QUEENS AND OTHER DEPRAVITIES

I’m drinking wine.  I just started though, so this won’t read like shitfaced Hemingway.  This may go off in several directions.  Should I start with Dunkin Donuts?  Can I get a “HELLO” for Dunks?  It’s a Boston thing (well, drinking really would take first place, but Dunkin Donuts is magic).  The first Dunkin Donuts was what pretentious Brooklyn pseudo dive bars try to emulate: authentic old school 1950’s formica laminate countertops with metal edging (for example) and stools that are screwed into the floor.  Just writing this is making me wicked happy.  I love retro anything.  I digress.  This line of thought leads to what I am doing in New York.  I mean, there are a ton of places to perform and duh, everything is here.  But it’s getting expensive and I’m getting tired.

I have this cyclical love/hate with my lifestyle choices.  I do standup and I paint and write.  As an artist, I had to come to New York… I sometimes do up to six shows a week and with that, I struggle to find time to paint while working a dumb part-time office job to pay my rent in Queens (crazy, right?) (and I have roommates so now it’s just like, I need to get some shit together).  This blog helps and thankfully it’s cheaper than therapy and less painful for my back than zazen.

I’m from New England, so it’s not as if New York is alien to me.  I’ve been coming here since I was an infant.  My mother was from New York state, and my father was from Philly.  I came back and forth to visit family growing up, and then to go see the theatre and hang with my gay boyfriends in my 20’s & 30’s.  Coming back and forth from Boston isn‘t that big of a departure, although we (us humans) have to do that provincial thing where we’re like you’re from Boston, or you’re from Philly… it’s not the same, and it’s not – BUT, it’s not like I just fell off the turnip wagon, because there are people from Wisconsin that live in Brooklyn for fukks sake. 

All of that said, I miss Boston and I wonder what the hell I’m doing.  On a good week, I performed (and got paid) at Dangerfields and the Friars Club (whose abbot is Jerry Lewis), and I did a show in a big theatre upstate and made a lot of money.  I even landed the Tropicana where you work nine shows for the week and stay in a condo on the boardwalk facing the water!  And I’ve shown my paintings in Brooklyn more than once.  On a bad week I’m thinking what am I doing?  I don’t have an agent and I currently don’t have a job except comedy.  I worry about my sister, my car is on the fritz, I really need to move, I’m exhausted and my parents are dead. 

This older gentlemen at my former job liked to comment about everything.  One day he said “you look tired.”  I wanted to reply, “you look like you died three weeks ago.”  People don’t understand the struggle.

Well, that’s it for now.  The wine is kicking in.  I wore myself out already.  My Queens aberrations rant will have to continue on another day.  The message is: stay gold.

UFC v. Old Guy

Let’s talk about men.  Yes the security guy at the front desk is cute, he does some kind of mixed martial arts, but he’s young.  Gay boyfriend was puzzled about how that could be a problem.  My thinking is this:  that guy can’t take me to the Essex House where I can comfortably sink into a fancy leather seat to drink top shelf martinis while taking in the wondrous aroma of whiskey and cigar smoke and talk about the latest Paul Krugman piece and possibly about art (whereas, an older gentleman can).  He probably shaves his pubes off.  And he wrestles with other men.  Gay boyfriend was still puzzled.  So in an effort to elaborate, I will do a compare and contrast argument with older v. younger, and I will entitle the latter “UFC”.  UFC definitely doesn’t have a beach house where I could drop the day job and go write my memoirs.  Even if that translates into squandering the time drinking too much and getting nothing done, where my ultimate and inevitable return would produce little writing and one big hangover, at least the opportunity to attempt a first draft would be there.  And I’d be tan.  UFC guy wouldn’t take me to fancy places like the Hamptons or Cape May.  His regular watering hole is probably in Bayonne.  Although, he most likely wouldn’t drink in lieu of fight preparation, so I imagine spending time with him could entail moseying around Prospect Park drinking energy drinks and green tea.  Maybe he’s not from Brooklyn but it doesn’t matter.  I don’t like parks.  I like the ocean and I like men who want to go boating.  UFC guy would grow completely weary from my intellectual rantings regarding the mastery of Peter Bogdonavich and how I need to go to San Francisco to remember the artist within that I feel I somehow left there.  Even though he’s handsome, he smells like cabbage.  He’s got that trimmed beard with a crew cut thing going on that’s wicked hot, but I’m at least ten years older than he is.  If in conversation he didn’t know of Mr. Roper (or some other important cultural icon), I would be mortified.

My father was forty-two when I was born.  His heyday was the fifties.  He used to prowl the Wildwood boardwalk with his drinking buddies and go listen to jazz.  I’ve taken just about all of my musical influence from him, from Harry James to John Coltrane.  And then there’s comedy.  That generation loved Johnny Carson.  He explained to me who Jack Parr was.  Growing up he used to play old Spike Jones records for me and do imitations of Peter Lory.  UFC guy has never even seen The Pink Panther.  Maybe what I’m saying is I have retro sensibilities, but more importantly, I think I'm saying I’m an old soul.  My friends all say i look young so I should go for it, but the truth is, that is not who I am on the inside.    

An older gentlemen would have a beach house.  He would think it was cute that I like vodka for dinner and he would always be concerned that I was alright.  He would call a lot and ask where I was.  The old school man wants to keep tabs on you because that's how they roll.  "Where are you?" is a common text and they get mad when you don't respond.  

Old guy wouldn’t think anything of coming to get me, wherever I was.  In New York, you’re lucky if you get a guy to leave his borough.  Another thing, it doesn’t have to always happen, but it's nice when a man scampers ahead to get the door, which seems somehow like a lost art. 

UFC guy has had so much pussy waving around, he doesn’t understand how to make a princess feel like a queen.  Old guy does.  Old guy also gets the whole jewelry thing too.  UFC guy has tattoos which is kind of cool but the first time I caught him looking at himself in the mirror, I think it’d be over.  Also he’s had more than one threesome and I’m just too old for that shit.

And further, New York guys don’t think they need to do anything.  They take you to a wine bar once and then expect sex.  It’s absolutely unacceptable.  Old guy would go so far out of his way to please his future bride and he would have the couth and intuition to wait until the time was right.  He would buy stuff and go for long weekend trips.  UFC picks up women from bars who dress sparingly and look like they’re twelve.  An older gentleman knows how to feed the Cinderella complex.  The only complex UFC is familiar with is Napolean.  I think I’ve made my point.  It is something I had to write out, because having several cougar friends, I just wanted to get my side heard.  But cheers to both types because God knows what we would do without contrast! 

WE WON'T GET SWOOPED AGAIN

This is my blog.  It’s sometimes about being an artist.  A lot of times it’s about people that aggravate me.  This one is about the heart.  

Here we go--->It instantly turns you into an emotional catastrophe when you care.  When you don’t care, you have total control.  Nobody can get to you (it’s pretty awesome).  The only downfall is oddly, in time, you find yourself having a strange hankering to play lacrosse. 

The cute ones get to ya.  I hate that.  It’s not fair.  I am not self-absorbed and I am not full of myself, BUT lately a lot of persons of the male persuasion have been barking up this tree.  My gay boyfriend Eddie says “throw one of them a bone.”  None of them are even in the right galaxy.  I don’t want to sound like a jerk, but everyone is out of my league… except…  hence, where the trouble lies… the fucking good looking one.  That makes me sound superficial……… and I’m not.  I’m talking about the guy that makes you stop eating, hit the gym, shave your legs, do your toenails and do your hair.  Let me tell you something: I have not had a boyfriend in ten years.  So, if I actually shave something or get my feet done, it’s fucking real.  My writing is suddenly taking on an epic Maury Pauvich-like quality.  I’m not meaning to be dramatic  <--- RIGHT THERE !!!  I’m being dramatic !!!  OH fuck.  This is not good.  For several years, I’ve been dressing and acting like a gym teacher.  I don’t want to characterize, generalize or sound like there is anything particularly wrong with saying gym teacher instead of lesbian, but I do want to stress that morphing into a basketball coach is just a defense mechanism I use to protect myself from getting hurt.  I’m no genius, believe me, but I suspect if someone makes you stop wanting to organize an indoor gymnasium kickball game, it is serious business. 

But when you really like someone, they ruin your life.  You begin to obsess about how you will get to see them.  You scheme.  You ask your friends.  You follow his stupid Instagram.  If he doesn't like stuff on your Twitter, you’re crushed.  That’s just weird and stupid.  And, when you don’t see him it hurts.  This is love my friends.  It doesn’t strike often.  The risk is you might have a fiery romance that can potentially end abruptly, and then you are left crying on the kitchen floor.  Funny, I’m already jumping to the breakup.  Another absurd symptom that you’ve fallen hard; oscillating between bliss and plummeting into despair, and disaster-izing about a relationship that doesn’t even exist.  Holy smoking ovaries Robin, I’m bat-shit!!!!  The stupid thing is I want this.  Love swoops in.  You can’t control it, you certainly can’t change it.  You can’t do anything about it.  You’re fucked.  

What I find completely recalcitrant is the other kind of swoop.  Love is never portrayed accurately in tinsel town.  At least not now.  Why is the leading man ugly can I just put that out there?  Has anyone seen Rock Hudson?  That is a leading man.  In modern movies, when the girl character gets her heart broken, the ugly guy makes his move.  I’m sorry but, first of all, gross.  Second of all, this happens in Under The Tuscan Sun.  This got under my skin so bad that in an effort to assuage the ickiness that that particularly ridiculous Hollywood ending creates in my brain, I’ve coined the phrase the “ugly guy swoop.”  After the handsome guy doesn’t work out, she’s given up and begun decorating her Etruscan villa, the tall, goofy, big-nose, curly-haired doofus shows up and gets her when she’s vulnerable.  Um, Diane Lane is gorgeous.  She’d never fall for an ugly guy swoop, even if he is a writer.  It just wouldn’t happen.  Disbelief not suspended.