from 3/26/08

How To Recognize Certain PATH Stations From Quite A Long Way Away

Last October, my friends invited me to go to The Hunt, which is a giant tailgate party that takes place inside a horse track. It's in New Jersey, but I went anyway, and we ate tons of food, drank a lot of beer and had a great old time.

Late in the afternoon, I felt myself sobering up. Not wanting to be hungover before the sun even set, as has been the case on similar occasions I rationalized, I decided I had to get drunk again quickly. I grabbed a bottle of vodka and downed a double shot. It felt smooth going down, so I took another single shot for good measure. Around 4:30, it was time to go, and as we were getting ready, my friend Jason asked me if I wanted them to drive me back to the PATH station in Hoboken. I live in Manhattan and had taken New Jersey Transit out, and as I had no desire to repeat that experience in reverse, said, "I would love that."

That's the last thing I remember from that day.

I woke up in an emergency room, lying on a cot, having no memory of how I got there. The nurse there asked me if I knew where I was. I had overheard someone say it, but only caught the last syllable. I said, "Brooklyn?"

She answered, "Hoboken." I thought, "Well that didn't sound very good," and fell back asleep. I came to again when I received a text message from Jason. "You left your wallet in our car."

I typed back, "Hold on to it, I'll get it back from you monday," and promptly passed out again. It turned out they'd dropped me off, and I'd disappeared into the station when Jason realized my wallet was still there. They waited for me to come back, which obviously I never did, and Jason figured I had the cash on me to get through to the train.

The nurse came in and out repeatedly through the night to check on me, and by the time morning came around, she was my buddy, the welcomed sight that made the experience slightly less disastrous. I woke up around 6am to overhear someone outside cheekily say, "I HATE drunks." At which point the nurse looked at me and said, "Well, there's my friend Michael here," and continued, "Time to go."

I thanked her and asked where the bathroom was. When I got inside and looked at the mirror, the first thing I noticed was the right side of my face was all red. I figured it was sunburn, then I saw the rest. There were cuts and scrapes all around my left eye and a deeper gash below my neck. I had bruises below my left elbow and I realized my entire left arm was sore. I had big bruises below both my knees and a big swollen bump below my right one. And I thought, "What the hell happened to me?" I'd been thinking this whole time that I was there because I was drunk, they never even told me I was hurt. I even found out later that they'd given me a head CT. And they never told me any of this! I'm not a doctor, but if I gave someone a head CT, I'd mention it to him. The best theory I could piece together was that I'd fallen down the stairs, but as I have no memory of the incident, that remains speculation to this day. I firmly believe I was concussed, I've been plenty drunker than I was that day and I've never lost that much memory.

I walked out looking for the nurse, but she wasn't there. I needed to get the hell out of there, so I just left. Now, I didn't have my wallet, so I had no cash to get home, and I was too embarrassed to hit them up at the hospital for it. I don't go to Hoboken very often, or New Jersey at all for that matter, so I don't know it too well. I was hoping maybe there was a bridge with a footpath like the Brooklyn Bridge has nearby so I could walk to the city. I asked the security guard by the entrance if such a thing existed, and he said, "Go outside, make a right, go down three lights, make a left, go down and make a right at the stop sign, then go down . . . "

And I just asked, "Can you write this down? Because I'm never gonna remember this ."

"Just make a right out the door, you'll see it."

I ventured out as the sun was just rising, made a right out the door, walked down a few lights and had no idea where the hell I was. I wandered around Hoboken for about forty-five minutes. I asked I guy at a gas station if there was anyway to get to Manhattan, but he said the nearest bridge was about ten miles away. With visions of panhandling in my head, I kept walking until I found a cop car. Trying to play into the policeman's sympathies, I told him I'd been mugged and was trying to get back to Manhattan. He said, "Make a right then the first left and go down two blocks to the PATH station." Much simpler directions than the last ones, so I went and managed to find the Newport/Pavonia Station. More after the fact revelations, this is over a mile from the hospital; not that far on the grand scheme but nearly three times the distance farther than the actual station I was looking for.

It was about a quarter to seven and no one was around, so I hopped the turnstile and sat, waiting for the train, wishing desperately to get out of New Jersey and back to my New York home, which I could have reached ages ago if I was Jesus and could only walk on the water.

The train came and soon I was back in Manhattan, where I walked from the last PATH Station at West 33rd, all the way to my apartment in the east 90s, all the while with a splitting headache and raging nausea. I thanked god I still had my keys, threw myself onto my bed and fell asleep for a long time.

And that, my friends, is how I gave up vodka.

Namaste.

from 8/19/08

Tell Laura I Love Her

Anybody else fucking sick of hearing about Michael Phelps? I'm happy for him, but I really don't give a fuck about swimming, and in about a week and a half, neither will anyone else. I don't care, he wants to impress me, he can pay my rent. I'm glad the U.S. is getting all these gold medals, but they're acting like he's the second coming. You know, Jesus walked on the water, he didn't swim the backstroke through it.

But I don't want to talk about him, I want to talk about my favorite Olympian. I talked about her back in 2004 after the Athens games, any old schoolers remember who she is? No? Good, that means I can tell this story again.

Her name is Laura Wilkinson and she's a diver. For those of you who don't know her story, she was training for the 2000 Sydney Olympics when she took a nasty spill and broke three bones in her foot. She was laid up in bed for six weeks and had to train by visualizing the dives in her head. When she got to the Olympics to compete in the Ten Meter Platform, she had to wear a special shoe just so she climb up the ladder, and do most of her dives starting from a handstand because she couldn't stand on the edge of the platform. With three dives to go in the finals, she was in fifth place and considered to be out of medal contention. Then she nails the last three dives, the Chinese divers mess up theirs, BAM, she wins the gold.

I thought, "What a wonderful story." And I didn't hear it until 2004. I didn't watch too much of the Sydney games because I didn't really care. But I watched the 2004 games in Athens because I was holed up for a week in my parents house, because my grandmother had died. Grandma had taken ill earlier that summer, and for two months she was going back and forth; she'd get better, she'd get worse. Finally, the morning that the opening ceremonies were due to start, I got the call, saying it could be any minute now. So I sat in my room, waiting for my Grandmother to die, for two full days. Finally, I got the call saying Grandma was dead.

As you can probably guess, I didn't take it all that well. She was my last grandparent, and also, my other grandparents all died before I graduated from college, so she was my only grandparent for my adult years. So this one really hurt. Now, in Judaism, we have something called "sitting Shiva," which is a morning period where you're not supposed to leave the house. So I went out to my parents' place in Long Island and spent the week there. The Olympics were going on, and at the time, the Olympics were the last thing that I cared about. But I had no control over the tv, so I was gonna watch it whether I liked it or not. But I became fascinated with Laura Wilkinson's story. I thought, "This girl's a fighter! She's awesome!" And she's really cute, that counts for something.

I became obsessed with following her; I watched her dives and I checked the paper and caught the rounds and followed her progress. Because, it was the only thing that could take my mind off the fact that my grandmother was dead. So by the time the finals came around, I was glued to the tv. And it was like, she wasn't just doing it for her, or for the USA, she was doing it for me, she was doing it for Grandma. Unfortunately, she didn't win, she took fifth place that year. But I still loved her, I still think she's awesome. And I didn't care that she turned out to be a major league bible-thumper. Her favorite movie is Passion Of The Christ, I mean holy fucking shit. She might think I'm a Christ-killer, who knows. But that didn't matter to me.

Then I went and I did something really stupid. I wrote her a fan letter. I never do that, but you can do a lot of dumb things when you're grieving. I told her the whole story, about Grandma, about how I loved her fighting spirit, everything. I just needed to get it out there, in her direction, it was comforting to me. So I did it, and forgot about it.

Then about three months later, I get an email. In the "from" line, it just says, "Diver." And I had no idea what it was, I thought it was spam, probably short for muff diver, they're trying to sell me something about cunnilingus, I thought, "I know, push up the hood, look for the little man in the boat and lick the alphabet, I got my technique down already." Then I see the subject line says, "Big Fan," and thought it sounded familiar. I open it, it's from Laura Wilkinson. I know, it could have been an assistant or something, but she's not a rock star, she's just a diver, so I choose to believe it actually came from her. She wrote:

Michael,

(She called me Michael!)

Thank you so much for your email. I completely understand how difficult it can be to lose someone you love. My family has lost several loved ones in recent years. It's wonderful that you were able to stay with your parents during that time.

Sometimes we have to go through difficult times, but they can definitely make you stronger inside.

Well, I will be using that "fighting spirit" as you called it to try to win gold again in the 2008 Olympic Games. I have a long road ahead of me and many battles I'm sure, but I feel like each time I face an obstacle, when I trust Him, God turns it into an opportunity.

Laura


The Preliminaries start tomorrow. So I'd like everybody to join me, let's pray for Laura Wilkinson:

God, I'm sorry about all the times I said, "Fuck you." And you don't like me, that much is clear, and I don't like you. But please, instead of praying for that thing with Marissa Miller and the massage oil, I'm taking a break, and praying for this, please, bring Laura Wilkinson the gold.

Amen.

Thanks.

Namaste.

Author's addendum, 8/21/08
Sadly, troubled by a strained tricep muscle, Laura made the Finals, but failed to medal, finishing in ninth place. She did, however, nail her last dive, capping a worthy and fitting end to an incredible career.

from 8/5/08

Perhaps I've Gone Too Far

. . .
. . .

Do you think Morgan Freeman narrated his own car crash?

Too soon?

This is the morbid sense of humor I was referring too last week. I work at a pharmaceutical advertising agency, and one of the drugs we represent is Ambien. And I came up with what I thought was a pretty good tagline, so I told it to one of the copywriters:

Ambien. So good, Heath Ledger can't stop taking it.

They didn't seem to like it either.

Tonight's theme is milestones, and I haven't really had any recently, the closest I've had is last week when I came back to the open mikes for the first time in nine months. The thing that truly shocked me about that was people actually noticed I was gone.

The only major milestone that even comes to mind is when I turned thirty. I wanted to celebrate by doing something I'd never done before. I didn't know what, but I hoped it would come to me by the end of the night. That night I went to a club with some friends, and after we left, I was walking back to the subway and I really had to take a piss, so I pissed on the sidewalk, and I realized, "I've never done this before. Mission accomplished."

I pissed on a subway platform once. Not my proudest moment, but when you've fallen asleep on the subway and wake up in the south Bronx seventeen stops past yours and it's 4am, you do what you have to.

But I what I really wanted to talk about is my neighborhood. I live in the East 90s, which I consider to be a subset of the Upper East Side. I'm not saying that we're better, it's still the Upper East Side. It's still frat boy hell and yuppieville, but there's a few things that distinguish it. First of all, it's right by the First Avenue Projects, which is First Avenue and around 92nd to 94th Street, and East Harlem, which officially starts at 96th Street. So it's a much more diverse area than your typical whitebred Upper East Side neighborhood.

This is unrelated, but we also have a very impressive population of rats. Not the little ones, I'm talkin' the big nasty Willard rats. And it's not like you hear them scuffle around and every now and them catch a glimpse, you see them running across the sidewalk every night. So if you know any city vampires who don't want to bite people and need to find some form of nocturnal wildlife to feed on, send them up to 93rd street.

Also, because of it's vicinity to East Harlem and the projects, it's the only Upper East Side neighborhood that's regularly patrolled by police. Crime used to be really bad there but it's been cleaned up for a long time. It used to be you didn't go above 86th Street, there were gangs and violence back fifteen, twenty years ago. But then they started developing the neighborhood, which they're still doing. More and more high-rises are going up. Remember that crane that fell about a month and a half ago? That was three blocks from my apartment. Usually when you gentrify an area, it becomes a safer neighborhood. Apparently that's not how we roll up there.

But the one thing that we still have a lot of is homeless people. It's not overrun or anything, but I see more homeless in my neighborhood than I do downtown. And the homeless people up there are, well, I'll just say it, they're assholes. Something about the place, it's like, "You spare some change?"

"No, I'm sorry."

"FUCK YOU, ASSHOLE!!!"

It's like they have the same sense of entitlement that the yuppies do. That's why it was so nice when, a couple of weeks ago I was coming home and decided to stop by the bodega for a soda, and there was a homeless guy sitting on a milk crate in front of it. It's his regular spot, and as I walked over, I see him jump up and run around the corner. When I came out of bodega, he's sitting there with a pizza box. I guess someone was gonna throw it out and he asked for it. Anyway, he holds up his cup and shakes it, and says, "God bless you sir." I was feeling generous, so I dropped a few coins in there, and he said, "Hey, are you hungry? They gave me all this pizza."

I laughed and said, "No, that's ok," and realize, that's the first time a homeless person ever offered me food. What a pleasant surprise.

Namaste, motherfuckers.

From 7/29/08

What'd You Do That For George? (Oh, God, He Knows)

George Carlin's posthumous cd It's Bad For Ya came out today, and it made me think about the impact that George has on my life. Not only is he my favorite comedian of all time, he's been a major influence on me; I'm not a comedian but he's influenced me as a writer, both through the love of social criticism and by teaching me to be unafraid to be morbid or sick. I have a very morbid sense of humor. Here's an example: last week, my friend Krista wanted me to go to a happy hour benefit for the Jimmy Fund Cancer Institute. I couldn't go, so Krista tried to convince me by saying, "Come on, it's for a good cause," and I said, "So what? My brother's already dead." Because my brother died of leukemia years ago. I find this funny. Krista didn't seem to think so. I guess she's not a Carlin fan.

But one thing that people who know me know is, I curse a lot. I used to attribute this to being from Long Island. It's a regional trait, like NEVER wanting to "change at Jamaica." Also, you either really love or really hate Billy Joel. I fucking hate Billy Joel, he's not bad but I'm sick to fucking death of him. To make things worse, I went to college in Allentown Pennsylvania, people used to sing that fucking song to me all the time, and I'd think, "Ooooooh, please get a tumor in your eye the size of a basketball."

ANYWAY

Sometimes people are surprised when they hear how much I curse, I guess the angelic face throws them. But the people I work with are used to it. In fact, I've become the benchmark by which cursing is measured. A number of times, I've been told by someone, "I was so mad last night, I was cursing as much as you." It feels good to be so accomplished. One person once told me I had a remarkable ability to string together a sentence with such a high number of uses of "fuck." I myself didn't even remember doing this, but apparently the sentence was something to the effect of, "I swear to fucking god, if I ever fucking find out who took my fucking folder, I am gonna fuckin' kick their fucking ass." Or something like that. Another coworker told me, "You use the word "fuck" more than anyone I've ever met." And she's an editor, she gets paid to notice things about words.

The cursing come out the most when I get mad or when I get caught up in a rant about something. Like when I read what that fuckwad Donald Trump said about gorgeous actress Anne Hathaway when she dumped that loser cumfuck con man asshole boyfriend of hers. She should have stood by him? Is he out of his fucking mind?! He turned out to be a scumbag and so she dumped his ass! So if he kills somebody she's just supposed to fucking hang around?! Smile and nod and talk about we don't know the better side that we don't, the one that doesn't fucking kill people?! And who the fuck asked Trump anyway?! You know who? NOBODY!!! He didn't say this in an interview, he issued a press release. What, is he working for fucking TMZ now? He's gotta open his fucking mouth about celebrities? I hope he dies. I hope he fucking dies, I hope that fucking thing on his head comes to life and fucking eats his brains, that fucking scumbag fuckwad MOTHERFUCKER!!!

And at this point, one of my coworkers will ask me if I've taken my medication, and I'll say, "Sadly, yes I have." This is me with my mood stabilized. Be grateful.

ANYWAY

When George died, I looked back and realized that I've been listening to him since I was five years old. It was 1975 and Class Clown was still popular, so my grandparents used to listen to it all the time. I'd hear it when I visited them and eventually they'd let me borrow it and I'd run it over and over again at home. And amid all the stories about Catholic school, Muhammid Ali and knuckle cracking, was the famous Seven Dirty Words routine. And so, at a young, impressionable age, I was introduced to the idea of profanity as high art. Maybe being from Long Island isn't reason I curse so much, maybe George had more of an impact on my life than I realized.

But one thing I'd like to add, something that really pissed me off when George died; the day after he died, they did a show about him on Larry King Live, and he was interviewing Jerry Seinfeld. I gotta be honest, I could give a fuck what Jerry Seinfeld has to say about George Carlin. Now, I know he's one of the more famous comedians in the world, but they're both comedians in the sense that Adam Sandler and Laurence Olivier are both actors, it's just not the same.

To be honest, I've hated Jerry Seinfeld ever since he hopped on the laptop bashing bandwagon. "These people buy a cup of coffee and they think they're opening a business." No, I don't think I'm opening a business, I just like to get out of the house every once in a fucking while. I live in a studio, I don't live in a mansion-sized apartment, that was bought with money earned, FROM A TV SHOW, THAT SOMEBODY ELSE FUCKING WROTE!!! FUCK JERRY SEINFELD!!!

NAMASTE, MOTHERFUCKERS!

Somewhere Down In Disturbia, It Ain't Right

I watched Disturbia on cable a few weeks ago. It's actually a pretty good movie. I know that detractors will just say it's Rear Window for the Gossip Girl generation, but I think it still weaves a good yarn, and David Morse is effectively big time creep city.

BUT

the love story falls a bit flat. so Shia Labeof (I know I spelled his name wrong, I'd learn the correct spelling but it's just not important to me) is basically an everyman, an average boy. that's fine, but his love interest, Sarah Roemer, is extremely gorgeous. Not just gorgeous, a gorgeous girl who wants him immediately. maybe it's because he's under house arrest which gives him a bad boy thing going, but then her reaction to catching him spying on her is to invite herself into his house like she's in the grips of her mating season.

THEN

when he tries to ruin her party and she confronts him, he goes on to describe all her idiosyncrasies and habits in frighteningly meticulous detail, the kind that in a normal society would be grounds for a restraining order. she responds by KISSING HIM. If I'd known that, I would have set up a telescope in front of Jennifer Love Hewitt's house years ago (you know, when she was hot). This is possibly more "disturbing" than all the bodies they later find under David Morse's basement, unless the whole point is that ultimately, Labeuf's behavior leads to Morse's in the real world.

and the film was a hit, possibly because it gives hope to all the stalkers out there suveillancing the girl of their dreams. it's not usually not the girl next door because not too many of them live next door to supermodels, but the internet has turned our computers into the ultimate pair of binoculers. this is no secret of course, but the parallels become increasingly vivid that further you wander into this vietnam, especially with the self-imposed house arrests of cyber-stalkers who never leave their parents' basements. Disturbia gives them hope that their dreams can come true. until then, cyberstalking will still be the most sincere and anonymous form of flattery.

New Kids On The Block

So New Kids On The Block are getting back together. the obvious question is why, but I suspect that one reason is the economy. not because those guys don't have any money, which they may or may not, but seeing as one of them became a real estate agent, with the real estate market being as bad as it is, he may be having a problem without the cash coming in. therefore, George W. Bush is responsible for New Kids On The Block getting back together, all the more reason to vote democratic this election and for the Hillary motherfuckers to not vote McCain out of spite if (and when) Obama gets the nomination (don't fuck this up like the Nader supporters did).

What happened to Donnie Wahlberg's acting career? After Band Of Brothers, even I had respect for the guy.

This is just what the world needs, a 40 year old boy band. Next we'll see a reunion of the original Menudo line up, they've got to all be 60 by now. Should we call them New Men On The Block? Don't they realize their fans are not eleven anymore?

Forever Your Girl


P: Do you have to take a girl to dinner if you want to make her feel special?

J: I don't think so.

P: Or can you just make her dinner at home?

J: That's even better. A nice intimate dinner.

Me: You know what really makes a girl feel special?

J: What?

Me: Anal.

A Few Thoughts On Spitzer

so our former New York governor was involved in another prostitution ring. first of all, "involved in a prostitution ring" is a bit of a suspect phrase. it makes it sound like he was actually part of the business, which I guess is the grammatical collateral damage of the press' inability or unwillingness to simply say "governor hires prostitutes" or "governor pays for sex." Spitzer's not sitting in Albany with velvet green mack-daddy hat and fat gold chain with a dollar sign.

now, in some respects, this isn't really a big deal. should prostitution be illegal in the first place? maybe not. this is the "free" vs "paid" debate. If a 22 year old fucks the balding, middle-aged governor for free, it's ok, but if he gives her compensation it's illegal? what if there's a grey area as far at the distribution of wealth? say spitzer instead were to take private lessons from the dude from "The Pick-Up Artist." then he sees a hot chick in a bar and feeds her that "excuse me, my friend has a jealous girlfriend..." bullshit, gets her number, takes her out for drinks, shows her the governor's mansion then takes her to the master bedroom and fucks her. he essentially is still paying for sex, but his money is distributed to the girl and her employer it's illegal, but if the guy that made the sex happen is the one who profits, the coitus proxy if you will, then it's ok. so you can pay to have the girl manipulated but you can't let the girl herself benefit from the sacrifice of getting nailed by some old freak. not that spitzer's a freak, but look at him and look at "ashley" or whatever her real name is. maybe she deserves something there.

and look at it this way. is there a difference between a guy paying to fuck a high-end prostitute and a guy getting a lapdance from a megahot stripper and then going home and rubbing one out while she's still fresh on the brain? (it happens) well, for one, the second method is essentially a 2 step procedure for an inferior product. what the governor's done is excise waste by cutting down on procedure, while achieving the same end product: an orgasm without his wife. On the other hand, this is also the costlier option, about $2,000 apparently vs $20 and the two-drink minimum. I guess the choice between cost, quality and project management is for the voter to decide.

I guess the biggest problem is the political pandemic of hypocrisy that this epitomizes. would we think more of spitzer if he hadn't helmed a crusade against prostitution businesses. maybe, maybe not, but when I was 15, I wouldn't have thought much of myself if I criticized someone publicly for running into the bathroom with a copy of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue. then again, god for fucking bid we actually get honesty from a politician.

don't know what I was thinking.

I Belong on the Cover of ‘Tard Magazine


When you’ve become accustomed to working from 8:30 in the morning to 6:30, 7:00 or 7:30 at night, the greatest thing about unemployment is the amount of free time it gives you. When I was told that my job was being eliminated, I felt the emotional shock arrow hit me in the chest as I thought, “I’m unemployed. Who could love me?” When the jolt lifted and I remembered that I’d been miserable for the entire two and a half years that I’d worked there, I realized that this was the best thing that could have happened to me. That job was killing me. Now I had severance, department of labor unemployment and two and half months worth of transit check unlimited metro cards. Was this ever sweet.

And now that I’d been emancipated from that midtown gulag, I finally had plenty of time to sleep, go out, look for a new job, and any tasks or errands I may have. Thusly, one Saturday, I woke up to realize that despite the fact that my daily allotted “me” time had been disrupted by three interviews that week, I’d completed any necessary personal tasks I’d had and had been left with nothing to do for the afternoon. And it was nice outside, sunny and cool. I can’t bear to be inside on a weather permitting day, it’s a trait that my mother branded into my brain by screaming it at me every non rainy weekend of my childhood as she shut off the tv and took away my comic books. Ok, so she was right about that, I just wish this had happened today, just so I could say, “Hey Howard Dean, wanna tone down the decibel level?”

Anyway, how to spend the day? I could walk to Best Buy and look at the big screen tv’s, dvd box sets and video games I can’t buy, dreaming about the day I have enough money to afford them. But now that I was unemployed, I could do the same thing just by going to the supermarket. Since I’d picked up my weekly supply of ramen noodles and generic Mac and Cheese the day before, that was out. Hmmmmmm. As I felt the specter of ennui approaching, a thought from the back of my head, one I’d apparently shoved down and tried to bury there, saw its chance to leap forward and be counted. And thusly, for no other reason that I could possibly fathom, I thought, “I think I’ll go to Hoboken.”

This Hoboken thought had obviously been languishing in the recesses of my mind long enough. It had lived in the shadows of ideas like, “I think I’ll go to Avenue A and hang out at Mo Pitkin’s,” “I think I’ll play Resident Evil 4 for an two and a half hours,” and “I think I’ll get stoned, eat salt and vinegar chips and watch Finding Nemo.” Now it was determined to have its day in the id. And the next thing I knew, I’d taken the subway to 14th and 6th and was headed for the PATH station.

I’d been coming to New York City ever since I was a kid and living here for nearly 10 years. In that time, I’d willfully explored or found myself in pretty much every neighborhood in the four boroughs I’d care to (I’m not counting Staten Island, as I don’t consider it part of New York City because you have to take a fucking boat to get there). It’s something I enjoy doing, it’s like exploring the world without leaving your hometown. My last neighborhood adventures had taken me to see the heavily Irish sections of Woodlawn in the Bronx and Woodside in Queens. I was also drawn to Woodside for Donovan’s Pub, which allegedly makes one of the best hamburgers in the city. I found mine to be good but nothing to sing from the top of the Chrysler Building about. But I don’t consider any journey to be a wasted one, plus it gave me a good story to tell a young lady I met soon thereafter. She would later go on to tell me she that was a vegan, but I don’t think she held my six-mile trek for tasty ground slaughtered cow meat against me. And if she did, well that’s living in the real world. I’ve been known to deny friend requests on MySpace because the person listed John Mayer under their favorite music. Even the most open-minded people have their limits.

So after all this time, I hadn’t lost my thirst for adventure, but I was running out of new places to go. One afternoon, I was so desperate to escape the monotonous familiarity of my own neighborhood that I went over to Morningside Heights, the area of northern Manhattan bounded by the Upper West Side and Harlem. My primary motivation was to check out the new Kim’s Mediapolis store on Broadway and 113th Street, but the more notable features of this sub-locale are Columbia University and Barnard College. It’d been about ten years since I’d ventured farther north than 112th Street (the location of Tom’s Restaurant, an essential stop for Suzanne Vega fanatics like myself) and that was to meet a girlfriend, who was a Barnard student. Being hopelessly in love as I was, I wasn’t really paying much attention to anything beyond the 5-foot radius around her body, so going back was essentially an all new experience. Years ago, native residents liked to refer to the neighborhood as “White Harlem,” but now it might be more accurate to call it “Columbiatown.” It’s like a little college town that’s been crane dropped into the big city. It’s cute. And by cute, I mean adorable in a sincere but condescending way. It might be in Manhattan, but it’s not New York. It’s an embassy for 18 to 22 year old diplomats. Nothing wrong with that, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s foreign soil.

Normally, this is as close to leaving the confines of my home state as I like to come. It takes a lot to get me to traverse our borders, being the obvious New York ethno centrist that I am. When I’m watching New York 1 and they get to their regular, “World Beyond New York” segment, I always think the same thing, “There’s a world beyond New York?” The 2004 Presidential election pushed my state bound jingoism even further. My old philosophy had been, “I don’t have to like Bush to love my country.” But after that November, I declared, “I am not an American, I am a New Yorker. I renounce any allegiance with a country who would willfully put that ignorant, corrupt and incompetent man back in power.” But now, over a year later, despite the fact that I’m still dreaming of the day that New York succeeds from the union, I’d actually decided to cross the Hudson River into alien territory. I’d exhausted the hamlets of Father Knickerbocker. I had to accept the fact that if I wanted to continue exploring the new, I’d have to branch out a little.

Hoboken carried the draw of, well, I didn’t know what, but it was close and easily accessible. I’ve always heard people from New Jersey rave about how great Hoboken was, but then again, they were people from New Jersey. An old coworker of mine once gushed with excitement over the new Hoboken apartment he’d just found. “It’s great, it’s so much better than New York, it’s cleaner, it’s cheaper, it’s like the Upper West Side across the river.” About six months later, he told me he was moving back to the Upper West Side.

“But I though you loved Hoboken.”

“No, it’s a fuckin’ dump.”

I should have taken that as a warning, but part of why I’d become a happier person over the course of 2005 is the belief that if I want to do something, follow the instinct and do it instead of giving myself excuses not to. Whether it was walking up to a girl cold and introducing myself, singing onstage at an open mike or competing in the Mr. Lower East Side Pageant by doing yoga poses in my underwear in front of the packed crowd at the Bowery Poetry Club, this concept had served me well. Perhaps it was the lure of the unknown or the prospect of finding a McDonald’s where the items on the dollar menu actually cost a dollar, but going to Hoboken was what I wanted to do that day.

I boarded the PATH train and eventually felt the instinctual cruel shiver that told me that I’d broken the state seal and was now in New Jersey. I walked out of the station onto the sidewalk off Court Street and looked around. It looked unsettlingly familiar. I’d been there before, only then, it was nighttime. So this was Hoboken in the daylight. Didn’t make much of a difference as far as I could tell, there wasn’t anything to look at. Just a newsstand, traffic light and some kind of bar or restaurant type thing across the street.

So I actually had been in Hoboken once before. Very briefly, and as it should be noted, against my will. After our boss’ Christmas party in Westchester, my friend Bill was driving back to New Jersey with his wife and fellow coworker Nicole, and offered to drop me off in Manhattan along the way. I got a little concerned when Bill’s wife lit a joint and passed it to him while we were rollin’ down the highway, but this dissipated shortly after she passed it to me. Bill handled his herb, plus, all the beer, wine and champagne he’d consumed that evening, well enough to avoid any life-threatening accidents. Unfortunately, his focus failed enough for him to miss the Manhattan exit. When we both realized what he’d done, Bill offered, no, issued, a solution I wasn’t quite expecting.

“Mike, you’re goin’ to Hoboken.”

“I’m going to Hoboken?”

“Yep.”

“But I don’t wanna go to Hoboken.”

“Don’t worry, it’s cool. Nicole lives there, I’ll drop her off and take you to the PATH.”

Bill’s plan came to fruition. I’d never taken the PATH before, but he assured me it was an easy transit system to figure out, and by that point, it was far beyond the level of choice for me. It was several hours past midnight, and I stood by the entrance on the empty, barren street, feeling like a five year old who’d come from the circus only to have his parents leave him in the parking lot and drive off saying, “You find your way home.”

And I said, “Bill, I’m gonna fucking kill you. And I am a smart enough person that I will do it in such a way that your body will not be found and I will never be caught.”

Bill said, “See ya Monday,” and drove off.

Before I could enter the station, I was approached by a young Hasidic man carrying a large plastic garbage bag. The image was more than a little odd and slightly frightening, but he was actually rather polite, “Excuse me sir, do you happen to be Jewish?”

It was 2 o’clock in the morning, 35 degrees outside, and this guy’s out on the town looking for Jews. In spite of my vice laden physical and mental state, or more likely because of it, I found this very amusing. So with great enthusiasm, I said, “Yes, as a matter of fact I am.”

“Well I’m from the Chabad Lubavitch, we’re giving away free menorahs to anybody who wants one. All we ask is for is a small donation.”

And I thought, Hey, I don’t have a menorah. I’d like to have a menorah.

“Sure, I’ll take a menorah.” I fished a couple of singles out of my wallet and forked them over, then he reached into his garbage bag and pulled out a menorah made of bent sheet metal and box of menorah candles. I thanked him and made my way into the station.

Once inside, I discovered my gifted IQ was sufficient enough to plan Bill’s murder, but not enough to overcome the double-edged substance blade and figure out how to buy a PATH ticket. The coke-machine styled automatic ticket vendor I’d submitted my dollar to had produced nothing. Admitting failure, I opened my wallet for another go, only to discover it was now empty. Turned out I’d been abandoned in Hoboken with just a few dollars in my pocket, and had unknowingly given all but one of them to menorah boy. Without a transit employee or ATM in sight, I stood there in frozen panic over the prospect of being trapped in this desolate, foreign land that god forgot called New Jersey. Fortunately, I finally noticed a light on the turnstile by the machine that seemed to indicate that my dollar had unlocked it for safe passage. It was my first correct deduction for quite a while, and soon I was on my way back to my safe Manhattan home.

Now, years later, I was standing on virtually the same spot as I was when I threatened Bill’s life and took candles from a stranger. Well, it was time to create some new memories of our little friend across the river. Time to discover the real Hoboken. I crossed the street and continued down the road, desperate to find something worth looking at. To my dismay, but not my surprise, I failed miserably. Mostly just a long concrete side walk and empty walls. Except for the occasional restaurant front, bank entrance and a parking lot, it was more like an oversized alley with traffic lights than an actual street. Eventually I came to a park, but not much there either, except for some children’s swings, monkey bars and a couple of young girls I couldn’t help noticing. They looked about 18, which in these times of mass-distributed milk saturated with bovine growth hormone, meant they were probably about 14 or 15, which meant turn the fuck away and keep walking.

As I prepared to go to hell, I moved off Court Street and shifted over to Washington Street. Apparently this was the cancer-ridden heart of this delightful burg, as it was lined with stores and pedestrians. I headed north, clinging to the hope that I could find something interesting. There were a number of restaurants that might be described as cheap, affordable, modest or shithole, depending on your level of income and condescension. I also spotted a few shops that sold nothing of interest to me, and a whole lot of small run-down convenience stores. I hesitate to call them bodegas because the term always implied New York. These places were in New Jersey, they didn’t have the right to be called bodegas. And as uniformly crappy across state lines as they were, at least New York bodegas had their selling points, like the pot and crack behind the counter, at least in the pre-Guiliani days. I couldn’t imagine these places storing anything illicit that appealed to the general public of Hoboken, except for maybe bootleg cd’s of The Dave Matthews Band.

Venturing further, I saw a building with a large golden statue of a deer outside it. Now here was something interesting. A beautiful animal, big and shiny, and no one around enraged enough by it to smash the Ten Commandments on the ground. Then I got closer and discovered that the building housed Lodge 74 of the Elk’s Club. I’d like to repeat that, THE ELK’S CLUB. The organization with a mission to inculcate the principles of Charity, Justice, Brotherly Love and Fidelity; to recognize a belief in God; to promote the welfare and enhance the happiness of its Members; to quicken the spirit of American patriotism; to cultivate good fellowship. All I really knew about those types of places is what I learned from The Honeymooners and The Flintstones; that apparently they consisted of grown men in stupid hats who used it as an excuse to get away from their wives and drink beer all night, with a chain of command that harked back to the backward days of feudalism. It sounded like a club for middle-aged frat boys who’d advanced thirty years without bothering to grow the hell up. It figures there’d be one here.

Carrying on, I saw a bunch of twenty something dudes drinking on the stoop of one of the many brownstones that lined the street. Or, maybe it wasn’t right to call them brownstones. These were walkups. Brooklyn has brownstones, not New Jersey. A brownstone is a walkup with an attitude; it says, “welcome to my home” but will just as easily shout, “get the fuck off my steps.”

Anyway, these guys were drinking beer out in public, which I gathered from their lack of concern was fine as long as you were behind your gate. Or that in a place as badly in need of an urban defibrillator as this, nothing ever happened to warrant the need for much law enforcement. These guys were clearly future Elksmen; baseball caps, sweater vests, shorts in January, and the self-impressed sneers on their faces that come with their stockbroker commission checks. One of them was even wearing a Boston Red Sox hat. Now, that doesn’t bother me because I’ve been a Yankee fan since I was nine years old and every blood cell that pumps through my veins carries a sheer hatred for the Red Sox. I happen to love the city of Boston and bear no malice against genuine regional Bosox fanatics. It’s the sudden influx of Red Sox paraphernalia that mysteriously appeared on the streets of New York the year the Red Sox won the World Series that makes me lose faith in humanity. It begs the question, was there an unforeseen mass emigration from New England into New York? Did they decide it was time to leave once the curse of the bambino was broken? Or is it more likely that there was a preexisting legion of asshole pseudos that lack the individuality to pick a fucking side and stick with it? If you don’t like sports, fine. If you do, don’t be so transparent that your idea of loyalty and strength of will is to knock over the flower arrangement and jump on the horse in the Winner’s Circle. Especially if you’re a Met fan. No disrespect, but don’t just shift your loyalties up north for the schadenfreude of cheering on the club that makes Yankee fans suffer. It’s not our fault that your team hasn’t won a world series in over 20 years. Well, it kind of is because we beat you in 2000. But regardless of the motivation, the Red Sox hat has become the uniform for the New York phony. If I were from Boston, I’d be pissed about this athletic perversion. As for this guy, it seemed fitting that the lodge wasn’t far down the road. It couldn’t far down the road for him metaphorically either.

I walked as far down Washington as I could bear, desperate to find anything that could have justified the price of my PATH train ticket. But I found no success. When I even glanced around for indicators of signs of life after sundown, there wasn’t much that I could find. Enthused Hobokeners always talk about the active bar scene. Maybe they’re all talking about the same bar. Maybe there was one magic bar in this drought of urban worth that convinced the locals that they shine in the shadow of Manhattan. Yes, Hoboken was just like the Upper West Side, without the sea of pubs, without the good restaurants, without said Tom’s Restaurant, access to Central park, the Museum of Natural History and Lincoln Center. Without the attempt at urban hipness that’s debunked by the yuppie demographic and kept in check by the family domesticity and small town feel, enough to keep it from becoming too unjustly self-impressed. Without all the things that make it a place where I would never live but actually, not such a bad place to visit. Hoboken is a place that actually makes me defend the Upper West Side. I think that says it all.

And when I was passed by a BMW that was blasting some pussy emo band like Taking Back The Brand New Story Of The Hawthorn Heights or whatever, I knew I had to get out of Hoboken as soon as possible. In New York, you’ll often hear hip-hop blaring out of car windows, and it’s fitting. It’s is the music of the streets. Apparently, the music of the streets of Hoboken is Fallout Boy. Emo, screamo, whatever the fuck you want to call it, is not punk rock. It’s the hair-metal of the 21st century. The kind of crap makes a pretense of being the loud, hard and edgy battle cry against the establishment, but is really just a non-threatening genre smokescreen that attracts weak poseurs by convincing them that they’re being rebellious rockers. They’re hardly exclusive to Hoboken, but the German yuppiemobile was the roaming audio proof: they’re here. And judging by everything else I’d seen, probably in great numbers. These are the same people who clog the arteries of downtown Manhattan, looking for their martini lounges and hookah bars. The ones who turned the phrase, “Go back to Jersey” from an astute, observational witticism into one of the most heinous insults you can strike with on the streets of the empire state. They can’t handle life in a real city, but use my home as their playground. And for some reason, for some motivation I could not explain, I had returned the favor. Why did I come here? Why did I do this to myself? Why did I spend three dollars to remind myself why I’m a misanthrope? ‘Cause I’m an idiot, that’s why. I could be home, lying across my bed, drinking iced tea and watching Mythbusters. And not just any episode, an episode with both the cute redhead and the pretty blond with the body who can fix cars. Just as I realized this, I passed a shop that was called “Greetings From Hoboken,” and was forced to wonder, who would send anyone a greeting from Hoboken? Isn’t that an open admission that they’d actually been there? Who would admit to that? I’ll tell ya who. ME, that’s who. In cultural circles, we call this, “suffering for our art.”

I was scampering back to the PATH station with a power walk that could have gotten me on the Olympic track team when I looked up and saw it. The one good thing about Hoboken. The view of New York City. Looming past the Hudson River is a clear shot of southern Manhattan, the sated infrastructure of buildings shooting up out of the smooth surface of the water like a lush garden of steel and concrete blooming from the garden soil. You don’t get to see New York like this when you’re there, it’s a shame that you have to go to New Jersey to do it. Back in August of 2001, while on my way to a concert at Liberty State Park, we surfaced from the PATH station at Exchange Place to see Jersey City in one direction and a breathtaking view of the southern tip of Manhattan in the other. Front and center were the Twin Towers, standing proud and tall like the all-powerful patriarch of architecture. We were in a hurry to catch the Light Rail, but I remember thinking that I’d have to come back there to take some photographs. I had plenty of time because I was off from work the following week, but I never got around to it. Then, just three weeks later, the towers were gone. The view would never be the same again. And I’d missed my chance to capture it. You really don’t appreciate what you have or where you are until you leave it, and maybe you need to do that every once in a while, no matter how painful it is. You know what they say about “when it’s gone.” Maybe there really is no such thing as a wasted journey.

Wasted or not, my travels that day were done. I hopped the PATH to the 6, and made my way back to my apartment. I collapsed onto my bed, grateful to be back to the sanctuary of my New York home, and watched my taped episodes of Mythbusters. They made a crossbow out of rolled up newspaper, homemade glue, a piece of a cafeteria tray and underwear elastic. How fucking cool is that?

(fiction)

My Good Friend Nomar

I’m at the corner of 33rd street and Park Avenue in Manhattan. And I walk. Then I’m at the exit of the tunnel that goes underneath Grand Central Station. And I stop walking. I hear a very loud horn, followed by a screech. Suddenly, I feel a sharp pain in my thigh, then a piercing pain on the side of my head. And I’m flying. Nothing compares to the feeling of euphoria you get from weightlessness. Even if it’s only for a second and a half, you know that’s the sensation to have as your last. Then I feel a rough, tearing pain on the back of my head and then everything goes black.

That was a few years ago. The next day they discovered I have Bipolar disorder. Two days later I was institutionalized. Did you know that certain forms of Bipolar disorder go undiagnosed because the mania is less extreme than the depression? That might have been useful to know before I decided to jump onto my desk, smash my computer against the floor, storm out of the office building and walk into the middle of the street. Geez, all those years of medical school and they can’t come up with a better way to figure out that I’m fucking crazy than me trying to kill myself. God damn, I’m mentally ill and even I could have figured that out. What the hell do those doctors do all day?

Anyway, I could tell you about the time I spent at the institution, but I’m sure you’ve heard enough of those kinds of stories. And trust me, it’s not what you think, it’s very boring. Institution life is very structured; it’s all about the routine. Every day, you eat at the same time, watch tv at the same time, take your meds at the same time, blah blah blah. I swear, more people went out of that place with obsessive-compulsive disorder than went in. It’s ok though; a few of them became professional house cleaners. Hey, you won’t find a better house cleaner than an OCD patient. Trust me on that.

A year later, I was out. Still bipolar, but armed with Depakote. It’s a mood stabilizer, which is good for you I guess. I kind of missed being on Thorazine though. That’s what they gave me in the beginning. Apparently they sometimes do that with suicidal behavior. Plus, smashing my head against the X-ray light board in the emergency room didn’t help. But what the hell, you ever been on Thorazine? Oh, you gotta try it, it’s awesome. It reminded me of all the times in college I got really drunk and then smoked a lot of pot. Imagine walking around in slow motion with a heavy lead blanket draped over you and you should get the general idea. Boy, those were the days.

But that was ages ago. I was released from the institution, and then, at the age of 33, I moved back in with my parents. I know, you’d think that that would make you even crazier, but I actually like my parents. They were 60’s beatniks who grew up and went to law school. They were professionals, but without the strict conservative tendencies. And they listened to jazz, so I never had to hear all that bullshit about how rock n roll died with Jim Morrison, like my friends who grew up with hippy parents did.

And when I moved back in, they were really supportive. I was very fragile, and I hadn’t dealt with the real world for quite a long time.
Everything was scary to me, because I never knew what was gonna set me off. Depakote only goes so far. Sure, I don’t wanna take my toaster into the bathtub, but that’s hardly the mark of unshakeable stability. One time, near the beginning, my mom picked me up a Pepsi instead of a Coca-cola and I went berserk. My poor mother.

Like I said, the real world frightened me, but my parents were ok to let me recover at my own pace. So I didn’t have to do anything. It was like being a kid again. Because, after your mental state’s been shattered, that’s basically what you are. You can come back lucid, with your old knowledge intact, but you’re still reeducating yourself in becoming a functioning part of the social structure. So I spent a lot of time in the beginning, free from responsibility and focused on relaxing. All I did was sit in my room, watch tv, play video games and eat ice cream. Remember when you were a kid and got sick, and you’d stay home from school and have a ball by sleeping until 12 o’clock and watching game shows all afternoon? That’s what it was like, only now I was mentally ill and staying home from work indefinitely.

And I watched a lot of baseball. I know, it got me worked up and emotional, especially when the Yankees were in a tight spot. But after quite a few one-on-one sessions with the doctor in the institution, I had accepted that it was just game. They figured that realization would be crucial to my recovery, after they made the mistake of letting me watch the Yankees play the Boston Red Sox a few weeks after they took me off thorazine. The Yankees lost. Boston’s shortstop, Nomar Garciaparra, in particular had killed us that day. He had four hits, including a home run that won them the game in the 9th inning. I’d thrown two chairs through the tv room window by the time they pumped me full of sedative just to shut me up. I just kept screaming, “That Nomar Garciaparra! I hate him, I hate him I hate him, he’s RUINING MY LIFE!”

But that was then. My friend Depakote won’t let that happen again.

Anyway, after a few months holed up in my room, I’d had enough. I had to go outside, or else I was gonna drive myself crazy again. So I spent every afternoon walking. I gave myself a goal to turn it into an adventure and feel a sense of accomplishment. One day I’d go to Gray’s Papaya to eat a hot dog. Another day I’d go to Riverside Park and look at New Jersey. One time I ate a sandwich at Tom’s dinner and then walked to Harlem and bought an oversized Fat Albert T-shirt. Just to say I did it. That was a fun day.

But eventually, I’d gone everywhere I thought I could go. I needed something to give my life a greater sense of purpose. And to that end, I started working at a record store. I came across it on one of my walks, but I didn’t start working there until much later. I had a few rather inauspicious initial meetings with the manager. He was quite unsavory. He had that kind of stern, crabby, bitterness that so many middle-aged retail clerks seem to have. I walked up to him and said. “Hi, my name’s Coltrane Tamberlaine. What’s yours?”

“What the hell’s your name?”

“Coltrane Tamberlaine.”

“How the hell’d you get a name like that?”

“Well my parents are really into jazz and so for years I assumed that they named me after their favorite saxophone player but then I found out their favorite saxophone player was Ornette Coleman and so I said, ‘Why’d you name me Coltrane then?’ and they said that I was conceived to a John Coltrane album, which they really shouldn’t have told me because I haven’t been able to listen to him ever since, which is a shame because I really like him, but anyway people call me Cole for short.”

“Yeah, that’s fascinating. In fact, why don’t you go over there and tell the cashier that.”

“I did. She said I should come over and tell you.”

“I must have pissed her off.”

“What’s your name?”

“IT’S JERRY! NOW WILL YOU GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE?!”

I started crying right on the spot. I ran home, slammed a Depakote and went to sleep. But I still came back next day. They were playing a kung-fu movie on the monitor in the video section. “Hey Jerry, did you know that the Jackie Chan movie Operation Condor was actually the sequel to a movie called Armour of God? And when they released Armour of God in the states on video they called it Operation Condor 2, so the movie that’s the original in the rest of the world is the sequel in the US to the movie that’s the sequel in the rest of the world?”

“You talk to everybody like this?”

“Yeah. I don’t restrain myself verbally.”

“Well, maybe you should.”

“I used to.”

“How’d that work out for ya?”

“I tried to kill myself.”

Oh that shut him up pretty fast. I guess he believed me, ‘cause he never yelled at me again. So I just kept coming back. Every now and then I’d buy something so that I wouldn’t seem like a freeloader. In fact, I became such a good customer, that Jerry had to tolerate me whether he wanted to or not. And so when winter came around and the store started hiring extra help for the Christmas rush, I said, “Jerry, my main man! What do ya say?”

He gave me a look as if the very thought utterly horrified him. But eventually he said, “What the hell. You’re here every day anyway. You might as well make yourself useful.”

And after Christmas, I ended up staying on. Even Jerry had to admit that I was a valuable employee. I was the only one who could answer customer’s questions about Miles Davis, Iron Maiden and Abba. Sure, I threw the occasional conniption fit, like the time I realized that the short and really hot woman I was checking out was actually a girl who was probably all of 14 years old. When she left I started screaming about how girls didn’t look like that when I was 14, and how it must have something to do with all the bovine growth hormone they give the cows who make the milk now, in an obvious conspiracy to make us feel even worse about our own decrepit sense of aging. Minutes later, I was on the floor with tears in my eyes, crying about how I was old and lonely and no girl could ever love a crazy person. But it was late spring by then. Jerry was just shrugging that stuff off. That’s what’s great about living in a city like New York. You can be pretty god damn manic and not scream anything worse than what bums yell out in the subway on a daily basis.

He just did what he always did when his patience wore thin, which was send me out to Xando to get him coffee. While I was in there, by coincidence, I ran into my dad. He told me a client had just given him tickets to see the Yankees play the Red Sox that night. “I was gonna call your uncle, but, do you wanna go?”

“Oh, YEAH!”

And later that night I was at Yankee stadium, at the ballgame, with my dad. It was great until the game started. At every game, there’s always at least one jerk who’s gotta spoil it for you, and it turned out that there were a couple of loudmouth guys from Boston, sitting right behind us. First inning, Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter comes up to bat, and there go the guys behind me, “Nomah’s bettah! Nomah’s bettah!” Third inning, there they go again, “Nomah’s bettah! Nomah’s bettah!” Fifth inning, guess who drove in the tying run? “NOMAH! AH RIGHT NOMAH!” Seventh inning, still tied, things very tense, Derek Jeter’s up again, and there they go, right on queue, “NOMAH’S BETTAH! NOMAH’S BETTAH!” I tried to stay calm and avoid any conflict. But this was beyond Depakote. This wasn’t just about brain synapses or chemical imbalances. I was offended. Offended, as a New Yorker. And so I turned around and faced them.

“NoMAR.”

“What?”

“Nomar. His name is Nomar.”

“That’s what I said. Nomah.”

“NoMAR! With an R in it. He’s your best player and you can’t even pronounce his fucking name!

He turned to his friend. “See? That’s what happens in New Yahk.”

“New YORK, YOU MOTHERFUCKER!” And I grabbed him, pulled him to the floor and starting shaking him. “Pronounce the R! Pronounce the fucking R!” His friend started hitting me but I wouldn’t let go. It finally took three security guards to pull me off of him. They dragged me kicking and screaming to the security office and tossed me into a little room. I cried so hard that I nearly threw up.

When the game ended, they let me out and told me not come back to Yankee Stadium until next year. They were gonna ban me for life, but my father explained that I was mentally ill. It’s amazing, the advantages of being crazy in the era of political correctness. But of course, the big question remained. “Dad? Who won the game?”

“The Yankees did. Derek Jeter hit a home run in the 8th inning.”

“YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!”

I started jumping for joy, right in the security office. My dad looked at the head security guy and pointed at me with raised eyebrows, to which the guy nodded his head. But I didn’t care. We hadn’t just won the game, we’d won the argument. Nomar’s better, huh? Not tonight. Guess he’s not ruining my life after all.

When we left the stadium, it was pretty late. The only fans still around were the ones who were waiting for the players to come from the locker room. There was a big crowd around a few of the Yankees, who were signing things left and right. Then I noticed that a few of the Red Sox were walking out as well. I excused myself and went up to them before Dad could stop me. “Excuse me, Mr. Garciaparra?” He smiled and said hello. “Could I please have your autograph?” He seemed a little confused, considering that I was wearing a Yankee cap and t-shirt. But he seemed more than happy to do it. He even asked me who to make it out to.

“Ah, could you put, ‘To my good friend Coltrane?’” And so he did, “To my good friend Coltrane, Nomar Garciaparra.” He’s a hell of a nice guy.

Ok, so I know that getting an autograph from a baseball player is hardly a profound epiphany. But when was the last time you made peace with a personal demon of yours? Do you have a tangible manifestation of redemption that you can look at when you need to be reminded that personal dilemmas can be overcome? Well I do. Even if Nomar doesn’t play for Boston anymore, I’ll always have it. And I have a job, the support of my family, and Depakote. All I need now is the love of good lady. And would you believe it, I actually feel a sense of optimism about that. It’s not so ridiculous to believe that a mental patient can find the right girl. I just hope it’s true what they say. You know, the pretty ones are always crazy.

It Couldn’t Be Any Worse Than The Fox News Network


I once heard about this kid from New Jersey, who brought new meaning to the phrase, “party down,” when he jumped from his Daytona Spring Break hotel window into the pool below. He made it, so he tried again. Again he made it, so he tried again. Again he made it, so he tried again, slipped, fell to the ground below and died.

This story taught me a great deal about myself. I’d had my suspicions, but I didn’t really know what a misanthrope I was until I realized that I didn’t feel sorry for this kid. In fact there’s a little part of me that’s happy about the microscopic rise in the average American IQ that we have with this imbecile gone. I just don’t see this as a tragedy.

That’s when it hit. Maybe this is actually the way we can save the country. We could save money on a lot of education and social programs if all we did was just let the stupid people die. Not every stupid person, I mean, there’s not a single person on the planet who’s above the occasional act of idiocy.

That being said, I think we need to return pointless acts of stupidity to the airwaves bringing back more programs like Jackass. If some kid is stupid enough to set himself on fire because he saw it done on show with a self-deprecating title and a clear, “Do not try this at home” disclaimer, he doesn’t live to pass the DNA on. Natural selection. Not just a theory, a good idea.

Here’s another modest proposal. A few shows might not be enough. We need a whole network of this. A whole channel specifically designed for stupid people to imitate, so they’ll die and exit the gene pool. The Deathtime Network. It’ll have shows like, The Camouflage Wearing Deer-Hunting Hour, Dick Clark’s Shotguns, Switchblades and Practical Jokes. We’ll have game shows like New York Rush Hour Jaywalking. It’ll be great, just imagine Chuck Woolery standing on the median at Broadway and Houston in Manhattan, saying, “OK, it’s Timmy from Omaha, the sign says, ‘Don’t Walk,’ let’s see if he can make it, OHHHHH! I’m sorry Timmy, too slow. But no one goes home empty-handed. Jack, tell Timmy what he’s won.”

“Yes Chuck, our second place contestant wins a free trip to the Emergency Room at St Vincent’s Hospital, deep in the heart New York’s fashionable West Village. That’s St Vincent’s Hospital, come for the triage, stay if you’re insured, courtesy of the nearsighted commuter from Bayonne, New Jersey who ran you over.”

We’ll have our own sports, too. Not the “putting a ball somewhere” variety like you sees on the broadcast networks. We’ll have automotive sports. You know the Indy 500? Daytona 500? We’ll have Death Race 2000. Like the Roger Corman film. None of this going around in a circle bullshit, we send the cars into the streets to earn points by running people over. The only question is where to do it. You could have it in New Jersey, since that’s pretty much how they drive anyway. Texas is another good option, they execute people for jaywalking there, no one will pay any mind to another missing pedestrian.

No, Death Race won’t be any fun unless you have it somewhere where people will actually know the difference. Plus, ideally, you’d want it in a place with an expendable population, like, say, France. But doing it overseas would be too complicated; your best bet would be somewhere close where the people are inconsequential, like Canada. You know, people who won’t really be missed.

Then we come back to New York for Celebrity Death Car, out in the Hamptons. Then every spring, we have the college tournament, but only for Fraternity brothers. We have it during one of those four day breaks, when most of the students are gone; we just bring the frat boys back for the taping. It’ll be easy, you just promise them a free T-shirt of some kind. You know, something like, “Co-ed Naked Lacrosse,” “Tau Delta Gamma Beach Party ‘04,” “Fred Flintstone Says Yabba Grabba Brew.” Hey, if they live, they’re gonna need something to put on under those sweater vests they like to wear so much.

Anyway, Death Race will have a point system for different types of pedestrians. But no points for children or senior citizens, I’m not completely insensitive. In fact, you make the mistake of hitting a child and you’re out of the game. That’s too cruel. The same pretty much goes for running over senior citizens. Everyone gets…, 8 warnings, but then with the 9th old-timer, you’re out of there. Then the finalists, in order to become champions, must cross the finish line, which happens to be at the edge of a fucking cliff. That way, we all win.

Now, the network doesn’t have to be completely negative, we could provide some balance by including some heartwarming content. The Nazi Execution hour. Now, there’s an idea worth imitating. Wouldn’t you love to hear that a fifteen year old bashed in the brains of a neo-Nazi with a meat-tenderizer, because he saw it on TV? You know, ‘cause we made killing Nazis look really PHAT? Come to think of it, we could integrate it into the other shows and make that the lynchpin of the whole network. Every day, we start the morning with Live with Regis and Nazi Electrocutions. Regis gets the comfy cushion seat, the guest gets an electric chair. You start small at first, local skinheads and clansmen. Then hopefully, as we become more popular, we could get the bigger high profile guests in time for sweeps, politicians and sports personalities, like David Duke and former Major League pitcher John Rocker. You think people wouldn’t be showing up late to work, because they didn’t want to miss the sight of some hateful, fascist government official with smoke billowing out of his ears? Who would object to that? I mean besides Bill O’Reilly? Did you ever notice that Nazis tend to vote Republican? Don’t mean to imply anything. Just sharing a thought.

Of course, at Deathtime, we’ll have to sell commercial advertising space. But the advertisers are gonna be involved with the population control too. Not necessarily the stupid people though. I’m not sure if it’s right to commercially endorse this form of genetic engineering. So just be fair, the ads will shave points off every IQ demographic, and we won’t have to look far to find clients that fit in with the ethic of the network.

First, we’re gonna lift the ban on television advertising for cigarettes. There’s a goldmine waiting to happen. Why the hell not? Why can’t I run a cigarette commercial if I feel like it? What are they gonna do, fine me? Who cares? I’ll pay the fine! Do you have any idea how much money RJ Reynolds will shell out get Camel commercials on tv again? You could write the fine estimates into the advertising contract, they’d slash their finger and sign the damn thing in blood if they had to.

And if I get arrested or sued, I’ll just do what the Tobacco executives and conservative politicians always do, I’ll say I didn’t know.

“Do you think advertising cigarettes on television is amoral and illegal?”

“I don’t know. I’m not a lawyer.”

Well, it is the truth, to a certain degree. But I digress. Next, we’re gonna run ads from all the major drug companies, but we’re gonna cut out the part at the end of the where they list all the possible side effects. All you’re gonna see are the old dancing couples, the thirty-something men walking down the beach, and the women doing Tai Chi in the park. No mention of the possible fatigue, headache, hair loss, body pain, cramping, night sweats, shedding skin, heart failure, bloody urine, gang green, galloping hallucinations of Tim Roth and Marissa Tomei riding on a giant cow’s tongue commanding an army of flying piranhas, and of course, certain sexual side-effects. It won’t kill anyone, but it’ll fuck with them real good.

Of course, the network is going to upset people. Everybody from parent groups, religious fundamentalists, right wing political organizations, and naturally, the rays of sunshine who are proud members of all three. So if it makes them happy, if it’ll shut them the hell up, I’ll make believe I give a crap about what they have to say and create disclaimers for all the programming. I could just put up something like, “If you think the following program could be dangerous, amoral, or if you just plain don’t like it, here’s a novel idea, shut it off.”

No. Maybe something like, “The following program may be considered offensive to people who don’t believe that anyone else has the ability or the right to decide on their own what they may consider entertainment.

No, that side of freedom of choice never seems to work with the types. The disclaimers will have to be more specific. I think a show like, “Oncoming Highway Traffic Skateboard Jumping,” will be preceded by something like, “The following program features numerous scenes of skateboard jumping over oncoming cars in various interstate highways. Do not attempt this yourself. And do not purchase the skateboard at Jackson Sporting Goods at the corner of Cold Spring Road and Jackson Avenue in Syosset, Long Island. Do not go to the Extreme sports section and ask for Matthew, the experienced staff member who will help you choose the right skateboard, in-line skates or any other extreme sporting equipment that’s right for you. That’s Jackson Sporting Goods, We Make Having Fun So Easy.”

And so, the Deathtime Network shall endure, boosting the brainpower of our youth by cleaning out the system. Another generation of this kind of natural selection and the youth of tomorrow would be positively gifted. This way, you could spend less money on education; the Republicans would jump at that in a second. On second thought, I think we’ll have to wait a while. I think our current president’s advisors would see the downside of the “letting stupid people die” policy, even if Dubya himself didn’t. Come to think of it, it would go through, the Vice-President would be all over that in a heartbeat. So call your local cable operator and demand The Deathtime Network. Just don’t forget to look both ways before you cross the street.

Are You There Identity? It’s Me, Michael


After a long day of work, there’s nothing more soothing than the comfort of home, which is probably why the double-hell effect of having the path to your door impeded by an illegal transgression is so agonizing. On this particular summer evening, I headed to the supermarket on the way to my abode to pick something for dinner. I only had about two dollars left in my wallet, so I stopped at an ATM on the way there, but unfortunately, it wasn’t working. Or something, it flashed something on the screen and spit some paper at me, all I knew was that this machine wasn’t giving me any money. No problem, there’s one in the supermarket. I swung by, and the bastard, he wouldn’t give me any money either. I knew the bodega next door had an ATM, but this was turning into a real pain in the ass. Nevertheless, I gave it a shot, and unfortunately, got the same result. I sensed a rather unfortunate trend as my stomach began to make those slow motion dj scratching noises that said, “Dude, the George Forman grill’s a callin’, we need meat, stat!” I did not want to disappoint, so in one last act of desperation, I hoofed it to the ol’ reliable, the Gristide’s below my apartment building. Hit the ATM, and there it was, this time in clearer English. “You have exceeded your daily limit.” My daily limit of what? Bitterness? It certainly couldn’t be my daily cash limit, because not only had I not made any ATM withdrawals that day, I hadn’t made any since the previous Sunday at CVS, which I used to buy Alka Seltzer, a gallon of orange juice and bag of beef jerky, the late lunch of hangover champions. Something weren’t right.

I ran upstairs and immediately threw the only food I had into the microwave, which was my last packet of ramen noodles. This was the sustenance that had once been my meal of choice during my days of unemployment several years ago, when money was tight. Now, I had money, but the bank wasn’t giving me any. The effect was still pretty much the same, I slurped them down, feeling not especially good about myself. I ran to the computer and did a quick online check of my recent transactions. I noticed that under the transaction descriptions were familiar locations, such as 34th Street, Lexington and 89th and 2nd Avenue. But there were also descriptions with words like Romtelcom 3, Radet CT and Fil Horea CJ. Were these names of businesses with ATM’s I’d ducked into to get my cash fix? I don’t know, you never stop to wonder what an ATM’s name is.

More importantly, I discovered that coinciding with these miniature Robert Ludlum book titles were an inordinate amount of three hundred dollar withdrawals over the previous week. Not only had I not withdrawn that amount in that time frame, I couldn’t recall a time in which I ever had in my life, except for the first month that I lived in the city, when for some reason my roommate needed my share of the rent in cash, thus leading to the situation wherein I was walking home with a large amount of money in my pocket when I was stopped by a man who said, “I was wondering if you’d like to buy some hash.” I ignored him and kept walking, which prompted him to add, “Can’t say no thank you? That makes me want to stick a gun in your face.” He was not an especially friendly drug dealer, at least not in comparison to the ones in Washington Square Park, a block and a half away from where I was living at the time. They always said, “Hey, Big Guy! Smoke smoke?” They always called me Big Guy. I don’t know why, I’m not very big, maybe it was because I’m tall. But it was kinda cool, it was like I had a street name. One time, I was wearing my knee brace, and they said, “Hey Big Guy, how’s the leg? Smoke smoke?”

Needless to say, despite these high times of big police budgets, gentrification and concerned, congenial drug dealers, I do not feel the need to carry $300 dollars in my pocket too often, much less five times in the past six day. Something was obviously up.

The call I placed to the bank was most illuminating. I explained that the $300 dollar transactions were in fact, not mine. The woman said, “Hmmm, you have a number of foreign transactions.” Seeing as I was an English major, and someone who’d scored reasonably well on my verbal SAT’s, and had once dated a girl that was Suma Cum Laude at Barnard University who told me she’d have to go home and look up words in the dictionary to find out what the hell I’d been talking about, it wasn’t an issue of not actually understanding the words, “foreign” and “transaction. ” However, the lack of justification between those words and my activities actually prompted me to say, “You mean as in, transactions outside this country?” Naturally, she said yes.

Well, it could have been financial industry jargon, and what the hell do I know about that? My first thought was she was saying they were at ATM’s at foreign banks, like I’d made a pit stop at a Credit-Swiuss cash machine to grab the green for my Big Mac value meal one day. But no, it literally meant, transactions not in the United States, proof positive to me, and hopefully the bank, that I was a victim of theft. I hadn’t left the country in over 8 years, much less the past week, in fact I hadn’t left the east coast in nearly 5 years, in fact, the closest thing I’d actually come to a foreign transaction was when my buddy Linda’s friend Monica, who was from Italy, kissed me on my left and right cheek to say goodbye the night we meet, as is the custom over there. Interesting side note, she later called Linda and asked if she could have my number, so Linda asked me if it was ok, and I said sure. And she never called me. Now I’m caught up in some kind of international criminal operation. Apparently I’m not having the best year.

Anyway, Jane, the very friendly and helpful customer service representative, counted up the foreign transactions, which totaled one-thousand, seven-hundred dollars and seventy-eight cents. She then gave me a provisional credit for the amount and filed an official claim for the unauthorized transactions. I would next have to fill out an affidavit which I’d be receiving in the mail in the coming week, then the bank would conduct an investigation to determine if the claim was valid. The investigation, I was told, should take at the most a month, and pending the results, my provisional credit would be made permanent.

It was all very civilized, and I don’t think I could have asked for better help from the financial institution that takes my money and uses it to finance investments to increase the net wealth of the millionaires who run it, but can’t be bothered to extend their Saturday hours a little longer so that I might actually get down there to deposit my paycheck, unless I forgo the nursing of my Saturday morning light hangover by sipping water while I watch Danny Phantom or an GI Joe Sigma Six. Maybe I’m a little old for those, but the early hours of weekend daylight are not exactly the best time for deep, profound entertainment, especially when it feels like there’s a dart stuck in your temple. Besides, I’ve always regressed when it came to television. I used to watch Sesame Street when I was younger, and by younger I don’t mean when I was a kid, I mean in college. I was always fascinated by the unresolved sexual tension between Elmo and Gina. I saw her give him a bath, I know what was on her mind. And as childlike as he was, you can’t tell me that Elmo didn’t totally wanna hit that.

Anyway, the bank hours may be inconvenient, then again that wasn’t an issue when I was out of work and made the weekly trek to deposit my unemployment check. I know I could have given them my account number and have the money go direct deposit. But you know, that weekly jaunt gave me something to do, empowered me with a sense of purpose for the day. The journey to the x-marked spot at 79th and Lexington was a pleasant distraction from pathetic career state that the9/11 and the Republican led economy and had reduced me too. The tellers would greet me with that comforting womb of recognition. “Yes, it’s me again, still unemployed, here’s my check.” Sometimes I’d swing by Kinko’s afterwards to fax a resume to a company who didn’t have an e-mail address contact, inevitably standing in the corner by the fax machines with all the other out of work people who were dong the same thing. You can always meet plenty of them at Kinko’s, it’s like Spirit for the unemployed.

Anyway, the sad truth was I’d been robbed, and become an unwilling accomplice of the zeitgeist of the era in the process. I was a victim of identity theft, the trendy new crime of the 21st century. It’s all the rage, check out half the tv commercials that are on nowadays. And I’d been forced into this role of mainstream lackey, like the thoughtless followers who chose their life paths by watching TRL. I never liked to be trendy, especially now, in an era where the masses deify stupidity in a way that makes George W. Bush president and Jessica Simpson a superstar. She says the stupid thing’s just an act, that she did the same thing to attract boys. I see, she needed to act dumb to get boys, I’ve heard that about cute voluptuous blonds. Now back to me, not only was I a poser, it had cost me seventeen hundred dollars. The costs to my checkbook and dignity were both staggering. If things were this bad, I guess I might as well go all the way, totally give in the way of the era. I’ll go abandon my love of punk rock, start wearing long black shorts, stop washing my hair, brush it all forward, put on a pair of thick framed glasses and go to K-Rock presented concerts wearing a “Thursday Is My Favorite Band” t-shirt while sing along in a cheesy falsetto. Why the fuck not? I’ve already lost my individuality. I might as well just go EMO.

I could do that, but I’d rather fucking kill myself. And I want to live, so rather than play into the pussification of punk rock, I hoped for the investigation to go well and moved on. Although coming year would see the rise of the sonic malfesance of screaming, lightweight whiners like Taking Back Sunday, Brand New and Hawthorn Heights, the bank determined that my claim was valid and I got my money back. Maybe actually is some justice in the world. I just won't be using the money to buy a radio anytime soon.

The Almighty J.C.

A week or so after the four year anniversary of 9/11, I was at Burger King, and a video by Matchbox 20 was running, followed by one by 3 Doors Down, part of what I assume was called the video Super Suck Hour. It was the video for the song, “Love Me When I’m Gone.” When the song was originally released in the fall of 2002, it received some short lived airplay in the wake of the unjust massive success of their previous album, but ultimately fell off radio’s rotation and failed to reclaim their gullible audience. Then when the Iraq war began five months later, they released a new version of “love me when I’m gone” which featured footage of military soldiers saying goodbye to loved ones and heading off to war, which went on to receive widespread airplay, propelling the album to multi-platinum success. My assumption being that this was done in the spirit of the FCC’s policy of equal time so that Rock and Roll artists could profit from the emotions of the American public in the wake of crisis as much as country artists could.

And just as I’m convinced that if Jesus Christ were to come back now, he would send Pat Robertson, Jim Baker, and pretty much the entire Fox News Network straight to hell for perverting and exploiting his teachings, I also believe that if Johnny Cash were alive and at full health today, he’d beat the living shit out of Toby Keith and Alan Jackson. Where was I when the world stopped turning? I was here in Manhattan asshole, where the fuck were you? Is southern profiteering from northern tragedy your idea of national unity?

And since I don’t pray to god because he’s been a bit of a dick to me, I pray to Johnny Cash. “Dear Johnny, I beseech thee, please come back and bash Alan Jackson’s skull in with his own guitar, then take the broken off neck and jam it into Toby Keith’s back. Just to watch them die. And while you’re saving us, please take a copy of The Rising and shove it down Bruce Springstein’s fucking throat until he suffocates to death. That would make me so happy.”

Amen.

This is an excerpt from "Dear Christa" that was written about two and a half years ago. Now that some of the stuff therein is starting to happen, don't say I didn't warn you:


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The Romantic Heroine

There’s So Much Rain ‘Cause the Angels Are Crying

One Opinion and What Everyone Needs to Know About "The Passion of the Christ"



This week I read an editorial in amNew York by Leonard Pitts regarding “Passion of the Christ,” in which he said, “As someone who’ll never experience anti-Semitism, I don’t know that I have standing to say there’s none in Gibson’s movie. But I didn’t see any.”

Now of course, I would never be closed minded enough to say that an opinion expressed in a free newspaper that’s handed out by homeless people is worth less than anyone else’s, god knows I take great joy in receiving my copy on the way to the 6 train every morning. But speaking as a Jewish person, as someone who has experienced anti-Semitism, I can say that the film is barbarically anti-Semitic. It’s an abomination, a two hour character assassination on an entire people, and dare I say, an insult to the art of cinema.

Another article I read quoted a girl who said, “Anyone who thinks the film blames Jews for Christ’s death hasn’t see it. The Romans kill Christ.” But no one’s disputing who actually cracked the whip and hammered the nails. Perhaps that's the attempt on Gibson’s part to make the film appear balanced, because the Roman solders who are ordered to torture Jesus all look like professional wrestlers who take great pleasure in ripping him to shreds. But the film places the responsibility for what’s happening entirely on the Jews. The Romans don’t even appear until about half an hour into the film, at which point they seem unaware of what’s going on and are unable to understand the significance. However, the Jews are quick to change that. According to Gibson, Pontius Pilot did nothing but try to quell an insurgence. Evil incarnate is represented in the film, not by Satan (who is a character), but by the Jewish High Priest Caiphus. It’s Caiphus who takes Christ to Pilot, unflinching in his insistent demand that he be executed. Caiphus then riles the masses to clamor for Christ’s death. Pilot repeatedly laments the “horrible” situation he finds himself in; he sadly whines to his wife how it’s been his job for 11 years to stop uprisings, now he’s cursed with the situation of having to choose between killing a man who’s committed no crime or risking a revolt. You can practically see the halo around his head.

Pilot gives the order to have Christ beaten and tortured, but only in an attempt to save his life. His hope is that if Jesus visibly maimed badly enough, it will be enough to satisfy the growing hoard of Jewish demonstrators. And indeed, after the solders go to town on him, Pilot displays Jesus to the crowd looking like a piece of lunchmeat, asking, “Is this not enough?” But Caiphus screams, “Crucify him!” which the crowd repeats with a fervor like the chant for “D-Fense” at Knicks game.

Gibson’s Pilot is so desperate to free Christ that he then announces to the crowd that he’s permitted to grant clemency to one criminal a year, and make them chose between Jesus, or the convicted murderer, Babbas. Babbas is brought out in shackles, jerking around and snarling like a feral animal, looking something like what a Jewish werewolf might look like just as the full moon hit the sky. So Pilot says, “Jesus?” He’s not motioning towards him with his head with raised eyebrows, but he might as well be. “Or Babbas?”

Only the most horrifically vindictive monster would not chose Jesus over this villanous savage. Of course, Caiphus cries, “Free Babbas! Free Babbas!” Pilot begrudgingly does, and Babbas hisses and snivels his way out, stopping only to give Jesus a quick smile and nod like the one Azul gave the mariachi in El Mariachi when he realized his enemy’s men were chasing the Mariachi and not him.

Any doubt as to who the film blames for Christ’s death is removed from the words of Jesus himself. Of the Romans, as the cross is being raised, he cries, “Forgive them father, for they know not what they do?” What does he have to say about the Jews? He says to Pilot, “The greater sin is on he who brought me to you,” essentially giving Pilot absolution and rendering the guilty verdict on Caiphus.

When I heard that line, I literally shot straight up from my bed and shouted, “What the FUCK?!” as it was that I was watching the film at home via the bootleg dvd I bought in Chinatown that afternoon. I needed to see it for myself before I could judge it, but I didn’t want to risk supporting Gibson’s propaganda of hatred. After watching it, I was greatly relieved that it was the guy on the Broadway and Canal who sells the burned cds and remix disks who got my five dollars and not Mel getting his cut of a ten dollar ticket. It’s not that Jews are depicted badly in film, it’s that they’re not depicted in any other way. There’s not a single positive Jewish depiction, very little is seen of those who followed and believed in him, except for Mary who spend the entire movie crawling on the floor and crying, and John, who stands by Jesus ‘til the end. Here’s what you need to know about John. It’s been widely reported that all the Jewish characters are ugly men with kinky hair and big noses, and this is true, with a few exceptions. Jim Cavezal, who plays Christ, is a good looking man, I think we all know that by now. Oh yeah, Christ was a Jew, lest we forget. But Gibson is quite particular in separating Christ from his Jewish roots, as he also does with John, who’s played by a handsome actor from Bulgaria, and Mary Magdalene, played by Italian uber-babe Monica Belluci, polarizing them in not only in physical appearance, but apparently in ideology as well. He doesn’t want us to think of them as being Jewish, in fact, we’re not even supposed to know they are. As the Voice reported, only the traitor Judas is crude enough to actually call Jesus, “Rabbi.” Judas by the way, appears to commit suicide, not out of guilt for betraying Christ, but to end the torturous tauntings he bears from the minions of Satan, as if to say not only is he unable to redeem himself, the evil hook-nosed Jew didn’t even want to.

The characters which Gibson distinguishes as Jews are never fully explained. If you want to make the argument that the film is only meant to encapsulate half a day and the rest you’re supposed to know, fine. I don’t think it’s a very valid argument, considering all the flashbacks we see, but let’s move on. The film makes no attempt to explain who the Pharisees are, in fact I can’t remember if the word is even used. Who were the Pharisees? The Pharisees were the Hebrew ruling class, an elitist fundamentalist faction who were corrupted by their own power and would have seen Christ as a threat to their authority. But these socio-political aspects are nowhere to be seen. It’s never explained why they so desperately want Jesus dead, we see nothing but blind, unrelenting hatred, making the Pharisees appear as nothing but wicked sociopaths. What we also don’t see is how they’re not representative of an entire people. A woman I work with had this to say on the subject of Jews killing Christ, “There was definitely a conspiracy, ‘cause THEY didn’t like him.” They? Who is they? Every single Jew didn’t like him? We know that’s not true, even if that’s what people like Gibson want to take from the Gospels. But the actions of a few don’t define a people, such an assumption is the very definition of prejudiced stereotyping. Let’s put this in more modern terms, imagine people talking about “those Americans.” “Oh, those Americans, they’re definitely narrow-minded right-wingers. They wanted to go to war with Iraq, they want to change the constitution to make gay marriage illegal, they want to censor what you hear on the radio and they want to take away freedom of speech.” Does that sound like anyone you know? Get the picture now?

And even still, that’s only if you buy into what’s in the Gospels. One thing I’m getting tired of hearing is the film’s praise from right-wingers that it’s an accurate depiction of the events as they actually occurred. If the film weren’t so hateful, I might be able to laugh at the notion that if I were to somehow go back 2000 years to witness the incident, I don’t think I’d actually see those people there. Let’s just forget for a moment that out of hundreds of gospels that were written, the four that were considered most beneficial to the cause of attracting followers were the ones chosen. I know it’s in the Da Vinci Code, but it’s based on history. But even ignoring that, much of what’s stated in the Gospels is contradicted by actual history. The actual Pontius Pilot was knows to be a harsh prefect who was quick to execute any potential political rebel. The fact that Christ’s arrival in the city stirred up public interest would have been enough to send Pilot’s flags up. The apparent charge from the Pharisees on Christ was blasphemy. Although it’s debatable whether or not claiming to be the Messiah was considered blasphemous at the time, it’s irrelevant since the Pharisees would have only been using it as an excuse to remove the threat to their power. But the punishment for blasphemy was death by stoning, the priests would have condemned Jesus to that rather than hand him to Pilot for crucifixion. Paula Fredriksen, a scholar from Boston University, said, “If Pilate didn’t have an itchy trigger finger, the Crucifixion, which was a specifically political punishment, probably would not have happened.” It's also been documented that Rome executed hundreds of other men who claimed to be the Messiah, so these circumstances were not that uncommon.

What we need to know about Gospels is that they were believed to be written between years 70 and 110, which means they came about after the Jewish revolt against Rome that began in 66 and the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in 70. With the rise of anti-Jewish sentiment in the wake of the failed rebellion and resulting tightened grip of tyranny from the Roman Empire, the Gospels were the product of an attempt to separate Christianity from Judaism, written at a time when it would have been unwise, even suicidal, to blame Rome for the death of a pious redeemer.

The problem with putting this in the context of a film is that people are quick to believe what they read and what they see. How many people saw "From Hell" and said, “I didn’t know that’s who Jack the Ripper was!” It wasn’t, it was just one of the theories. And now, millions of people have probably exited The Passion of the Christ, saying, “I didn’t know that’s how it happened.” The truth is, it’s not, it’s just one man’s vision, seen 2000 years after the fact. But most people can’t distinguish cinema from reality, and won’t even give the idea that a movie might be historically inaccurate a first consideration.

What is clear, is the genesis of hatred that the film represents. For years, I wondered what the rational behind the notion that the Jews killed Christ was. One month ago, I still had no idea. Well I know now, and you can bet that plenty of people who are not so open-minded know as well. The only thing I might say I can thank Gibson for is opening my eyes. I never knew where this blind, widespread hatred of Jews came from. In Hebrew school, they tell you that Jews weren’t subject to Christian usury laws and thus were the only ones who could make a business of money trading. After being shut out of most industries, many did, leading to the stereotype of the money grubbing Jew. They also say that by becoming the minority, they were used as the scapegoats for any social-economic problem the leaders of varying time and places needed.

But they never told us that the most of the white world is raised with a group of texts that blamed us for the murder of God. That might have been useful to know before I got to college. You really think a white hooded redneck from Bumblefuck Missouri has issues with a money changer from the Renaissance when he yells, “Are you a Jeeeeeeeeeew?” Of course not. But people like Gibson are quick to believe everything that the Gospels tell them, apparently, except for the part that says Christ’s very mission and purpose was to be martyred and he came to this world knowing it would happen. They're also quick to forget about his resurrection, leaving them free to hate and vilify an entire people for the murder of someone who isn’t dead. And now, no one has to read a book, they can see it live on screen and be done with the anti-Semitism program download in two hours time. Another example of more terrifying life through technology, ‘cause at a time when Anti-Semitism is already on the rise, I don’t mind telling you, I’m fucking scared.

Another blatantly hollow sentiment Gibson expels when he goes on these news magazines and talk shows is that he doesn’t think that all Jews today should be blamed for what happened any more than all Germans today should be blamed for what the Nazis did in the Holocaust. That’s very sweet Riggs, but lets talk about how bigotry works. Ignorant hate-mongers (like your dad) don’t make such distinctions based on separate time and places. They identify a type and apply it to all examples that they see. Of the many lines I heard in college, including, “That’s so cheap, it’s so Jewish,” “I know you want to pick up that penny,” “You can’t take 25 cents out at the ATM,” “If you can’t take the heat, get out of the oven,” and “Your grandfather’s a lampshade,” the worst of all was quite possibly, “There was one Jewish kid at my high school and he was an asshole, so I assumed that all Jews were assholes.” What happens when people with the same mindset see Jews that are wicked Christ killers? You don’t have to imagine the answers, you only need to see the history of Passion Plays and the rioting and killing of Jewish people that followed to get your answer. In 1942, the Slovakian papal nuncio was asked to intervene on the behalf of Jewish children who were slated to be sent to concentration camps. He refused, saying, “There is no innocent blood of Jewish children in the world. All Jewish blood is guilty. You have to die. This is the punishment that has been awaiting you because of that sin (of deicide).”

And now the sin of deicide is available for viewing at a theater near you. And Mel Gibson is no doubt very comfortable reaping the box office profits from the upcoming wave of violence and hatred he’s created. Well thank god he didn’t get my ten dollars, in fact he won’t get anything from me ever again. At least the money I would have spent on any future Gibson projects should more than cover the copy of Schindler’s List I’m gonna buy. I’m not suggesting that everyone boycott the man. You do what you want. And if you must see The Passion of the Christ, it’s your right. Just hear me when I say this: please don’t.