Were’s My Nanny, Dude?

Posted on July 15, 2013 by xaviertrevino

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When we first moved into our apartment here in Williamsburg, our building became the first and only residential building on the block. I should say our side, the South side of Broadway between Thornton and Flushing; because there are a couple of residential buildings across the street.

Our side of the street starts with the Bed-Sty Diner on the corner of Thornton, a couple of “Big Shirt” stores (as the ever lovely Danusia likes to call them), FOUR dental clinics (two catering exclusively to children, and one where a patient was notoriously left in the chair and locked in one night under anesthesia), a pharmacy, a butcher, our friends the health food store right downstairs, two Arab owned bodegas, and a Burger king between us and the subway.

There is also a MacDonald’s across the street from the Bed Sty Diner.

There are three public garbage cans on the block, one on each corner and one in the middle of the block, just a few feet away from the front of our building.

There is also plenty of garbage.

A lot of it comes from the fast food joints, of course. People leave MacDonald’s or Burger King, finish their drink or food, and if they don’t throw their garbage on the ground, they make a feeble attempt to put it in one of the overflowing garbage cans.

When we first moved here, out landlord told us that the Department of Sanitation had been contacted and made aware of our new residential status and would be collecting trash on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday mornings, and on Saturday recycle items would be picked up. Sounded good.

For the first few years, they would only pick up the black bags, the recycling people ignored us. The paper and mixed glass, metal and plastic would sit in front of the building for days until the Doe Fund people would bag it up in black bags. So much for the Mayor’s concern for better recycling.

Speaking of black bags, I found out the hard way, in a long conversation with a 311operator one day that all garbage except recycle is to be placed in black bags. I called to complain one day, and the conversation went like this:

“Was your garbage in black bags?”

“No.”

“Well sir, the department of sanitation will not pick up garbage unless it is black bags or garbage cans.”

So I started buying black bags, and even putting my less conscientious neighbor’s into the black bags. Most times it was still not picked up.

One morning as I was leaving for work at 5:30 AM I found out why. Our garbage was assigned to the truck that picked up on the north side of the street; we had no truck of our own. If there was a car parked in front of our building and it blocked the driver’s view of the garbage in front of our building, they did not bother to cross over and look.

Our landlord gets a lot of tickets for uncollected garbage, but if he doesn’t want to pay someone to keep the front of the building clean, that’s his problem.

I find it hard to understand, though, how the garbage men, who patronize the Bed Sty Diner and the Arab bodega on the corner of Flushing in large numbers cannot take the time to pick up the garbage in front of our building.

Recently, the landlord started work on the apartment downstairs and threw out a lot of household garbage the people who’d moved out left behind. That stuff remained in front of the building for weeks, as a matter of fact, there is still a piece of wood, a slat that came out of that apartment that still resides either in the gutter or sometimes on the sidewalk in front of our home.Image

I love our apartment, it is a 1200 Square foot loft space, with two bedrooms, a kitchen and dining room, a good sized living room with 12-foot ceilings, and importantly to the lovely Danusia, lots of light. But it turns my stomach when I leave my apartment and have to encounter a big pile of trash that seems to grow every day, and watch Sanitation trucks callously drive by while their boss exhorts people to drink smaller sodas and eat less salt and grease. He thinks fat people are ugly. Well, I think garbage is pretty ugly too, Mr. Mayor; maybe you could exhort your employees to do their job in all the city neighborhoods, not just the ones you have to look at.

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This Much Is True

Posted on July 10, 2013 by xaviertrevino

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I don’t know whether to give a shout out to Wally Lamb or Spandau Ballet (I think they were first) but this much is true: I am now officially a Moth Addict.

I went again, last night to the event at Housing Works on Crosby Street. After the excitement of last week’s performance, I came home and Googled The Moth to find out when I could do it again, and found out I only had a week to prepare. The theme was listed as “Summer Of Love,” so I really couldn’t use the same story I used last week, which is funny but true. That’s what the guy up on stage said last week, the story has to have a beginning, middle, and end, and it has to be true. But so many of the stories that were told were so heavily embellished and worked on that at least for me I found it hard to believe they were true.

So I thought of that, making something up; but I already know I’m not good at making things up, I had a friend who once told me I was a terrible liar “I can always see right through you, it’s pathetic” he’d said. So I have to stick to the truth, rather than risk sounding pathetic.

Not that the people telling the stories were pathetic, most were very funny indeed, but I thought the purpose of The Moth was to tell a story, not use the stage as a proving ground for stand-up comedy.

Anyway, yesterday I got up early and before I got lost in the world of facebook, on line shopping and looking at websites that may be harmful to my computer I wrote out the story I was going to tell, the story of my summer of love; 1972, when I fell in love for the first time. I wrote it and rehearsed it and ran out to buy a pair of brand new sneakers to wear and came back and rehearsed it some more. Then I left early for Crosby Street because I know the Bookstore is a small venue and I wanted to at least get a seat this time. My friend Lexie was coming to support me, and that was great, as I noticed last week that half of the people that went up on stage were alone, and I didn’t want to be one of those people. So I saved a place in line for Lexie, who always shows up at the last minute with a smile on her face and love in her heart.

When they started the MC announced that “Summer Of Love” was too restrictive, and they’d opened it up to just “summer,” and people started telling all kinds of crazy stories that just happened to have happened in the summer. There were a lot of laughs, and I started getting anxious about my story, which rather than being funny is a sad, rather poignant story of young love. I started debating with myself if I should go to my Nixon story, after all this was a different crowd and it felt really good to hear the people laughing last week; and besides, the Nixon story did actually happen in the summer.

My stomach churned and I asked Lexie, who read the story (I had the print-out in my pocket) and she said, “Tell the love story.”

Two of the best Moth stories I’ve ever heard were not funny, they were moving. One was told by an ex-NYPD detective, about the mother of a dead criminal who has no pictures of him and wants his mug shot as a memento, and one is by my wife’s boss, Andrew Solomon, about going to Afghanistan and talking to musicians who were not allowed to make music for the time the Taliban was in power. It’s easy to make people laugh, you make funny voices and say outrageous things; but it is much, much harder to make people cry or reach into their well protected emotions for a visceral reaction.

At points I wanted to stand up and shout out “But is it true?” If I did that, I stood the risk of ending up like my friend Andy Kessler, rest his soul; who was interviewed by New York magazine a few years ago and just complained about how kids now days just are “Doing it all wrong.” I loved Andy, and there was nothing I could do to assuage his (sometimes) surly disposition, but I at least could make him laugh and cry on occasion.

So, I kept my mouth shut and waited, and by the ninth person, I figured I wasn’t going up anyway, and relaxed. Then the guy called the last name and it was me. So I went up there and told the truth.

There was very little laughter, and a big gasp at the punch line, where my girlfriend’s mother told me she’d taken her to the gynecologist to get fitted for a diaphragm just before she left for college, but I got really good applause at the end, and a high score (9.3, 9.6, 8.0), and got lots of high fives and whispers of “Very moving story,” all from women, but it felt very good indeed to stick to the truth.

 

 

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Let’s go Chopping

Posted on July 8, 2013 by xaviertrevino

nixA couple of weeks ago I was on the J train on my way home from work late Saturday night, I get off of work at 11P.M.; and the train was filled with kids headed out to party in Williamsburg, or coming back from partying on the Lower East Side, take your pick.

I noticed a young man of indeterminate race (he could have been anything from Latino to Israeli to Serbian) accompanied by two pretty blonde girls in frilly frocks and combat boots. An old but tried style very popular on the East River Shuttle.

The boy, on the other hand, fashionably scruffy with a two-day growth of beard and a shock of thick black hair that hung in his face like Hitler’s hair at his most frenetic; had on jeans and a really fabulous shirt, a “Colossal” shirt, as Ratso Rizzo would have put it.

It was like a bowling shirt, short sleeved and box-cut with an open collar; but what made it special was that the body of the shirt was white and the sleeves and collar were black in contrast. Furthermore, the white part of the shirt had a print of a little skull and something else design, very cool. A thought occurred to me that occurs often enough I have to think about it; “I gotta have that shirt.”

Sometimes that thought comes over a pair of boots, pants, a hat (I’ve got a whole shelf in my closet devoted to goofy hats I thought would look really fly on me but don’t) a jacket or as in this case, a shirt.

I could have asked the kid, “Hey, where did you get that shirt?” But I didn’t me being me and never wanting to ask for help, I figured I could find it or at least something close to it, as the black and white contrast was more important to me than the little skull motif.

The next morning I Googled “contrast collar and sleeves short sleeve shirts”, and looked at Amazon, and on Google shopping itself, to no avail. The closest thing to it was the “Charlie Sheen” series of bowling shirts.

On Monday, my day off, I went off to Soho in search of the shirt, or something like it. I started in Bloomingdales on Broadway, and walked up to Houston Street looking in a variety of stores, to no avail. I gave up and went to Whole Foods for groceries.

One day a few years ago, I was with a few male friends, we’d gone to an event in the West Village, and as we walked to the subway we passed one of those “sample sales” and I said I’ll see you guys later, I’m going to see what they might have in here. One of the guys, a guy I’ll call Peter, suddenly said:

“Oh, you shop? I shop too. So does Richard, Richard shops.” Richard is a mutual friend, and I never was interested in whether Richard, or Peter, for that matter, “Shops.”

But there it was, it has a name, I “Shop.” Who knew?

Today I gave it another try, I gotta have that shirt. I started at Bloomingdales again, but this time my strategy would be to take my time and look very carefully through all the racks. There were some nice summer shirts, very similar to what I want in cut and material, but all in some kind of print or another, no contrasting sleeves and collar.

I went to Yellow Rat Bastard across the street, no luck. I walked over to West Broadway, and remembered I’m not a millionaire. I made my way back to Broadway. I saw a pop-up store just north of Prince Street that looked promising, it was skateboard themed and this shirt fits the bill. Again, similar but not what I wanted. There were a couple of shirts that might have made a nice compromise, but the sales people, all kids in their 20’s, were unbearably pushy.

“That’s a nice tattoo.” One said, indicating my swimming woman tattoo.

“What is it?”

“It’s a woman swimming.” I said.

“You like that shirt? You’re like the hundredth person to touch that shirt today. Feels nice, don’t it?”

After agreeing the shirt felt nice, I left. I walked up to Houston, resigned to repeat my visit to Whole Foods. I passed another store called “Billabong”, an Australian themed skateboard and surf store. Again, pushy kids and not quite what I’m looking for shirts. Then I saw a tee shirt in a sort of cream color, with NIXON simply stenciled across the chest. It was cotton and soft, and it was only $20, less than the J. Crew tees I usually wear. I took it to the cashier and paid for it. At least I can wear it the next time I tell my “It Was Nixon” story at the Moth.

By the way, I didn’t misspell “Shopping”. My mother, who never quite mastered the English language, used to say it like that, so it’s an homage to her.

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Five Computer Family

Posted on July 7, 2013 by xaviertrevino

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There are only two of us, well three, if you count the cat, but only my wife counts the cat, and the cat doesn’t use the computer (despite my urging to “write or get out” as a prerequisite of being part of a writing family) but we have five computers in the house if you count our iPhones. And they do count, as they are mini-computers, technically speaking.Image

When I was a kid, the measure of success and prosperity was two cars, at least on TV and the rest of the world, my world in the housing projects the measure was more than one TV, which we achieved when my dad bought his own personal COLOR TV that was kept in HIS bedroom in front of HIS bed. More on that some other time. But after he bought his personal color TV I took it upon myself to sneak in and watch it at every opportunity when he was at work, since it was more dazzling than the big black and white Philco that was in the living room. Sometimes I would forget to put it back on channel 47, the only Spanish channel back then, and I would get yelled at for touching HIS TV.Image

I got my first computer in 2000, when I was recently divorced from my first wife. The one we had when we were married was really hers, I didn’t know how to use it properly and really had no reason to.

My then 12-year-old son had to set it up for me and show me how to get on line.

“See dad, it’s pretty easy, huh?”

Easy for him to say and do. That computer was a Dell desktop, and it took up most of my kitchen table, which at the time was really a card table my brother had found in the street somewhere in Hell’s Kitchen. I signed up for AOL and actually met a woman on the AOL dating thing, a woman named Yvonne from somewhere upstate who came to New York to visit me. My first and only experience with on line dating. I wrote emails to my new friends and learned how to surf the web.

When I moved in with Danusia, my new wife, we were not married yet; but she had a 12-inch MacBook and suggested I get rid of the Dell. She said I could use her computer if I needed to, but I didn’t really feel comfortable with that, and that Christmas I bought myself a 15-inch MacBook Pro. Danusia fell in love with my new computer, and was on it all the time, as it was a lot faster and prettier than her old 12-inch MacBook. I urged her to get her own, and the following Christmas she got a SEVENTEEN-inch MacBook Pro, which now was much faster and prettier than my 15-incher. Grrr.

By now I had advanced from using my computer to store pictures on and surf the web to writing on it. When I met Danusia, and she’d told me she was an actress and a writer, I had shown her a little hand-written piece I’d done about the birth of my son, and she said that’s one of the reasons she’d fallen in love with me. But now she started urging me to write, and that’s how we became a writing family. So you can blame Danusia for making me think that anyone would be interested in reading what I write, and for wanting to make it public.

Somewhere along the line I got us iPhones, I had gotten a big check at work when I filled in for the then handyman and splurged on his and hers iPhones. That makes 4 computers, or “devices” if you want to get technical about it.

Danusia travels a lot for work, and she always took her 17-inch 3-pound laptop with her.

“I wish I had an iPad” (which she pronounces as “iPod”), it would be so much easier to carry when I travel and we would still be able to Skype!”

So last Christmas I bough her an iPad, and that makes five computers. The iPad is really convenient when we are watching a movie together and HAVE to know the name of this or that actor/actress we just can’t place. Or settle a bet on whether someone won an Oscar or not. “You give Oscars to everybody” Danusia is fond of telling me.

But the primary purpose of all of our “Devices” (Steve Martin/Dan Aykroyd, anyone?) is writing.

A typical evening (or morning) in our apartment will find us at our respective computers, quietly writing away, each in our own little world. She is working on a new play and I write blog posts and stories, and now I have something new to write for, my next Moth story. Our worlds collide when we either read what we’ve written aloud to each other, or if it’s long, we print it out, or sometime email it to each other. The other day she emailed me some pictures from the bedroom (I was writing in the living room) that made me shut down my computer and think of something else.

 

 

 

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Moth Story

Posted on July 2, 2013 by xaviertrevino

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I first heard about The Moth about six years ago when I first started taking Charles Salzberg’s advanced non-fiction writing class. After reading one of my pieces, a woman in the class said, “You should do The Moth.” I did a little on line research and found out what The Moth was all about, and wondered if I could do that, stand in front of a roomful of complete strangers and tell a five-minute story without notes.

The story itself is no problem; I’ve got plenty of stories to tell. If there was a person that weird shit happened to, it’s me. Or maybe it’s that I did weird shit, and things happened to me as a result. Maybe a little of both, I don’t know. Weird shit happens to a lot of people, but in the end I’ve discovered it’s all in the telling, and the willingness to do so.

I tried to sign up for one of these Moth things on line, and discovered that each competition had a theme, and your story was supposed to fit that theme. This was sort of discouraging. But I figured as a writer I was good enough to bend one of my stories to any theme, and tried to sign up anyway. It was a no go; I kept getting the digital world run-around and gave up.

A few years ago my teacher Charles asked if I would be willing to read a short piece at the KGB bar as part of the Trumpet Fiction Ducts.org Saturday night readings; and I said yes. That night I read a short piece involving two NYPD officers, a blue and white NYPD van, Richard Nixon, and myself. Plus a small cast of Lower East Side extras. It was well received by the audience, everybody laughed in all the right places and even in some places I didn’t think were very funny, and I felt very, very good when I left the lectern. I though this was something I could get used to.

This past Sunday my friend Lexie who lives in Washington Heights called and asked if I wanted to go see The Moth at the Bell House in Brooklyn the next evening. She said “It’s like a poetry slam, people put their names in a hat and ten of them get called up to tell a story.” Well, I already knew that, and here was my chance to get “A little love” as they used to say at the Nuyorican Poetry club. I said, “OK, I’ll go, and maybe I’ll put my name in the hat!”

My wife Danusia goes to this spiritual lady reading thing every Monday night at a YMCA on the Upper West side, so she just said “Good luck.”

I was only joking when I said I would put my name in the hat, I didn’t think I could remember the story well enough as I’d written it to do it off book; but ego got the better of me. I pulled out the version of the story I call “Busted”, printed in 24-point type so my old eyes could read it properly in the low light of the KGB bar and started reading it on the train ride over to Gowanus to meet Lexie. I wouldn’t get picked anyway, I thought, but mentally edited the story so I could come in under five minutes, as it was seven minutes at the KGB reading.

When I got to the Bell House there was a line of people stretching down the block, and it is a very long block indeed. I wondered if we would even be able to get in. Lexie wasn’t there yet, and she texted me to get a ticket for her. When I got to the ticket window the girl behind the counter said “There’s no tickets, we just stamp your hand, so no, you can’t buy your friend a ticket.”

“What if she can’t get in?”

“She’ll be alright, don’t worry.”

A tall man waiting behind me said, “She won’t get in, I’ve been locked out before.”

Well, thanks mister. I paid the 8 bucks anyway and went outside to wait. I got in line and felt the anxiety grow, and once they started letting people in I was already mentally strangling Lexie. I got out of the line and saw her wandering down the block looking for me. I waved franticly until I got her attention and commanded her to run inside and get her hand stamped. I resisted the urge to say, “You’re late.”

She got her stamp and we went inside, and there were no seats left. People were already signing up, so I made my way to the stage and filled out my release form.

The show got started and the first person was called up. The theme was being stubborn, and since I’ve often been accused of this, I figured it would be pretty easy to wrap my story around it. The next person was called, and the next. Each time they guy reached into the canvas tote bag to pull out a release my neck would tighten up.

“Are you nervous?” Lexie asked. I was but nervousness is something I’ll never admit to.

“Just a tad” I said.

“Well, I’m nervous for you.”

The way it worked was that the person who just finished would pick the next name out of the tote bag. After five people the MC announced a ten-minute break that lasted almost twenty.

“OK” he said, “lets see who’s up first for the second half” as he reached into the bag. At this point I wasn’t even worried.

“Xavier Trevino! Come on up here!”

Suddenly my heart started pounding and there was a ringing in my ears. I made my way through the crowd to the stage stairs as he told a very short joke and motioned me onto the stage. He adjusted the mike and said, “remember, stay close to the mike. Good luck.”

I looked out into the room and all I could see was spotlights and darkness below. Just talk to the lights, I told myself. I took a deep breath and hoped I wouldn’t stutter.

I told my story, a little shaky, not as smooth and rehearsed as the others, but the crowd laughed, no, they howled, and applauded. I finished and the big guy slapped me on the back and said “great story.” I was grinning ear-to-ear and numb when I walked off the stage. The three judging teams gave me an 8.6, a 9.0, and an 8.4. Nobody got a 10, but the next to last guy brought down the house with a great story about mushrooms, vampires, and liquefied gold. He got all 9’s.

 

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Not Guilty

Posted on June 25, 2013 by xaviertrevino

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I’ve been watching all of this Paula Deen business on TV for the past couple of days, and I wonder what all the hubbub is all about. After all, she is a white Southern woman, and when she was asked if she had ever used the “N word” she said, “of course”. At least she was honest about it, something I doubt most whites would be willing to admit to doing.

But racism is not a one sided affair, unfortunately, and even good people on any side of the fence can be guilty of it.

I myself am a Mexican-American, therefore a “brown person” in current racial vernacular. Growing up in the Lafayette Gardens housing projects in Brooklyn all of my friends were black, or should I say “African American”, in the current vernacular?

When I went to high school, most of my friends were white, and most of those were Jewish. They were all very fond of saying to each other “don’t be such a Jew” when someone balked at spending money. Just like the black kids called each other the “N word” affectionately. I don’t ever recall ever being with fellow Latinos and calling each other “Spick”, or “Beaner” or any other derogatory names. But Latinos do tend to refer to each other by the countries they come from, often in an oblique derogatory manner. So I am usually “México” to most other Latinos.

An interesting thing happened to me while I was in the army, and I was stationed at Ft. Bragg, N.C. I spent a night in the Fayetteville county jail; all because of bouncing a $10 check at the local Piggly-Wiggly and then missing a court date over it. I was arrested on Post, then driven to the jail and issued an orange jumpsuit, a pillow and a blanket and escorted to a cell which housed thirty or so men. On entering the cell, I noticed that all of the Whites were on one side and all of the Blacks were on the other side. There was one empty bunk in the middle, a sort of no-man’s land, and that was the bunk I was invited to take, by a Black prisoner who asked if I had any cigarettes after helping me settle in.

Another interesting thing happened to me a few years later, and I’ve been dying to tell this story ever since, but could not find a situation good enough to frame it, so I say thanks to Paula Deen and her clueless insensitivity for giving me one.

It was October 3rd, 1995, and I was at the time working at a shoe store on 55th Street and Lexington Avenue. I was on my lunch break, and as a lover of books I almost invariably spent lunch in the Barnes and Noble around the corner from the store on 3rd Avenue, browsing the latest John LeCarre or Len Deighton books, as I am a big fan of spy novels. I was doing so on the second floor, and the store was designed with a sort of mezzanine where you could see down to the ground floor from where I was standing. I suddenly felt a sort of psychic energy, an invisible vibration that descended on the store. I looked around, and I began to notice a lot of the store employees, who were mostly African-American, whispering to each other, starting on the ground floor.

It was like a massive game of telephone, where one whispered to one and that person would walk over to the next African-American and whisper something into that person’s ear. No white people were whispered to. I watched this phenomenon with great fascination, and I wondered what all the excitement was about, as judging from the speed and the expression on each person’s face as they received whatever message was being passed, it was exciting news indeed.

In seconds it had reached where I was standing, and the last receiver quickly approached a young African-American woman who was re-stocking shelves inches from where I was standing and whispered to her, but loud enough for me to hear, “not guilty.” The girl broke into a wide grin as she slid a book into its place on the shelf.  

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The Sanitizing Station

Posted on June 23, 2013 by xaviertrevino

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disWhile I was out of work my company installed a “sanitizing station” in the lobby. The polished brass base is nice, it matches the base on the “All Visitors Must Be Announced” sign, but the plastic Purell dispenser and the sign with a picture of the hand waiting for the goop with the words “sanitizing station” over it are not. The lobby is beginning to look like the old 42nd Street.
It’s not even Purell, they started negotiating for a Purell contract but it was too expensive, and our company is all about saving money and charging the maximum amount of rent. They’re probably going to find a way for the tenants to pay for it anyway, and charge Purell prices.
My wife was in the city the other night; she called and said she was in Central park so I suggested she stop by for a visit. She said she was too far downtown so maybe next time, but she would call me later. She did call, about a half hour later and said “It would have been nice to see you” and as I was answering, I saw her walk through the lobby door and start laughing. A pleasant surprise, she played a little trick on me.
Then she noticed the sanitizing station, said, “this is new” and promptly put her hands underneath so that a dose of sterile alcohol-based goop was automatically dispensed into her palms. I was disappointed. I wanted to ask if her hands were dirty.I only use it if I pick up a piece of trash from the sidewalk or if I’ve touched a dog.

“You know, you are drying out your hands and compromising your immune system by using that shit” I blurted.
“I’m just cleaning my hands, that’s all.”
“Well, since that thing has been here I’ve seen people use it, and I’ve seen people walk right by it; and the people that use it exhibit some kind of desperation in my eyes.”
That’s what it was. There were people who had to stick their hands underneath that thing each time they passed it, no matter how many times they passed it, and not because their hands were dirty, but because it’s there and it’s free. They have a compulsion to take anything that is offered, these are the same people who pick up A.M. New York or any of those other free papers that are not even worth using as toilet paper only because they are free, and then carelessly drop them anywhere after they’ve looked at them.
There was a doorman who used to work here, and whenever I relieved him, I found two or three or even sometimes four untouched cups of cold coffee stashed all over the lobby. Some tenants are nice enough to ask you if you want a cup of coffee or something when they run out for their own, and this guy said yes to everybody, whether he needed it or not, only because it was offered. I told tis story to Danusia and she said, “well, that was nice of him, it made them feel good to bring him a coffee.”
“Well, to me it’s just a waste, if you’re not going to drink it. Think of it, more Styrofoam garbage, and wasted coffee someone else could have had, just so that he could satisfy his compulsion.”
She looked at me with a look of surprise.
“Think of it, the coffee, the Purell, the newspapers, some people are just takers for the sake of taking, and it turns me off. When people ask me if I want coffee, and I don’t need it, I say ‘No thank you, but thanks for asking’, that way they feel good without having to waste a coffee.”
She looked at me and smiled.
“Wow, the stuff that’s in your head! If people could only see.”
If only, but they can’t see, so I have to write it down somewhere, like here, for people to see. I don’t even know why I care; taking is about control, refusing is about control. I guess at one point I was a big taker, and watching others take without thought reminds me of that and I don’t like it. I’m glad I’m not so much of a taker anymore, I’ve actually turned into a giver, not a co-dependent giver, mind you, just someone who’s learned what real kindness can be. I guess I have to try harder to be kind to the takers in my head.

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His And Hers Remote Controls

Posted on June 18, 2013 by xaviertrevino

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We have a variety of remote controls in our home, for the two TV’s (four controls) for the DVD player, for the CD/USB player, and for the ACs (4). That’s a lot of small plastic candy bars lying around. Then there are the chargers, two MacBook Pro chargers, two iPhone chargers, and one iPad charger that belongs to my wife. I gave her an iPad for Christmas this year. Sometimes it gets confusing, like with the TV’s.

We have a big TV in the living room, a 42 Toshiba flat screen, and since I couldn’t get the satellite box control to program properly to operate the TV, we have to use the TV’s remote to turn it on and off and adjust the volume, and the box remote to do everything else.

The TV in the bedroom should be easier, since there is only one satellite box, but it isn’t. We used to have an old analog TV which we had to buy an adaptor box for when all signals went digital, and I thought when I put the small flat screen in the bedroom (after buying the big flat screen) it wouldn’t be needed anymore. But I was wrong. I tried programing the flat screen digital TV ad nausea to no avail; I can only get reception if it’s hooked up to the box. So two plastic candy bars for that TV too.

Both having iPhones can be a problem, as the chargers are identical and women carry different handbags on different occasions, and when her charger is in a different handbag, the next handiest charger, mine, becomes hers.

I don’t know how many times I’ve come home with a dead phone and reached for my charger which hangs from a hook my wife thoughtfully screwed into a kitchen cabinet just for our chargers and found there were no chargers at all hanging there. Same with our headphones, but I can live without headphones.

A couple of years ago, my wife left for the UK a week before me, and the day she left I came home from work to find out my iPhone charger was somewhere over the Atlantic ocean safely ensconced in my wife’s luggage, along with hers. I went out to buy another charger. You would think that with three chargers the problem would be solved, but did you ever meet a woman who had less than three handbags?

The same thing happens with the laptop chargers. My laptop rarely leaves the house, or moves from my designated spot in the living room, my office, so to speak; so I always think that’s where I’ll find it. Unfortunately my wife often takes her laptop with her, and sometimes both chargers. Since I got her the iPad it’s been a little better.

THANKFULLY, we don’t have that problem with the air conditioner remotes. We have three air conditioners, the big Friedrich in the living room, a 10,000 BTU in the bedroom, a Frigidaire; and a 12,000 BTU Sharp I scored from a tenant a couple of years ago as a spare, I can pop it into the guest bedroom if we get a summertime guest. The guest bedroom also serves as Danusia’s office/yoga room, and she prefers to have an open window with plenty of sunlight streaming in, so no AC. There is a remote for all, and even two for the Frigidaire in the bedroom, which is great, since at different times during the night either of us might decide it’s too hot or too cold and don’t have to reach over each other searching for the remote to adjust the temperature. We achieved this feat quite by accident, at one point we had two Frigidaire units, the one in the bedroom and a 12,000 BTU in the living room. When I scored the Friedrich, a 14,000 BTU unit from a tenant that was moving back to France we gave the bigger Frigidaire to Danusia’s neice Kasia who lives on the lower east side with her Libertine husband Charles, who was loath to buy a new air conditioner.

I do have to give a shout out to Charles, though; as he was the one who drove and helped me carry the Friedrich up four flights of stairs last fall.

It wasn’t until this spring when I installed the ACs after the first hot days that we discovered that we forgot to give them the remote. So now we have the two in the bedroom for the one AC, as since they were both Frigidaire the remotes are identical. I may not always know where my iPhone charger may be, but I’m always sure my AC remote is right on my night table, right next to the two TV remotes.

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The Father’s Day Card

Posted on June 15, 2013 by xaviertrevino

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My 25 year old son emailed me last Monday to ask for my address, a sort of frantic, urgent “dad when you get a chance send me your address right away” and that was it. He did say he was OK in response to the last email I’d sent him a couple of weeks prior.

This is how we communicate, random emails that are few and far in-between. He has a phone that says: “the present subscriber does not accept incoming messages at this time.” Sometimes I’m lucky and he answers.

Javier lives in Omaha, Ne. Why Omaha, kid? A kid that was born in Beth Israel hospital on 17th Street, grew up in Greenpoint, Williamsburg, and Spanish Harlem ends up in Omaha, Ne. But he’s happy, and that’s what’s important.

So yesterday, on my way to work in the afternoon, I opened the mailbox and there it was, the envelope with the Omaha Ne. return address on it, my first father’s day card from him since he was 12. I still have one or two of those, “the best dad in the world” scrawled in his childish block letters, when my wife asked if I still wanted them I gave her a look that she said “never mind” to.

I love my son, and I know he loves me. We tell each other that each time we talk, and have always said so. My father, on the other hand, would only say so when he was very drunk, and that’s when I least wanted to hear it. We had a horrible relationship that I was able to salvage only in the last years of his life when he was in a nursing home. I always made sure to visit on his birthday and father’s day, and treated him with all the love and kindness I could muster.

ImageMy son is six-foot one or two, and 220 pounds. A few years ago he came to stay with us in Brooklyn for a summer after he’d told me on the phone that things weren’t going well with him and his mom in Santa Fe, NM. I took to calling him “the giant boy” to my friends, who found that very entertaining. I called him this because even though he was 21 at the time and the aforementioned size, all he wanted to do was play video games and eat bags and bags of Doritos corn chips and drink gallons of soda, child-like endeavors if you ask me. His first day in Brooklyn he ran over to the local Food Bazaar for a pint of Ben and Jerry’s chocolate chip cookie dough and had it for breakfast. He claimed they didn’t carry that flavor in Santa Fe.

That summer I got him a job with my company and he was doing great at it until his grandfather died and then he suddenly quit. He told me he had a nervous breakdown, but I suspect he needed to play more WOW at times he was supposed to be at work. In September, after a month of lying on the couch and in his room playing WOW I bought him a ticket back to Santa Fe. I told him if he wasn’t going to work he was not going to live in my house. The day before he was supposed to leave, he asked if I could change the ticket to a later date. I asked why.

“Mom said she turned my room into a studio, and where am I going to stay?” He said with a panicked look in his face.

“That’s a good question, son, because you can’t stay here either. I got you a great job and you quit, and you haven’t made an effort to get another, and we agreed that if you didn’t you’d go back.” His panic-stricken face almost broke my heart, but I knew I had to get him to take care of himself.

“Look, you’ve got some money, I’ll give you some more. When you get off the plane in New Mexico get yourself a cheap motel room, and start calling all your friends to see if one of them needs a roommate. If all else fails, I’m sure they have homeless shelters in Santa Fe, probably nicer than the ones here.”

He went back, and that’s how he hooked up with the friend who owns the house in Omaha, Ne., where he lives now with a bunch of kids his age and works at a car wash. I keep telling him to see the movie “Car Wash.”

So it was great to get this card, to see my son learn how to take care of himself, to be a father. He was here last summer for a week to go to some comic book convention in New Jersey, and we talked about fatherhood.

“I don’t think I could ever do it, dad. I don’t think I’ll ever have kids, I’m not cut out for it.” He told me.

“Yeah, son, I felt exactly the same way at your age. And yet here you are!”

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Rainy Day Delivery

Posted on June 14, 2013 by xaviertrevino

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Part of my job is calling people on the phone and telling them they have a delivery. When I worked days, it was usually groceries, now in the evening it’s mostly prepared food. It starts at six, the parade of mostly Hispanic and Asian deliverymen and boys, on bikes, on scooters, on foot.

I noticed that some doormen treated these guys like shit, ordering them around, some making them wait for an empty elevator or just being plain rude. I know it’s a tough job and I try to be as kind and courteous as possible to them. A lot of them don’t speak English well, and some have a hard time differentiating “B” “C” and “D”. I call apartment 16 B and say, “You have a delivery.” “I didn’t order anything.” I ask the guy again, “16 B?” “Oh, no, sorry, 16 C.” Those are the times my patience wears thin.

It was raining again last night, so there were a lot of deliveries. People who often go out to pick something up because they don’t want to tip bite the bullet and order in if the rain is too heavy; and it was pretty heavy last night.

It was worse last Friday night, and there was an almost endless parade of deliverymen coming through the door, in their bike helmets and slickers and ponchos and improvised tied-up plastic garbage bags, one and all soaked to the bone.

There were guys from Haru, Grub Hub, Pappa John’s, Lenny’s Cilantro, and a new one, Seamless.com. You don’t even have to pick up the phone anymore.

So they all came in, dripping wet, streaming water everywhere. Often they have more than one delivery, and they drag in all the other bags with them, if they left them on the bikes someone would probably take them. Here is where problems arise.

One guy came in with four plastic bags of food, an Asian guy, and he promptly puts them all down on the little round wooden table by the elevator, a bit of lobby décor that’s seen better days, mostly due to people putting wet stuff on it. It ruins the finish.

I say, “Please don’t put your bags on the table.” “Oh, sorry,” as he puts them on the floor. But the damage is done. I resist the urge to run over to the table with a paper towel and wipe up the water and show him how he’s inconvenienced me.

Another guy came in that night, a walker, holding a large black garbage bag. He was a young kid, twenty or so, Hispanic, but he spoke good English so he wasn’t an immigrant.

He wore a thin poncho and when he pulled back the hood I could tell he needn’t have bothered, he was soaked through and through. I watched as he ceremoniously unwrapped his big black plastic bag and extracted a small paper shopping bag, which was also soaked. It looked like it was about to fall apart. He rummaged through it until he found the slip.

“14 A,” he said triumphantly.

“Go on up,” I said as I dialed the intercom.

“Can I leave my bag here?”

“Sure.”

He went up and was up there a long time. I started to get worried and was about to call the tenant when the elevator went up to 14 and I watched him board the elevator on my monitor. Yes, we have cameras everywhere. He came off the elevator in the lobby brandishing the wet paper shopping bag, now torn and empty.

“Just my luck, it fell apart as I was handing it to the lady!”

Bad luck indeed.

Watching this parade every night, especially on rainy nights like these, especially after some of them show me what they received as a tip (one guy held out his hand to display the 67¢ someone had given him) it makes me feel gratitude instead of resentment at doing the job I’m doing now. I am warm and dry inside the lobby making a pretty good salary while these poor guys are riding bikes out in the pouring rain for peanuts, and I’m sure some of them are glad to have the job.

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