December 20

I saw you fidget at the northern tip of the sidewalk, as we waited patiently, after the show, for the traffic lights to turn red from green. You took out your cellular phone from the side of your coat pocket, punched in a few numbers, and slid it back in, several times, over the course of four minutes. This was 66th Street and Broadway; about 7pm on a cold December night when Christmas lights were sparkling on the facade of the Lincoln Center plaza. 

You had Tracy tattooed across your pale left palm, and 2006 across your right. And you fanned yourself vigorously with the Playbill brochure, till the bus came and stopped in front of you. You looked at me and smiled, alerted by the inexplicable sensitivity that comes with being observed. You walked up the steps, scanned your bus ticket, and instead of walking to a seat you gave the bus driver a large bag filled with cake you recently bought from Cafe Boulud. And then stepped down from the bus, with water in your eyes, tears that you could no longer hide, and walked away.

I followed you for almost three and a half blocks, and yelled Hey there! Are you okay? You stopped immediately. And folded your knees, and contorted your elbows, and sat on the sidewalk. I walked up to you and asked, Is everything okay, Sir? You paused for a while and then said, It's just the memories, you know? They're rough tonight. What about them? I asked. To which you pulled out a picture from your wallet and gave it to me. She died, eight years ago, when a bus hit her in that exact spot on this very day. I let you talk, as tears rolled down your eyes, and your fingers quivered in paternal angst. 

After a minute of silence, you said to me, And so I buy cake from her favorite shop and give it to the bus driver who comes at the exact same time every year, in memory of my girl, the person who always made me smile. And then you looked at the sky, cleared your throat and whispered softly, Sweetie, do you hear me? Daddy loves you very much.  

 

chocolate bar

A little chocolate wrapper, fluttering around the corner edge of 85th Street and Lexington, speckled with mud and fractured snowflakes, reminded me of our encounter with Harold in the summer of 2004. Remember him from your old neighborhood? He used to live with his mother and a widowed aunt who made tulip bracelets for supplementary income down the alleyway from the train tracks. When he came up to you and said, can you give me food? I haven't eaten in two days, you grabbed my hand, and let go of the lilac vase you were carrying to give to Rita before the circus. The hand-grabbing didn't mean anything. It was friendly, impulsive, and reactionary. A lot of things we did as kids didn't have double meanings or distorted motives. They were simple; heartfelt, sincere, and playfully innocent. Adulthood, on the other hand, brought in layers and layers of unnecessary complexity; things that didn't have to have meaning, things that didn't have to offend, or make anyone uncomfortable about anything. 

But you grabbed my hand, as a reflux, perhaps, and while the vase shattered into pieces, you took out a chocolate bar and gave it to him. He cried, took the chocolate bar and ran away --dropping the wrapper by a driveway. Three days later, he died in a car accident. I lay a tube rose at our meeting spot. It made the news.

observations in November

I find it particularly hilarious that they call you Lucifer, because you apparently glow in the dark. Like a transfer protein. Because you are stowed away, along the folds of a pocket notebook. And forgotten. And re-invented. And re-discovered in your glory 47 years later. You came from a damp rural town in eastern Norway. And sank into Brooklyn till they took you out from the corridor. Lifeless and pale. Your hands folded in the shape of your flag. And your frozen lips in a perpetual smile. Blue gray and particularly cracked. I stared into your open eye -you forgot to shut the lids before you died - and there was hollowness and history. That was my first encounter with lifelessness. 

The Rabbi that day tormented me for my garment. And my lack of prayer. He compared me to a water lily and stroked his beard fourteen times before reading a poem in Hebrew. I sneezed at the congregation, and shut myself into a box of gelatin, with the kippah falling off my head, and my skin becoming brittle. 

Today, I walked into a lake by the scientists' cafeteria, and sat in the middle of it, counting the number of honeybees buzzing around the library. There were five. And one on the ground. There was a couple holding hands, wrestling like maniacs. Her name was Athena and his was Elijah. They were married when they were 10 in a refugee camp in the far East. She left a trail of tears as she walked back to her motor car. I ran over and traced the water trail to a bathroom, where I found a smear of blood. On the wall, it said, Unborn Child #9.

 

the eye problem

When you wear an incorrectly powered contact lens on your left eye, inadvertently or purposefully in my case, your eye forms red tangles. It is blood. Oxygen-filled. A hundred days old. Circulating within erupted venules, and chirping away songs of the spring of 1989. There are polished edges near the lens, that have voices. Record-keeping, and narrating; there are memories in your eyes, like in the twang of your vernacular. It is the time for harvest -when you sit in silence, balm on your head, drinking coffee, and think about making mistakes.

abrupt

When we sat down to eat at the burger joint on Lexington Avenue, little did I know you had a history of divorce, crystal meth, HIV, and a son who has turned his face against you. My situation is the contrary -adrift, and afloat on an ocean of memories. It has been four years since I have seen them face to face. We try in different ways to reconfigure relationships; you crochet, and I weave, and yet the fabric is never seamless.

I walked into a closet of light bulbs at the end of yesterday. They were smooth cheeked, hallucinogenic, and timid in a way dimples burst across their foreheads. For seventeen minutes and nine seconds, I whistled bluegrass tunes, and scrunched fourteen bulbs using my right fingers, till I smelled mica in my blood trails. The day ended with the sun squirming into a horizon cushioned with dust pillows from the chimneys.

Abrupt.

Life has been whirling in a polychromatic spiral of possibilities and impossibilities, and the cataracts of unions closing in chasms of institutionalism. We see babies, and dead bodies swinging in the same air under the veil of ritual. And I feel the contortion of your cravings crackling and bursting across electronic paragraphs, where I imagine you, behind an illuminated blanket of pixels, reddening with lust, pulling your clitoris, shaking your head in semi-circles, the primal aroma of manhood pirouetting in your kitchen. I imagine the air suckling perfume from your apron, in front of a radio, playing Elvis Costello. And then you are laying on a rug, holding a book, your bright white legs splayed apart perpendicularly, reading about enema as you prepare for the night. I imagine a name for you. Eugenia Wallace. Or Hilda Koch. You in a corset. Your breasts squeezed into the shape of seedless raspberries, popping over the curvature of lace and leather. Standing beside your loveseat, you sing songs of fire birds and thunder. And when the clouds melt into balls of rain, you walk to the forest and meditate on where you were left behind. On who held your hand, who stole your shoes, and who measured your shadows. And rumination bubbles in your blood orifices a magnetic covetousness. A craving to be attended to, to be loved, and held beside. 

Shadows, from the outside, are short-lived. But the path you have tread, the gravel you have stamped, the air you have exhaled, have left elements of presence in the midst of particulars. This is an urge to refold yourself into happiness. To smile like a canary dancing in the sunshine. To buy yourself a compliment of strength and fidelity, and to tell yourself -this is a life worth living.

around the house

The way our arteries pulse at night -I could substitute our market of clocks with the microphonic bang of contractile body bells to resonate in the corners of my ocean-colored study. I feel the rise and fall of fluid permeating under your skin, and fleeting to your fingers. It has the permanent sound of a flea market on a Saturday morning.

The candle on my nightstand is muted by remote controllers that burned the wick; to a point I hear requiems at sunrise, when the clouds, blueish-white, are waiting in line to shower.

The curtain on the North window is squeezed around its navel to fit an eye lash of the wrought iron grille that was put up in 1942 to prevent burglary in my tenement. It looks like the cut-out of a corset, pleated like a skirt. Mary Wessler said, it's so vanilla, i could lick it. So I took pictures this morning and sent them to Cherry magazine, because they sell posters of lonely curtains. 

There are four glasses on the floor, sweating from the cold water that I poured into them 3 minutes ago. There were fruit flies in them this afternoon that I chased around the house, and blew air behind their wing pockets till they flew away into the air outside the confines of 319 east and circled back to the neighbors faucet. I broke their fly families, and felt a little sad. How long do fly families survive? I wonder. 

And I flipped through four or five books since I got back from the sauna; my skin reddish-violet from the 184 degrees inside. I love the feeling of sweat trickling down my shoulder and chest hair, and the strength of the heat clearing my mind of unnecessary worries. The books were tragedies. Personal tragedies. One, a bronchitis story. And others about autistic kids or disabled infants. I started thinking about Grandma, and missed her terribly. Her lungs wrestling -this mental image of her skinny, bony body tiring away to remnants of soot from charcoal stoves. Ones on which she cooked, post-Independence when my father was ten, and flying kites against clear blue skies in the July of 1963.

Letter to Mother II

Dear Mother,

I got a message from Gary last evening on Facebook saying "Tom, I need to talk to you." Do you remember Gary from Mount Eden Center? We used to hang out a lot in elementary school and then he and his family moved away to New Hampshire and we sort of lost contact. I messaged him back, asked how he and the Doll's were doing and if everything was okay. "Not really," he responded, "I came out to them a few days ago and they were so angry that they don't want me to meet with any of my friends. Needless to say, they took away my cell phone and won't let me do anything before I talk to a therapist. They're like...this is just a phase Gary. Don't be silly. Talk to the therapist and things will be fine. But I know myself, and this is not a phase, Tom. I just wanted to reach out to you because I learned from Facebook that you have a boy friend and was wondering if you have any words of advice." I told him what I had to say, and he said it comforted him. It made me happy.

The conversation got me thinking about sixth grade when you came up to me one day and said, "I learned from Mrs Ringer today that Johnny is a fairy. Fairies can sometimes do bad things. You shouldn't mix with him too much from now on, okay?" "Okay," I said, not knowing what I was agreeing to or what bad things fairies can do. A year later, on a Tuesday evening, while you were drinking cognac with Aunt Marla, I overheard her say, "You've got to be careful about him, dear. I saw him on the roof from my window the other day. And he was wearing his sister's velvet frock and clapping. You don't want him to be one of those now, do you?" I ran away from home that night, and cried under the stars, and stayed at A. Weissman's place till sunrise. And when I turned 16, you asked me that afternoon, "Any good girls in school, baby? I told Marla yesterday that you're all ready to date the prettiest of them all."

That remark set off some kind of a compressed spring in my system. Even though I had never dated women in the past, I thought that I could ease into it. I imagined every other man doing it, so why couldn't I? Perhaps, if I truly loved and valued someone, I could just as easily be in a happy, committed relationship with that person, irrespective of gender. And if I got more emotionally invested, and the relationship became more serious, one day I would realize that loving boys was, perhaps, a short-lived whim, a tiny speckle of my imagination and more like a go-to cushion of satisfaction because I didn't know any better or otherwise.

And then I met someone unexpectedly on a Saturday evening at a diner in the suburbs of New Haven. She was with a boy, I remember; perhaps a cousin or a negligent lover, with dark drooping eyes and pompadour haircut. And I was with you and Irene Goodman, cater-cornered from her, drinking lemon tea and eating raspberry scones. While waiting in line to use the restroom, she and I randomly started chatting about fiction books. It was Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge for me and Claude Simon's The Acacia for her. The conversation lasted about a minute and a half before we heard someone flush the toilet followed by a grating whoosh of the hand dryer. As I peered into her cornflower blue eyes, moistened by periodic blinking, she said, "Wanna hang out sometime?" "That'd be cool," I said, warily. "Well, here's my number," she added, as she pulled out an olive-inked felt pen and a small piece of recycled paper from her magenta twill pant pockets and scribbled it down. "Text me whenever you want to," she said and went inside the restroom. While walking out she smiled awkwardly, lifted her right hand as if to wave at the wall and said in a hushed, muffled voice, "Have a wonderful night."

We reconnected, a few days later. I texted her saying, "Hi Liana, this is Tom. We met at Barry's in Maltby Lakes. You asked me to text you, remember? How's it going?" She replied within a few hours saying, "Hi Tom. Have been waiting for your text all this while. Things are going well. How've you been?" And that is how the slew of text communication began. The idea was simple, I told myself: Try your utmost to focus on her and don't think about boys. If your mind does, however, start to wander away, rewind your thoughts like bits of plastic tape spinning around spools of old audio cassettes and reset your focus. Tell yourself that you can do this and keep moving forward.

For the next few weeks, bleeps and buzzes and short acoustic rings from my cellular phone suctioned me up to the rim of excitement. My phone would beep in the middle of art lectures, at the end of synthetic chemistry lab courses, and infrequently, in the beginning of ballet lessons and I would reply to each text carefully within a few minutes. By the end of third week, terms of endearment sprouted up. "Good morning babe" she would say; or "Have a wonderful day, honeybear." And on our fourth week of cellular courting, she wrote, "Babe, I've been thinking about running away to Santa Monica with you. I'm miserable here without the ocean."

The novelty of the possibility of dating a girl, and the possibility of reinstating, what society calls, a normal and natural attraction adequately seasoned the enthusiasm in my responses back to her. Under the circumstances, I got the attention I needed, started to somehow feel a strong emotional connection, sensed a mutual romantic interest, and felt a genuine element of happiness while interacting with her. Text messages began to interweave emotions and expectations and myriad responsibilities shortly, leaving me suffused with boluses of endorphins. I felt like I was living in a glass cage in a mystical state of quasi-euphoria --in that same over-the-top ecstasy that consumes a runner towards the last few miles of a marathon or while slicing through layers of crisp, tangerine air on the backseat of a roller coaster. The emotions that developed were real and raw, but I didn't know what they were. Was it love? I asked myself. Was it just a playful obsession? Or perhaps, a childish crush? Whatever it was, it felt authentic and undiluted in its strength to a point where I second-guessed loving boys for the first time in my life. It felt liberating to think that I could be like the other guys in school who affectionately talked about girlfriend responsibilities, and more importantly that I could bring her home to a family event without you and Daddy feeling uncomfortable, embarrassed or being shamed by other people.

I sometimes wish that you had met her. You would've loved her like your own daughter, given how similar your tastes and interests are. At other times, however, I am glad that the meeting never happened, because when she would eventually find out about my being gay, you would, understandably, chide me for toying with her emotions, and tell me that I should've known myself better and made up my mind about identity preferences. In your world, everything is black or white, but it isn't so in mine. I still think about her, though. Her welfare, her happiness, her career goals of rural obstetrics. Her russet curls and refined smiles, as delicate and light as large soap bubbles. Her adventurous eyes, like rings of topaz, infused with gelatin and an origami of tender muscles, and the tattoo on her breast in ancient calligraphy that read Liberate The Rebel. She loved volleyball, white wine and garlands of seashells, but most of all she loved Nature as a priest and a father. Her mother, she said, was Marilyn Monroe. And the guest list on her fridge magnet read Georgia O'Keeffe, Sally Bowles, and Indira Gandhi.

The night we became a couple was a humid, September Wednesday when pellets of mist were foaming in the air. We were at the Turtle Pond in Central Park, staring at the Grunwald monument, talking intermittently about Nixon and Bill Clinton, and the injustices of racial profiling when she said, "Can I ask you a question, T?" "Sure, go ahead. What's up?" I replied, seventy eight percent certain what the question was going to be. "We've been chatting for about six weeks now, and I like you a lot, and I think you like me too. So, I was wondering...do you want to be in an exclusive relationship with me?" I said yes. Flatly --without feeling any emotion. I don't know why I didn't feel any emotion that very instant, because via text, the connection seemed strong. It came out involuntarily, like a knee jerk response at the crux of the situation, which of course made her giggle and chuckle and cry with happiness. As for me, I became breathless with apprehension, nervousness, and a battery of misgivings; it felt like I was drowning at the intersection of lies and deceit. But I folded myself back together, drew a deep breath, and engaged in a full-bodied hug, feeling her breasts squash against my chest. And then she rested her head on the bony groove of my right shoulder and caressed my neck in gentle swirls, as tips of my body hair bristled underneath the weight of her fuchsia painted nails. A minute later, as my lips lay quivering like a lightning-struck tuning fork, she kissed me --warm, and deep, and tangibly heavy as I pulled my tongue back in the shape of a c, touching the flesh of my burnt upper palate. I felt strips of her tongue push through gaps of my teeth, beads of spittle leaping onto the floor of my mouth. And we sat still for a few long seconds -transfixed with emotions and odors of nervousness, before we resumed staring at the monument, discussing politics, and the injustices of racial profiling. Her nipples were hard and visibly aroused, popping like buttons through her peach-colored blouse, but for me, there was only a feeling of fearful empty hollowness -not a single trace of an erection.

You probably wonder why, then, did I say Yes when I knew it wasn't going to work, perhaps raising your expectations of my having a normal life? Why did I say Yes when I knew I had feelings for boys and ultimately wouldn't be interested? I wish I had a simple answer to that, but I don't. Emotions are complicated, and I couldn't parse out a crush from love; an obsession from real, grounded sentimentality. More importantly, I just couldn't bring myself to say No on her face, which was so perfectly lit up with a soft romance when she asked me the question. I've always had trouble saying No to things I knew would make someone infinitely happy. And the proposition of a relationship was no exception for me. Did I do the right thing, in retrospect? Absolutely not, and there are no legitimate excuses to prove otherwise. But I tell myself, people often say "You never know unless you try." So I tried, half-expecting the outcome. But I tried nonetheless.

Few days into our relationship, the reality of a serious commitment severely jolted me into a state of fear. There were expectations, and obligations, and timetables were created. And e-cards, wake-up messages, and voicemails of missing me and loving me gripped me full-throttle. I became hesitant and second-guessed myself every minute of every day. Yet, I couldn't bring myself to say Liana, this isn't working. I couldn't bring myself to rupture her heart with splinters of my identity confusions when trust and affection were beginning to build. I couldn't look into her eyes and tell her that I had to leave; that she should find another man, that she should be freed. However, my self-loathing and bitterness never went away. I wore costumes and masks of the affable phantom; rehearsing my lines and readying my acts as reluctance gave way to miscommunications which eventually tipped the relationship along a downward spiral. Life became a gimmick --a constant game of hide-and-seek with charades, facades and situational alibis. The hardest of all was during the holidays, when we drove back to her parent's home in the belly of the woods, and sat on the patio overlooking the lake, and talked about how happy and fortunate their daughter was to have found me. "It's nothing short of a miracle!" her mother said, "I knew God would answer my prayers." Despite my refusal of sex, my discomfort with public display of affection and despite the rockiness of my emotions, she loved me  and thinking about all the sacrifices she made over the year makes me choke up. In my defense, however, I tried as hard as I could to be in love with a woman and to have a heterosexual relationship. What didn't occur naturally, I doctored it up --paying attention to Hollywood, texts from favorite novels and even conversations with chums. But there was no love in the empty vessel that was me, only friendliness and wan obsession. And on a Friday night, one year from the Turtle Pond, while going through pictures of Sister's engagement party on my phone together, a text notification popped up on top of the screen. The 917 number was saved to my address book as Jackson S. It said, "Last night was hot, man. I want you to fuck me again. As hard as you can. Free tomorrow by any chance? I'll be home by 7." She looked up, let go of my phone, and said, "I knew it, Tom. I knew it."

I tried three more times, thinking that the first relationship probably didn't work out because she wasn't the right person for me, but all of them ended badly. One found me stumbling out of a gay sex club in Fort Lauderdale at 1 am on a Tuesday, drunk out of my mind in a leather jockstrap, when I was supposed to have been sleeping at Aunt Lori's condominium after helping her move. In the morning when she said, "I love you" and I said "I love you too" she became the color of a ripe strawberry and yelled "Get the fuck out of my life, you fucking faggot liar." The second, while attempting to check her email on my computer, found innumerable bookmarked links to gay pornographic sites. She sought refuge in an asylum nearby shortly after, suffering from chronic depression from being with a fourth guy who happened to be gay. And the third one, after soulful thinking and a few weeks of mindful meditation, came out to me as a femme lesbian. In that circumstance, we were both relieved. It was a win-win situation. Love for boys is not a choice or an addiction, it is the normal for people like me. It is the instinctive natural. Boys are what raise eyebrows, make the heart flutter, and cause erections. It is not an alternative, or a cop-out mechanism that Benny and his wife drilled into your brain, to make you believe that mine was the easier way of life. Being gay is hard; exhausting, tiring and emotionally taxing. But what I want you to realize is that sexuality, for me and for many people like me, is not an open tab. It is not a flexible on-off switch as they make you believe in your neighborhood of cultists. It is not "doing whatever makes me happy"; rather, it is the platform of emerging happiness.

Many people out there continue to believe that the minority status that paints my identity can be fixed by the callings of Jesus, and the Krishna and a handful of either deities. Success stories of "gay conversions" spread like wildfire in the religious circles that lend credibility to the family spheres, providing hope that perhaps the right camp, the right proselyte can make the miracle transformation. As for me, I have tried your normal, I have tried heterosexuality, I have tried from the bottom of my soul to love women and have a wife, but the mechanics of us gay men don't necessarily work that way. And I write to you, to say, that because of the false hopefulness that organizations promise, that religious leaders vow to create, hundreds and thousands of little boys and mature adults are wriggling and squirming under the burden of handicap; with fractured identities and unhappiness.

In the past few years, several advances have been made, at least on paper, for gay men and women in my neck of the world. Social liberation, they call it. Or perhaps, emancipation of another minority class.  To truly liberate a class, there needs to be an attitudinal shift; revocation of prejudice, termination of targeted biases and re-morphing of the existing image. We are only at a point where ripples are being generated on the skin of the social curtain. It takes time, they all say. Give it a generation. But the burden of identity discrimination even through the span of a generation can take its toll on innumerable queers as we are guarded within a cage of apparent cowardice, defectives and other personality follies. Why not think of an attitudinal shift as a sort of community service? A service that can help battle scars of self-loathing, thoughts of suicide and covert misery. That can prevent closeted husbands from renting hotel rooms and fucking boys and juggling sexual diseases between the barometer of the "straight-acting life" and true identity undertakings. Coming out, as I have realized, is contagious in the sense, it provides support to people on the edge. It provides validation to countless men and women living in a nebulous cloud, not knowing what life is like when the ball is dropped.

I overheard a professor's husband say the other day, "Those queens just want too much attention. They're obnoxious in general, and now they've started completely stream-rolling over everyone's civil and religious liberties." This is what breaks humanity into little pieces -that present attitudinal stronghold of bitterness and resentment against a supposed "lifestyle choice." People often say, forget about the petty differences and look at the bigger picture and be united for more important causes. But it is hard, when you are made to feel like an outsider, pushed aside and isolated and made to live like an island beside the mainland, and asked to make the extra effort to meld into the mainstream. Acceptance, I realize, is easier said than done. In my rally to advocate for people of my kind, I sincerely wish that the lubrication of social upheaval begins at home, sooner rather than later, and eventually spreads from node to node of community and state lines to remolding of nations and continents alike. And yes, Johnny maybe a fairy, and his kids may never have anyone to call Mother, but they will be loved, in their own little ways, with their own little dolls and fairies. 

Hope you are well.

Love,
T.

Dear Book

Dear Book,

Even though you and I do not share any dregs of DNA, I often think of you as my third parent -the way you are nurturing yet strict, provocative yet calming. You speak to me inaudibly in creative metaphors, action words and clusters of compacted idioms but I hear your voice loudly and clearly ringing through the folds of my brain as it seeps into my mind, and settles into my thoughts like a sprinkling of sawdust pulled into cohesion by the brawny arms of gravity. Your voice serves a multi-dimensional purpose: instigative at times, often invocatory, while wrapping me up in threads of emotions uncoiling, as if, from a spindle. You can bring joy and sadness within matter of minutes, alternating like a pendulum bob, through a simple act of comprehension; the edges of your alphabets dripping with beads of melancholia or whiffs and rinds of celebration. Contained within you is the spectrum of emotionality that remains couched behind the darkness of India ink, behind stretches of sentences with colons and apostrophes, and the devised anatomy of paragraphs. Reading through your skin, the bouquet of sentences, reveals the contents of your guts, your past history, the traces of your genealogy, and the messages you harness. You teach without sounds, you speak without lips and stay reliable through the storms of adolescence and adulthood, that brew and strengthen and accumulate with time, experience and inconsolable tragedy. 

Holding you, or even just seeing you standing on the wood shelf, brings back memories from a long time ago. Betty D. adopted you from the local thrift store for seventy-five cents and brought you back to my parents house in a charcoal-colored plastic bag. I clothed you that afternoon in a brown paper skirt, combed around the sleeves and polished the semicircular ribbing spread across your spine, listening to the songs of rain pattering on the grass outside. For the next several days, I sat out on the patio and read your words, swelling up with emotions along the way. When Mother and Father went out for work for large stretches of time, delivering babies and suturing amputees, I would place my head on your firm paper body and tilt my ears to the side, hoping to hear sounds of vowels shuffling across your weighty stack. It would bring me joy, and comfort and solace in a way no other thing or person could. I never felt lonely with just your company, because you educated me, made me think, and challenged my beliefs. I clutched on to you the night Grandmother died, wriggling and squirming in her bed as emphysema gnawed away the bulbs of her alveoli. It brought comfort to me and a sense of closure. I took you in my book bag my first day of college, knowing I could talk to you if no one else did. And I surrounded myself with stencils of your words when people dismissed my sexuality. I have felt coupled to you all along because of your quality to fascinate me alongside your patience, your gentleness and kind demeanor. I romanticized, as a child, a future with you. And sometimes I feel that little has changed, even after seventeen long years.

A lot of people completely underestimate your personality. They look at you pityingly or objectify you completely or treat you as just a book. They ignore your body smells, your own pattern of aging and the fact that you bruise easily. They miss the the sound of flutter rushing across your leaves, fail to observe the bends and turns along the blunted rims of your abdomen, and gloss over the personal memories you evoke just by being you. They make bags out of your scales, decorative pieces for their homes, or sometimes even fashionable garments -immune to the sounds of your cries or your unconventional lisp, as they break open your rib cage or yank out your extremities. Since today is the age of convenience, portability and efficiency, a fair share of consumers have decided to digitalize you. They will preserve your words behind the rhomboid of an illuminated screen and access your outer casing through buttons and switches. All your friends and peers will be given shelter in the memory chip of the same device, categorized under file names. And you will vanish from the tangible to an abstract intangible, accessible only through puddles of liquid crystals fractionating and colliding on the interface of skin and glass. The feel of your follicles, the unevenness of your skin, the aroma of the non-multiplicative dead cells polygon-ed across each page -somehow they will not matter. The possibility of doodling and hand writing notes beside arcs of black typescript will not be relevant. Being able to flip through the sheaf of your constituents or laughing to your narratives with balls of spittle flying in heightened trajectory and landing on your laminated coverlet are deemed optional and unimportant. So, you are re-formatted by the know-it-all tycoons and publishers and book company magnates and electrocuted; militarized in a way, and made to be uniform.

I am thinking of the time you were used as a weapon, flung to my head out of a fit of rage. The time you were hidden from my mahogany shelf, serving as a repercussion for my rebellion and disobedience. But there was also that time when I leaned on your shoulder after receiving twenty rejection letters from professional school applications. I relish at your mysteries in the front car of the subway, as the rest of the commuters titter away to paradoxes of comedy clubs. You are my prized possession as I walk around the park, while the residents of the city glamorize for television, doll-up like marionettes wired to culture, and sparkle like rhinestones in cages of mirrors. Most importantly, you are like a parent -a role-model of tolerance, a constant companion and a person of reliance, as Mother and Father tend to the poor, continents and oceans away. I have not seen them in four full years, but seeing you keeps me going.

Despite what others say, you are not inanimate or lifeless. For me, you are a shelter of comfort, a trove of knowledge and an organic catalyst for lifelong learning; fertilizing ideas, aiding the sprout and blossom of innovations, and egging on minds to re-evaluate beliefs of politics and society. People in past civilizations have tried to burn your predecessor, fearing education may backfire against their personal vile. All of that because you are powerful, you are important, and you are necessary. You are the book, the beautiful soul, smiling for centuries to come.

Sincerely,
T.

question

the way, mary jane, you say you hurt, 
make me think that you have a heart made with 10 million packets 
of Domino sugar, powdered Bon Bons and yellow, Indian sand.

i want to hold the periphery of your cheek
and massage Olive oil, camphor and chocolate.
everywhere. behind your ears. nipples.
and the inner folds of your hibiscus vagina.

i want to scratch the lesions 
around your navel. lick your blood
to taste how saccharine and sugary you can be,
and stitch dandelions to your toes.

so that you may have a reason to smile.
and eat breakfast of sunshine, figs and lotus roots.
for dinner you may drink a swirlie
of tears, sweat and almonds 
encased in the confines of a narrow perimeter.
where rivers have birthed, 
leaves have crinkled,
and myna birds have fluttered across meshes of corn.

you have loved Main Street
and grown proud of reform,
telling yourself -I am purposeful in this town
I am a white woman, locally brewed,
I know this territory -it is familiar.
I fear sometimes that familiarity 
has scissored right through the stretches of your imagination
and made you fearful of being uprooted. 

i want to urge you to re-convene 
and re-aggregate pieces of yourself
sit around the flicker of a vanilla candle 
and ask -am I truly happy? 

A memory

Walking from work this afternoon in the rain reminded me of home. And the two of us, from years ago, when we were fifteen and fourteen, respectively. You, A, used to live on the fifth floor of a pink building by the toll bridge in a neighborhood called Park Circus, surrounded by prayers, conservative Muslims and the delightful aroma of chicken kabobs. Cars and buses would come and go, too ordinary to notice on their usual journeys, belching puffs of soot from old, rusted radiators. And you would sit by the balcony, holding a paint brush, and stare at the clouds walking in the sky, waving at you, calling you names, slipping away into the silence of twilight.

I lived in a house, similarly pink, in a sub-urban district by the degenerate lake, surrounded by retirees, songs of the orchards and mile-long thickets of bamboo trees. The eunuchs would come, at the crack of noon, and dance to the sounds of violent drums and hiss at strangers, standing behind black grille gates counting handfuls of coins, and erupt in peals of joyful laughter when the beats came to an end. The pharmacist next door would return to work after a satisfying lunch of rice and fish, sometimes stopping by to say Hello and inquiring about my father's whereabouts. His father was shot, ten years ago, on a Saturday night by a gang of robbers, dressed as girls, haggling over the cost of a cough syrup bottle. He bled to death in front of my eyes. The ambulance never came, the police didn't report. And that was the end of Ravi K.

When thoughts of home came swarming in, I held my breath and pressed my jaws and widened my lips in a curled semi-circle. And looked at my nails, the uneven white edges, and thought, for a second, about Mother, who I haven't seen in four full years. And then I thought about you and me, in the silent corner of a pastry shop, staring at the ceiling and the wide French windows, discussing Shakespeare, Lord of the Rings and life in America. There was a transience about the moment, like the cusp of traffic lights turning red to green, or orange to red, commanding passengers to go or to stop, and then it was gone, within the blink of an eye, back to 4:30 pm, rush hour traffic and the metallic thrumming of subway cars.

The rain poured down through overhead clouds and wet the sidewalks in a dark, earthy gray. The drops, at first, looked like miniature bubbles; like tiny beads of undissolved gas in a clear, refrigerated liquid. Soft, and bouncy and a little spongy, they rolled off the sleeves of my orange checkered shirt. But then they got larger and larger, taking the shape of transparent pellets, and diffused throughout my poplin weave. It reminded me strongly of the monsoons in the city, when you and I, in painted caravans, would sit on the broken seats towards the back and eat mangoes cut in cubes, our faces and teeth yellow with pulp, and compare who had had more leftovers stuck to the skin. We would go to the temple in the nearby village and I would pray for peace and forgiveness, till tears squeezed out of my wooden brown eyes. You waited outside by the off-white shoe racks, and counted the number of hibiscus buds, and stared at the expressions of traveling devotees who went to the temple, hoping earnestly that God would fix their lives. You and I disagreed on the nature and extent of our religious beliefs, but we were respectful of each other and avoided the topic; fearing that our disagreement would split us in half.

I remember very well, a certain day in the April of 2004, when the floods crashed into the perimeter of the city. People died mercilessly, hungry and homeless, because their mud shacks melted back to the earth. Fish bones floated on the murky waters and twirled, in dance, in the currents. We had no power for days. The buses froze. The flowers cried. Steam from China cups of nearby homes filled the neighborhood air with a dizzying aroma of Darjeeling tea. In the middle of this, you asked me softly, Do you want to go for a walk? I said yes, instantly. And so we went, without rain boots or shoes, walking on water, and stopped in a field, soft as putty in the south side of town. We walked around. The ground felt like cake with unsettled icing, brown and green, alternating with the portraits of grass, brown clay and carcasses of three dead crows. You took out a flash light and projected it upward to see how far the amber bulb would light up the air. And then you said, do you mind holding my jacket for a minute? I didn't say yes, but pushed forward my right arm, my palm facing up to the circus of clouds. You walked to the center of the rectangular field, your footsteps echoing in the silence of the evening, and stood there for a second. After that, you knelt down carefully and tilted to your side, before laying down flat on the ground, on your belly, hands stretched out in a loose empty grip and your hair jet-black, like Pashmina wool. You put your ear against the surface of the field, and said to me, I hear heartbeats of our land. What joy filled me up, I cannot even describe. I ran to the edges of the isolated field and laughed with leaves, and flapped my arms like a wandering magpie, my soul energized with the beauty of a wet, monsoon, evening. 

There is happiness, sometimes, in the tragedy of monsoons. When the dams crack open, and the water gates flood, and the sound of sizzles surround the town. It is a memory of home that I never forgot; you and me, in an empty field, gaping at the sky. 

hanging in there

Every time you say, I'm hanging in there, I have this image of you swinging from a bean stalk, elevated seventy feet above ground. Below is a wide, ocean-viewed, butterfly garden covered to the north in hyacinth clusters and to the left, along the trim diameter, is a patch of marigold. Your arms are in a loop,  like the Olympics ring, through which sunshine and insects float in streams. And the tips of your hair, brown and pointy, crackling like chestnuts or splintered pistachios in the heat of a summer swig, when buffalos and bees, caked in oil, hum in the waters of the Yangzong sea. The color of your cheeks is an embarrassed red, and you are surrounded in a scent of mulled camphor. Your words project like film onto the flat of a farm, where unpaved roads and irrigation puddles intersect in perfect geometry. It is like a reflection of your mind; a mirror held to the convexity of your pale eye ball, your cratered mahogany iris, and the hollow silence of your deaf pupils. 

You seem to be suffering a lot lately. You seem to be stalled in a transparent cabinet, frozen and blued in an umbrella of air. You try to move, to walk and smile, but your muscles lay fixed in one dimension. As if pinned along the perimeter of myofibrils, to a point where you asphyxiate with the warmth of your own body heat. Circumstance, I say, and shake my head; the mother of travelogues and plaintive progress. 

I see you from a distance, electric at best, stuck in a mountain of iodine crystals. Your head jutting out, your arms wiggling, and the cage of your upper body trapped in the slant, you speak mathematics and the couture of bubbles. And then you become a leaf, green with veins, bent along your back at thirty five degrees, plucked, forcefully, by a child of six. Placed in a vase of burnt metalloids, you have a new home. You have a new dream. You bring forth a ratio of renewed happiness. And like you said, you blush a green, as the cups of your kidneys swoosh and clutter the candy globes in your blood. You are an oriole with canary filoplumes, embracing your inner diabetic, gurgling away depression, and starting afresh, in cottons of rain, along the periphery of the monsoons. 

The waves of summer are popping in the air. Awake, awake and run to the mills, and climb the beeches on Forest Lane, and shriek out the voice simmering in you. Lola B, Lela B, it is about time, I say. 

the back of the bus

Looking at you, sitting in the back of the bus with your Mexican nanny and off-white pants, reminded me of a time of my own childhood. 

You are probably 9, with sky blue eyes and a short blond crop. You have a small triangulated nose, a chiseled cheek and a short, stubbed chin. Your face is partially square, a little rounded at the jaws and arched around the forehead. You look like a Cole, or may be a Colin -I cannot quite tell. And in the 20 minutes of our bus ride, with very different purposes and eventual destinations, you never smiled. At all. You looked out of the window, and looked at the green of Central Park giggle at the top of your curled eye lashes. You looked at the stones of the narrow passageways, hugging against moss and pearls of rain. You looked at people, and shoes and a salad of paper scraps strewn on the bus floor. But your lips didn't sink an inch. Your eyes rarely blinked. And your face looked frozen in a pocket of the hour. It was 4 pm on a Wednesday, buried in the midst of a bustling afternoon. You were going home. With a non-mother mother. Azalea print backpack. And a non-ironed tie. 

You are a beautiful child. Whoever you are. And innocent, and reminiscent of a past self that I beckon only with memories. Memories of a conundrum, memories of a hallucinogen, memories of acoustic dreams, resonating like laser beams along the edges of my body. You are lost now, in the ocean of faces, in the bowl of clouds of Manhattan boys, in the lungs and vapor balls of the Upper West Side. You are a memory, a negative on my camera film, bottled with sulfides and lathered with peels of Washington cherries -your cheeks are ablaze, your hair in a lilt, your consciousness sparked in the origami of purpose. 

I am the face of aging time. I am the clock of pencil chandeliers. I am the surface of pregnant clocks. And I think about your face with a sparrow in my heart, with a volcano of tears from calcific depression, from the yowls of anguish disguised as smiles -everyday, every night, paddling in the sea of the backwater ripples. Obsession with boys that never came, that pushed away at the gentlest touch, that kissed and drank bottles of wine, and ran away to the tip of the estuary saying call me when you reach home. And then there was silence. The disguised ignoring, the painted facade of the germinating actor, standing as if in a Venetian court and hailing at the ruins of a diseased soul. The double life, the double pronged wretchedness of your poisonous self -throw away your face of pretended truths, slice away your veins and shed your layers and layers of invisible make-up. When you walk on that ward and take care of people, of dying psychiatrics and breast-missing hoodlums, you say that you believe. What do you have, to be able to believe? What do you say, feeding them injury, that they are about to lose this life? Because, nursing was your only other option, DB. Switching from real estate, to a meaningful path, you didn't lose your decorative lies.

You beautiful child. Asleep in my mind. You reminded me of a time when all I worried about was good food, shelter and statues of Lego. And sat at the back of a bus, yellow and blue, and smiled at the stars, asleep in the sky, ringing and turning to melodies of love. Thinking to myself -I love people, they must all be good. 

investing in you

I know I tell you a lot of things now about my lover, ex-crushes, current crushes and infatuations, but I can't help but continue to have a faint sense of guilt, lingering in my mind; a feeling, wispy in a way, that I led you on. We were meant to be professional, under the aegis of circumstance, but both of us know that we became friends quickly. Like somewhere down the line, the water broke, the sac of dutiful role assignments stretched open, and we embarked on what we like to call an adventure -a journey without an ending. I wonder what it was about me that broke the shell, that sprayed your mind with a sense of awakening. That drove you to a literal frenzy where, I remember, you said that you'd be okay with quitting your job. I let all of this glide by, not commenting and choosing to avoid topics, because I developed a fear of losing you. And I didn't want to at any cost. So silence became an answer, a lot of the time. Facades became common, more often than you will ever realize, and deep within the cave of my belonging, I was rotting with a seed of hidden identity -unclear, shattered and terribly lost.

A lot of people out there chatter constantly about investment; time-stamping and cataloging every step of every move. Choose your friends carefully, is the mantra I hear everywhere all the time, or maybe it has been for a while now but surfaced to human civilization in different shapes and forms throughout the tunnels of history. So the natural outcome of living in this counter-culture results in the investment in the right set of friends, I suppose, in which we live together in a zoo -taking, only, and not giving back. The economic nature of it all makes me think that I live in somewhat of a dealership, that every hour is a transaction of a visionary enterprise and that every step I take should have some positive outcome. But it forces me to think of a question I have shied away from for a long long time. What was going on between you and me?

I keep going back to that one night at the bar, in the crummy basement with blue lights and a flashing sign of Heineken entrapped along the hallway. I was drunk, after 8 shots of liquor, and so were you. Your frames were bent along the ridge of your nose, and you were sitting at the bar, in a trim black dress, staring at the television screen, laughing with your friends and looking at me from time to time. I saw you giggle through the corner of my eye, and a misty mold of your body hunched around the outer edge of my strained peripheral vision. My friends were around, dancing to the music. Swaying their hips, snapping their fingers and shouting in song when the choruses came along. People chugged their beers like buckets of rainwater, and flirted with strangers in the bisected corners. Some held hands, or sucked on nipples while others tiptoed to the backyard to bellow out smoke. I knew it was you, but I didn't care to talk or even go up and say Hello. Why? Because it may have made both parties uncomfortable and in a small town like ours, ignite a spark littered with rumors. What also crossed my mind was the fact that if I had said hello, it may have demonstrated a personal interest. What if you thought, let's take it to the next step? What if you thought, oh may be this is going somewhere? And in all my cold nonchalance, and box of untruths, what good would it do to egg you on?

And so began the skirting around. Touching topics, leaving questions unanswered, and addressing issues selectively. I believe yours was an escalation of emotions, on the swing of a sharp, angular spiral with shaky balusters and lubricated hand rails. You climbed up in your petticoat-ed whims, not lying, not in a pretense, but in unsubtle innuendos. I wasn't sure at first what was going on; what a sudden influx of pleasure puffs, food, wine, books and smiles! You took to discussing the sex couture of your thongs and the lace curlicues of your bras. You took to an explosion of divulging your desires, your convolutions, the softness of your breasts. You opened your arms, and the partition of your lips, and the curtain across your trimmed vagina. And broiled within me a patchwork of complexities; layers and layers of fishing across, detached and unhooked and eventually recoiled. Extended to me a tongue dripping with beads of your secrets. And pulled me ashore to the beach of your inner self, the human B, the desiring B, the B beyond a cage of professionalism. And I went adrift, waddling on waves, wallowing in foam and tart-colored make-up, swimming away, gulping carcasses of crabs from droplets of the sea's devastating glands. Like cancer dispersed within my capsule of reasoning. Like I glossed over reality to reflect on you a segmented, modular guide to living. Of which I have tired, over and over again. Muted by misgivings, and blinded by a thicket of prickly, devastating lies. But you have been patient. Knowingly ignorant. And a part of my fragmented family.

I have a lot to say. And will speak another day. But this is my muse for a Monday evening. When the winds outside, in turnip cloaks, play civil auctioneers of Spring.

seeing your window

Dear Eddie, 

I thought about you a few nights ago, while walking back home, really drunk, from the Wallflower Bar on 12th Street. I had had 4 glasses of wine by then without even realizing it because I was so into the conversation with Peter Sanger, my old classmate from Harvard. We didn't talk about anything you and I used to talk about. Instead, we talked about business -numbers, figures, data and social rhetoric. It was good in a way, liberating even, to touch his skin -even if it was brief and sincere and self-admittedly professional. We laughed a lot, made noise to a point a waiter had to come and ask us to "keep it down a little bit", embraced each other like a father and daughter, firmly and rigorously and intentionally full-bodied, and joked around about Chris Wilkins fucking the tutor on Sunday nights by Wigglesworth. He's come a long way with his insecurities about height, bought a studio apartment on the 11th floor of Jane Cottage, working out of Berkeley now, in data mining and population design and plays dodgeball in a gay league every weekend since February. A full life, he calls it. Plays golf with his father at a country club in Long Island, fasts on Yom Kippur, and spends seventy five dollars on liquor by the end of every week. He's charming, and amiable and piercingly smart, but I sense loneliness in his smile. I can tell that he wants to be touched more, held more, and loved, more, by people. We get so caught up with New York sometimes, that we forget people. We forget what personhood means when all we do is increase our tallies of people as objects, of men as objects and women as toys. Everyone deserves love in a way, you know. Everyone does. Peter and I spoke about this for a very long time, for the last hour at least, and about effortless dates, about wanting to settle down and about finding boyfriends, about adversity and disappointment and about sustainable friendships. One of the biggest problems with New York is that we can't form a sustainable network of friends or lovers or fuck buddies because man-the-object is treated as something disposable, easily sacrificial and conveniently replaceable. To invest in a friendship, to drill into an ultimatum -oh why should you ever want to do that? Perchance the swinger on Christopher Street or the drag queen on Waverly can be your liaison to someone hotter, better and sexier. You are uprooted in your position of even friends because you're not the face of glamor anymore, because you cannot provide the wow-making, you cannot be suitable for continuous camaraderie. Why? Because you're knocked down, like a chess piece, plucked aside in a wooden box, and stowed away till a new player starts the game.

We got Japanese food later. A sizzler of fried, curried octopus limbs, some sauteed sea urchin called Uni, two bottles of Orion lager and a braised duck hot pot. I managed to wink at the bartender twice. Woof! He was hot as hell, with nice fleshy arms, ocean blue eyes, and a bright silver hairline. He seemed really really nice and even gave us a lot of really tempting offers about the evening's dining specialties, cocktails and desserts. But, they are all really nice aren't they? Is it genuine? or just part of their job? To attract, to allure, to draw you in so much that you feel heard, paid attention to and temporarily cared about? We, in America, demand "being nice" a little too much of customer service, I think -it feels unreal to think about. But such is our culture of service with a smile. You've got your problems, deal with your problems, I don't need to know. Or want to know. Or care to know about what's going on in that brain of yours. Don't burden me with your issues, whether you have a dead pet or a heroin addiction, because all I care about is me. Me. Me. Me. And only Me. And, the way you're serving me -because I'm paying you. I'm buying the way you're going to behave with me. And if you don't, I will not tip you. I will complain to your manager and give you a terrible review on Yelp so that you are fired from your current enterprise. For every customer, you will remold, you will play the game again, and change the way you do business to cater to them, and please them just the way they want. You, Mr Bartender, will be my puppet, and your heart will be a bismuth spade, that will freeze to cement when you are on the stage, working with a smile, serving with a smile and providing to a crowd an agency of pleasure. You shall be flawless, you shall be ideal, you shall abide by my rule book or else -leave. You will be sent away, and replaced, again, with a perfect host. With a straw doll of glamor in Oxfords and plaid, in heels and shoeshine, and lipstick and rouge who will smile at me, pretend to care and refill my water just as I please.

We stuck around at the Fish Camp for about an hour or so and then started walking towards his place. He wanted to show me the roof deck of his building. But while walking back on 4th Street, I glanced at your building and noticed your window. The light was on, and looked like shy against the width of your frosted glass. I tried not to look, but I couldn't help it. I loved you once, and the curiosity never went away. I tried again not to look up, but I kept doing it anyway; smiling at Peter all this while. Don't Look Up, I kept telling myself. Don't Look Up. But I kept looking up, and finally just stared at your window for a few moments. And I saw what you didn't want me to see. Shadows. I wished it was a shadow of you. Just you. But you've taken to the plural again. It was you and someone else, holding each other. Kissing each other. Your tongues folding in on each other. Your fingers tracing up and down against the sigmoid of his back. You held his head, you brushed his hair, and you stood up straight and bent again. I wanted to disbelieve. I wanted to stab my eyes and blind myself -blow away my power fuse like a switch, like pressing hard on the nipples of aging candle wicks. I wanted to tell myself, that it was only a figment of my imagination, it was only a quadrant of my insecurity, but Eddie, silhouettes don't lie. Silhouettes cannot lie. They are the leeches of physics, the followers of actions, never a traitor, never a betrayer -only magnified sometimes and diminished during others. And at that very moment, my blood shot up. My heart started spinning like a bicycle wheel, and I couldn't breathe anymore. My legs started shaking, my brain started screaming, and I became epileptic with spasms. So dangerously severe, I turned blue in the middle of the street. And I convulsed, and buckled and bent like a snake, and slithered by the lamp post like an ovulating worm, and felt the binding materials of my skin shedding away, like an avalanche on Everest. My glands were burning, my ribs were ringing, and my bones were left to rattle on their own. My face swelled up, like an inflated grape, and my shoulders cramped. My nostrils flared, like hot air balloons, and my chest collapsed into a hollow bowl. And second by second, I felt increasingly choked. Like there was poison in my veins propelled by valves whipping up blood in delirious tango. I could feel your lips Eddie. I could feel your touch. I could feel your squeeze around the circumference of my neck. I could feel your erection against the fabric of my pants and I felt jealous, so miserably jealous, that I wanted to tear all my hair out, and just scream for twenty minutes. 

But Peter noticed my sweat, and heard my cry. And picked me by my arms and dragged me to his home, and seated me in his roof deck, where I fell in love with my city all over again. The lights twinkled like gems on a crown in the distance nearby. It was magical, and surreal, and made me miss you terribly. 

I have moved on from you, a long time ago. Or tried to at least. But I will never forget you, and even if it's a sliver of my age, I will remember you with fondness. Forever.

I hope you read this someday in your life.

Best,

T. 

seven minutes

The man seated across from me at the La Familia Day Care Center in Hollis Hills, Queens, is David; but he does not resemble a single David I know. When I say resemble I'm talking about facial features, expressions and ethnic backgrounds. He towers over me at six feet five inches but looks uncannily small as he hunches over the small maplewood desk and looks at me through drooping eyes like I am a piece of ginger, like I am catastrophe, like I will sentence him to isolation and squash his eyeballs; that expression of you may only touch me cautiously -that grave, defeated look.

I begin my routine.

"My name is Jonathan Wollman and I'm here from Castleton College. I'll be taking just a few drops of blood from you today for a diabetes test and a lipid profile test." 

I stare into his eyes. The white part looks a little yellow, and a few ruptured capillaries are netting around the edges. I am scared that there is some sort of a pressure build-up within his eye chambers, puffing it up, that may eventually make it explode. That will end up pretty badly; probably in a runnel of blood gushing out of his pink carunculae, leaving him blind, desperate and suicidal. What is left of a homeless man without the gift of vision? I ponder. 

He nods, loosely, and smiles a few times. Something must be really funny that I don't quite get or am completely oblivious to. I repeat my introduction. There is no agreement, disagreement or acknowledgement; just a calm indifference possibly common among the poor, homeless and decaying.

"Do you have a preference for which hand I should use?" I ask.

He shakes his head, gently at first then violently, for a few seconds. He pauses for a moment, yawns, and resumes shaking his head. His platinum-blond hair clomps against the arch of his forehead and thrums like a boat engine brrr-ing through the ocean. 

"Alright. I'll use your left hand, then. Do you have a finger preference?" No answer. I carefully reach for his ring finger. It is cold and crinkled and frighteningly white. 

"Do you mind rubbing your hands for me, please? This'll help with your blood flow." I tell him, while rubbing my own to show how it needs to be done. "If we get your hands nicely warmed up then we don't have to prick you multiple times," I say. 

Suddenly, he makes a low-pitched, mechanical gurgling sound. Perhaps he wants to say something?

"I don't have blood," he says, finally. The voice is gruff, a little raspy, a little smokey but not extremely deep. It sounds like a packet of audio waves leaking through a plug of mucus, covering, intermittently, a nozzle looping into his vocal tubes. 

I laugh spontaneously. "You're funny," I say, but he's not amused. "It'd be hard that way. But here...can you please rub your hands while I get my kit ready?"

He rubs his palms in smooth continuous circles, but so gently that I doubt it will do any good. The motion seems mechanical, artificial and ticklish; as if his fingers have ears and wake on command. There is no mind involved, just simple steps and two bare hands rubbing away in sporadic rotations, familiar to one another like coeval half-sisters or neighborhood cousins skipping rope, rowing or lobbing pebbles in a lake. 

From the blood kit in my delegated station 6 I take out a piece of white netted gauze, a Johnson & Johnson Band-Aid, a green plastic-encased lancet, a lipid profile cassette and a capillary tube. I arrange them all on a piece of paper towel, in an anti-clockwise fashion, and go through my checklist to make sure I have everything I need.

I've missed the alcohol swab. So I turn to my left, pull one out from the kit and keep it at the end of the trail. It looks like a Japanese fan, only not as sophisticated. Then I pick it up and tear it through the center of the wrapper. One uneven piece spirals down the eight inch distance and lands on the paper towel. The other is still stuck to the swab. Next, I pull the swab out with my right thumb and index finger and throw the other piece of the wrapper into the trash can. It lands without a sound -as if, nonexistent. 

I bring the alcohol swab closer and closer to his ring finger. Eventually, it touches the pulp, I wipe it for a few seconds and fan the area to dry it off. There are little ripples on his skin, as if hit with an avalanche or corrugations made from wind, the kind of creasing that happens when you dip your fingers in hot or cold water for too long. Age and homelessness have taken its toll, forming shapes like contour maps all over the pulp. This is a sad reality and there is nothing I can really do to remedy it. 

Within a few seconds, I pick up the lancet, twist the cap off, hold it perpendicular to the finger, count in my head, one, two, three and push the plunger, deep, through the five strata of epidermis, into the inner layer of skin, till the tip of the micro-spear nicks a part of the digital artery. I remove the lancet, and notice a drop of blood peeping through the wound. 

"That felt great, Doc. Do it a few more times," he says. The lancets are not reusable and I have no reason to prick him multiple times, unnecessarily, so I take it and throw it into the red "Sharps" container. As soon as it enters the container, it is invisible because the bucket is not see-through. I hear a crrunch, and know it has landed safely. Glass upon glass, steel over steel, they can resume sharing stories of piercing, pain and viciousness, the many people that have come and gone in happiness and in despair. 

I collect the first drop of blood in the capillary tube and start the A1C test right away. Then I wipe the site of his wound with fresh gauze, and start squeezing his finger to get a few more drops. I will need it to run the lipid profile cassette. He seems restless and annoyed, all of a sudden. 

"Just one more minute, just one more minute," I say as Theresa, my assistant, and I squeeze out blood from his finger. Finally, we have the necessary amount and start the test. I give him a Band-Aid and ask him to wait. The tests take about seven minutes to run. During the remaining time, he is allowed to drink water, fill up a questionnaire or just sit there. 

After about a minute or so, he suddenly starts talking. "You can't deny that the Germans still won, aye? They revolutionized the world. They proved themselves despite having a bad reputation. They did the right thing -you know?" 

"Oh-okay. But where is this coming from all of a sudden?" I ask, casually.

"You're using a god-damn Siemens machine. You outta know this shit." I'd never given it much thought, but he was right. 

"Those Jews, I tell you...I hated them. Growing up. I knew the Germans did the right thing. But now I hate them even more."

"Why? Why do you hate them even more now?" I ask. 

"Because one of those docs, Silberman from the Bronx, killed my best friend. My best friend of 37 years. It's tough, ya know?" He says.

I expressed my deepest sympathy and then asked, "What did he do?"

"Never paid attention to my friend. At all. They say they wanna take care of the homeless, and volunteer for this and that to show that they care, but that's bull-fucking-shit! They don't give a bleep about us poor people. They lie to us, tell us, we do this, this and this, and everyone believes. When Cody was in pain, he didn't even write him a damn pain-killer because he was busy. My ass. He was probably too busy fucking his slut or mooching up to the rich ones. It'll all about the money, isn't it? You people are all about money." 

He made a gesture with his right thumb and index finger, gliding the 2 briskly, thumb over index, like flipping bills, or tossing a coin. "Because of that Jew, my friend died of an airborne infection of the Central line. What could be worse?"

There were 2 minutes left on the blood panel machines. "Keep talking," I said.

"37 years is a long time you know. When you know someone for 37 years, it takes another 37 years to forget." 

"I'm sorry for your loss, David."

"Thanks Jonny. Cody was such a simple-minded guy, you know. It's really hard to find. We lived together, found food together and hung out all the time. When I became homeless, in the September of 2006, he even left his parents' home to come with me."

"That was very sweet and considerate of him," I said. 

"Sometime around mid-summer, last year, we went to Santa Monica. Hitchhiked all the way. We did drugs, smoked pot, talked about life till the end of the night. We just always discovered new things about one another, and that brought us much closer throughout the years. Such a good guy...oh God's so vicious!" 

30 seconds left on the clock.

"A lot of you think that homeless people like us are always unhappy. But let me tell you, it's not true. Not necessarily. We are and we aren't. It's like a dynamo going back and forth. All we expect is for society to not treat us like a piece of shit. Like dirt. Many of us had homes once, had families once. But circumstances change things ya know? When you lose all of that, you start looking for new companions. People who understand your situation and not judge you for everything that happened. You look for people in the same boat as you -or even a new cruise-liner. You start bonding over it, slowly; you have things to talk about -where the free food is today, when the heater's not working in the Citigroup Atrium, when it is...stuff like that. There's competition too you know. People struggling...who gets that dang food first! But it's an adventure really. Not the typical...just a different kind of life. Some have it betters than other, just like you folks."

The green Fisher Scientific beeper goes off. I mute it and write down the numbers.

"Have you ever had a companion? Like someone who you just think about and it brings a smile on your face? Gives you energy on a bad day? Someone you know who's thinking about you constantly even if you haven't talked to them in 2 weeks? Someone you can count on no matter what -come hail come snow, even through the most bizarre family circumstances -like the death of your son? I smell him in this room, even thinking about him. I hear him talking on his cell phone with his god-damn sister in Nashville, Tennessee. Oh Cody..."

I smiled at him then waved my hand at Jemima, who was standing at the reception area, to let her know that the tests were complete and that she should send me the next patient.

But David continued. "...And you know when we were in Riverdale, earlier this year, visiting my cousin Diana Finley. One Saturday evening we sat down in the living room floor and made plaster molds of our hands. They looked great, boy, they looked grreat. You could see the outlines of the veins, hairs, everything. I took Cody's and he took mine. But that bastard broke it within a week. Haha. But I kept it carefully. And thank God I did. Now that he's gone, I hold on to it every night before I go to sleep, outside the church or on the street. It's like holding on to a little part of him, a part that doesn't slip away. A part of him that stays with me, real and alive. I bring it close to my face sometimes, to wipe my tears. Maybe he can feel it too, up there somewhere..."

"It'll get better," I say and offer him a hug. It's awkward and maybe unprofessional, but he appreciates it nonetheless.

"Maybe it will, maybe it won't. Time will tell. But I tell you boy, those Germans were right." 

I didn't want to prolong the conversation, on this topic of Nazism and anti-Semitism, any further. Finally, I said, "Your numbers are ready, David. Zenda will escort you to Dr Karen's office and she'll tell you what your numbers mean. It was nice meeting you. Hope you feel better and have a wonderful day."

He stands up while pushing his chair backward with a resounding squawk. He has advanced hydrocele, a condition where his testicles are enlarged to a point it almost touches the floor. Lymphatic drainage issues -chewing his organs away, second by second. Homeless and uninsured -why, of course, should he receive treatment? God forbid healthcare should ever be a human right -the line of thought that exasperates me beyond control. In the middle of all this, I notice his suspenders, beautifully woven, holding up his denim pants with mini-eruptions of thread. 

He shakes my hand one last time and before he leaves he leans forward and says, "Pleasure. Pleasure meeting you boy. When you grow up, just remember one thing, the helpless will always need your help. Don't fool them no more."