail while monitoring something simmering on the stove.

By dinnertime, she was primed to be more lighthearted, but she could turn quickly if something set her off.  Usually it was something on the news:

“How about that!  Raped that little girl?  What do you boys think they should do with a guy like that?  I’ll tell you what I would do.  I would take that guy out into the middle of the woods and I would make him take that thing of his out and I would cut it off and put it in his mouth.  That’s what I would do.”

It was something to think about while chewing your pot roast.

My father died when my brother and I were young, a car accident, and my mother took over his business, a roadside bar and grill.  It was called the Duncanvilla and under my mother’s hard watch, it became very successful.  Men from all around used to come in for her famous meatball sandwiches and enjoyed the bullying, no-nonsense lip she gave them.  She could be coy when needed and at other times, cold and tough.  There were very few she couldn’t handle and when one came along that she couldn’t she coaxed the other regulars to pressure him to leave.  Her business partner was in the mob; she looked down the barrel of a revolver during one robbery; and one of her barmaids, as she called her staff of all-women bartenders, was rumored to have murdered her first husband.

My twin brother and I each had a different relationship with her.  My brother was a hot shot when we were in school, a lady’s man, cocky and smart.  He was Born To Be Wild as they say and that kind of behavior in my mother’s eyes was like a gauntlet thrown down.  She came at him with both barrels blazing and Jesus did they fight.  Mine was a more smoldering relationship.  Conflicted about my sexuality, I was moody and distant which could also set my mother off, especially on days when she was a little rough around the edges after a night of drinking.

Years and years later, long after I had come out to her and my family, long after my brother married (to an alcoholic btw), my mother got sick with cancer and I left my job in NYC to return to Pa and take care of her.  It was an incredibly fulfilling experience.   We rarely fought.  Actually, we became oddball friends.  Good friends.  We talked, ate together, drove around in the car.  We didn’t spend that much time together, but the time we had was truly enjoyable.  It wasn’t till the last two months of her life, 60 long cruel days, that the experience became almost unbearable.  She was so sick she couldn’t eat, couldn’t talk.  She just lied in her bed and wasted away but she would not die.  She seemed to face death with the same angry stare, the same icy poker face that she must have given that man with the revolver.  My mother didn’t greet oncoming death with contrition; she looked it in the face and without blinking seemed to say, “Yeah?  What about it?”

The night before she died, I gave her more morphine than I should have.  It wasn’t my idea; it was the hospice nurse’s.  Before the last injection, I told my mother that I thought she was beautiful and called her my beautiful angel.  She sighed…a kind of huff that was riddled with fatigue and perhaps contempt.  I left the room with her staring angrily at the space above her.  Silent and armed to the end.

I went to bed unsure if she would make it.  About 3am I was awakened by a telephone call.  I answered and a seductive, male voice asked me if Angel was there.  Confused a bit, I stuttered so the voice repeated, “Is Angel there?”  We live in a very white, blue-collar town; there are no women or men called Angel where I live.  Toughening up, I queried, “Who is this?”  And in the same seductive tones, the voice repeated, “Is Angel there?”  Then the caller hung up.

The next morning, I woke to find my mother dead.  I recalled our conversation during which time I called her my Angel and I remembered the eerie late night phone call.  I *69ed the number and it came up blocked.  The man never called again and I never found out who it was.

It was the height of February cold and snow when she died, but I had been preparing for it for weeks by buying forced, spring-bulbs to decorate her room and bringing in vases of forsythia and ornamental quince to bloom.  It had all timed out perfectly and that day, when I waked her in her room, mourners sat with her in a space filled with spring scent and blossoms.   By 10pm the funeral director came.  It was heart wrenching to let go of this woman after guarding her for so long.  In her room, I made brief preparations.  I tore out all of the hateful tubing, catheters and bandages, changed her clothes and brushed her hair.  In the inside pocket of her nightgown I placed a picture of my brother, her, the dog and me. It was a shot of us crouching before a rhododendron bush, years earlier when that bush was much shorter and so little experience had passed.  Those were the days when the trip to Florida was just around the corner.  A night of anticipation and then a harsh whisper in the middle of the night.  “You boys get up.  It’s time to go.”


  


Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Arabian Nights




Hey, I think a blog or two back, I talked about wanting to crawl on my knees to find this one guy I wanted to fuck, right? Well, I had my chance last night.

As usual, my regular squeeze was MIA, so I went looking online and the next thing I know, I’m chatting up this Egyptian guy…the one I told you about earlier.  Now I don’t know if I told you this, but I have a real THING for Middle Eastern men.  I love their politeness, their grooming, their accents, their asses, their textiles, their tea, you name it.  And when this rose-lipped, bubble-assed beauty said that I could come over and fuck him, I practically tripped over myself scrambling out the door.

I started to worry when 5 minutes, then 10 minutes and again at 12 minutes into the journey, he called to find out where I was.  Where I was??? Jesus Christ, if I had been moving any faster, I would have had to get NASA to plot an orbital velocity. 

So I get there, and this guy is so fucked up on Meth, he can barely function.  I ‘m hardly in the door before he starts:  “Take it out, take it out, take it out. Let me see it. Let me see it. Take it out.  Take it out.  Take it out.  Awww that’s great.   That’s beautiful.  Touch my tits, touch my tits, touch my tits.  Let me hold it, let me hold it, let me hold it.”    This man shouldn’t have been a drug addict; he should have been a driving instructor. 

And it only got worse when we were in the bedroom. “ Push it in, push it in, push it in.  That’s enough!  That’s enough!  Stop.  No.  More!  Leave it there! Touch my tits.  Touch my tits.  That’s it baby. Now push it in, ½ a centimeter more, just ½ a centimeter. 

Jesus Christ!  Now I needed to know metric conversion.  He had me pushing and touching, twisting and fiddling.  It’s a small wonder that with all that dialing, I didn’t tune in a television program.

“Come on baby, get it hard for me, get it hard for me, get it hard for me.”  How the fuck can I get it hard?  I’m too busy taking all this direction!

Finally I told him I had it and packed up and left.  But before I went, he reminded me that we had hooked up years ago when he lived in another apartment further south in Chelsea.  It all came back.  I had gone over to his apartment on a late Sunday afternoon.  He was high then too, but he was much healthier and in far better shape then.  I remember thrilling that I had bagged such a beauty.  His ass was twice the size then that it was now in his current wasted frame.  I remember sunlight coming into the room.  I remember fucking him and a feeling that he was remote…distancing himself from the man that was attached to the cock that was up his ass.   I remember cumming in him at his insistence and then an awkward, quiet goodbye.   

I hadn’t seen him in all these years.   What had happened?  That beautiful body?  There were pictures on his wall of his family…taken some time ago, they showed a healthier frame on him.  Now they were in shadows in his darkened, messy apartment.  The health of his past, the zest of his life…now a grainy backdrop to this mad, jacked-up....  I wished I had known him better before…before he had come to this.  For a few seconds I enjoyed a fantasy where we were out together, talking and enjoying each other’s company.  I took another look at the dark wall with all the pictures.  Which of those older folks were his parents?  Who were the children he held his arms?   Those images, that man, that youth and now this quaking, bug-eyed collapse he had become.

You know, I pull back and think to myself…what has a farmer to do with all these urban tales?  Where is the talk of baling hay and how to balm an utter? 

Well I’ll tell you this.  At my farm, there is a steep hill, the face of which is covered with tall, dark, solemn hemlock.  There they stand each morning and night to look down upon me in stoic silence.  Firm, immutable, cold.  Beneath their height and shadow I am nothing other than the choices I make, stupid or clever or funny or kind.  No response from them, encouragement or clues.  I am left before them, my tiny actions, however good or bad, my pathetic attempts at reckoning what should and should not be, with the only knowledge that mistakes are swiftly and irrevocably punished.