IT’S ALL RIGHT

Posted on April 19, 2014 by xaviertrevino

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Yesterday I was doing some work for friends of mine, the wonderful Anne and Paul who have a condo on East 9th Street. Anne read my blog about being out of work a few weeks ago, and graciously offered me some work.

There were two things on the agenda, the repair and painting of the ceiling of their downstairs neighbor, due to water damage; and the cleaning of their deck in the backyard.

I was back and forth between the two tasks, as the repair involved some minor plastering and the plaster has to dry before it can be sanded and painted.

I started on Thursday, and one of the deck tasks was to clean up all of the dead vegetation collected in the nooks and crannies of the deck and its various planters/flowerpots.

On Thursday I found this:

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Green shoots already growing through the dead vegetation looking to grab some sun.

I cleared most of the vegetation from the deck, and I’m supposed to give it a waterproofing treatment, but in moving a lot of the big ceramic pots I found that the deck was very damp in a lot of places, and the deck must be dry for 48 hours before the sealant can be applied. I filled two big black garbage bags with leaves and branches.

When I went back yesterday Anne was a little more specific, saying she wanted the dead leaves out of the planters as well. I know that rotting vegetation becomes compost and becomes good loam after a while, so I’d left it there. But I guess she wanted it out for aesthetic reasons.

As I started to remove the leaves I found this:

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Little green buds of something unknown hiding beneath the dead leaves.

It was still a little chilly yesterday and I wore a sweatshirt hoodie. If the sun had been constantly out I would have no need for the hoodie, but the sun was intermittent.

Of course, I started thinking of the Beatle’s Here Comes The Sun.

And it has been a long, cold but not particularly lonely winter. A lot has happened to me since the beginning of winter.

Danusia and I tried to buy a house in Far Rockaway, and that fell through.

I shoveled a lot of snow at work and listened to a lot of complaining about what a horrible winter it was.

My friend Maggie died in the dead of winter, and when I went up to Hudson for her memorial I couldn’t help but marvel at how beautiful the snow was upstate, and that Maggie was at least buried in a beautiful place.

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Jenny and Maggie.

Then I lost my job, not long after that. Maybe it was good luck we didn’t get that house after all.

On Anne and Paul’s deck there are two skylights for the duplex below, protected by a big iron-barred cage. The cage was filled with dead leaves, and I made a futile attempt to at least sweep some of the leaves off of the skylights on Thursday. On Friday Anne showed me how the gate on top of the cage can be lifted to allow better access to the skylights and the deep furrows between the frame of the cage and the sides of the skylights. The furrows were deeply packed with leaves. On this part of the porch there is no decking, just the bare tar roof beneath. It looked as if it hadn’t been cleaned in years.

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You can see the black soil to the right of the pile of leaves.

As I started raking up the leaves I discovered that at the very bottom was the rich black earth that was the result of decaying vegetation being eaten by worms and then defecated out. Nutrient rich black loam is basically worm shit. But it sure does smell nice. I love the smell of rich soil; it brings back memories of my mom’s spring planting when I was a kid. She was an avid gardener, and had to make do with the gardens on our windowsills made of clay. Once she even had me climb a chain link fence and steal some potting soil from the NYCHA garden shed in the projects we lived in, that’s how important it was to my mom, the farmer’s daughter.

I picked up a pinch of the soil in my fingers and held it up to my nose, relishing the smell, the smell of the cycle of life. The nutrients in the soil feed the plants, the plants die and feed the worms, and the worms make new soil for other plants to make the world beautiful. And so it goes.

The same with people, we do things that others admire, bad things happen to us, we persevere, and others learn and want to follow, improve, delight, as I have followed Maggie, and maybe someday someone will follow me.

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    CRANK!

Posted on April 15, 2014 by xaviertrevino

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People write all sorts of blogs, some even only have pictures, not even actual writing, but the pictures have a theme, like my friend Dennis Gordon who takes pictures of abandoned and decaying industrial buildings.

I remember when he said, “Hey, I read your blog. I’ve got a blog too,” and I looked and there were pictures of empty falling-apart buildings, but no words.

I wanted to say, “That’s not a blog, there are no words,” but then I remembered the old adage A picture is worth a thousand words.

That’s debatable, but I’m not going to go into that right now. You can look at Dennis’ picture blog here.

Most picture blogs are porn blogs, and those are all on Tumblr, I think if you are interested you can find those yourself.

When I started writing my blog I started getting likes and comments from strangers, and the strangers fell into three categories: people who “Made Money Blogging,” and wanted me to pay them to show me how to do it; Christians, I don’t know why I get a lot of Born-again Christians reading and liking my blog, but I do; and finally people who just like what I have to say and want to let me know.

As I said before, my blog is simply about me. The things that happen to me or and what I do about it. Sort of an opinion blog, I tell stories and then opine on them.

I told a friend of mine, Lexie about my blog and I urged her to read it.

“I only read cancer blogs,” was her firm reply.

So there are categories, cancer, food, spirituality, health, humor, politics, music, and movies. People write about everything under the sun, and I guess so do I.

I have written about health, (The Heel Spur) about garbage,

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(Dude, Where’s My Nanny?) food,

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(Tomatoes, How To Cook Beans) music, (My Patti Smith Story, Crashing Iggy’s Party,

The Real Hedwig) and I’m sure if you look hard enough you’ll find humor and spirituality thrown in there somewhere; I guess the sort of spiritual ones are the ones the Christians like. Maybe I can convert them to Humanism.

I first heard that term the summer I turned 18 and was dating a girl from Bayside, Queens. She told me her father was Italian and her mother Jewish, but they had both abandoned their religious beliefs and had embraced Humanism. At 18 I could have given a shit about religion, or humanism for that matter, but I sure was in love with that girl.

I know a little more about it now, so I describe my beliefs as being closer to that than anything else. Be kind to one another. I know it’s hard, but it works better than being unkind to others. That just makes people hate you. But a lot of people hate themselves, and they don’t mind being hated, so I guess it works for them.

 

Wanting a theme for my blog is always in my head, and a reoccurring theme is complaining about stuff, I missed the train, the tomatoes were tasteless, the Mayor didn’t pick up the garbage, my heel hurts, you get the picture.

I thought of this: I can call my blog CRANK, and just complain about stuff.

I used to watch 60 Minutes just to see Andy Rooney complain about stuff, he was always funny; and I thought, “Hey, I can do that! I can be a professional crank.”

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I have to admit I’ve had visions of being the next Andy Rooney dancing in my head for a while, at least since he died and there’s been no one to take his place.

After all, I am the right age; I think I’m as old as he was when he started that segment. And I can be very, very, cranky, just ask my wife, the lovely Danusia.

CBS, are you listening? You don’t even have to pay me as much as he got- I’m a man of modest means, it doesn’t take a lot to make me happy. But I can be a great complainer.

When I was a kid listening to the fabulous WNEW FM radio station, with Roscoe

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and Jon Zacherly

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and Scott Muni they would play these great public service announcements. There was one where an old man with a New York accent would intone: “You complain and you complain but nobody does nothing about it…”

And that’s just it; no one wants to hear a complainer, at least I don’t- I hate it when someone just misses a subway train after yelling: “Hold the door! Hold the door!” like they are someone special who has to have the door held for them; and as they reach the closed doors burst into a round of cursing and stomping as if that was the last train on earth that just pulled out. I hate seeing that.

But I sure did love Andy Rooney. Maybe it is because his complaining was a little cleverer, or I just identified with what he thought was bad.

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My favorite Andy Rooney scene was actually on the Ali G. show, when Sacha Baron Cohen as Ali G. tries to interview Rooney and Rooney just unclips his mike and says: “You should leave now, this interview is over.” (I’m paraphrasing here, don’t hold me to an exact quote) and then Ali G. says: “Is you chucking me out ‘cause I’m Black?” (That’s an exact quote)

Rooney gives him a surprised look, his bushy eyebrows raised to the max and he says “Who’s Black? You’re not Black.” With the finality of a man who knows a little about bullshit.

 

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THE REAL HEDWIG

Posted on April 12, 2014 by xaviertrevino

 

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The Real Hedwig 

Thanks to the generosity of my friend Vicki Perlman (sometimes Alspector) the lovely Danusia and I went to see Neil Patrick Harris in Hedwig And The Angry Inch last night at the Belasco Theater. It was a delightful show, I’ve seen bits of the movie with John Cameron Mitchell (I guess you have to have three names to be Hedwig) and was sort of familiar with the story, but it was a story I’d heard before, a long time ago, when Mitchell was probably in Junior High school.

The show was great; Neil Patrick Harris is a wonderful actor, and watching him last night I could only think- my, has Doogie Hauser grown!

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Note the uncanny resemblance.

He sang beautifully, as did his supporting cast/band, especially Lena Hall as Yitzhak, Hedwig’s husband. The lighting and staging impeccable and dazzling, starting with Harris being lowered down from above the stage in a sling in his David- Bowie like outfit, which he strips off to reveal long fishnet covered legs in hot pants and high heeled boots. He and the band rip into the first number, Tear Me Down, and my heart is pumping fast. It stays that way for the rest of the show.

As I watched the performance it brought back memories of a show I’d seen a long time ago, probably in 1975 at Max’s Kansa City. The performer that night was Wayne County and the Backstreet Boys.

It was uncanny, the resemblance between the Hedwig character and Wayne/Jayne County. Of course Wayne was much raunchier at a time when raunchy was truly groundbreaking, and it took real balls to get up on stage in drag and put on a Rock And Roll show.

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Jayne County

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It could be the same wig.

With so many pioneers under the bridge like Jayne, Lou Reed, and David Bowie, this show was exciting and fun, but it is now mainstream. On Broadway, of all places.

I met the then Wayne once, as a matter of fact had dinner with him (at Max’s, of course) one night.

I had a friend, Mike; and Mike was the drummer in a band called New Clear Energy, one of those struggling bands that actually got to play at Max’s once. They played CBGB’s more than once, but Max’s was king then.

Wayne had seen them, probably that one time at Max’s, and had talked to Mike about playing drums in t he Backstreet Boys. The dinner was to be sort of an interview, or more of a persuasion, as Mike was reluctant to do it.

That’s how I got to be at the dinner. Mike was afraid of Wayne, he didn’t say so in so many words, but I could tell.

            “Come with me to talk to Wayne.” He’d asked.

            “Why?”

            “I don’t know. But I want to make sure he doesn’t to anything weird.”

            “Mike, I don’t think he wants to fuck you, I think he just wants you to play drums for him.”

So we had the dinner, Wayne’s treat, (I had a burger) and Mike said he’d think about it. He kept avoiding Wayne after that, and Wayne simply got another drummer. Mike had blown his chance to at least get paid for playing drums.

A year later Wayne had his famous dust-up with Dick Manitoba at CBGB’s, I wasn’t there that night but I heard all about it from friends. Manitoba had been heckling County and had a mic stand thrown at him in the process.

I remember in the early days of the New York Dolls there was always some guy in the back of the room, usually by the bar who would shout out “Faggots!” with some regularity, and I wondered why he was always at the shows if he didn’t like faggots. Then I wondered if the Dolls were paying him to stir up some drama. Now I wonder if it was Manitoba.

I’ll never know.

What I do know is that Wayne eventually became Jayne, went to Germany in the early ‘80’s to have a sex reassignment operation. That took balls.

The night of the dinner Wayne wore a jean jacket and a colorful woman’s scarf, and a big beret. He was polite and soft-spoken, gently urging Mike to play drums for him. Nothing like the loud, aggressive stage persona, but most definitely gay.

He did not come on to Mike, and I don’t think it was because I was there, I think it’s because all he really wanted was a good drummer.

So Jayne followed her dream, became a real woman, rather than just writing a play about it. But never achieved the stardom she so craved. The world was not ready for Jayne in the 1980’s.

But the world is ready for Hedwig now, and I can’t help but wonder if it is because it’s just a play, just a fantasy, something that was dreamt up as an entertainment.

I saw Jayne once more in the summer of 2000, at a benefit for Lou Reed’s ailing bodyguard at the Bowery ballroom. It was the first time I’d seen Jayne as a woman, since in the late 70’s I dropped out of the scene to become a full time drug-addict. So here I was, the summer I was getting clean, and standing next to me was Jayne, watching Sylvain Sylvain sing, “She’s A Femme Fatal” at this benefit. Jayne wanted to go up on stage and do a number, but the powers that be said no. Jayne was unhappy about it. So was I, it would have been fun to see one more raucous Jayne County performance.

At the end of Hedwig, Harris mentions some people, Lou Reed, Nico, and Aretha Franklin, of all people as influences. It would have been nice if he’d mentioned Jayne, the original “then he was a she.” Yes, it would be nice to give nods to someone who did it first, and did it real.

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  PANDEMONIUM!

Posted on April 9, 2014 by xaviertrevino

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I missed posting yesterday because I was busy; I got a little P.A. work on of all things a Polish music video for a Polish pop star. But more on that on Saturday. Stay tuned, loyal readers, it will be worth it.

But what I wanted to write about, what I’d planned on writing about yesterday was about going to my friend Puma Perl’s PANDAMONIUM, a show Puma puts together on occasion at the Bowery Electric on the Bowery, of course. I remember when that place was REMOTE, a bar with little video monitors and cameras at every table with phones where you could call a table to talk to someone you wanted to have sex with that you saw on the monitor. They closed down a while ago.

I don’t even remember why I went to Remote the one time I went there, but I didn’t find anyone to have sex with.

I went to the Bowery Electric a few years ago to hear various friends read the work of Herbert Huncke, junkie raconteur.

I’ve seen Puma’s advertisements on Facebook for a while, and it always looked interesting, but for the past year I worked nights every weekend and couldn’t make it.

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Puma Perl And Friends

Puma contacted me last month after reading my WHAT DO YOU WEAR TO YOUR OWN EXECUTION blog post and invited me to read at one of her Pandemoniums. “It won’t make you rich,” Puma wrote. But it would be fun, I thought.

I was under the impression that it was all about poetry, but Puma advised me to read carefully, and I did, and it says “Music, spoken word, and poetry.” So I guess I fit into the spoken word category.

“Come down on April 4th and see how it’s done,” Puma wrote in a subsequent email.

So I did.

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Tessa Lou Fix

It was a lot of fun, though the room used for Puma’s show is about the size of my living room, I got there early enough to get a seat next to my friend Tessa Lou Fix, who was reading some of her poetry that night. Tessa is a wonderful poet, I’ve heard her read at two art shows in the past couple of weeks, and I have to say I’m impressed and I’m a fan. I got to read one of my pieces at one of those shows, the closing of my friend Darryl LaVere’s art show. Darryl is a wonderful painter.

I’ve of course tried my hand at poetry, and all I’ve managed to come up with are some cringe-inducing pages better left in the notebooks I wrote them in. There is a nice one I wrote about my mom that I will publish here before the month is out in honor of National Poetry Month.

Needless to say, I’m always impressed by people who can compress so much emotion and passion into a few choice words that fit in meter.

Puma’s a wonderful poet too, I looked at her website “Knuckle Tattoos” that you can find here.

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The pandemonium started with music, a friend of Puma’s named Rick Eckerle sang a few songs, not exactly my cup of tea- to me he was trying to sound like Bruce Springsteen, but what do I know about music?

What was more entertaining was that he was having microphone problems and at one point he asked his accompanist to “turn down your guitar.”

Then came an English fellow named Jeff Ward who read from a memoir called  Parasite, a Crystal meth nightmare. And it was very good. “Meth equals” life was the last line of the chapter he read. Indeed.

This would be me at the next pandemonium, just reading from a drug memoir.

Then came Tessa with her wonderful dark poetry, I guess the theme here is the underpinnings of society, the people like us who used drugs, sex, and Rock and Roll to escape our inner turmoil. I guess I fit right in!

There were a bunch of people who I found interesting sitting in a little group to the right of the stage, in the most comfortable seats- and I found it amusing to see the way they were dressed, sort of like circa 1980’s Brooklyn gangsters and their goomahs. They talked through Eckerle’s entire set and I found it a little annoying. That they turned out to be performers too made it even more annoying, performers should know what it’s like to have a crowd talk while you are trying to entertain them. When two of them got up on the stage, I expected Doo-Wop, but instead they sang three Everly brothers songs, Bye Bye love, Let it be Me, and the classic Jean. It was a man and a woman, Joey Kelly and Donna Destri, sister of Jimmy Destri, the keyboardist for Blondie.

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Joey Kelly is in the center with glasses.

 

They were actually very good, nice harmonies. Joey’s mic kept drooping in its holder when he didn’t keep his hand on it, another inadvertent touch of comedy.

Then Puma went on, and she recited her poetry with a musical backing, a few guys she calls “Puma Perl and friends.” It was a guitar, base and sax, and on this night she had a special guest, Walter Steding on electric violin.

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Walter Steding

It worked because the musicians were really low key, never overpowering Puma’s voice, though Puma’s voice is hard to overpower!

She did a call and response thing with Walter, voice against violin on one poem, and it was really great fun.

My favorite piece was called “The Perfect Man,” and you can read it if you go to Puma’s website. The Perfect man was anything but perfect, of course, unless you are a person like us- a nonconformist who always aspires to the cheaper things in life.

I’ll be up there in June, which is when the next Pandemonium will be. I can’t wait to add my voice to the din…

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GOODBY COLUMBUS AVENUE

Posted on April 5, 2014 by xaviertrevino

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OK, it’s official now; the union rep called and said the company had settled on a severance offer, 8 weeks pay plus a “neutral” letter of recommendation. So that comes out to less than a half a weeks pay for each year I worked there.

I could have taken it to binding arbitration, a last ditch attempt to keep a nowhere job in a skinflint organization. I realize that I am better than that, so I’m taking their offer. Time to move on.

It’s a little scary, walking away from fairly good money and medical coverage- but at the rate the union is doing givebacks and taking bullshit pay increases, maybe I’m getting out while the getting’s good. It used to be a great deal, not so much anymore. Only the lousiest dentists accept our union’s compensation nowadays.

I could go on, but this isn’t a rant against the union, it’s about letting go and moving on.

I grew some in the 17 years I was there, learnt some stuff- about things, about people, about myself; for that I am grateful. I worked for four different supers, and with the exception of one, they were all pretty much the same, insecure macho men who thought they were the greatest things since sliced bread.

The first one was even certifiably insane; well, at least bi-polar. I remember finding the half-full vial of Prozac in the garbage the day he decided to say, “fuck it” and go back to being crazy. He got fired too.

The second one, Glenn was fun; he was the one who urged me to become a handyman and even tried to take me with him to the bigger building he vied for and got. He even told the handyman and me that he was grateful for our help the first year. “I couldn’t have done it without you guys,” he’d said. A display of humility that’s rare from most of these egotistical bastards.

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The current one, the one that calls himself the “Tank” is fond of telling the staff that he is “The best super in Rudin Management.” People that give themselves their own nicknames and need that kind of affirmation are not exactly my cup of tea. He has wonderful mechanical skills, and works more than any other super I’ve known, but he is a terrible judge of character. I’m sure future event will bear that out, but I won’t be around to see it. That’s OK; it’s ugly to gloat over another’s misfortune, something I hear he’s been doing over my situation.

So yes, I am better off not working for someone so gleeful about my failure.

The third one, who also left for a bigger building, kept the shop terrible mess the two years he was there. He had a table dedicated to a guitar he was hand-building, he got as far as ordering all the wood and buying all the tools, then strewing everything all over the table. I wonder if the un built guitar is lying on another table in his new building, still waiting to be finished?

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Renovation work.

I won’t miss standing on my feet for 8 hours, breathing in toxic dust, aggravating my heel spur by standing on ladders all day, or the exhaustion from hard, heavy work meant for a much younger man when I was doing the handyman job.

I won’t miss having to work 16 hours straight because my relief NEEDED to watch a football game or go to a party and get drunk and called out sick.

I won’t miss some of the crazy-assed self-absorbed tenants who are angry all of the time and see “the help” as justifiable targets for their anger. Ditto for some of the deliverymen, movers, technicians, and messengers who demand immediate attention.

I will however miss some of the people I’ve become friends with throughout the years, Barbara and David, my crossword buddies, Dani with the Porsche who always was kind to me despite being a Republican, he taught me that even Republicans can be nice. Beth and Bob and their two wonderful girls who are the sweetest kids in the building.

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Natalie and Emma, the nicest kids in the building.

Marsha the therapist who was always generous when I did stuff for her and took enough interest in my writing to want to read some of it, Trudy, the eldest tenant in the building at 94 who would always say “when you die you are going to heaven,” or “you would make a great politician” when I refused to badmouth any of the other tenants to her.

There are many more people that I grew to love and admire, people who taught me things about life and about myself, like Maria, the therapist with an office on the fist floor who actually apologized to me once after getting angry over something- yes I can do that too, admit I made a mistake and go back and say “I’m sorry I yelled at you.” Or better yet- don’t yell at people.

I’ll miss the views from the roof, that was one of my favorite things to do- go up on the roof and look at the city.

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When I stood on the roof and looked out at the city it made me feel special and lucky to live in this big crazy city that I grew up in and love, I took many pictures form the roof as you can see, but the luckiest one was the one I got of the Space Shuttle on top of the 747 that was transporting it to Kennedy.

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The Shuttle’s last ride.

I’ll even miss watching the people go by on 86th Street, that was the best part of being a doorman in the summer. I’ll miss Columbus Avenue around the corner, a place that’s changed a lot since I used to hang out with a famous transsexual in the 70’s in Jackson Hole on 85th Street.

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A sudden summer rainfall was always entertaining.

I could always go back and visit, but I doubt it. But I know it will be there if I want to.

 

 

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  HOW TO COOK BEANS (Not meant to be a food blog)

Posted on April 1, 2014 by xaviertrevino

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Being Mexican, one of the staples of my mother’s dinner table was beans. She liked pinto beans, and as a child I was required to sift through the dried beans and remove the small stones added to the beans to increase their weight. It was boring and tedious and a lot of small stones got past me. But I liked my mother’s beans, especially when they were refried and mashed in hot lard. We had these with eggs for breakfast.

The first time I tried to make beans as an adult was when I was cooking dinner for my future father-in-law, I’ll call him Big Bob, mostly because he was tall and had a big booming voice. I remembered how my mother would start the beans early in the morning and they would boil on the stove for hours, and she added water as needed.

I rinsed the beans like mom used to do, added water, and started cooking. Hours later, the beans were still hard. I added more water and turned up the heat, Big Bob was due any moment at our studio apartment on East Houston Street and the beans were still uncooked.

I tried really hard to make an authentic Mexican brunch for my future father-in-law and my girlfriend’s three siblings, but in the end the beans part of the brunch partially burned on the stove, and what didn’t burn was still “al dente,” or hard to the bite.

            “The beans have a sort of smoky flavor, how did you do that?” Asked Big Bob.

            “Ah, actually, I sort of burnt them a little.”

He put down his fork and didn’t touch a single thing on his plate for the rest of the meal. It should have told me something about my future wife’s learned behavior, but I had to find out the hard way.

Eventually I looked up how to cook beans, and found out that the most important step was to soak the beans in water overnight, otherwise they’ll never get soft.

Thirty years and many pots of beans later, I’ve finally perfected my Mexican beans, and I make them regularly, though not quite as regularly as mom did.

So, in case you ever get the urge to make beans, I have put down my recipe here.

ImageSoak.

I like to use red beans, I just love the color and flavor, much richer than pintos or any other kind of bean. So, red kidney or small red chili beans to start. Pick out the stones, if any, and soak overnight. I use a half a pound of beans, which makes a little less than a quart of beans, enough to last me a week.

ImageRinse.

Next, I chop half a small red onion and sauté it in a couple of tablespoons of hot oil in a four-quart pot. You can also add a couple of cloves of minced garlic, if you’re into garlic.

ImageChop.

I bought a “Chopper” this summer, after using one at my friend Albert’s home where we stayed for a week, but I’ve decided it’s too noisy and too much of a pain in the ass to clean, so I’m back to hand chopping with a chef’s knife. It feels more real to me.

As the onion caramelizes, rinse your beans in cold water. Add the beans to the hot pot. This makes a great sizzling sound that will always remind me of my mother’s kitchen.

ImageCaramelize the onion.

Add a quart of water, and bring to a boil.

ImageBoil.

When it’s boiling, I add my secret sauce/stock. You can use a couple of cubes of bullion, chicken or beef stock, and any spices you might want to put in to taste.

I’ll tell you what’s in my secret sauce/stock in case you want to make it.

I cooked chicken the day before, and to do it first I sautéed the onion and a whole jalapeño, reduced them in water, added a couple of tablespoons of red molé, some turmeric, a dash of salt, and a teaspoon of Grace’s jerk sauce. This was added to the chicken and slow roasted in the oven.

After the chicken was done I saved the broth in a separate jar, and this is enough to make two pots of beans.

So add your secret sauce/stock, and reduce the flame to a simmer. Cook for an hour or so, adding water as needed. You don’t want to burn them the way I did.

ImageMy secret sauce/stock.

Keep checking the softness of the beans, and if you like refries, the softer the beans the easier it will be to mash and refry them. If you want the beans for like a three-bean salad, leave them a little firmer. When they start to split in two, you know you’ve gone too far.

When you’re done, you can save the juice separately, or leave the beans in it. The brown juice makes a rich egg-drop soup if you want a quick cup of nourishment.

If you want to make refries, you definitely need to drain the juice.

To refry, simply heat some oil in a saucepan, add the beans and use a potato masher to mash them to your required consistency.

The beans can also be used as a base for an awesome chili- in the future I’ll post the chili recipe, one that’s guaranteed to leave you panting and red-faced.

The secret to good cooking is not to get caught up exact amounts and ingredients, you can substitute and add/subtract ingredients to your taste, but most importantly, put a little love in it. 

 

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 WHERE ARE YOU FROM?

Posted on March 29, 2014 by xaviertrevino

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I finally heard from my union rep on Wednesday, after leaving a nasty message on his answering service that morning. He told me to go ahead and file for unemployment, a little bit of advice I could have used a month ago. I did so Thursday, and as I filled out all of the required paperwork on line- I have to call it paperwork although no paper was required; I realized that I’m not losing anything, whatever severance I get would be deducted from my benefits. It’s like running in place.

I also went to a job orientation on Wednesday morning; a friend has hooked me up with a possible job in another building where he knows the building agent.

I’d called the said agent the day before, and he instructed me to report for “training” and “familiarization” at the building. He gave me the guy’s name and number, and I didn’t understand the name, so I asked him to spell it.

            “S-E-G-U-N-D-O.” He spelled out.

            “Oh, Segundo,” I said in my perfect Spanish accent.

            “Does he have a brother named Primero? I asked by way of a joke.

            “What?”

            “Segundo means second in Spanish. Maybe he was the second born.”

I realized this guy wasn’t getting it, so I let it drop. I called Segundo and arranged to meet him at the building the next day. When I showed up Segundo was in the lobby with two of the staff. They were all Hispanic men in dark blue work pants and powder blue polo shirts with their names sewn on the breast. I told him who I was and he let me in.

            “Wait here,” he said as he got on the elevator and disappeared. One of the staff came back up and came over to talk to me.

            “You the new relief guy?” He said in very bad English.

            “Yes I am.” I answered him in Spanish.

            “Oh good, you speak Spanish. Where are you from?”

            “Mexico.” I did not ask him where he was from.

I’ve never liked when people ask where I’m from, and to fuck with people I usually say, “I’m from Brooklyn,” and force them to spit it out.

            “Ah, I meant where are you originally from.” What if I was born in Brooklyn? Or at Beth Israel hospital like my son for that matter? But I was born in Mexico, so I have to say Mexico.

            “Oh, I thought you were from Guam.” Or Samoa, Hawaii, the Philippines, Puerto Rican, (I got that once from a redneck in North Carolina) Pakistani, Maori, or an Eskimo. Yes, someone once said he thought I was an Eskimo. And California, once. That was cool, I’m glad someone mistook me for a Californian than a New Yorker.

            Segundo came back up to retrieve me and took me downstairs. We sat at a little table outside of the laundry room and he put a couple of sheets of bank paper and a pen in front of him as he sat opposite me.

            “So you speak Spanish?” he began, obviously the other guy had told him so.

            “Yes I do.” I replied; also in Spanish.

            “Good, because some of the other guys don’t speak so good English.”

            At the top of the blank paper he wrote, “Speaks Spanish.”

            “How about English? You speak English well?”

            “Yes I do, fluently. I grew up here.”

            Speaks English. He jotted down.

            “Where are you from?” There it was again, the big important question. I guess the other guy hadn’t passed on that bit of info.

            “Mexico.” From Mexico, he wrote on his paper.

That gotten out of the way, he went on to less important questions, like work experience, where I live, how old, etc. He wrote some of those things down.

            “OK, look, it’s good you speak English, because that’s what most of the tenants speak. If they talk to you, you smile, say hello, how are you, how’s your dog, and that’s it. Don’t talk too much to them; they don’t like us. Just tell them you’re on duty and can’t chat, OK?”

            “Sure.”

We went on a tour of the building, and in the bike room he pointed out a few dead water bugs.

            “When you clean in here, make sure you sweep up the water bugs, that’s all. The tenants don’t like water bugs.”

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I didn’t have a picture of a dead water bug, so the dead rat will have to do.

We went up to the roof to look at the water tank and elevator room.

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The water tank at the old building.

            “All we really do is keep the building clean and take out the garbage. Anybody wants anything else; tell them to talk to me. I’m the boss, not them. They think because this is a co-op they are all owners and bosses, but they’re wrong. I’m the boss.”

OK, I thought. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

We said our goodbyes and I left, and I thought about whether I belong or not again; and I know I don’t. But this would just be a part-time gig, something that will give me more time to do what I truly love, write. But it’s good to have options.

 

Years ago one of the tenants moved out of the building I’d been working at. They had a little boy, Lyle; and Lyle was 2 when I met him and 3 ½ when they moved out. The day they moved out, Lyle was sitting in the back seat of the SUV they were driving away in. He rolled down the window and called me over.

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Lyle.

            “Xavier, could you come here? I want to tell you something.”

            I walked over to the car and stood looking at Lyle through the open window.

            “Come closer.”

            I bent down so my ear was closer to him.

            “I love you Xavier.” He whispered. That brought tears to my eyes, and despite everything that’s happened since then, good or bad, it’s the one moment of the 17 years I was there that I would treasure forever.

 

             

 

 

 

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I DO BELONG

Posted on March 25, 2014 by xaviertrevino

 

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The last time I was fired from a job, some 19 years ago I spent the next six months, the whole time I was on unemployment sitting at home. I watched TV all day and built model airplanes. I was lucky I had a whole closet full of un built model airplanes. I was a sad, lonely fat man jealous of my then wife because she had a job and somewhere to go everyday.

This time around, I’ve been very, very busy; catching up on a lot of things I’ve been missing for the last year because of having to work in the evenings every weekend. Saturday night I was at an event, it was sort of a reading/music performing party at a photo show of my friend Katrina Del Mar’s photography.

ImageKatrina Del Mar

It was great fun; I got to hear Katrina read from the novel she’s writing, as well as friend Patty Powers, Tessa Lou Fix (poetry) and some short films (videos?) by another friend, Anne Hanavan. I also saw a lot of other friends I had not seen in awhile, and even said to one “I’m glad I got fired so I could be here to enjoy this!”

Watching the performers and readers brought home one thought: this is where I belong. This is what I am part of, by virtue of my experience and the ability to articulate that experience both on the written page and orally.

I’ll never forget the thrill of going up in front of a live audience a few years ago to read a short story I’d written, this was at an event sponsored by my union, 32BJ. The union had somehow gotten some grant money and put a creative writing class on their agenda, I took it and was selected to read at this event capping the completion of the workshop. Another thing they did was put together a “Chapbook,” and I was to be in it. I was also asked to record the story orally at some studio in midtown.

When we got the chapbook, I was disappointed to find my story had not been printed. Instead, it was on the audio CD included in a sleeve in the back of the book. But the woman who produced the book knew something I did not know, that I had a good presence in front of people, and that my voice, which always sounds funny to me when I hear it from a recording was appealing.

A couple of years after that, while taking a more advanced writing class at the JCC in Manhattan, I was asked to read again, this time at the KGB bar.

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This event is an ongoing thing; it’s called “Trumpet Fiction” and is put on by The Greenpoint Press, a small imprint publisher that my teacher Charles Salzberg is part of.

I read the piece I’d done at the Union again, and added another piece I wrote specifically for the night, something I called BUSTED, which has since morphed into IT WAS NIXON.

Then last year a friend invited me to go to THE MOTH with her, and on a lark I put my name in the hat. Incredibly, my name was called and I got to go up in front of a very large group of strangers and tell a story, this time without the benefit of reading it off the page. I did the Nixon story.

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Now that was really thrilling, the applause and the slaps on the back and high-fives from strangers got me hooked. I’ve done it twice more since then, and I intend to go back until I win one of those slams.

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A couple of weeks ago, when I published WHAT DO YOU WEAR TO YOUR OWN EXECUTION my friend Puma Perl messaged me about reading at one of her events, which she calls Puma Perl’s Pandemonium. Puma is a poet, and most of her readers are poets, but Puma did come and hear me at the KGB bar way back then, and if she’s interested in having me, I’m in. I’m going to tell a story about a famous transsexual I was friends with in the 70’s.

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Not the one I was invited to read at, but do go, it looks like fun. I’ll be there learning the ropes.

I also secured a spot in the next BUGHOUSE SPIN in Bushwick, telling a story about working for pennies.

I used to go to readings and the like, and always felt I wished I could do it, sometimes I would hear something really bad and think: “I have better stories than that.”

But they were up there and I was down here.

This didn’t happen overnight, it took some work on my part and a little luck on the universes part, but it’s happening, I’m doing something that is a lot more satisfying than a steady paycheck and building model airplanes. I’m feeling alive.

And I want to thank all of my friends, and my lovely wife Danusia for all the inspiration and belief in me. I will, of course keep you all posted on when I’m reading and where, and the next time a good MOTH theme comes up, I’m there.

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LOOKING FOR GOD (in all the wrong places)

Posted on March 22, 2014 by xaviertrevino

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Last Tuesday night I went to an event called “Bughouse Spin,” at a place actually called the “Bughouse” in Bushwick. It’s basically people telling stories, “Spinning,” as denoted in the name of the event, and the theme for the night was GOD. The “G” word, the word that is the source of so much controversy, fear, and contention in so many of us.

I was looking forward to an interesting evening.

I thought I would hear the stories, listen, and applaud politely (or impolitely, depending on the story) say a couple of congratulatory words to the readers, and go home satisfied (or unsatisfied) and that would be that. But that was not to be, and it turned out to be a good thing.

There was to be a discussion after, and the curator and hostess, Martha Williams, did a great job of that. She made sure every single person in the room put in their two cents, whether they wanted to or not.

It wasn’t hard, most of the 25 or so people in attendance (myself included) were pretty opinionated and loquacious, and so the discussion was lively and satisfying.

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A halo on an unidentified man could be god.

 

The four spinners gave their take on who or what they thought god was, or wasn’t. Two of them were outright bashers, atheists who hate all things god and religion. The other two tried to understand what god is, and gave an honest try at it, or at least in explaining their own feelings about conflicted emotions.

For me the discussion after was the best part, the thought really flowed into the room when questions were asked and opinions given. One of the spinners had actually read the bible, (New Testament) and he asked if anyone else in the room had. To my surprise five others had. I was not one of them.

To me that brought home the exact problem I encounter when having discussions with opinionated people who only look at things from one side. I am not qualified to speak for or against the bible because I have not read it.

One of the participants, a red haired woman who was also the only Jew in the room, said the one thing she’d learned by reading the bible was that it was a beautiful book that taught us about “community.”

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Child god.

As social animals we are always looking to make our community work better, and this makes sense. I don’t want to get into a whole discussion about religion, its history or purpose here, this is after all just a blogpost and there’s plenty to read on the subject out there; but I will say this: religion is here to stay and whether I believe in it or not, it will always be part of my life in one way or another.

During the discussion, I realized that a lot of the participants, most of who were younger and hipper than I were confusing religion and spirituality. I used to confuse it myself.

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Sun god.

I had never thought of myself as a spiritual person, in fact I did everything I could not to think about my place in the world (and the world in general) by using copious amounts of drugs to dull the responsibility of doing so. An older woman in my writing class asked me last week, “why don’t you describe the way you felt on drugs?” This is a woman that probably never took anything stronger than an aspirin in her life and was curious.

“I felt nothing,” I said. “I took the drugs so I did not have to feel. I was not searching for enlightenment.”

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Cloud god.

Perhaps I am lucky that I self-medicated, who knows what I may have done left to sort through my racing, jumbled thoughts that filled me with so much fear that I could not bear to leave the house without taking some kind of drug; there was discussion of suicide, of wanting to hurt others, of hiding in cults, all things I may have done left to my own devices.

I used to open the door to Jehovah’s witnesses so I could have a “discussion” with them and bash religion and Jesus Christ and small-minded people who were blind believers.  In the army I almost came to blows with a fundamentalist Christian when I insisted that “god didn’t write the bible, men did,” much to his dismay. “Are you putting down the good book?” He asked.

“What makes you think it’s a good book?” I taunted. He had to be held back from punching me in the face, and I smugly thought I’d struck a blow for reason and humanism. But all I’d really done was prove that I was just as closed minded as he was, unwilling to believe that there is more to this world than what is in my own head.

The teachings of Jesus Christ are simple: be kind, love others, be tolerant, and don’t judge. Unfortunately in our modern world there is so much intolerance, judgment, and unkindness done in his name.

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Jesus.

There is also a lot of good done: charity work, education, and enlightenment. And not just in the name of Christianity, all of the major Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity carry the double edged sword of love and tolerance on one side and hate and intolerance on the other side, depending on the level of literalism they ascribe to.

For me, I choose to believe in a higher power, in that what is in my head cannot be the last word, since once I’m gone it will all go on as if I were never here in the first place.  But as long as I am here, I may as well be happy, and I can only be happy if I look at the kind and tolerant side of the sword, and try and not think too hard about the other side, which I can’t change or do much about. People are going to believe what they want, and it is not my job to change that or enlighten them. That is up to them. What I do is up to me.

My last post was about beauty, and to me that is what god is, it’s beauty, and there is beauty everywhere I look, and the pictures I posted above are an example of what I think is beautiful, and godlike.

 

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THE BEAUTY OF IT ALL

Posted on March 18, 2014 by xaviertrevino

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This morning when I opened my eyes the sight of the full moon perched just inches above the building next door greeted me, across the concrete and brick triangle that is our backyard. It was 6:40am.

The sky was still dark, the bedroom window faces west; but it was light enough to give the white of the moon a particular yellow tinge. I had to get a picture of it. I got up without disturbing the lovely Danusia and decided to go to the living room to get my iPhone.

I stopped to pee, that’s what usually wakes me up, the urge to urinate (I have BPH) and after doing so I made my way quickly to the living room to retrieve the phone. Less than three minutes had passed.

I turned the phone on, and flicked the screen up to reveal the camera; but just as I reached the bedroom to get the snap, the phone died. I had not recharged it the night before.

I peered through the window to see where the moon would have been from the angle I’d woken up in, but the moon was gone, set behind the Home Relief Building on Thornton Street. The sky was lighter too.

I can have my phone ready tomorrow, and providing it’s not cloudy I’ll most likely see the same thing. But I doubt I’ll remember, unless I write it all down and plan for it.

I was wondering what to write about today, I was going to write about the final chapter of losing my job at the building, but the union rep never called me back yesterday and that’s all still up in the air.

The whole moon incident brought home one thing to me, the fact that I am different than the people I worked for (and with) and that I probably did not belong there in the first place. I was just marking time.

The biggest difference is that I can find beauty in almost anything, from the way the moon looked in the lower corner of my window this morning to a pile of rubble in the bathtub of an apartment being renovated. The guys at work were mystified, “why are you taking a picture of that?”

“You wouldn’t understand anyway,” I would tell them. If you have to ask, you don’t understand.

My bosses took pictures of things like that, corroded leaking pipes, rubble, cracks in walls, but all for reasons of explanation, of having a record of what went wrong and how it was fixed. I took pictures because what I saw was beautiful in a way.

I just noticed how the words “saw” and “was” are anagrams, and strung together in a sentence they are beautiful in a special way.

That’s what makes me different, I notice things others don’t, and I remark on those things, either by taking a picture or writing about it or telling a little story to someone about it. I help others see the beautiful world, and that in itself is a job, one that I love.

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I looked through my iPhoto to find a picture of the moon, I knew I’d gotten a decent photo one night in Mattituck, Long Island last summer, and I noticed again how beautiful a lot of the pictures were, and how varied were the things I took pictures of

I can find beauty in freshly fallen snow on the beach,

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 colorful bits of trash on the sidewalk,

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a bent FDNY call box,

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 a giant plastic eye floating through the air,

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the shadows of a still fan on my ceiling,

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a dress hanging alone from a fire escape,

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something I’ve cooked,

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Big Ben on the Thames,

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a couple of fighter jets screaming over the Hudson river,

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a girls legs silhouetted bare through the material of her dress by the bright summer sun. There is beauty everywhere, if you only take the time to look.

After my last post a friend, Puma Perl contacted me about telling a story at one of her events, she puts on these musical/ literary events where people read poetry, tell stories, do some kind of performance art.

I am flattered and I accepted. I will let you all know when that’s happening, if you are interested. I’m excited about that, a lot more excited than going to hold doors and sign for packages five nights a week.

 

 

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