An interesting weekend, so far

I got the extension on my deadline for the next book, and I feel much happier for it. Putting up this new site felt great -- the old one, designed by the incomparable Kate Gilbert, was nearly impossible to update since my hard drive crashed and I lost my software, and it had looked the same since 2001, which is just decades now. But then yesterday morning I heard from Samantha, my little volunteer-ee, and she is in the hospital with pneumonia. I say right away that I'll visit that evening. The hospital is on Rockaway Parkway and Linden Boulevard in East New York; I will take the 3 train seventeen stops into Brooklyn, get out, and walk three quarters of a mile. This doesn't bother me -- I'm used to shitty neighborhoods, to being the only white face; besides, I'm always affecting my little bourgeoise take on the boriqua thing, with the topknot and the gold hoops. I'll fit right in.

Yeah. No. I've just stepped out from the Saratoga Avenue station, and I believe I may be in Compton. Pit bulls strain behind chain-link fences, as clusters of young men crowd the corners, yelling at each other from across the street, "You better watch that shit, yo, you better watch it!" Seriously, one group of guys started yelling that at another as I was passing, and the frozen calm expression on my face nearly cracked. Just walk casually, at the same pace as these eight-year-olds in front of me. They're not falling for my doting, condescending, beatific white woman smile; they look at me like, "What the fuck are you doing here, cracker bitch?"

I'm walking, I'm walking, I hope it's the right way. A woman with Jehovah's Witness literature -- "Excuse me, is the hospital this way? Thank you." I get to the building, finally, but I can't see the entrance. I start to walk around and around...

And by now it's 6:20, and I am going to have to turn around and leave at 6:50 if I'm going to get home in time to meet Bill and Edward for our every-other-Friday-night creative conferral, and I can't find the fucking entrance. I believe I am in the parking lot. I am going to cry if I can't fucking find this entrance right now. I walk into the first door I see, which is where the trash is taken out, and ask someone where I'm going. At long last, I find the place, and get my pass, and go up to her room.

She's asleep. She looks like hell. I write her a note and leave the book I brought, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. She wakes up for a minute, but I tell her to get back to sleep, we'll talk soon. She nods, and dozes off again immediately.

I leave the hospital, and I can't find my bearings. I walk and walk in what I think is the right direction. This isn't so bad, I kept telling myself. You're just being a racist. The neighborhood's not so shitty. Look at all the kids, look at the families, look at the cars. The burned out buildings, the abandoned lots, the rundown storefronts. The men striding across the street, arms out, elbows akimbo like wings. I see the elevated tracks of the subway from a few blocks away, and head that way. I get on the train, and it feels good to be going home.

Volunteer Notes

So I volunteer at the shelter where I lived back in 1984, when I left home. Every Wednesday, I shlep my bag full of beads and jewlery making supplies up to the Older Females unit (girls ages 18 - 21), and we sit around and make beads for a few hours. I am known as "Bead Lady."

In order to protect the girls' privacy, these notes date back at least a year from the time they're posted, and names and other identifying details have been changed. This first entry is from April 2004:

Dispatch

I brought two movies and the CD I burned for Kisha, and some books I got free from Kirkus Reviews – some “Angel” novelizations, some new Nancy Drew. Corny, but the spines are new and bright, and the stuff is reading-level appropriate, as opposed to the few shelves’ worth of incomplete, expired encyclopedias and coverless Michener paperbacks. I check in with Marlene, the head of the unit, who I haven't seen for a few weeks. She asks if I can help her with some filing, and corrects me for doing something wrong. I don't want to be rude or shirksome, but I would rather be on the floor right now, even if there's no one in the lounge.

I shove papers around, then the girls come back from dinner (5:30), and I throw in "Bringing Down the House" with Steve Martin and Queen Latifah. There are only two girls in the lounge, and they're shy, so we all sit there quietly, occasionally laughing. There's a scene where Queen Latifah is fighting a skinny WASP who does crazy kickboxing aerobic moves, and it's surprisingly violent, so that's when one of the pastors walks in, and just sort of stands and watches these two women, one black and one white, beat each other's asses. He asks the name of the movie, and I supply it. I say, "It's rated PG." Even though these women are 18 to 21. But last week they were watching the movie “Belly” and Precious came in and said, "This movie is all about black men killing black men. And the white man profit." So I figured I'd bring a comedy. Also, cursing is joyfully engaged in by some, but very much frowned upon by some other residents. Noted.

After the movie, three girls want to go to the clothing room. I tell the Resident Assistant on duty, she gives me the key. I introduce myself to N’bushe, Karen, and Big Cee, who has a tattoo on her ankle that says “Big Cee.” Big Cee says her mother has ovarian cancer, and that’s why she’s here. She was at her father’s in Florida, but “that didn’t work out.” There is nothing in the clothing room that fits Big Cee, as there is nothing big enough to fit Karen, and there was nothing last week big enough for Princess. They need some big clothes, and they need to buy the girls bras, because a lot of them only have one. N’bushe and Karen point out things they think are hideous and laugh at each other. I flip through the Daily News left in the clothing room and note that Nelly and Ashanti were seen leaving a hotel in the early morning hours. I read this item aloud, it elicits a modicum of interest. Sadly, I have no follow up. The girls all take some of the generic corporately donated t-shirts that come in unisex sizes up to 2XL, and N’bushe takes two pairs of cropped pants, one blue, one green. They sign the book, I sign after them, and take them back up and across to 5A, where three more girls decide they, now, want to go to the clothing room.

Brenda is very animated, funny, slipping in and out of voices. Yvette is unbraiding her orange and yellow-blonde braids. The third girl, the one who decides to come at the last minute – I don’t get her name. Brenda asks Yvette, “Why you don’t get someone to do that for you?” Yvette sucks her teeth. “Cuz ain’t nobody loves me, ‘swhy.” Yvette sounds like she is smoking a cigarette as she speaks, it’s a very throaty, faint wheeze, very gangsta. I can barely tell what the hell she is saying. She has a cast on two fingers, and she says, “Ow, my fingers hurt.” I ask what happened, and she smiles at a point just to the right of my face and says, “Punch.” There is nothing big enough for Yvette, so she gets a white 2XL Nintendo Mario Brothers polo shirt. Brenda finds eight hundred things and takes them all. Third Girl got a few things. I want to get her name when she signs the book, but it’s indecipherable.

Back in the lounge, we are now watching American Idol, and Fantasia Barrino is on stage, singing her own wheezy ass off. Big Cee is sucking her thumb and rubbing her left ear. Four girls are playing spades at the table, six or seven watching the show. John Stevens comes on, and they are apoplectic. “He so white he blue!” “Shut up, you Harry Potter motherfucker!” The really loud girl, the one who loves to curse as loud and as much as possible to piss off the ones who don’t like it, yells, “You look like a cock! sucker!” She is, improbably, crocheting.

I see Kisha, and I give her the CD. It’s Michael Jackson’s “Off the Wall,” because last week she was telling me that Michael was innocent of the child abuse charges, and that he meant a lot to her “when she was a kid.” She is casual about accepting it, as I am about giving it to her, though it has been burning a hole in my hand since I got here. I said, “How was your day? Did you get the job at Nathan’s?” She did, but she doesn’t want it. I don’t blame her. She would like to be a talk show host/producer. She needs help with her resume, so we sit down and work on it, and draft a cover letter. She’s looking for secretarial work so she doesn’t have to do fast food. We talk about producing, which I used to do at Pseudo, and how shows are organized and taped. She wonders if she will change after she is wealthy and famous. She would like to stay hood, she says, but she would also like to aspire to more.

Ode to Procrastination

Give up, give in, the car's in the mud
The baby's underneath, the keys are in the trunk.
Have a cigarette; it's not New year's yet.
Happy birthday, stupid poem.

(2003)

Ashleigh's Spring Break

I only slept with one guy – two guys – before we got down here, and now I’ve been with like six, if you count blow jobs as sex. I’ve been with like a different guy every night, and we’re going back tomorrow so tonight’s our last night, I don’t even know what I’m going to do. Lots of people left today, but me and Jenny and Sparks, we’re going back tomorrow.

It’s weird all these people are gone, like those guys from Duke, we were partying with them on Friday in their room and when we left they said they’d see us tomorrow, and then when we went to see them this morning they were gone. Jenny was so bummed out, she was crying, I guess for whatever reason she thought she really liked that one guy Jeff or James or Jamie, and they were going to stay in touch and visit, and then they kind of sneaked out, like they didn’t say goodbye, they just left.

I mean I knew my guy I was with had a girlfriend, he told me, you can go down on me, give me a blowjob, whatever, but I can’t have sex with you because I have a girlfriend. And he was so drunk, we were both totally messed up, we were drinking these things they said were Long Island Ice Teas, but I think it was just like ice tea mix and grain alcohol. I had like four of them, three or four, and he had like eight, and I was like, dude, you can’t even get it up, much less worry about having sex. So we were just like messing around, he was fingering me and I was trying to give him a blowjob and he was practically passing out.

But he was so hot, he was so sexy, he had sandy blond hair and light eyes and a really ripped body. All the guys I was with down here were super hot. Except the guy from the beach bar the third night, he was like older and he wasn’t that hot at all, I don’t even know why I went with him except I was totally wasted. We were drinking these frozen drinks like strawberry margaritas, raspberry margaritas, all thse flavors, those guys got us wristbands even though we totally didn’t have ID except Sparks, who has this real fake looking ID she got from online. Anyway they hooked us up with wristbands and I just got totally floored and Jenny was with this guy who looked, like, a lot older, like he probably wasn’t even a breaker, he was like a local guy or something. And I went with his friend, whose name was Dee, and the next day we didn’t even want to pass by there because we didn’t want them to see us and recognize us, we just wanted to hide from them, we were like, “mistake, mistake number one!”

Like, Dee was in his twenties at least and he had curly hair, which I am so not into, like I think he might have been Jewish or something. Actually, probably not, I’m pretty sure he wasn’t. And like everyone else down here has been really into partying and having fun, and he just seemed kind of, I don’t know, sad or something, maybe because he was older and there were all these other guys who were so much hotter than him, like so much hotter. And I told Jenny the next day, I said, “If you see me with somebody who’s not totally hot, like Josh Hartnett hot, pull me off him.” And she was like, “Whatever, like I’m paying attention to what you do, I’m busy with my own thing.”

But whatever, so we didn’t go back there, actually that day we didn’t even make it down to the beach, we didn’t even go out of the room hardly, all of us were all so hungover, and MerriLynn and Katie came in around noon and they saw us and they were like, "you girls are sad and pathetic and sad some more, you’re some sorry hoes." And Sparks was trying to say fuck you, but her face was all in a pillow cause they turned on the light, so it came out FUNFOO. So all trip since then we’ve been going FUNFOO, when we get really drunk like we’re yelling at guys in cars, or some girls are trying to be bitches, we’re like FUNFOO, and we’re totally cracking up and they have no idea, they’re like, those girls are crazy!

And MerriLynn and Katie and Jess and Other Ashley all left yesterday too, they were like, "we’re so done here," and whatever, they had a little attitide about us staying the extra night, like didn’t you guys party enough? Like ucccch. Like they’re better than us? MerriLynn shouldn’t talk, she’s the one who flashed her tits at the guys from Duke which is how we got to meet them in the first place. But she’s all, “I’m a tease, I’m not a slut.” Which she was just saying to make Sparks feel bad because of what happened the night before, when Sparks got drunk and passed out and had sex with, like, four guys at once or something. And she was feeling really weird about it, like if she hadn’t been so passed out she probably would have said no, or something. But whatever, that’s her business, we’re here to do whatever and have fun, and what we do on Spring Break stays at Spring Break.

I mean, crazy stuff goes on down here, not just getting drunk and hooking up, you know? Like they have this radio station down here that plays all the best music, all the party music, and they have this stage set up on the beach and they have like wet-shirt contests and wet boxer shorts for the guys, and they have like musical chairs, but instead of chairs its guys sitting there and only girls can play and when the music stops you’re like sitting right on some guy’s boner. And all these guys are just freaking out, and some of them are really rude, this one guy was hammered, his face was like purple and he was yelling, SUCK MY, you know, COCK, SUCK MY COCK, WOOOOO!

And it wasn’t even 1pm, I was like, can’t you even wait til nighttime? I mean, we were all pretty sauced, I doubt I’d be having guys do body shots out of my belly button if I wasn’t tanked, but we were at least mellow about it. We just wanted to have fun, lay on the beach, maybe go in the pool, but the pool where we were at, there was this group of guys who were really grabby, they kept trying to take off girls bathing suits and stuff, and people were spilling their drinks all in the pool and it was, like, scummy. But once we found where that radio station had the stage, that’s where we hung out. I mean, it’s not MTV, they’re about an hour north of here, and we’re all like, duh, that’s where we should have gone. We could have seen some celebrities and gotten on TV and stuff.

But whatever, there’s some local news crews going around, and Jenny was all excited last night because she saw these guys with a big camera and mic and everything, and she was like, “It’s those guys from Girls Gone Wild, let’s go flash them!” And she’s yelling and chasing after them, I was grabbing her back, I was like, “Don’t do it! Jenny, you totally don’t want to wind up on some commercial they show on, like, the Man Show, your dad would freak out and kill you!” And she’s like, “Fuck my dad and fuck you, I’m going over there, and you’re just jealous because you’re too fat for Girls Gone Wild, they don’t want chubbies like you!” And I know she was drunk, but I have to say that hurt my feelings. I mean, just cause I wasn’t bulemic from 9th to 11th grade until my family finally caught on and put me on Zoloft, doesn’t mean that nobody wants to see my tits.

So I was like, “forget her,” and I let go of her shirt and she ran over there, but it wasn’t even Girls Gone Wild, it was some other thing, like a documentary, and there were all these guys with camcorders around and they’re all chanting, SHOW YOUR TITS, SHOW YOUR TITS, and it freaked her out I guess, because she wouldn’t flash them and she ran back over to us, and she was like, “Forget it, if it’s not even Girls Gone Wild, if it’s some stupid cheesy thing then I don’t want to do it.” And I was like, “Thank god, Jenny.” Thank god.

(2003)

Dear Jen,

I don’t know you, but I think about you a lot, and today I felt like I had to tell you, I really love you. Is that stupid? You must get so many letters like this. It must be frustrating, not being able to tell everyone who you really are, not being able to say, “You don’t even know me, how can you think you love me?” I’ve had people who don’t know me tell me they feel connected to me somehow. I’ve had stalkers, erotomaniacs in my life, and it’s not only scary, it’s lonely. It makes you feel less loved, less understood, less genuinely known and seen and appreciated. So you see, I’m doing it again, imagining that I understand exactly what you feel like when you read this. I can’t help it.

I know everyone says this, but you and I are really so similar, Jen. We come from the same place. We’re both urban Jewish girls with divorced parents, on the prowl in Manhattan – I mean, you’re a year older than me, and you hang out more uptown, but I could be you. You could be me. Maybe your clothes are a little bit nicer. In essence, we are the same.

Like what you said to Robert that night. “Sex with you was the best sex I ever had.” I heard that, and it hit me all the way down my spine. Isn’t that my line? Didn’t I say that, more than once? My tongue flickering in some guy’s ear, a sixteen-year-old seductress, trying to get him to remember that one night when he wanted me, before I became a joke. Letting him know he was the greatest stud in the world, and I’d do anything, anything, if he would only use me for his own pleasure. “Sex with you was the best sex I ever had.” That’s exactly what I would have said.

See, I totally understand. I could have fallen in love with him too, Jen, easy. That proud, ruthless, intelligent face. So tall, so indifferent. And then he fucks you one night, out of the blue, and you feel like the most special receptacle of his greatness. You feel like he recognizes greatness in you, and he hates it because he loves it so much, and that’s why he fucks you so roughly, so rough that at the end of it you are in pain, and in love. It’s like an Ayn Rand rape scene. He owns you now, and he despises you. It’s the best sex you ever had.

That’s what you tell him. And it works. And the two of you go off to fuck in the park. You’re so happy, Jen, you’re so fucking psyched. You’re buzzed, it’s warm out, and the best looking guy at the bar is leaving with you, with a raised eyebrow and a little smirk to his friends. You’re going to get fucked raw tonight, and maybe afterward he will tell you the secret to his pure, violent passions. Something he’s never told the countless other girls he’s used and sneered at, the ones he only fucked once. You’re thrilled as your bare back hits the ground, as he fumbles to get himself undone. Twice means he loves you. It means he can’t stay away.

Oh, Christ, here I am doing it again, I’m acting like I was there, and I wasn’t. I’m so sorry, Jen. I over-identify. I’m just like the rest of your groupies. We feel like we know what you went through. You were all alone that night, fighting, clawing his face as he beat and choked you, why? It didn’t matter. Your neck, compressed, his horrible teeth bared as you fought for breath. Then the slipping away. How sweet, to go to sleep after all that awfulness. Just to let go and not have him killing you anymore. I wish you could have killed him instead, Jen. But I’m glad you got to go to sleep.

They read your diaries in court. It was like reading my own. The diaries were supposed to prove something about girls like us, girls who fucked in parks after drinking in bars. It proved to me that we were the same. You wanted a boyfriend, you wanted to have fun. You were going to college. You couldn’t wait to meet the guys there. It was all so close to home. The picture of you and your two friends, smiling so satisfied and wide, just like the one of me and Spring and Bronwen in my wallet, raising our drinks with our cigarettes dangling and our sunglasses askew. There was an army of us that summer, tough girls, sexy girls, wild girls. You and me, Jen. BFF. For-evah.

You know, he’s out now. You probably don’t want to hear about him. Maybe part of you does. I’d be interested, if I were you. I’ve been looking for him. I want to see him somewhere. I don’t know what I’m going to do when I see him. But I want to see him. I guess that makes me a stalker. You know he gets tons of fan mail. I feel like that’s really unfair. I guess that’s what this letter is. I’m your biggest fan.

Your biggest fan. Like I’m a sixteen-year-old girl all over again, that summer you were seventeen. Half a life ago. Jen, I’m sorry, I’ve had all this in my heart for so many years. People have encouraged me to let go. I can’t let you go, Jen, because you are not gone. Jen, I was thinking about you again today, how much I miss you, how much I wish you were alive. I hope you get this letter, Jen.

I love you,

Janice

(2003)

How do married people masturbate

How do married people masturbate?
What do they picture when they come?
They think of the guy at the office, the girl
In the video, her asshole stretched, wincing;
Ex-girlfriends, ex-boyfriends, the ones they still hate.
There’s nothing safe to think about, they fall asleep.

This is how you prepare to go to sleep,
How you wake up, how you run home and masturbate.
Everybody does it! Why can’t you? You hate
Me for wanting to fuck when you just want to come –
I turn to stroke you, you turn away, wincing.
I don’t care if you think about another girl.

I would want to fuck her too, that girl,
Anybody but me, laying next to you asleep,
A big fat fucking obstacle to your wincing
Nightly ritual: Pop in a tape and masturbate,
Watch that girl get drilled. Two minutes to come.
You mop up, drift off. You burned off some hate.

Not me. I walk around with mine. I hate
What I saw on that tape. I thought, poor girl,
She’s in pain and she has to pretend to come.
I lay next to you that night, unable to sleep,
Therefore you were unable to masturbate.
The clock shined mean and bright in the dark. We winced.

Some nights I straddle a pillow, wincing,
Squeezing at thoughts I don’t want to think, I hate
The way you come to me when I masturbate.
Face down on my belly, I look like that girl.
I writhe a while. I give up. I go to sleep.
I don’t come. It’s okay. I don’t need to come.

I don’t care what you think about when you come,
As long as it’s me you’re fucking, wincing,
Waiting for you to get off and slump, fall asleep.
You are faithful. I have no right to hate
You, hate myself, hate the hundreds of girls
With their assholes stretched, so you can masturbate.

I know who you are when you masturbate. I come
Into the room, kiss your forehead, your lover girl. Why are you wincing?
Your toes curl in silence. I hate you. I love you too. Let’s go to sleep.

(2003)

Socrates was a girl

Socrates was a girl
in his youth. Pre-sex, like a
manta ray, she swam down
canals and somersaults,
torrents, rushing to meet
her lover, her own
idea. They was always
shoving a corn cob dollie in her
shivering mug, a broom. A bride.
She thought, I have to get a pair of pants on
before I burn the building down.

Suicide was a girl, gutless.
You don't talk about the vomit.
The regret. A teacher told her,
A person can never try to do
a thing. They either do, or
they don't.
Who are you? If you're dead?

I made a mistake, she thinks,
half off a bridge. I'm flying.

Finally, the feminine method.
I alone will derive. My hoe, my wink
to the empty room. My noosed
neck, a headrest. A pillow for the
afternoon. Does that answer it?
I'm satisfied. No such thing as an
imperfect circle. When completely empty,
complete.

(2003)

A much better day today.

Sunshine, for one, which is such a relief, and makes me think of the summer ahead, and Fire Island. Plus I finished this last bit of revision on the memoir yesterday, and I am very happy with it. It's so simple with me: When the writing is going well, I feel good. When it's not, I feel bad. That's it.

It was also very heartening to do this reading on Sunday night, at Cheryl B.'s series, Atomic. First of all, some lovely people came, including Chuck Funk, Edward Clapp, Michael Stewart, Jen DeMeritt, Todd Seavey and his girlfriend Nancy, Steve and Pam Rosenbaum, and my old cohorts from the Pussy Poets, Anne Elliott and Gloria. I really enjoyed the other readers (Steve Caratzas, Sara Seinberg, and Elizabeth Whitney), and the response to my stuff was great. Also met a very cool lady who just sold her memoir to Algonquin, Felicia Sullivan. I seriously enjoyed talking to everyone I met and saw that night, and I loved being on stage reading, and I thought, "Why can't being a writer be more like THIS, and less like sitting at home banging my head against an empty screen?"

Anyway, it's beautiful out, and I shouldn't be inside. I have to leave for my volunteer shift at the shelter soon, don't even feel as burnt out as I usually do, hope it'll be an easy night. I'm a week behind in my volunteer notes, and I was thinking of going to see Soce tonight at Galapagos, but really, how often do I leave my house if I don't absolutely need to?

A: Not fucking often. But I'll do it now.

(originally written 4/6/05)

I don't know how I feel.

We had a really nice day yesterday -- got up, and I did my four mile run, then we walked another four miles over the Brooklyn Bridge, one of my favorite walks in the city. We went to Junior's and ate eight miles worth of cheesecake and looked at all the people in their Easter wear, then we walked up to the Brooklyn Museum, past all the top sites on the Janice Erlbaum Reality Tour -- the place I lived when I was sixteen, the place I lived when I was twenty-five through twenty-nine, the place I ran away from when I was fifteen. I asked Bill to stop into the stationers so I could see if the women who dresses like Elvira is still there, and she is, with her long black mullet-style Elvira hair and her low cut black shirt. She must be sixty by now.

The Basquiat show made me happy, I always get happy and excited when I look at his work, I feel like I'm back in the 80s and anything is about to happen.

Then I went to Collective:Unconscious for Faceboy's Sunday night open mic, which is something I used to do religiously, and haven't done in almost a year. The new CU space is nice enough, feels a lot like the old one, and there were plenty of old faces at the place, and even some friends. I haven't been on stage except for readings in forever -- it's different when you're up there to talk to people, to relate to them instead of just reading off a page. And it felt great, it felt amazing. It's like a vitamin that I've been missing. And yet, I don't want to go back there, to that same old place, with the same old people, most of whom are doing exactly the same stuff. And that feels sad.

I have a lot of writing to do, as always. Still haven't updated my volunteer notes from last Weds., totally slacking on that. I think I took the cone off our cat Velvet's head prematurely and now the stitches in her belly from being fixed are going to come out, and she's going to heal all wonky. I am the best-intentioned worst cat mom there is.

(originally written 3/28/05)

The Feeling

The feeling of wanting to write a poem
and not knowing what you want it to say.
You want to write about the feeling itself,
the premonition you have when you pass
the chair where you write, the clairvoyance
lurking in the corner of the room where the
dead cat sat and blinked at you like a cursor,
the live one threatening to step on the keys,
and why not. He knows the feeling. He'll
tear ass to the living room in the middle
of the night because the right beam of light
came through an imagined window. He'll take
all of the pens and stash them under the sofa.
Is it that important? he asks, licking my left
hand. To say nothing? Will they mind if you
don't remind them? This wasn't what you were
thinking, was it? That's what I was hoping to
figure out. Maybe I should just wash myself
with my tongue and my foot. I could call it
interpretive dance.

(Feb. 2005)