Caruso of West Hollywood

I.

Caruso was waiting for me at a small public park in Studio City not far from his girlfriend’s house.  Ex-girlfriend’s house, to be precise.  About an hour earlier she threw him out and took away his car keys because she owned the car he had been driving.  The finality of their separation was certified by the ugly bruise on the left side of Caruso’s face.  The bruise was still spreading like a lunar eclipse when he limped to my car from one of the picnic tables near the parking area.

     “Frying pan?” I asked after he planted himself in the passenger seat.

     “Magazine,” he said.

      I took another quick look at his purple cheekbone.  “Must have been Vogue.”

     “Didn’t notice,” he sighed, “but the damn thing was thicker than a surfboard.  I really didn’t expect it.  Marina was holding it with both hands, like she was about to open it and read something.  I was in the middle of a sentence when she just swung it with a two-handed grip and whacked me in the face.”

     “And the limp?”

     “Tripped on something in the hallway.  I was in a hurry.”

Kinderszenen...

A writing exercise was well underway when I showed up late, again, for my third grade 
Russian language class.  The teacher, a large woman with the crudely chiseled body of a socialist realist public sculpture, looked happy to see the little fucker who often had more important things to do than to come to her class on time.  Had I missed the class, I could have pleaded illness or family business and avoid the failing grade, which now I would surely get because there wasn’t enough time left for me to do the required work.

Handsome Jan

 

There ought to be a law against parties held by graduate students in the humanities.  The world is full of misery as it is.  Why add another couple of hours spent on a rickety chair in a dimly lit room filled with old but still useful furniture and young but already useless people? 

       I went anyway because I heard that Alina was leaving the Ph.D. program to attend medical school.  By the end of spring she would move to another city, and after that the only way for me to get naked with her would be to become one of the cadavers in her first year anatomy course.  The party was my last chance.

Bon appétit...

It doesn't take F. Scott Fitzgerald to capture the essence of the lower Second Avenue on a hot and humid weekday afternoon: the sidewalk reeking of garbage, urine, and vomit (the last two courtesy of numerous pubs); the air dense with exhaust fumes from the endless traffic jam of crawling buses, delivery trucks, taxi cabs, rusted vans from Queens, and not yet dented SUVs from New Jersey.  And all this enveloped by the hazy mist of lukewarm condensate, sprayed from above by countless air conditioners sticking from soot- and grime-covered windows like long-neglected and constantly oozing pimples.  Just the kind of place to have lunch at a sidewalk restaurant.

Whaddayawant!?!?

Four times (on three different days) I tried to listen to my favorite piece by the German modernist composer Helmut Lachenmann.   And each time Lachenmann's otherworldly orchestral textures were shattered by incessant ear-piercing shrieks of a bluejay sitting on a tree next to my house.  Naturally I hated the bird for its anti-modernist heckling, but also for bringing back memories of an even more annoying creature I once encountered on a half-empty mid-afternoon train I was riding back into the city some years ago.

Life lessons...

Years ago my daily walks usually took me through a tiny city park called Tompkins Square, located in the slowly gentrifying but still filthy and smelly Manhattan neighborhood known as the East Village.  One time a young guy sitting on a bench asked me for a cigarette.  This he did with politeness completely unexpected from a typical Tompkins Square junkie: his hair had not been washed in months, some of his front teeth were missing, and his body was not far from reaching the state of a dessicated mummy.  I had about a quarter of a pouch of Drum tobacco with me (enough for about 5 cigarettes), so I gave it all to him since I was only a couple of blocks away from home where there was plenty more. 

My generosity must have made the guy quite happy because he followed his thanks with a cheerful "Lighten up, man!"  I suppose this parting bit of advice was inspired by my perfectly neutral but decidedly Eastern European facial expression, which most natives perceive as being somewhere between a frown and a scowl.  Be that as it may, the thought that kept spinning in my mind for the rest of my walk home was:
Fuck me!  I just received some life coaching from a mummified junkie with missing front teeth!