Diesel bleeding from his pores
Knuckles curling on the floor
All the way to bed

Then, collar a fist tight round my neck
To show how he could squeeze my breath
But all the while below, instead
He enters gently

Riding slowly
Building with me
Deep and wet

With fingers trailing down my skin
And as the storm begins within
Its rolling rips us both to shreds

We grasp and groan and grapple
Spent, collapse against each others’ breast.

Then, sticking out its sharpened claws
It spoons its catch into its jaws
The creature, now sated, licks its face
And settles down by the fireplace.

The girl who said it was tough. I wouldn’t have dreamed of asking her to elaborate. I was afraid of her. I was afraid of everyone else, too. That first club resembled nothing so much as a women’s prison movie, and just to begin with, I was half everybody’s size.

This is before I’d ever danced. I was a timid barmaid, way the hell out of my element. I skulked around that Yonkers dive bar fully aware of my white-bread origins, fearful someone would find out I hadn’t grown up working class. I was kidding myself — one glance at my naïve little face and they already knew.

I would listen, wide-eyed, to these women talk about their lives. The dancers were all different from each other, yet similar. There would be a discussion about somebody’s boyfriend — usually a useless deadbeat who left her high and dry when it would’ve been nicer for her to have a man around. Or they’d compare cover stories they used for their kids, whom they were usually raising alone. Rarely did anyone talk about her childhood or where she came from. It didn’t matter. We were all in the same place now.

But when it came to “daddy issues,” I could definitely relate.

As a toddler, I worshiped my father.

I wanted to be just like him; to do what he did, wear what he wore, and eat what he ate. The sun rose and set on him, and that was the end of the story.

My mother has pictures from when I was two years old, of my father and I “meditating” together. We’re both sitting Indian style on his bed with our eyes closed. She used to tell me she was astounded that I was able to sit so quietly and for so long doing nothing. But it wasn’t difficult. I was just happy to be next to him.

I would run to the door every day as soon as I heard him come home from work. Then I’d try to lift his briefcase, which would always be too heavy for me. “When I grow up,” I’d say, “I’ll wear a suit just like yours, and have my own briefcase just like this one.” “Don’t you want to take after Mommy?” he’d ask, and I’d shake my head. My mother didn’t work. She just stayed home with me all day. But my father went out and did important things, and then came home for dinner. I wanted to do important things, too.

When we went to synagogue, I was fascinated by my father’s tallis, the fancy blue and white silk prayer shawl he wore to services. I liked to play with the strings that were hanging from it; I would try to count them, but there were too many and then he’d move anyway, at which point I’d need to start all over.
I also liked to hide under the tallis, breathing in the crisp, vaguely musty smell of my father’s Saturday suit. Then he would wrap one end around me and pray in the other, rocking back and forth on his heels, chanting almost inaudibly through his nose.

Sometimes the rabbi would be giving a sermon. My father would open up his prayer book and whisper the Bible stories to me, pointing at the page even though I couldn’t yet read most of what was there. He never ate breakfast before synagogue, but even his strong, sour breath didn’t bother me.

I remember my grandmother standing in front of the Judaica shop, holding my hand, asking, “Do you have a girl’s tallis for sale?” In a conservative synagogue, the prayer shawl was strictly mens’ apparel. The woman behind the counter must have looked at her like she was cracked.

My father and I were of a similar temperament. We were both stubborn people. If either of us believed something, we believed it in earnest and fought for it hard. Little did I know that religion would be the thing that eventually pitted the two of us exactly at odds with each other.

To be continued

*

My first memory pre-dates any language. It’s an aesthetic memory of total minutia, which is how I know it’s real. It’s the kind of thing your brain simply wouldn’t bother making up.

I’m wearing a parka, sitting in a baby swing.  The swing is square and wooden with a bar across it. My hands are on the bar, and my mother is behind me, pushing the swing. She speaks sometimes; I recall the pitch of her voice but not knowing what her words mean.

I’m staring straight ahead at a building. My mother plays tennis in there. It looks like half a golf ball, submerged in grass. I don’t know that, of course. I know only that it’s round and white and made of squares. It seems soft to me, like if you fell up against it, you’d bounce right off.

I gaze up at the sky, trying to find the sun, but there is no sun. The day is gray and damp; the air has a bite to it. My cheeks are cold. Crows caw in the distance.

My eyes attach themselves to a pair of lights on the side of the building. I try to discern whether these lights are turned on. I think I see glints of light reflected in the textured glass. But the sun isn’t shining, and so there’s nothing to reflect off that glass. I stare until I get lost in the texture of these lights.

My mother’s is speaking again. Her voice prattles on in the background. I remain transfixed by the floodlights, searching for even the tiniest hint of a sparkle against the bland, ugly whiteness and the cold, gray day.

*

I have a few other fragmented memories from before I could talk, and they’re similarly disjointed.

My mother listened to Muzak in the car, while my father always played 1010 WINS, a news radio station on the AM band. I didn’t like either one, but the 1010 WINS theme music sounded ominous. It terrified me.

An early nightmare has me in my crib, in the dark, peering out through wooden bars at the stark white walls of my bedroom. Suddenly the 1010 WINS theme begins to play, and the crib starts moving by itself. It rolls right out the bedroom door with me in it, as if I’m in my own personal vehicle. Next it’s rolling down a hallway and then into the lobby of a bank, which is closed for the night. The lights are off, the teller’s windows are empty, and I’m alone in there.

My crib rolls me across the lobby floor, into an elevator, and then down into the bank’s vault, where I see walls of brass-colored safety deposit boxes, reaching all the way up to the ceiling.

The crib slows here, then starts to move in reverse. It takes me once again through the dark, deserted bank lobby. Then up the hallway and back into my bedroom, finally parking itself mercifully against the wall, where it belongs.

*

Each of these memories is punctuated by a feeling of sterility. The seriousness of my parents’ adult life, as my mother carted me back and forth to errands and similar. There’s an underlying anxiety; a sense of shuttling from place to place with deadlines but no purpose.

*

Children’s television in the 70s was funny…

colorful;

indulgent;

… comforting.

In contrast to my parents’ everyday life outside that box, which, devoid of happy music, bright color, or abundant laughter, appeared — even to the smallest child — to be pretty fucking joyless.

At midwinter in England, it gets dark before 4 pm. I’m glad time has begun to spin in the other direction now. Every extra minute of daylight, no matter how brief, feels like a bit of renewal.

So, about those beginnings. I’ve been thinking. I’ve not done much with my web site in over a year. Even when I was promoting before, I’ve kept the content sparse here. And this is because, until recently, I was loath to post anything I felt was too personal.

I’ve just realized there’s nothing to keep me from mouthing off till I’m satisfied, here on my own bloody site.

I’m not sure what’s changed. I only know that I’m no longer afraid to say what I feel like saying. Opinions. Anecdotes. Observations. Or pure gibberish. Sure, that too.

None of the socially appropriate reasons people mind their p’s and q’s actually apply to me anymore.

I don’t work a straight job, haven’t in years, and if the fates are on my side, then I never will again.

I’m no longer concerned about upsetting my family. My husband is going to stand behind me thick or thin. As for most of my blood relatives… well. That ship sailed a long time ago. And when I finally got wise, it sailed me right across the vast ocean that now sits between me and them. Which might as well be a whole hemisphere, or even a universe.

What else? Friends? Well, those are people who don’t spend the better part of their time judging you. I’m certainly not worried about losing any of mine over a blog that’s but a blip in the midst of all the internet white noise.

As for my enemies, sure, I’ve got some. You always have a few more people in your life than you’re aware of who love you. Ditto for those who hate you. One of my known enemies dropped dead last year; it may have even been a suicide. Sometimes if you wait them out, these things have a way of taking care of themselves.

So I’ve done a proper tally and there’s no reason to sit around quietly just because I have nothing important to say. Neither does anyone else, after all. And yet so many people are saying so much nothing everywhere that I think it’s a safe bet they will thoroughly drown all of my nothing out.

I suspect I will look back someday and understand that it was only when I gave myself permission to be nobody that I finally found my voice.

There's also this factor.

Whenever I use it to surf the web or upload anything, I can’t help but consider what I might be sharing, and with whom.

The phrase “Big Brother is Watching You” has been used so much that it’s nearly lost its meaning. Yet the concept remains relevant, more so in this era than ever before.

Today’s corporations are as powerful as nation states, and sometimes even more so. The scope of their power makes governments look insignificant.

1984 came and went, and we breathed a sigh of relief when our televisions didn’t yet watch us.

Now, corporations have made it rewarding for us to invite them into our homes, friendships, love lives and careers. They’ve given us fancy new gadgets to play with, amusing new applications to use. And while we play, companies like Google and Facebook collect our data, “personalize” our web experiences, and occasionally disseminate information about us without our permission.

Our peers expect us to embrace the new culture these technologies have spawned. To lay our lives bare for the world. Smart phones allow our favorite brands to travel with us with us everywhere we go. We can access the web on all our mobile devices, and broadcast our locations to the whole planet.

Often, we’re not all that concerned about to whom we’re broadcasting. In any case, we’re willing to give up a lot of our privacy for the “convenience” of using the latest technologies. After all, it’s just a status update.

I can’t possibly be the only one in the world who finds this somewhat unnerving. Feel free to share the image I’ve created! Only please link back here when you do so.

I like catchy music. Some punk falls into that category. Most does not. I used to go to the hardcore matinees at ABC No Rio and feel like a heretic, surrounded by true believers. Did these people know something I didn’t? To this day, I can’t remember a single name out of any of the bands I saw there. Musically, the bar was set pretty low. But the bands all conformed to a mold, a particular style, and this mold was tuneless. It was almost as if each of the acts was ensuring it wouldn’t stand out from any other act, all in demonstration of their “equality.”

These days I listen to many different kinds of music. A few weeks ago, I was loading up my iPod, and I realized there were probably less than 15 tunes in there that would qualify as “punk.”

I had to ask myself, did I ever really like punk all that much in the first place? Or did I just think I was supposed to like it, because I’m a born-and-bred New Yorker, and that ethos gets into your soul?

I suspect it’s the latter. New York is crammed with options, but that city can sometimes make you think there are only two choices: punk rock or the Gap.

The truth is, too much of either one is pretty boring.

A large part of the joke, I think, is that people could never agree on what was and wasn’t “punk.” From what I understand, that was even the case in the 70s. In the Village and on the Lower East Side, the same argument was still going on twenty-five years later.

Some people thought it was fashion. They went out to be seen, after spending oodles of cash and hours of time on their clothes, shoes, and hair, getting that look right. How are people like this any different from the girl who spends whole mornings flat-ironing her hair, and whole afternoons dribbling away money on 57th Street?

There were the gutter punks who spared for change on St. Marks all day, allegedly living in squats in Alphabet City, but plenty of them actually went home to the suburbs at night and slept on clean sheets.

Probably my least favorite “punks” were the activists — NYU students, usually, who hung out at ABC No Rio and made a big show out of doing Food Not Bombs. This kind of thing looks great on paper. What could be bad about mass volunteering for social justice?

But what I found was, a lot of the people who get involved in social activism tend to be hateful, holier-than-thou snobs. They proselytize. They are smarter than you are. They are making the world a better place, and if you’re not doing it the same way they are, then you are helping to destroy it. They are as bad as Born Again Christians — worse, maybe, because you expect Born Again Christians to be smug.

I will never forget the time I offered to volunteer at the now defunct “anarchist” bookstore Blackout Books. The other volunteers were put off. I hadn’t read enough Karl Marx or Emma Goldman to be able to spout off quotes, in place of my own thoughts, during our conversation. If I sound bitter here, it’s because these kind of people wind me up. I can’t help it. I value the ability to think for myself, as opposed to rattling off someone else’s long dead rhetoric. What kind of anarchist enforces a secret handshake?

I deplore the hypocrisy of a movement that bills itself as a safe haven for outsiders, but is instead an exclusive clique with the same undercurrent of expected proprieties you’d find at any debutante ball.

You’ll notice that I haven’t even mentioned music yet. Neither did most of these people.

To Be Continued.

I’m not the slightest bit squeamish about my age, so here’s another giveaway. When I was in high school, “indie rock” — a term which has long since become meaningless — equaled independent or alternative music. Music which was eventually co-opted by major labels for repackaging, and force fed back to us as “grunge.”

The timing of “grunge” coincided with a mass interest in punk’s roots. See some works by Greil Marcus, a man with terrific and original ideas but whose unfortunate lofty writing style mitigates the relevance of much of what he has to say. In the 90s, many last-gasp Gen-Xers professed to love their punk. (The bulk of whom went on to become hipsters and yuppies, naturally.)

I can’t listen to Nirvana these days. It was never my favorite then, and it sure as fuck doesn’t stand up now. If Cobain hadn’t killed himself, Nirvana would have remained the cultural flash in the pan it was meant to be. Do you know anyone who still listens to Pearl Jam? Really? (Which, incidentally, was always a much better band.)

In New York, punk rock is considered, overall, an aesthetic. It’s the music, sure. But it’s also an “attitude,” and purists would have raucous debates with you about punk rock’s origins.

“Punk rock: the Sex Pistols. The Clash.” “No way, man! CBGB’s! That pussy Malcolm McLaren nicked the New York Dolls’ sound and Richard Hell’s look.” “They stole their shit from Detroit! MC5, the Stooges, hell you better believe it, Iggy Pop!”

Et cetera. Ad nauseum. Yeah. And I used to live for those debates.

I was a misfit. I bought the whole rigmarole: I was supposed to enjoy what misfits enjoyed. Plus I had the added bonus of getting to watch it all disappear just as I was arriving, which made it all just so poignant. A counter-cultural death rattle! Right here in plain view! Tatty (and affordable) New York goes up in smoke to make way for soulless gentrification. What else is a young outsider to do but rally “Punks not dead!” at the top of her lungs, making sure all and sundry can hear the missing apostrophe in the battle cry.

Oh, I was a good little soldier, all right.

To Be Continued.