Treasure
Chad and I found a small plastic bag from Hot Topic one day. It had cotton draw-strings and the plastic was durable, of the highest quality; black, with pink lettering. It had suburban glamor. It was the kind of bag that could potentially contain a Slipknot beanie - or maybe a Nightmare Before Christmas action figure...
I can't remember where that bag came from but it wound up with us. Gemma had recently moved in with us, she was Chad's first cat, a domestic long hair with chronic diarrhea. She was probably 7 or 8 months old at the time and she would eat grass constantly, which would upset her stomach. She also ate kibble non-stop and was kind of a lard ass.
I had just returned home from an early afternoon class and Chad was not due in at CostCo for a couple hours, so we had some time to kill. Over an episode of Family Guy we decided what was to be done. We filled the Hot Topic bag with Gemma's miserable feces and threw it into the alley way behind our house. Then we ran up to my bedroom and waited for some Rancho Cotati high schoolers to stumble upon in on their way home.
One kid found the bag and excitedly grabbed it, realized it had something in it, and fought his friends off as they tried to take it from him. He loosened the drawstrings, peeked in at Gemma's feces, and exclaimed, "It's shit!" then flung the bag at his friend. Another kid picked it up, confirmed it was shit, and threw it at someone else. The four or five of them ran away from the scene with such urgency you could almost think they knew we were somewhere watching.
April Fools #2
the day hip chris died
too early tuesday
happens all the time
i spring from bed
faster than the hot water heats up
in the shower
and i'm employed
answering the company phone for money
it rings almost all the time
so when my pocket rang
at 11am
it was strange
not to be a third party
It was Mayla texting from California
"Have you been on facebook this morning?"
which made it 8am her time
"No?"
Then she called and started crying
Or sobbing really hard
and told me Chris had taken some bad speed and overdosed
Chris had partied himself to death
Last night / this morning
I got choked up next to Jean, my co-worker
who now had to answer twice as many phones
I'd seen Chris last wednesday
he drummed the shit out of some show
but now he was dead
I went outside and Mayla told me what she knew
His friends, some Tom's River derelicts,
found him on the floor that morning
I called a bunch of people who loved Chris
because they deserved to know
walking in circles
there were tears on my face
on streets where i'd always been normal
It was february but I didn't wear a coat
Everyone consoled,
was shocked and heartbroken
And it made sense
Jean asked me if i wanted to go home
the soft XM sixties radio resurfaced
and i replied with breath
that just floated in my throat
as i got another text
Mayla:
Just found out
it was just a sick joke
, I'm so sorry
April Fools #1
courting a 1pm nap
in two pairs of pants
and three shirts
phone vibrates on the end table
which is not mine
reminding me none of this is mine
no matter what
my phone might tell me
the caller is nowhere
we are both nowhere
near nowhere
home
cast off blanket
and big eyed dog on floor
both tell me so
Somewhere just south of Canada
After several hours on the road we pulled off for gas and to pick up snacks from a Stop N' Shop. I slowly hoisted myself from the seat and stretched my stiff, weary legs. The composed February evergreens indicated we were closing in on the border and the air washed my city lungs like spring water. Looking up, the endless gray sky was as vast and sprawled out as the upstate highways we'd been driving on - but the hum of the road was finally hushed. The still silence of country life resounded in the gravel underneath our shoes.
Vanessa made friends with the overweight teenager working the register. He was frustrated on account of Neil, his co-worker, who should have been at work an hour ago. Nobody knew where Neil was and I never would have known Neil was even missing if Vanessa hadn't told me so. The teenager wore his frustration gracefully, like an old coonhound with a full bladder and nobody to let him outside.
Next door to the gas station in the otherwise-nothingness sat an old gray shack; creaky and crumbly, plopped upon itself like a precarious pile of books. In the driveway were several cars, each one a stoic meditation of cold metal in varying extremities of stillness. They could have been the exposed roots of whatever kept that shack from simply blowing away. The four of us followed our curiosity up the hill and towards the entrance.
Inside was a wall to wall junk sale - books, records, artwork. A man waived us in from a table in the middle of the room, "Come on in folks, have a look around!" his unkempt curly hair was graying but the passage of time was too busy everywhere else to make him old. In fact, his mustache was still tobacco brown and there was a trace of mischief in his eyes. He looked like the third Mario brother and this decaying shack housed his accumulated inventory of frog suits, warp whistles, and p-wings. With him was a woman who barely acknowledged us, transfixed on the game of backgammon she was losing.
The entire shack had the old book smell so dense and full that the act of looking actually felt like reading. There was no place to direct your eyes that wouldn't beg some question. No blank space, no vast horizons. We wandered the labyrinth-like narrows, dwarfed by stacks of tackle boxes, empty photo frames, baseball autobiographies, and Donald Duck inner-tubes. There was nothing to be sought after but everything to find. The man watched me fingering through a stack of paintings, "Oh, you like art! My son did those paintings."
Vibrant wood-wrapped canvases mostly comprised of large deliberate dots of acrylic primary colors, plopped in incredible patterns to create landscapes, chairs and faces. I said, "These are great." I would have bought one but any one of them would have dominated my bedroom with manic authority, I'd have had to pay it rent. Besides that, the possibility of discovering the price on his son's artwork was more than I'd be willing to pay was an awkwardness I couldn't chance. These paintings were perfectly at home in the shack, so there they'd stay.
"We're drinking beer tonight." the man excitedly blurted, as if we couldn't see the box of LeBatt Blue sitting plainly in the chair next to him. Dragon told him we on our way to Montreal from the city. "Which city?" he asked.
I didn't want to spend a lot of money but I needed a souviner so I settled on a Vest Pocket Dictionary that looked like it was from the 1930's. "I'd like to buy this" I said. "Oh, that? You can just have that."
Phil bought a few records including a handsome Leon Redbone album. As he paid for them I looked at the half empty twelve-pack sitting in the chair next to the man and across from the woman. In that moment, and there's no way to explain how I knew it, I was certain that those were not regular beers. Those beers were his son the artist, transformed perhaps by some immortal backwoods wizard, and there with us occupying his space in the middle of nowhere..
Yestercopes (bonus tracks)
To commemorate 3 months of
in print, we've decided to share with you a few of the subway riding somebodies who wound up on the cutting room floor.
To all the commuters, sight seers, and derelicts on the NYC Subway, ILOANBooks thanks you for keeping it real.
Running into Carlo at Waterlaunge
i was walking away from a taxicab, towards home, when carlo and i spotted each other. he was standing in the doorway of waterlaunge smoking a cigarette with one of the club's pretty young girls (who may or may not be hooking, the jury is still out on that). it was about 2am which meant the night was young for waterlaunge.
carlo had a scarf draped stylishly around his hooodie and a glazed, happy look in his eyes. we hadn't seen each other in a year but i could tell he was moving from his thugged out teens into soft and silly drug twenties - which was relatively good news.
he and the girl were familiar with each other and seemed to be friends, like alumni from the same orphanage. it was hard to imagine carlo had been living by himself in bed-stuy for over a year now but he had been. it was my first time at waterlaunge, which was the newborn neighborhood monster. every honest, working family on the block wanted the place closed down. besides accusations of prostitution, the place was known to sell beer to minors, blast music until dawn, and fights were common out front.
i bought us a couple six dollar coronas to drink in plastic chairs at a card table and i thought about prohibition. carlo told me his brother was working at wholefoods in manhattan and sometimes sees famous people. his mother was doing good. he hadn't seen brian in a minute but the two of them were cool now.
there were about twenty people at waterlaunge. all males except the bartenders and the girls dancing to the reggaeton below the light fixtures next to the stereo. you had to yell in order to be heard. everyone knew the police had been scoping the place for weeks and i could have been a cop if not for all the ways that i wasn't. carlo introduced me to some of his friends, one was the son of the owner. he asked me how i knew carlo and i wanted to say...
back in 2005 carlo was a chubby little inconvenience in the package deal of life on jefferson avenue. he and his friend wilbur: taunting the weird white neighbors from behind the handlebars of their bicycles, calling us hipstas from the afternoon stoop in varying degrees of hostility. by 2007 wilbur had disappeared and carlo was in high school. his was the first family of jefferson ave. then there was 2008 when he got moody and spent his nights on h-block. by 2009 i didn't even ask his mom about him because she would say she had no idea what he was up to. in 2010 i moved and so had he.
...but it was easier to just yell, "neighbors."
Special days (By Chazy Braverman)
A short essay on 90s basketball sneakers
Like the ghost of Jacob Marley, the mid-90's have returned from the dormant fog of yesteryear to inquire what's become of the present. I've been spending my afternoons obsessively researching basketball shoes from the era - it's no secret this was a golden age for b-ball kicks. It started with some idle eBay window shopping - the Jason Kidds, the Penny 1's and 2's, the Grant Hills... of course the Jordan 11's (probably the first basketball shoe to ever attend a prom).
But it didn't stop there. I became enthralled with shoes I hadn't thought about in 15 years; the Shawn Kemps, the hideous Reebok Shaqnosis, the Air Uptempos with the giant AIR written on the side, the counter-intuitively awesome looking Dikembe Mutumbos, the Converse Larry Johnsons... Looking at these shoes transported me to a forgotten time. A time of Beavis and Butthead and microwaved cheese sandwiches. A time of physical and psychological awkwardness so full of uncertainty that I almost never consult its memories. A relatively shapeless time between Ninja Turtles and drivers licenses.
Revisiting those days through the lens of basketball shoes gives those memories structure and stability in the same way hoops helped me go from childhood to full blown adolescence with minimal insanity. In 1994, after a lifetime of public education, I started 7th grade in Catholic school. We had to wear uniforms so what you wore on your feet became disproportionately critical to how you wanted to present yourself. In other words: shoes were all we had.
It was during this time that I had my all-time favorite kicks. They were blue, black, and white: the colors of the Orlando Magic, my favorite basketball team. I didn't know what the shoes were called but I remember how good they felt. They were super lightweight, with a mesh top and support that made them comfortable as slippers. In fact, during summer these were the first shoes I ever habitually wore without socks. A classmate of mine was wearing the Jordan 11 low tops in Bulls colors and they were structurally similar; our shoes shared the same fundamental appeal.
The Bulls and Magic were the two best teams in the NBA. The Magic had a young Shaquille O'Neal and a pre-injury-plagued Anfernee "Penny" Hardaway who was only getting better. Penny was my favorite player; a lanky point guard with inventive passing skills and a penchant for dunking on fools. I wrote him a letter that year enclosing his rookie card, (in case he didn't already have it) and he sent back a signed 8x10 which I still have. My shoes were representative of my authority as an Orlando Magic fan, likewise my friend with the Jordans was the Bulls expert. In a way only 13 year old boys can, we based our identities on professional athletes.
Now, in 2011, Shaq is a gelatinous looking mound of week old leftover steak and on Facebook my middle school classmates are organizing our 15 year reunion. They are posting pictures of us in the playground, at sporting events, pizza parties... photographs of people I remember from the same era as the shoes, indeed these were
their
shoes. I had forgotten what most of these kids looked like, in my mind they were older - they aged within my memories. In these photographs I can see them exactly as they were back then; like a pair of Pippen Max Uptempo's never taken out of the box.
Through these photographs I am returning to the past with an objectivity that softens everything. What had once been a whirlwind blur is now a patchwork of moments interwoven by distance and tempered by perspective. The smell of a stairwell. The ridges on an aluminum bench. A tongue burnt from hot chocolate. Laying in bed at night and listening to The Five Stairsteps on 94.9's "Turn Off the Lights" with Xavier the X Man. Having a crush and catching a whiff of her hair. The girls, by the way, avoided basketball shoes altogether and wore all-white sneakers, usually K-Swiss or Keds. I quickly learned to worship those little white shoes, too.
In my research I've discovered those old blue and black shoes I loved so much. They were called the Nike Air Lambaste and it turns out Penny Hardaway actually wore them in his first All-Star game before he ever had a shoe contract of his own.
The shoes are virtually forgotten now; not a single pair on eBay. They just sort of disappeared in the midst of so many legendary basketball shoes. Nobody preserved them the way 'collectible' shoes were preserved - these shoes got worn and worn
out
. One guy wrote about how
the Air Lambastes were for actually playing basketball - this endears me to the shoe even more because I was no Jerry Stackhouse myself.
The Air Lambaste and I had a lot in common. We were witnesses to greatness and if our own potential was not immediately visible we still knew it was there. I saw the 95-96 Bulls become the greatest team in NBA history and the Nike Air Lambaste sat on store shelves among some of the best basketball shoes ever produced. The shoe is also a precursor to the Penny Hardaway signature series, (which is comparable to being, say, Salvador Dali's dad).
My interest in sneakers was a byproduct of my interest in basketball. Shoes were
part of
basketball - they probably still are. One of the beautiful things about basketball is that it has a clearly defined set of rules. You can have a conversation about basketball and not be at a loss for words. You can tell the truth. It is statistical and for the tough calls there's a referee. That trumps the entropy of real life.
In 1995 my dream job was to become a sportscaster. When I think back on that dream I believe it was based on the fear that sports were the only thing that made sense, (and that making sense mattered). Generally speaking, things have continued to not make much sense but I'm more comfortable with that these days.
That kid I used to be - obsessing over his basketball card collection, memorizing numbers from the official NBA Encyclopedia, playing endless hours of NBA Jam - that kid and I have missed each other. I can remember when he used to work the nacho stand at the school's home games just to bask in the glow of the game.
Lyrics to the latest hit single from Caboose
Cuddles like a snuggie
thuggie as Fergie on a porcupine's birthday
Can you smell my soul incense
dancing rainbows in my he- he- head?
roof-tin piddle
Big dog hanging on the side of the market w/ shoulder hair
gears newspaper holder you got 4 kids
umbrella in my meal
float Kardashian why up the hill
soup for a fraction of my windex summer split
PANT LEGS
Grooming on the styrofoam crane of cobbler
scream church songs like a tinkle of pee
figurine & fingers like a sexy utensil
My well-groomed toe hairs blow in her direction when the moonshines in my jasmine tea cup
blossoms like onion rings
Oprah bookclub baby
Acoustic camp fire lottery dream
my love trust argyle lizard lemons
flipping through channels without your comments
thirty years of trash-bags smell
gas up the Miada I got gas
My post modern cappuccino curator self-stamping teddy bear
I just want to dance with your pent-up aggression, baby
na-na na-na na
Hey Chaz (by Vanessa)
Hey Chaz
the lake is frozen over
but Albany won't come
they don't want to skate with us
maybe we're not good enough
oh no no no
we're just as good as Albany
we're halfway between New York City and the Paris of Canada
we're as good as Albany, Chazy