Houses and Homes

It’s different up here, I admit. It smells sweet. We stop in front of a house that is in need of a paint job. The three-story is ready to give—scratched up, mauled over by decades or centuries of wind burns and rain. Two brick tire tracks head up the driveway to an equally beaten garage. We stand side by side. A house and a garage. I want him to hold my hand, but he doesn’t. I want him to kiss me, but he doesn’t know. Trees hover, spilling giant, brassy, fairytale leaves. The house is leaning into the garage. A light goes on upstairs, and we look away from the house and into each others’ eyes. The rock wall has stone bulbs, pressed together like our knuckles.

Nobody looks like me.

The PhD abandoned the city for a teaching gig at a college in upstate New York. I find his departure depressing, but his observations poignant and hilarious.

“You know what being in Albany makes me realize? That I am really pretty much a hipster. When I am in New York or San Francisco or anyplace that is full of them, I dont feel much like a hipster. But when I am in a place where there aren’t many, I suddenly feel like a huge one. Because I look around and nobody looks like me. And I think, Damn, I’m usually just a normal guy but here I am a bearded eyeglassed freak weirdo. And I was thinking about this today because, well, I was on the bus, stopped at a light and I looked out the window, and I was surprised to see a bunch of people who looked like me.  And I thought, Hey, look, Albany hipsters. But then a few of them turned around and they were actually just homeless people.”

Like a complete unknown.

The kid sat a few rows away in my car with his guitar and strummed it lightly, staring out the train as the Hudson flew by, one knee upright and the other leg folded on the seat, propping him up as his fingers picked at those strings and the slow, thin twang of some newer, younger, Bob-Dylan-like song politely pressed against the window, eighth notes and a strum of chords huffing like careless afterthoughts as he nodded his head occasionally and continued to look out at the green and the blue and the slightest of gray waves that for once, I noticed, seemed to lap in slow-motion.

The time we went to the demolition derby.

I stayed one more day because someone said the words “demolition derby” and it sounded perfect. I needed some destruction. I wanted to watch it, to savor it from the grandstand bleachers and smell fuel.

I was not prepared for the smell of grease.

We pulled up in a cloud of smoke face to face with a giant duct-taped Indian. “Well,” I told the car, “at least there’s no litter.” Everyone agreed. The parking lot of the Orange County Speedway was immaculate, save the huge Indian. Joe climbed it and we snapped a photo of Chief Towaco.

The line for the demolition derby snaked twice around the parking lot.

Sondo kept looking at the crowd and giggling. “Look! Look at his hair! He actually has a red neck!” We tried not to snicker along with her. We tried, for the most part to ignore her.

“Oh my god! I can’t. I caaan‘t.” Sondo was gasping.

Mark snapped his head back at her and whispered staccatos. “Sondo, do not think for one moment I will defend you. Because I will throw you right under the bus. Do not fuck with these people. I will not have your back.”

Sondo shut up. The guy behind us with yellow teeth looked like Gary Busey. Every time I looked back he grinned at me and his son hung back behind his Wrangler pant leg. I tried not to look back. He freaked me out.

At some point, a bunch of teenagers swung a gate open, and our part of the line realized we could sneak in without paying the $14. We were too foggy and paranoid to make a decision. Fifty people jogged past us, grabbing their kids and making a run for it. We remained frozen in place. Finally, out of indecisive desperation, I told the group, “This isn’t a legal matter. This is about ethics.” I leaned on the word and we all nodded. It made us feel better, knowing we weren’t morally corrupt, even as we forked over our clean bills to the man in a box with two different colored eyes.

We finally walked into the grand stand, and our eyes stung from the scent of fried grease. We found seats on the long planks of wood sank in the middle, no doubt from the obese attendees.

Sondo and I decided we needed more booze. We stood in line for beer, but I decided this sort of event called for hard alcohol.

“A vodka-soda, please.”

The man at the bar blinked at me. “We don’t have Pepsi here, okay, only Coco-Cola.”

“No,” I stammered. “I mean, um, club soda.”

“You mean diet? We don’t have diet soda here, either.”

“What about seltzer?”

The bartender blinked again and added a splash of seltzer to my cup of vodka. “Want some fruit, too?”

“Um, no thanks.”

I gripped the soda and walked with Sondo to the concession stand. We stood in line, the frier scent caking in our nostrils, sticking in our hair. We got three orders of cheese fries, a jumbo sized hot dog and a platter of sausages and peppers. They were out of corndogs. We carried them back to the boys who were standing on the bleacher, the plank of wood wheezing under them. We all dug into the food and focused our eyes on the speedway. Cheese sauce hung from our bottom lips.

Mike told us we were just in time—the announcer was welcoming the star of the show, Crash Malone.

Crash Malone promptly drove his little truck into a vertical schoolbus and escaped from the towering pile of flames, waving his helmet around and flipping off the finger. Mark was jumping up and down on the bleacher shouting: “CRASH MA-LONE! CRASH MA-LONE!”

“Who is Crash Malone, anyway,” I whispered to Joe.

“A fucking psychopath. Look at that fire!”

We stood in awe, our mouths (full of cheesefries) open, watching as truck with trailers attached to them drove around and around, trying to knock the other trailer off. One burst into flames. The crowd went crazy.

Kids pressed up against the limp fence as the four-cylinders slammed into each other, sending pieces of metal flying up into the sky, commingling with the stench of fried dough and fuel. The audience was screaming and kissing and fighting. A man proposed to a woman on the track. Another man was dragged out for drugs or disorderly conduct, or so we suspected. I wondered where that guy who looked like Gary Busey went, and if his kid was still hiding somewhere behind him. Some company had kids in yellow tee-shirts standing near the bathrooms, handing out free samples of snuff. People with sauce from their cheesefries still clinging to their chin—not us, we had wiped the sauce off by now—stood on line for fried dough and shook big, dirty bottles of sugar on them, licking the stickiness of off their fingers and replacing the sugar on the stand for the next customer. Beers spilled and children cried. Another bus burst into flames, and this time the EMT ran out like a hero. He was quickly shooed away by the crew and the fire smoked outrageously, the clouds of gray growing and building and finally pillowing out into the parking lot.

We left early, before the six-cylinders, to beat the crowd, to wash our hair, to talk about that time we went to the speedway to watch the demolition derby.

The Armed Fried Chicken Robbery

We were drinking beers and playing Asshole. I was losing. I was the Asshole. I didn’t care, you know, because to be honest, I can be a control freak. And I guess the Asshole doesn’t have control of the game, but control of the cards. It was good enough for me and anyway, I was happy enough to sink back into the couch and sip Yuengling while I sneaked glances at Joe’s cards and Mark and Mike argued about throwing the game.

At one point, Frank gave his new friend Steve a $20 and firm instructions.

“If you want to go to Kennedy Fried Chicken, and you should, get as much chicken, biscuits and fries you possibly can.”

Steve took the bill and grabbed Frank’s pack of cigarettes. We went back to playing Asshole.

Eventually, the tension between Mark and Mike ripped the game in half, so we set up Rock Band and watched Mark prance around the room with the mic, belting Fleetwood Mac and changing the words so the chorus was a big send-up of Frank. We kind of forgot about Steve, who at this point, was running down Main Street with a steaming hot bag of chicken in his hands and a cigarette no doubt dangling from his lip.

“YOU GUYS,” yelled Steve, as he entered in the back door. We lunged for the chicken and fries and ignored him.

Frank chewed a leg thoughtfully. “What took so long?”

“WHAT TOOK SO LONG,” Steve began, out of breath from the cigarette or the run or the thirty extra points on his waistline from nights spent eating Kennedy Fried Chicken, “was a fucking robbery.”

We put our chicken down.

“A robbery?” I squeaked.

“Yeah. A fried chicken robbery. I even have video.” He whipped out his cell phone and showed us a 30 second clip of blurred people running around screaming in a fried chicken store. “See, I ordered the chicken and fries and biscuits like you said. And I waited around, right. But then when the guy handed me the chicken–through the bullet-proof glass–some dude ran in with a gun, grabbed the chicken, and ran!”

“Oh my god.”

“I know! Motherfucker took our chicken! But don’t worry guys. I made them make it over for us.”

We chewed the chicken thoughtfully. It tasted pretty good, and it was still hot.

We didn’t know him that well, but Steve was alright by us.

This is the life.

I left Manhattan again for the country. I stopped writing because I have nothing to say. There are a lot of barbecues up here. I’m drinking too much and eating too much and can sleep for 11 hours undisturbed. Leave me alone. I’ll come back eventually. Just give me space.

Bald Eagle

I went to Connecticut and got drunk and, swear to god, saw a bald eagle.

Swear to god.

Another view of the Hudson

Another view of the Hudson from train heading back to the city. God I miss living upstate. I am officially vexed by New York and miss dangerous hairpin turns and loud music and acres upon acres of trees and dogs and walking down the street nodding hello, how are you, to the store keep who actually is sweeping his stoop and smiling gently, eyes squinting in the amber sunlight.