Recycle, Please (repost is good too!)

Posted on September 26, 2013 by xaviertrevino

                                                                                       Image

This morning I got to watch something I haven’t seen in 3 years. Three years ago I was working as a doorman at the same building I am working at now. Then I was a handyman for a while, and now I’m back to being a doorman. Don’t ask; if you know me and have been following this blog, you know; if you don’t it really doesn’t matter. What matters is that I was a doorman on this shift, the 7am to 3pm shift for seven-plus years, and for those seven-plus years every Wednesday morning I would watch as the can and bottle people would come and rifle through the clear plastic recycle bags and pick out whatever was left from the night before.

Image

 

See, the really enterprising can and bottle people roam the streets of the city from just after midnight till dawn when most of the building night porters are putting out the garbage. I know this because I started out in this building as a night porter, and in the beginning, my first year there, there was even a regular guy who would show up at 1am every Wednesday and actually help me lug the big bags filled with cans, bottles and assorted other glass, plastic, and metal (not to mention more than a few soiled diapers)

up the stairs to the service entrance in order to have first crack at the bottles and cans. He was a small thin Puerto Rican man in his early 40’s and he called himself Lucky. That was his name, not his milieu. He was like clockwork every Wednesday for three years and one day he didn’t show up, and I never saw him again. There were others, but not as industrious or as engaging as Lucky. I always thought that if these can and bottle people ever put that much energy into a real job, they’d be all right. But who am I to judge?

Today I watched as two women, one African American and one Asian went through the plastic bags methodically emptying one bag into another, picking out the goodies and separating the empty bags, saving them into their shopping carts. The current night man uses a lot of plastic bags unnecessarily, I guess. Or somebody took the bulk of the redeemable cans and bottles at night.

Image

The first super I worked for, an insufferable petty tyrant of a man would spend Tuesday nights in the basement with his wife separating the redeemable plastic and metal and cashing it in himself, until one day the wife had enough of that and they stopped. I wondered why a man who made 60 thousand plus dollars a year and had a free apartment (in 1997) would want the measly twenty or so dollars you might possibly get from our garbage, but hey, it takes all kinds, right?

Back to the diapers, a lot of the nannies in the building had the bad habit of just opening the service entrance door and throwing the soiled diapers into the nearest open receptacle, and that would be either the green paper bin or the blue glass, plastic, and metal bin.

Image

Blue for glass, plastic and metal

Image

Green for paper

If you are a mom and have a nanny, or if you are simply a mom that has babies and lives in a high-rise with a service staff, please tell your nanny (or yourself) not to do this, as the guy picking up the garbage in your building has to fish out these gross dirty diapers under pain of getting a ticket from the city for mixing refuse with recyclables.

A bit about the paper; when I first started the job, in addition to the Luckys of the night there were also the paper guys, guys who would simply rip open the plastic bags full of newspapers to rifle through them, or cut the twine on the stacks of newspapers I had so painstakingly put together and rip off the first pages of every newspaper they could find, leaving me to clean up the mess. I used to fight with these guys, and I wondered what was so valuable about the front page of a newspaper. I found out that newsstand guys gave them a nickel a front-page, which they in turn return to the distributors (take heed, NYT and Daily News) and get a credit for an unsold paper that they don’t deserve. Like I said, it takes all kinds.

Well, I’m glad I don’t have to carry all that garbage up the stairs anymore, and I sure am glad I don’t have to spend my night rifling through garbage bags in order to make a living.

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Wild Man On The Loose

Posted on September 21, 2013 by xaviertrevino

                                                                                            Image

 

Last night while I was on my midnight J train ride over the Williamsburg Bridge I was thinking about writing this morning’s blog, running through the various themes that have been kicking around in my head since Tuesday, undecided.

I was listening to music on my iPhone, when “Smashed” by Mose Allison came on. And I knew what to write about.

When I was 16, I bought an album called “Cactus,” at the urging of a friend.

“Carmine Appice is on it.” He’d said. My friend was Italian, so I guess it was important to him that someone named Carmine was making Rock and Roll. It was all right, nothing to write home about, but I did like one song, Parchman Farm. The credits said someone named Mose Allison had written the song, but when I was 16 there was no Internet or Google so I just forgot about it.

Three years later, when I was a freshman in college, at the famous (or infamous) Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, just blocks from my home, I met a fellow student that introduced me to the real Mose Allison.

We were in a class together called Light, Color, and Design; and he came up to me and started talking. I was this very insecure poor kid from the projects and here was this very confident looking middle-class white kid who seemed to be a little older than the rest of us and he wanted to talk to me. We became friends and we agreed to meet at the local watering hole, Eric’s on DeKalb Avenue that night.

His name was John, and he was tall and Jewish, looking like a cross between Maynard G. Krebs and Cosmo Kramer of Seinfeld fame.

Image

Maynard G. Krebs

Image

Cosmo Kramer

He wore a goatee like Krebs, and his hair stuck up in the air like Kramer’s. He wore these big square framed black plastic glasses like Buddy Holly’s. He wore torn t-shirts underneath a well-worn brown tweed jacket with leather elbow patches and used words like “dig” and “cat” and said “man” a lot. I thought of him more as a beat generation holdover than as of a hippie, which was what I thought I was. He was also much cooler and hipper than either Maynard G. Krebs or Cosmo Kramer and a hell of a lot more seriouser. (Yes, seriouser.)

We met at Eric’s; a dive bar hole of a place that catered to the Pratt crowd with 50-cent beers and a drink called the Skip And Go Naked (which a lot of people did after having a few of these) that cost two bucks and came in a 16-ounce mixing glass.

John introduced me to Becks beer, as in his opinion Heineken was “piss water.”

He expounded on a great many vague ideas about the state of the world and the people in it, I just listened as he was buying. He invited me back to his place, on Adelphi Street just a couple of blocks away.

It was half of an old railroad apartment up a fight of stairs, in one of those dilapidated aluminum sided tenements that line the streets of Fort Greene. There wasn’t much in the apartment, just a mattress on the floor, a chair, and a record player, and a big stack of albums.

We cracked open a couple of Becks as he put an album on the record player. A very smooth, rich voice crooned “I’m smashed, better try me later…” I was hooked. All I ever listened to at this point in my life was Rock and Roll, the harder the better. Folk music was for pussies, and Jazz was for old farts. We drank and sang along to Smashed, and Wild Man On The Loose. I listened to Parchman Farm for real for the first time. He let me take home a record, Wild Man On The Loose.

Image

He told me how he wanted to build a fish tank into the floor, so he could look at the fish as he walked through his apartment.

“Sounds like a good idea,” I said.

One day in class he displayed his homework assignment, I forgot what I had painted but it was supposed to involve colors, and his was simply a piece of white 18×24 inch foam-core with probably 100 dead cockroaches pinned to it. He stood by his piece the whole hour and a half the class lasted until the teacher stood in front of it and shook his head wordlessly and walked away. The teacher was like that.

I avoided him after that; I didn’t want people to think I was friends with a nut.

One night I went to Eric’s and someone said, “you should have been here last night. Your friend John was drunk and he was handing out $50 bills to everyone in sight.”

What a drag, I thought. I missed out on a free $50.

I never saw John again, I heard that his rich father talked him into checking into a mental hospital after the giving away of the money incident. I didn’t get a $50 bill, but he gave me something much more valuable that I still have today. He gave me Mose Allison.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Don’t Forget To Wash Behind Your Ears!

Posted on September 17, 2013 by xaviertrevino

                                                                                        Image

 

When I was getting divorced some 13 years ago, my son would come and visit once a week. His mother wanted him to stay the weekend, to give her some alone time with her new paramour, but given the dump I lived in and the limited space, I told her it wasn’t a good idea, but I would spend as much of one of my days off with him as I could.

I lived in a studio apartment in Hell’s Kitchen and it probably hadn’t been renovated in 40 years. I inherited it from my father, whom I’d placed in a nursing home; and at his age he wasn’t prone to doing any housekeeping.

One Sunday, Javier usually came on Sundays; my soon to be ex-wife asked a favor in the midst of our “pick-up arrangement” conversation.

“Could you do me a favor? Could you talk to the kid about his hygiene a little? He spends about 2 minutes in the shower and I know he’s not cleaning himself properly.”

She always referred to our son Javier as “the kid,” a habit I’m afraid I sometimes adopt.

“Sure.” I said. “I’ll take care of it.”

ImageThe “Kid.”

ImageA raw loofah

I prepared for the bathing lesson by buying a brand new loofah at the drugstore, and getting out a fresh white towel for him. I had been using loofahs since I was a kid, my dad would bring a supply of raw ones back from Mexico, like the one in the picture above. You can only get the cut-up ones at the drugstore on 9th Avenue.

 When we arrived at my place after meeting in front of Barnes and Noble on Lexington Ave., where I would pick him up Sunday mornings as his mother waved from about a block away I asked him to jump in the shower.

“But I just took a shower, dad.”

“Humor me. I want to show you something.” He went in the bathroom and took a less than 2-minute shower. I timed him at 72 seconds. When he came out I was ready for him.

“Come here.” I commanded, wielding my pristine white towel.

“Let me have your forearm.” He did as he was told, offering up his forearm. I took the white towel and scrubbed his arm hard. The towel came away black with dead skin.

“See that? The rest of you is covered with the same dirt. Go back in the shower and scrub with this,” I said handing him the new loofah; “and don’t come out till you can wipe yourself on that towel and not blacken it, it should take you at least ten minutes.”

He did as he was told. The towel stayed white this time, and his skin had a rosy glow.

I discovered the same thing by myself when I was 12, the same age he was at the time. My mother always used white towels, I guess they are cheaper, and my money-conscious mother was all about saving money.ImageMy non-white towels.

One day after one of MY 2-minute showers I was drying myself vigorously the way I’d seen my dad do and was surprised when the towel turned black. I wondered why, and I realized that I wasn’t scrubbing off all the grime on my body. I went back in the shower and did it right, braving dad’s loofah for the first time. I realized a sponge wasn’t enough for a dirty boy like me.

My other body-cleaning discovery was made when I was 16 and dating seriously for the first time. My girlfriend at the time, a crazy half Irish-half Lithuanian girl of 14 would at some point in our make-out sessions get around to sticking her tongue in my ear. I almost jumped away the first time, it felt wet and slimy, and her breathing and the squelchy sound was deafening. It was all I could do to keep from squirming away and blowing my chances of getting to third base. The things we humans do for sex! 

Of course, I had to reciprocate. I was learning as we went along, up till that time all I’d ever done was French kiss and feel up a couple of girls, the ear thing was a surprise, but I figured if she was doing it to me I was going to have to return the favor, so I did.

Surprise number two was that her ear tasted remarkably of wax, and not the clean scented wax of candles. It was the inner-body smelling wax of ears and belly buttons.

So now, in addition to exfoliating properly, I also make sure to clean the excess wax from my ears, and to wash behind them as well.

When I was in Basic Training there was a kid who wouldn’t bathe, he smelled and his lack of good hygiene became apparent one day when we returned from the field, where we had to paint our faces and hands with camouflage greasepaint. When he came down for dinner the backs of his ears were still green, as well as his neck. We were instructed to give him a “blanket party” and throw him in the shower forcibly by the Drill Sergeants. After that he bathed more often.

I’m glad it never came to that for my kid or me. 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

The Mad Hatter

Posted on September 14, 2013 by xaviertrevino

Image

When I got back to work Wednesday the first thing I asked the boss after he shook my hand and said welcome back was “did I finally get a uniform?”

“Yes, it’s in a box in the shop.” He answered.

There were two boxes, actually, a big one with:

One size 46 wool overcoat.

Two wool jackets.

Two wool pants (partially lined).

There was another box, which contained a hat.

When I was a doorman before, we had no hats, but just as I was in the process of becoming the building handyman the new super ordered hats for all the doormen, except for me, because if all went the way he wanted I wouldn’t be needing it. I laughed at the other guys when the hats came.

But now the joke’s on me, I got the hat and I’ve got to wear it. I took it out of the box and put it on, and it didn’t fit. It just sat on the top of my head; the crown is not deep enough.

I have to pull it down hard to get it to stay, but then it pops back up after a few seconds and falls off if I lean over just a bit. Carlos, the day man, said, “maybe if you get a haircut it will fit better.” Maybe; but I don’t plan on cutting my hair for another week or so.

One of the tenants saw me and said, “You’re not a hat type of guy.” I usually look ridiculous in hats, just about any type of hat, but I love hats. I have a whole shelf of hats at home that I don’t wear because after I bought them and looked in the mirror at home I thought I looked ridiculous.

I do look OK in my old army patrol cap; it’s from the 80’s so it’s OD green instead of some weird modern camouflage pattern; and I still have the AIRBORNE tab sewn onto the crown. I took off the jump wings, no need to hit people over the head with it.

I also have a great fur hat that looks pretty good, but I can only wear it when the temperature dips below 20°.

Image  My Coyote hatImage Danusia’s Raccoon hat

I bought Danusia one first, hers is Raccoon and mine’s Coyote, both varmints before you PETA people get all up in arms about it.

About nine years ago I was having a birthday and one of my friends asked me what I wanted. I told her I wanted some kind of trucker hat, something country. She gave me a John Deere hat, which I still have and wear on occasion. That and the patrol cap are my rain hats.

A few years ago I got it into my head that a straw trilby with a stingy brim from J. Crew would be just the thing, they had vintage ones for $200 on their website. I wanted the tan one, but they were out of tan in my size and I had to settle for black. I would look really cool and Williamsburgey in my new stingy brim trilby, augmented by wayfarer style Ray- Bans. When I got the hat I tried it on, and instead of looking cool I looked like one of Papa Doc Duvalier’s Tonton Macuotes.

ImageJ.Crew trilby

That wouldn’t do. I wore it to a picnic that summer, and it’s been on the shelf ever since. Maybe I’ll donate it to Housing Works.

This summer, I ran across a straw fedora at a Scotch and Soda sample sale, pre-distressed and misshapen.

It was only $15 so I said what the hell. I wore it on our Long Island vacation, it looked pretty cool, but nobody asked if I lived in Williamsburg. I’m pretty sure all of the North Fork people correctly pegged me for a city guy, though.

When we came back we went to a friends barbeque on the Upper East Side, a woman asked where I lived and I told her Williamsburg.

“But where’s your cool straw hat?” She asked as way of a joke.

“It’s on a shelf at home with the rest of my goofy hats.” I told her.

ImageScotch and Soda fedora

My dad always wore hats, he wore Stetson fedoras all the time. Actually, in the summer he went hatless. In the winter he wore those cheap vinyl trooper hats, and I thought he looked ridiculous in them. The black plastic hats, that is, he looked pretty cool in the fedoras, like a Mexican gangster. I still have his last fedora, a brown Stetson. It’s too small for me; otherwise I’d wear it. It’s a nice hat.

In the spring I came across a vintage herringbone wool fedora on Etsy, a Stetson. It was my size and only $19. I had also scored a wool herringbone overcoat from J. Crew for a third of the original price. The hat matches the coat, and it is getting cooler, so now it won’t be long before I can wear them both. My dad wore those long wool overcoats too, so I’m beginning to look more and more like him.

Image Now that’s a nice hat!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

What If Mama Never Returned?

Posted on September 10, 2013 by xaviertrevino

                                                                                                       ImageMe and Mom

 

When we were on Vacation a couple of weeks ago on the North Fork of Long Island we took a day trip to Shelter Island. I borrowed a bike from our host and we rented one for Danusia at a Mobile station on the island, probably the only gas station there.

After our exhausting but beautiful ride through the very hilly island we were returning the bike and picking up our car when we heard a commotion above our heads.

There was an Osprey nest on top of a power line support, and in the nest was a young Osprey.

                                                                                             Image

There was another Osprey, and we saw for just a second as this one landed on the nest clutching something in its talon and immediately take off again, circling the nest as she clutched her catch and calling repeatedly to the other bird. The bird in the nest cried franticly and flapped its wings, but remained in the nest.

“What are they doing?” Danusia asked me.

“It looks like the one flying around is the mama and she’s trying to get the fledgling to fly.” I assumed this, I don’t actually know what the birds were doing, I know that Eagles play with their catch (they play catch!) and Ospreys are sort of like Eagles, but this bird wasn’t letting go of whatever she was clutching. It looked like a mouse, I know Ospreys are fishers, but if a mouse is convenient, why not? The assumed mama bird flew in wider and wider circles, and landed on a tree about a hundred feet away, still clutching and calling. The other bird continued to flap its wings franticly and cry back.

                                                                                                           Image

“Why won’t the other bird fly?”

“Because it’s scared.”

We got in the car and left, I didn’t want to miss the ferry and I knew if the bird wanted to eat it was going to have to fly.

The incident brought back memories of my youth, and in retrospect I believe I was lucky, the tree was cut down right from underneath me and I had to learn to fly.

My mother died when I was 23, and her death sent me into a dark depression that I treated by the copious consumption of drugs and alcohol. Within a year I was at my father’s door asking for shelter, because of my inability to hold a job or keep and apartment. After a few months of this, two men wallowing in their self-pity and long held resentments on both parts, my sister who’d moved to Detroit after my mother’s death showed up one day and helped my dad pack all his belongings into a U-Haul hitched to the back of her car. She was taking him to Detroit.

“By the way, I told the management office dad’s moving out” she told me as she started the engine and drove off with my survival mechanism.

It was a hard lesson, and it took some time, but I was finally able to hold jobs and pay the rent on time. It was either that or wander around the streets of Brooklyn mumbling to myself.

Many years later, my 21-year-old son called me from Santa Fe, NM to complain about how difficult it was to live with his mother and stepfather, who’d moved out west soon after our divorce was final and they’d gotten married.

“As long as you live with your mother, you’ve got to play by her rules” I told him.

“If you don’t like it, get a job and your own place and you’ll never have to listen to her criticism again.” I believe I used a different word, but you get the point.

                                                        Image

                                                                                                Javier that summer

After a few more phone calls I had an idea.

“Why don’t you come to New York for the summer, I can get you a job, you can save some money, go back and get your own place.”

This we did, I bought him a ticket, got him a job, fed him, and nurtured him to the best of my ability, making up for the years we’d spent apart. Then my dad died and my son Javier suddenly quit the job. He spent all day in his room playing video games. I gave him a month to find another job or go home.

A month went by and I saw he’d made no real effort to find work. You don’t go on job interviews in shorts and tee shirts. I bought him a ticket to New Mexico and told him to pack his bags. The day before he was scheduled to leave he called his mother. After that conversation he seemed really freaked out, and asked to talk to me in private. We were at a picnic; a memorial for a good friend who’d died the day before my dad did.

“Dad, I talked to mom and she said, where are you going to stay, I’ve turned your room into a studio.”

“Where are you going to stay indeed?” I said.

“Look son, I bought the ticket and you’re going back. If you can’t stay with your mother, use some of your money and get a cheap motel room, get yourself a job. I gave you a chance and you didn’t take it, you quit. You’ve got to learn to take care of yourself.”

He looked scared, all of a sudden very pale and shaken. I slapped his hard muscular shoulder and said:

“Don’t worry son, it will be OK. You’ll see, and thank me one day. If you can’t find a job, I’m sure they have homeless shelters in Santa Fe, probably a lot nicer than the ones they have here!”

That was four years ago, and I’m happy to say Javier has a job, he works in a car wash; he has a place to live, a house he shares with I don’t know how many other twenty-something’s, and the last time we spoke he’s trying to buy a car so he can get around in Omaha, NE where he lives. If he succeeds, he’s have one up on me, I don’t even have a driver’s license, much less ever owned a car.

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Midnight Moment

Posted on September 7, 2013 by xaviertrevino

                                                                                     Image

 

We had a houseguest for five nights last week, a Polish girl who comes to the states every summer to do something or other. She was here last year for a couple of days, and I don’t remember what she’d been doing in the states but this year she spent some time with the Bread And Puppet Theater in Vermont. She lived in a tent all summer and was allowed to shower once a week. I’m glad I wasn’t there.

You would think the day of the hippie commune was over, but I guess if we can have survivalists we can have hippie communes. I was never one for roughing it; I’ve done my share in the Boy Scouts and the U.S. Army. Kaya, our guest, spent the first day with us extolling the virtues of living in a Yurt.

                                                                      Image

 

Kaya showed us pictures of yurts online and told us we could buy one for less than $5,000 in Vermont. Or buy the land and build one for five grand, or something; as the discussion had lead to Danusia and I wanting to buy a house.

“I don’t see a bathroom or running water in any of these.” I said.

“Oh, well, you have to have an outhouse, and get water from a well or some other source.”

If it doesn’t have a bathroom or running water I’m not living in it. Our camping trip through Nevada and Big Sur last fall was it for me.

The next day Danusia took Kaya on the Staten Island ferry for a look at the New York skyline, harbor, and the Statue Of Liberty. I passed on this trip; I’m very familiar with all of those things.

For the last night together Kaya wanted to go see something called Midnight Moment in Times Square.

Midnight Moment is something sponsored by the Times Square Alliance, one night a month for three minutes starting at 11:57 a good number of the giant digital screens in Duffy Square show the same thing.

But before the midnight moment, which is way past my bedtime, I suggested we go to a movie, because if I was at home waiting for the right time to go to Times Square I’d just fall asleep on the couch. We all decided on the new Brian DePalma movie, Passions. I’m not even gonna talk about the movie except to say it’s Brian DePalma’s homage to himself. It was fairly entertaining, with Rachel McAdams and Noomi Rappace in a sex and hate triangle where the catch phrase is; “It’s not backstabbing, it’s just business.” Something we are all familiar with.

                                                                                             Image

We saw the movie at the Elinor Bunin center at Lincoln Center (I know, too many centers) on Monday night, and I thought we were going to be the only ones in the theater. A few more people showed up, including two gay boys that sat right in front of me and tittered through the whole movie. Ten people in a 200-seat auditorium and they have to sit there.

                                                                                Image

                                     Kaya and Danusia ham it up in Damrosch  Park

After the movie we walked over to Damrosch Park where there were a bunch of seats set up for one of the Fashion Week events and we goofed around and took pictures while we waited for the midnight moment. There was a lot of discussion about walking down to Times Square; we had plenty of time, but with torn cartilage in both knees and a heel spur I demurred.

“I’ll tell you what, you walk, I’ll take the train and meet you there.” I told them. On second thought, it would be a big hassle to find each other, so I convinced them to get on the train with me.

We got three quickly and ended up having to walk up to Duffy Square to see this thing, Kaya had the streets written down. Leave it to a visitor to get it right. We walked through the brightly lit streets of Times Square, and I marveled at how much it’s changed since my youth. Gone are the soft and hardcore porn theaters, the peep shows, strip joints and mob-operated gay bars that lined the strip.

Gone are the hustlers, pimps, and prostitutes, the phony drug dealers hawking oregano and baking powder to tourists. Oh, yeah, there were tourists then, who wanted to see the show, and that’s still the same. The tourists.

11:57 arrived and we all looked up from the crowd to watch the leader count down to the animation, a brightly colored thing of a woman walking down some stairs and petting a cat. It was done by something called The Nature Theater Of Oklahoma. Even the talent is a tourist nowadays.Image

 

 

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

THIS IS AN UNNECESSARY ALERT

Posted on September 3, 2013 by xaviertrevino

 

                                                                            Image 

 

Yesterday, because of the sudden thunderstorms and flash flooding that never materialized for Manhattan and Brooklyn my cell phone kept going off with a really annoying alarm warning me of impending doom. The audio alarm, a shrill, insistent vibration reminiscent of the “This is only a test” NORAD warnings I used to hear as a kid on TV kept going off followed by a text warning on my cell phone screen that disappeared when I unlocked my phone to read it. That gave me the idea for this post.

I was going to save the warning to use as a graphic for this, but each time I unlocked the phone it was gone. Then I had a better idea, get a screenshot, I’ve taken dozens of screenshot by accident, now was the time to do it for real.

The last alert came about 3PM as I stood on the corner of 14th Street and 9th Avenue waiting for the bus with the hot sun streaming down on me, with no sign of the heavy downpours bringing 2 inches of rain per hour that prompted the flash flood warning on my phone. I was ready for the next warning to get that screenshot, but that was the last one, I’d missed my chance.

                                                      Image

But here is a reasonable facsimile I found on the Internet.

The first time I heard one of these warnings was in the beginning of the summer. It was the middle of the night; I was fast asleep when the shrill insistent vibration suddenly erupted from the lovely Danusia’s iPhone on her nightstand. The both of us sat up wondering what the hell it was. I always turn my phone off at night, so we were spared a double dose of irritation.

The similarity of the sound reminded me as I said before of all the Cold War drills that scared the shit out of me as a kid

This is only a drill.

I remember when I was a kid, there was a day everybody was supposed to stay inside and hide for 15 minutes, and I remember looking at the posters on the subway warning everyone to comply with the drill under penalty of arrest. The whole city was supposed to come to a standstill and hide for 15 minutes on that day. It was known as Operation Alert, and though it happened once a year, I only remember one. I guess it was the one that happened in the spring of 1961, when I was six. I anticipated it with both fear and excitement; I was going to take part in the Cold War against the dreaded Communists. The day came and I found myself walking down the street with my father, who could give a rat’s ass for government drills or Communists. The sirens sounded and all good citizens scurried for cover, except for us, the winos and the street people arrayed along Atlantic Avenue where we lived.

“Papa, we have to take cover!” I pleaded.

“Shut up and keep walking, kid, it’s got nothing to do with us.”

It was better advice than I thought at the time, terrified that we would be arrested and thrown in jail, or worse, roasted alive by the radiation of a Soviet H-Bomb.

                                                                          Image

Those subway signs are echoed today by the If you see something signs, those ubiquitous reminders to be vigilant against our enemies, just like the Operation Alert signs and Duck and Cover drills did so many years ago. And the same way Operation Alert and Duck and Cover have gone by the wayside, one day the powers that be will decide that it is too expensive to maintain the See Something campaign and that will go by the wayside too. Now if I can only get rid of those alerts on my phone…

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Walking Disaster Handyman Blues

Posted on August 31, 2013 by xaviertrevino

Image

As some of you that read this blog know, I lost my handyman position at the building I work at a few months ago, because I couldn’t get some cheap tiles my boss bought to lay down right on an uneven concrete floor. There were other things he alluded to: loose doorknobs, screws that weren’t driven in flush, you get the picture. But people still ask me to do things in their homes. I think that’s one of the real reasons, he couldn’t handle that people asked me instead of him, the boss.

I must admit though, that he did have some valid criticisms. I’m good with my hands, and very good at figuring out how things work and go together, but sometimes tools and or materials just won’t cooperate with me.

Not long after I lost the job, and was re-assigned as a doorman on a less than desirable shift, I was standing in front of the building helping unload someone’s car when another tenant, a retired university professor who taught Shakespeare or something came up the block pushing his little red walker. He was trying to get my attention but I was too busy. I noticed he had a really ugly canvas perched on the handles of his walker.

He went in the lobby and sat down.

When I was done, I came in to help him on the elevator with his new piece of art. It was a 2X3 canvas of two weird looking smiling horses, one blue with red splotches on its body and the other one pink and yellow. It was meant to look like Chagall but was more like something out of Beanie and Cecil.

Image

 Chagall

Image

Cecil

“Look Xavier! I saw a man putting this out on the sidewalk, I asked him for it and he gave it to me! Isn’t it a wonderful painting?”

“Sure, Professor, it’s lovely.”

I gathered that “the man” who was putting it on the sidewalk was a porter and the painting was garbage, but you know what they say about one mans trash.

“Xavier, when you have time do you think you can come up and hang it for me?”

“Of course, Professor, of course.”

A couple of days later I came to work a few minutes early, and before changing into my doorman’s uniform got a Phillips head screwdriver, a couple of small screws and some picture wire and went up to the Professor’s apartment.

The painting was done on a store-bought pre-stretched canvas and was not framed. I was just going to screw the two screws into the stretchers and wrap some wire around them, the painting didn’t weigh much. I turned it over, measured a foot down on either side, marked it, and started to position the screws. As I did the first screw, the screwdriver slipped and I poked a hole through the canvas. A small hole, but a hole nevertheless. Wow, I really am a lousy handyman, I thought. I pushed the damaged canvas back into the hole, you could only see it from up close, and with the Professor’s eyesight I didn’t think he would notice. I hung up the painting on the wall the Professor had indicated and he was very happy.

The other day I was braising some chicken in a large saucepan in preparation for roasting it. I was also organizing the recyclables, as my wife is prone to throwing the paper in with the plastic, glass and metal. The apartment door is right by the kitchen, and I like to multitask. In between turning over the chicken I first got all the paper together, and took it out into the hall, carefully throwing the deadbolt so I didn’t get locked out in my t-shirt and underwear. I live on the top floor, and there are no other apartments on my floor, so I feel very comfortable going out in the hall in my drawers.

I did the bottles and plastic next, then the black garbage bag. The chicken was browning nicely. I spotted something I’d forgotten, opened the door and reached for the black bag to add it. I did not throw the bolt, using my foot to keep the door from closing. I reached a little too far and I heard the latch click shut behind me.

Now I was locked out, in my underwear, with chicken on the stove on high heat. I went up to the roof to see if there was any way of climbing down to an open window like Spiderman. Danusia would be home any minute, I thought. It was past four and she said she’d be home by four. But I could smell that chicken.

Eventually I bit the bullet and went downstairs to our friends the Turkish health food store guys. I called the landlord’s store across the street and they said to come over and get the keys. I ran across Broadway in my blue boxer shorts, nobody stared. One of the kids from the store came with me with the keys, we tried them all and none worked. It was time for the fire department.

They came in two minutes, and I was really surprised. It took one of them less than a second to pop the door open with a very large crowbar with a flat head. After getting my name they turned and left without a word. I yelled “thanks!” at their retreating backs.

The latch was sheared off, but the deadbolt worked.

Yesterday I went and bought a new $65 Marks mortise lock, the same kind that was on the door. I’ve installed dozens of these, and it usually takes five minutes.

Image

I pulled out the old lock, put in the new one, put the doorknobs and plates back on, and was ready to screw in the cylinder. It wouldn’t go. I kept trying, wasting almost 20 minutes. By now I’m drenched in sweat despite having the AC on. I pull everything apart and see if the threads on the lock are defective. The cylinder goes right I, it’s an alignment problem.

This time I don’t tighten anything up until I get the cylinder to catch. I should have done that in the first place.

I did manage to hang a chandelier we bought for $10 the day before though, and only got zapped twice while doing it.Image

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | 11 Comments

Farewell To Dutch

Posted on August 27, 2013 by xaviertrevino

Image

Elmore Leonard died last Tuesday, and since I was on vacation and not watching the nightly news (or the morning news for that matter) I didn’t find out until I saw Maggie Estep’s blogpost about it the next day, and she mentioned Leonard’s 10 rules about writing essay, and how the rules had influenced her writing.

I haven’t read the 10 rules book, but I did read 27 of his books, and I must admit, besides being highly entertaining, they were also a good influence on my own writing.

I’ve always loved tough-guy books, especially when the tough guy isn’t really so tough, just a little smarter and luckier than the real tough guys, and Leonard’s protagonists were always average guys (sometimes women) dealing with so-called tough guys.

The first Elmore Leonard book I read was Unknown Man # 89, and I found it in the library on post in Ft. Bragg, NC when I was in the army, in 1981.

Image

This was the cover on the copy I had

There was a great character in the book called Raymond, pronounced RAY-mond, according to the book, and he was some kind of backwoods Cajun killer working for a guy named Mr. Perez (pronounced Pe-REZ) and they were both in Detroit looking for the wife of the unknown man. A lot of their scenes involved the two of them discussing how close to home the “Authentic” Cajun cooking was in Detroit. Raymond went out to eat a lot; Mr. Perez stayed in his room and ordered in.

At one point, Raymond chases our hero (his name I forgot) through the streets of downtown Detroit firing a shotgun at him the whole time, and our hero took to referring to Raymond as the “Swamp Creature.” When I read that I was hooked, you can’t beat that for a description. I was in the army with a couple of swamp creatures, and Dutch knew what he was talking about.

There were no more Elmore Leonard books in the library, at least not crime ones; there were some westerns, but I’m not a great fan of westerns. So I didn’t read any of his other books until four years later, when I was out of the army and living on the Lower East Side. That book was Cat Chaser, and I loved what I got to read of it. In Cat Chaser, the hero is a Marine in the beginning of the book, and deployed to the Dominican Republic in 1965 to do whatever it was the Marines were sent to do. Marines are not Army, but military, so it was close enough for me. I could identify with the character.

Image

Cat Chaser was this guy’s radio call sign, and he meets and falls in love with a beautiful Dominican woman during his brief visit.

I was working at a shoe store out in Queens at the time, and read on the way there and on the way home, a trip that averaged an hour on the F train. One morning, I was reading the book while sitting on the little concrete seat at the Second Avenue station waiting for the F train. The train pulled in, and I was so engrossed in the book I waited for the last second to jump up and board. The train doors closed, and I looked at the seat I’d been sitting on, and there was a book lying there, and it said Cat Chaser on the cover. That’s the last time I saw the book.

I must admit, I wasn’t in my right mind at the time, and I was prone to leaving half read books on train stations or having them stolen by my friends.

One of the things about Leonard’s characters was that they reminded me of some of my friends, like the Corsican Sous-Chef who copped my copy of James Jones’ Go To The Widow Maker, another unfinished book in my history. I know it was him because he was the only one who “dropped by” that day.

There are plenty of books I’ve started and not finished for one reason or another, but these two were definite “finishers.”

When I first saw a picture of Dutch I thought he looked remarkably like Michael O’Donahue, another good writer and a sort of friend of mine. O’Donahue once gave me an autographed copy of Charles Bukowski’s Hollywood, and I still have it around somewhere. But I haven’t gotten around to reading it.

 

Michael O’Donahue

o'donahueSo, farewell, Dutch, I’ll miss you, but there are still a bunch of unread gems waiting for me to get around to. And if anyone has a spare copy of Cat Chaser or Go To The Widow maker, drop me a line.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Easily Distracted By Aircraft

Posted on August 23, 2013 by xaviertrevino

Image

 

When I was 16 I worked at a shoe store, Bloom’s Shoe Gallery on Sixth Ave. just down the block from the Waverley Theater. Three siblings, Sadie, Joe, and Milt Bloom owned it. They were all old, and each had a peculiar quirk. Sadie was the eldest, probably 70, and had a hairy face and walked as if her thighs were glued together to the knee. Milt was the youngest, but the boss; and he thought he was Groucho Marx. Joe was in the middle and kind of dense, I was told by a coworker to always go to Joe when I had a sale to ring up because he was easily distracted and I could confuse him enough to get him to give me the wrong change, and keep the difference. Every time Joe heard a fire truck go by siren blaring Joe would drop everything to run to the door and watch it.

                                                                   Image

It’s the same with aircraft and me. Every time I hear any kind of aircraft fly by I have to look up and if possible, identify what type of aircraft it is.

As a child, aircraft were what I loved to draw the most. I had drawings of all kinds of planes, and there was a hobby shop nearby that I would spend hours in front of looking at the model planes hanging in the window. I watched movies about planes and pilots, and wondered what it would be like to fly, to look down from high above.

As I grew older, the love increased, but I developed a fear, a fear of heights, and a fear of flying. It was a paralyzing, visceral fear that I hated having. I refused to go on roofs or fire escapes, and traveling over bridges was a challenge, I could not look down.

But I still looked up at planes, and wished I could be in one.

That opportunity came at the age of 25, when I was working at The Albany Skydiving Center in Duanesburg, NY. To say I was terrified would be an understatement, but curiosity and a threat to be sent back to Brooklyn trumped fear and I boarded a Cessna 206 that had the door and seats removed for skydivers. I sat on the floor behind the pilot, wearing a pilot’s reserve parachute with my legs spread open, so the next guy could lean into my lap. He and five other jumpers were crammed into the small plane like this, only the jumpmaster stood, crouched, really, over everyone else looking for the drop zone. It took 20 minutes to reach 15,000 feet, and when they did they all somehow went out of the door at once. The plane seemed to jump up into the sky from the sudden loss of a thousand pounds. I thought I would toss my cookies, but it didn’t happen.

That’s the remarkable thing- I’ve flown hundreds of times since then, in sometimes really bad conditions that cause the plane drop and pitch and roll with sickening suddenness; but I’ve never lost my lunch. I’ve seen plenty of others do it, but it’s never happened to me.

This week I went up in the co-pilot’s seat for the first time, and again, all I could think up in the days and hours leading up to the flight was “I hope we don’t go down.” I imagined the engine quitting suddenly, looking up to see a giant jet bearing down on us, a sudden storm appearing out of nowhere to swallow us up whole…

But I was also excited. I’d always wondered what the view from the cockpit would be like.

It was a Cessna 172 Skyhawk; similar to the 182 I’d jumped out of on my first parachute jump. The pilot was my friend Shari, someone I’ve known for almost 30 years. She’s been flying for the past 10 or so years, I think, we lost touch for a while so I can’t be sure. But she has mentioned it to me for sometime now, that one day she would take me up. And that day had come.

Danusia and I drove out to the Mattituck airport the other morning to wait for Shari, and the Mattituck airport is a 2,000-foot tarmac field with a few small planes and a helicopter parked on the apron. No tower or field control or anything. We watched as a small red and white plane flashed overhead and landed on the field out of sight from where we stood. We listened as the plane turned around and taxied over to us. It was Shari.

Shari shut down the engine and climbed down from the cockpit. She explained the flight to us, a hop over to a field in Rhode Island for gas, then on to our destination, Block Island for lunch.

We got on the plane, Shari showed us how to strap in, and we all put our head sets on so we could communicate without yelling at each other at the top of our lungs, the way I had to on those other small aircraft flights. Shari turned the key in the ignition, the prop turned over, and after taxiing back to the runway we were off!

We climbed to 2800 feet and headed north to RI. I looked down at the North Fork, trying to spot where we were staying but it was impossible. We flew over Robin’s Island and Shelter Island, then over the sound.                                                                

                                                                     Image 

 

I was glad I had on polarized sunglasses, as it was clear and sunny, a little hazy. I spotted the field we were going to land on for gas, and Shari bounced the plane once on the landing.

                                                                 Image

“That was a shitty landing.” She said.

“Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing.” I said.

We gassed up and when Shari went to the office to pay Danusia and I explored a hangar full of unusual planes, and an old Korean War helicopter. Shari reappeared and we climbed back into the 172 for the next leg of our journey.

As we approached Block Island Shari had me take the yoke, and talked me through a 90° turn for our landing run. I’m glad I didn’t put the plane into a steep dive and land us in the Atlantic.

                                                                    Image

We landed and walked the 30 minutes into downtown Block Island, which Danusia calls “Black Island” because in Polish O is A and vice-versa.

I wanted a souvenir, but I didn’t want a t-shirt that said “Block Island.” I spotted a nice silver fish suitable for framing in a gift store, and after Danusia talked me out of it, Shari bought it for me as a sort of belated birthday gift. It was $18, and I call it the $18 fish. I’m going to mount it and put it on our kitchen wall when we get back to Brooklyn.

Image

                                             The $18 fish

 We had lunch; we walked around, talked, swapped flying stories and eventually headed back to the airstrip. We strapped in and flew the slow, uneventful but breathtaking last leg back to Mattituck.                                                                            

                                                                     Image

 

We flew over Montauk, where Shari has a house, back over Shelter Island and the Peconic bay, and landed safely in Mattituck. We said our goodbyes and Danusia and I watched Shari take off into the evening sun. It was great flying around, and even greater to take the yoke and do a 90° turn. I can say I flew a plane now, even if it was for only a minute or so. But it sure was fun. And scary.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments