June 2015 - Gatsby's Senior Moment

Gatsby's Senior Moment

-by Eric Beeman

            In the meadow on a hill shrouded by a morning mist on what would become a very hot day, a doe breakfasted on new grass, clover flowers, and other field offerings. Instinct intact, Gatsby sprung from the mowed path toward the animal whose white tail took flight toward the opposite side of the meadow.

            When Gatsby reached the tall grass his haunches tried to follow his muscle's memory. Ten years ago he galloped over the same field after four deer, his Lab-Ridgeback mixed paws thumped the ground with the sound of horse hooves, running a steady race into the middle of the small herd causing the four creatures to scatter in a defensive maneuver. This confused my dog for the split of a second it took for the wild animal to disappear in the woods a quarter-mile from my sight. Gatsby followed.

            I worried, waited, and called. He returned panting, happy, wet, full and proud of his two year self. Gratified by the chance to simply try and catch them.

            This time, a decade later, his body defied him. The knees caved and his hips slipped, his rear end sank to the ground. A thing I've seen happen jumping into the car in a way that makes me wonder if I will ever be one of those people who provide a plywood ramp to the back of the car (he does love riding in it so much) or consult vet in search of anti-inflammatories or a glucosamine supplement. Not that a person can visit the vet without them finding a dozen sundry lab tests and questionable recommendations that feel as thought they are designed to drain the money from your sympathetic wallet. Though lately, my own body aches lean toward empathy. I'm aging too, at a slower rate but nonetheless distinctive downgrade in physical prowess.

            Gatsby gave the meadow a cheated look then adjusted, back on all fours and trotting on the low growth of the footpath headed in the wrong direction. I called him the right way around, happy to witness a limp-free trot toward me.

            Just then a hyperactive white and brown dog with the curly coat of lamb and a patch of brown fur around his eye bounded up the hill, sniffed Gatsby once and ran into the deer scented grass before Gatsby could sniff back.

            "Nice to be young!" I said to the mistress following behind.

            "He's not young," she responded as if I accused her of something criminal.

 "He's four years old."

            "Oh. Four is young," I said and walked away with my senior canine, feeling warned off from talking people. Even from dog people.

            As I walked I re-thought and replayed in my mind what I could have said to the  woman instead. For example: "You're right!" People enjoy being told that. But it was too late for corrective action.  That standoffish woman probably would have shrugged off such a nicety anyways.

            Next time only speak if spoken to.

            Gatsby and I represent a pair of species matched to give the other what he lacks. Scavenger chooses the provider and the loner chooses the social beast. A symbiotic relationship founded millennia ago. A way to coexist and persist before the Sixth Great Extinction comes to undo the world we know. The asteroid, fire or flood that will send the current crop of vertebrates into oblivion. The Earth always shakes off what threatens diversity in the biosphere.

            Pope Francis, between encyclicals, challenged his flock not to substitute giving birth to children with keeping pets. An odd thing to preach against considering he's the namesake of a saint known for loving animals. But not surprising, given the fertility rate required to maintain popular and economic relevance in the competition for global indoctrination.

            Well that is just what I have done. Substituted humanity for caninity. He is my substitute child. Gatsby, not Francis.  I am not particularly religious but highly attracted to the possibility of an organizing principle, a purpose beyond ME that doesn't involve taking on other people's problems. Kind of like a dog.

             

            And yet now, a week after the failed deer hunt, Gatsby temporarily leaves me for a pretty white two-year old Siberian named Nanuk, joining her and her handsome owner who looks to be fifteen years younger than me. He wears the same color shorts and t-shirt as me but dons work boots instead of running shoes. I thought dogs rely on scent not wardrobe markers but Gatsby can't seem to tell where I am.

            "I guess he's yours for the day!" I shout over, breaking the don't speak rule

            The guy takes pity on my abandonment and walks the newly formed dog-pack my way to redirect Gatsby back toward his rightful owner.

            "How old is she?" I ask.

            "Two."

            "She's gorgeous," I say. "He's coming up on twelve soon and getting senile apparently."

            "At twelve he has every right to."
            "You're right. This is his one big walk for the day."
            "Nanuk never stops."

            "Two is the age of non-stop action."
            "She'll slow down when it gets hot. Thankfully."

            "Dogs ultimately know their limits. Funny, Gatsby doesn't usually like female dogs unless they are in heat."

            "She can be persistent."

            "I'll say."

            "Welp, have a good one. "

            "You too."  I answer feeling glad to have had an un-damaging conversation with a stranger.

            As we part, I wonder if in ten years Nanuk's owner will become like me. Playing out the clock. Keeping to himself and wondering whether or not to build a handicap ramp so his Nanuk can get in and out of the car without injury. Forgetting about his own sore knees as attends to the slowing down of his once rambunctious charge.

            Gatsby decides to rest. He digs at the earth and lays down to pant. I used to stop him from digging, but why? Go ahead, give in to instinct my friend. Do what you can to be you.

He settles his sore legs in the cool dirt and connects his line of cataract glossy vision toward me to make certain I will stay.  He is doing what is best for him, and so I must be too.

            Dog, deer and dad at dawn, perfectly okay with giving up the chase.

           

May 2015 - People Who Need People on the Subway

People Who Need People on the Subway

-by Eric Beeman

BOARD CENTRAL SQUARE
I used to fight my dog (dude plays video game on phone turning and tilting it like a steering wheel)

I don't like people who abuse animals (girl with tight pink blouse, leaning into him, headphones on intermittently demanding attention)

If another dog tried to fuck with my dog I'd say 'go get 'em'

I don't like people who abuse dogs

It's not like that

I knew this girl whose dog had its eye poked out

I used to fight my dog

QUIET FOR 2 MINS

I still gotta talk to my wife (achieves the next level of the game)

If you want your money you gotta talk to her (fumbling through large knock off designer pocket book for a tooth brush, brushes teeth sans paste or sink)

I want at least a hundred bucks today, no less

Your money is none of my business (puts toothbrush away)

She's gonna have to give it to me (shakes phone like a lit match)

QUIET FOR 1 MIN

If I don't like you I'll steal your shit (thumbs atwitter)

That's scumbag shit (Mirror chapstick)

How many times have you left me alone in your house and I haven't stolen a thing

That's why I like you

EXIT DOWNTOWN CROSSING

April 2015 - Buscando

Buscando

By Eric Beeman

There are lucky dogs, and unlucky dogs.

Lucky ones collared and cared for, living high on a hill with a view of across the strait of the Palaminos and Culebra islands–sunrises, moonrises, and eastern clouds, each day tracking above their watchful eyes. They find sweet comfort in the sunshine and Leeward breezes. The pack consists of three small white Havanese, a black-brown half-shepherd half-hound, and two midsized yellow mixes. The five animals work in unison, greeting guests, barking at every car that ascends the winding driveway to the top where the hotelito sits. Life lived in a guest house. Trusting the daily neck scratches from a rotation of visitors, eating left over dinners from a home-style meal pot that the man (he is the cook, cleaner, bartender, and guest attendant) prepares.

These dogs are not pampered, but they are welcome to stay, or go.  Home and free at once, from dawn till dusk, when the coqui begin their cacophonous song.

Down on shores beyond the city of Fajardo a canine pack of satos forage in the dry-season barely-damp mangrove. Little yellow pups stalking lizards like a prized meal, off put by the scent of a mongoose, yelping loudly at the larger dogs that steal their catch. Females live a short life lived perpetually pregnant, and shooed away by a team of the grounds keepers collecting dried-broom tree branches within the boundary of the Parque Nacional Balneario, or on the beach of The Waldorf el Conquistador, or the small lawns, tiny walled-in claims of land that parse up suburban villas.  

Wherever they scavenge unwelcome. Unlucky.

* * *

For me, a simple walk from Playa Colora to the parking lot became a Mishap in the Mangrove. I didn't remember any turns on the way in. But on the way out, there appeared many. One wrong, mostly unconscious choice had left me lost in the decaying stench of a jungle. The labyrinth laughed at me, birds, and small animals made strange caw-caw-lings and human-ish shrieks and whorls. The splashes of sun dappled an ever-narrowing trail descending toward the swamp bottom, where I imagined a half man half iguana centaur awaited my wayward arrival.

But the trail turned up, and sunny again, where I encountered an assembled group of also-lost people. A Puerto Rican man, who spoke plenty of English because he grew up in New York, and his adult daughter who didn't, because she grew up here. They were joined by a floundering couple of quiet married folk from Long Island. All of us together looking for the way back to park entrance. 

The daughter was dressed for a drink by the pool, not a hike in the mangrove. She wore a tiny white bikini, walked in flip flops and had a large canvas beach bag slung over her shoulder. She carried a smile and island attitude, going with the flow under no particular concern, such as I had, that we'd sucked into the mud, brackish with volcanic silt and ever-composting foliage.  Her father shouted loudly for our attention, as if to say, I am watching you, as we jogged ahead to beat the edge a clearing looking for a sign of civilization. Not that it mattered to me. Girls in white bikinis don't need protection from me. The dead end path led to an RV park, seemingly deserted, surrounded by a ten-foot fence, and a sign, NO ENTRADA.  

But we were getting closer.

The Long Island couple had long ago given up on knowing where they were. Giving full faith toward the taut and tanned well-fed belly of the man that was guiding us. The tourists tapped their empty water bottles against their thighs in gentle but nervous syncopation.

For the first time in my life, I slowed my pace and stuck with a group. The father and I powered up our cell phones, and used the GPS map to guide our way back to the dimensionless curve of blue that represented the cove and the beach we were seeking.  As we walked, a dot on my phone pinpointed our travails, ever so slowly making progress, like a hedgehog plodding his way home with a daydream in his head.  

* * *

Cats are the only mammals known not to forgive. If you step on a house cat's tail it will remember, and carry the grudge forth until the transgression doesn't matter to it anymore. No one can win absolution with petting, a treat, or a toy. Their behavior is their own prerogative. 

A cat kept in the home will love you, keep you, and share the space. But make it known who owns the spot of sunshine on the floor in front of the window. 

Feral kittens aren't so standoffish. They can't afford to be. Once they set paws beyond their nursing habit, they and gather in the marketplace, begging for scraps under the cafe tables on the sidewalks across from the Mercado Santurce. Taking time to pounce and bat at each other's noses or tails between devouring the falling crumbs, or licking food from deliberately dipped fingers of the diners above them.

Cute kittens will convince you with their clean faces. The older ones? Look out.  Battle tested and street certified. There is a fight to be had and a territory to watch over. Seeking shelter in the corner room of a graffiti-covered building. Ghoulish ghosts and blue-faced devils spray painted on the walls above their heads.

Safety is relative.

* * *

To conserve paper and the trouble of packing and keeping it dry, I downloaded all of the directions I thought I would need, saved them as PDFs, in the order in which I hoped to use them, inside a desktop folder on my MacBook's screen. For reasons unknown, during the ascent toward the hotelito, the computer wouldn't turn on.  I attempted every reboot strategy I could: pushing the power button repeatedly, opening and closing the computer lid repeatedly, pressing Command Option Escape ad nauseum.

Nada.  

Maybe it needed rest, perhaps the humidity crossed its switches. I don't know. But I did know I needed to get to the hotel before dark, or I would never find it. So I drove my rent-a-car into the foothills of Naranjo directionless and unfettered by knowing where I was.

Afternoon rains soaked the air and windshield. Soft water like a showerhead set on spray. Red-earth mud showed through the plowed green terraces that opened up the sky in spaces between the mountains. The curves of the road grew tighter, raising the altitude with every rolling turn. My rented Kia, so accustomed to the groomed tarmac of the autopista where the odometer had tallied the previous 276 miles, seemed to revel in the challenge, its engine raced with joy as it revved atop over a mishegas of stone, dirt, and cinder that pieced the pavement patches together.

Through the wonder of a dyslexic memory, instead of taking of taking a right, and a right (which the downloaded maps would have shown me) I took a left, a left, and a left.  Farther and farther I wound on the winnowing roads. Back home, these paths would be undeserving of any official designation. But here they were blazed with black-and-white signs and numbers indicating their designation as a state (colony) route: 965, 985, 971, 976. Combinations of nine-hundreds conflated my mind.

I was lost.  

Finally the Kia crawled through a tilted antique green metal gate, indicating an entry into some kind of private property.  But it was not a hotel. It was a steep descent of gravel that I feared would either take me to the other side of the island or the middle of the rain forest.  I executed a judicious twelve-point turn and headed back (I hoped) the way I came.

The sun was gleaming now, and a rainbow projected over the sloping landscape, lush, wet, and green. Then, a few miles from where I reversed direction, I came upon a mini-van which crossed the entire width of the road, and I had to stop.

The van's front wheel had sunk nearly afoot off the edge into the red mud. Three young Japanese-American students were shooting I-Phone movies of their predicament, while their driver pushed the gas. The misdirected tire spun and spun, spewing the thick farm grass with a spray of red dots.  

I was grateful (for not being the one stuck) and simultaneously bereft that (without a doubt) I could not drive around them without enduring the same fate.  Nor could I help them, wearing flip-flops, and temporarily possessing a car half the size of theirs. None of this could prove useful in pushing them out of the muck.

Every two minutes another vehicle arrived, mostly Toyota pickup trucks driven by farmers and landowners. The men brandished patience, smiles, and a few good yucks, interspersed with Spanish swears thrown in our direction. Variations of ¡so pendejo! and ¡que chavienda! Spoken in jest with expectation that the audience would understand how they had annoyed them, also acknowledging that it wasn't really their fault; the road was narrow, the ground was wet. They didn't know where they were going.

After a long surveillance and assessment of the scene by one of the men, a plan was put in place. He spirited a thick-gauged fifty-foot hemp rope from the bed of his truck. He crawled beneath the van like a crab on his back and tied one end of the rope to something substantial in the undercarriage.  Then he angled the rope off of a cement utility pole at the edge of the field, and back to the bumper of his own truck.  With some implicit hand signals directed at the driver of the van the extrication began. The entire apparatus of rigged together van, pole, and truck shook, and the telephone and electric wires trembled but held their tension.  Rubber found traction.

And the scene dispersed.

* * *

That night, I lay in bed at the hotelito.  A thunderstorm passed, the water drained from the tin roof into collection urns stationed at the corners of the guesthouse beneath the wide eaves of the hipped roof. Moonlight broke the clouds and drew path to where the ocean and horizon meet. The rainforest awoke with a rousing cheep--cheep--hum. While I am certain these were the sounds of frogs and insects, my sleepy mind drifted toward the birdfeeder hanging from the potting shed in my backyard.

Finches, chickadees, catbirds, robins, cardinals, jays, and blackbirds, they all visit the clear tube seed silo swinging from a hook.  Beaks dart into tiny holes to retrieve the meal. Yes it is March but winter is retreating at a glacial pace. The snow melts slowly. A migratory pile-up is happening in Rhode Island, cautiously waiting out the cold before going any further north.

Seedeaters thrive, insectivores not so much. It is too cold, too late, this year.

The pecking order is fierce, birds jockey for position along the roofline of the shed and the peak of the garden fence.

Wait your turn and go hungry, or get you beak in there somehow.

One poor creature is always shut out. It addles along, thin and under-fat, accepting it's place. On the ground gleaning tiny pieces of nutrition from the husks of sunflower seeds, because it knows that's the best shot it's got at life.

The cheerrping and chuurrbling of the temperate El Yunque night eased into a rocking assonance. A humming planetary vibrato of insects and tree frogs sang me to sleep.

* * *

"You can't get lost in Puerto Rico," said the woman on the plane next to me, going home to visit her mother. "No matter where you go, you are still on the island. It's not like here where you drive and drive and are in three different states before you realize it."

If I wasn't lost, I was always searching. Buscando.

I parked the car in el centro de Ponce, fed quarters in a meter and wandered the blocks wooden, stucco homes, iron balconies. An architectural cross section of Key West, Florida and Sevilla, Spain unfolded around me.  Beneath blooming yellow and pink flowered trees strolling through a myriad of shops. Stopping inside a resale shop of Catholic artifacts, religious ornamentation sold from estates and deconsecrated churches.  I considered buying something and shipping it home, but alone it would have meant nothing, the message required context.

As I approached a plaza, everyone I saw seemed to have a plastic spoon and cup full of bright colored ice cream, the source of which I wanted to find.  Scooped from a vendor with a cart, with bells jangling from the side as he moved forward. I pointed toward mango, found a place to sit,  and took in the scene.

It was Middle School recess, or early release Friday. One of those things or maybe even a siesta, existing as a relic in this, the most Spanish of American towns. Uniformed girls and boys wearing plaid skirts and white blouses or khakis and monochrome polo shirts emblazoned with school logos ambled about in small groups. Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen year-olds ambled about. So many couples! Holding hands, kissing, whispering in each other's ears, flirting on schoolyard swings or stone benches near fountains. Rehearsing for love, reading from a five hundred year old script. Practicing romance as a learned art.   

No sign of gay love, anything bucking tradition, or at all like me.

Through the iron and stone gates of a convent, a beautiful young nun, in gleaming white habit, flitted between the archways, leaning forward as she walked swiftly in and out of view, an apparition wavering in the hot sun. She had something to do, some place to be, right that moment.  

Don't we all? Don't I?

Alone, but present together with the people and the places around me.

Searching.

March 2015 - You Had a Dream

You had a dream. In it you gave your briefcase to another person, and that person went to work for you, or tried to. Navigating the third week of commuter rail delays, canceled trains, and subway transfer failures caused by mechanical errors, frozen switches, and late-to-arrive equipment. Your ninety minute commute was  prolonged to the three hours. The glia coat of your proxy's brain dissolved. Jangled nerves sparked and fired outside the skull. Gone was the natural bubble-wrap casing between the cerebrum and skull, the substance that cushions the mind against the jostling stress of getting from place to place. 

You don't even carry a brief case. Really, who does anymore?  It's all backpacks and computer sleeves now. Today the case is an empty dream box. Inside you find the archetypical traps of a dying middle class: a steady salary, health insurance, and retirement benefits. The political cry of Gen X, Gen Y, and so-called Millennial no longer claims improvement upon the lives of our American parents. Recent ancestors fade to ghosts, sitting at their separate computers playing solitaire onscreen, as night arrives. They wait for the snow removal crew to arrive, with no where to go, whispering prayers against a sentence lived out in a dementia unit.

***

Across the Ocean, a medieval death cult rises. Today, their internet production allows the world to watch twenty-one captured Coptic Christians wearing orange jump suits, marched on a beach by gun slinging Jihadis toward a ceremonious beheading. Censors blur the pics, but you get the message, as blood ebbs in the tide of the Mediterranean Sea. Water runs red like a Pharaoh's curse. Each video sequel is more sensational than the previous. You saw the prequel, the caged pilot paraded through a dirt packed village amid a throng of jeering men, where he is burned alive. Before that, one captured Westerner has his head cut off by an executioner with a British accent and handheld dagger. You guess that must have gotten boring.

History repeats itself, and rises in your collective memory. The Jordanian pilot is a Salem Witch fallen from the sky, trailed by the burning embers of a billion dollar jet, fueled by imagined sorcery. A Medieval diorama displays lions feasting on flesh in the Coliseum, and hooded prefects of the Spanish inquisition building pyres in the plaza, and Jews boarding boxcars to take a ride deep into a Nazi winter.  Round and round we go...

What is this time that you are living in? Clicking the remote between the Grammy's the Oscars, Forty Year Anniversary of Saturday Night Live, and other mindless self-reverent fluff.  Did you see what Kanye did? What Kim wore? Saturated by distraction while Evil prepares to overrun the world and pull the plug on the screens.

***

You live in Rhode Island, after all, so a blizzard, two nor'easters, and another blizzard–while excessive–are not surprises to anyone here. A sub-freezing reign of artic cold makes the dog's paws pause, bent at his joint, he looks like you as God, eyes pleading, What are you going to do to fix this?  

All you can do is say sorry for forcing him outside, while you warm the pads with your mittens, digging clumps of snow from the tufts of hair, and jostle him forward so he can pee, poo, and get on.

The big question isn't, why do you live here? It's what are you going to do next?

***

Who on this train is willing to kill for it? The passengers entranced by the candy color pixel tiles cascading up and down the screens of their hand held devices?

You worry that it is going to take the worst of America to defeat the death-cult warriors. Our best traits will not be honored. Multiculturalism, religious tolerance, and equal rights won't do the job. Neither will online pornography, Hulu binges, or the games played on the dumbass smart phone.

As you can see we have a short train, the conductor announces apologetically, I suggest you get squishy, say hi to your neighbor and make the best of it. You won't do that, but you will move your backpack to make room for the overflow crowd, as the train crawls and chugs to Boston for work, creating another insidious commute.

The war-if we win it-will be won by an army of insentient drones. Designed by combative humans with a killer instinct. Maybe that is what these pocket video games are actually grooming the train passengers for.

Why does your mind drift right, even while your heart leans left? Is this good sense, or a mental impairment brought on by seven feet of snow and a night of bad dreams?

You close your eyes, and pretend to sleep.

Feb 2015 - Hyde Park

Hyde Park

by Eric Beeman

             Story goes he was a University of Chicago professor who lost his mind. The man high-stepping purposefully up Kenwood Avenue holding a shepherd's staff, wearing a tartan-print sash over homespun clothes. He chanted incantations, annunciations, proclamations, and prophecies. Proselytizing gibberish. His stick tapped on the sidewalk, counting off his steps. Day after day marching along in a lunatic's song.

            "What department did he teach?" I asked Faruk, wanting to know specificity, since this was his neighborhood, his school, where he came to study Mideast Studies.

            "Who knows? From the looks of things Anthropology, Paleontology? Maybe History?"

            "Scottish Studies?" I wondered, observing of his MacDougal-ish garb.

            "I don't think there is such a department."

            "It would be sad, if he didn't seem so sure of himself."

            "It's true, he seems to know what he's doing."

            We eyed the old professor, holding our breath in as a personal caution. Could this kind of mental slide happen to anyone? Even if never expressed in an overt and public fashion?

            "He must have a pension from U of C, or some form of retirement income." I posited, envious that the man lived his life unhinged, but also apparently self-sufficient and cared for. "I wonder if he does his shopping that way...yodeling up and down the aisles of the Jewel."

            "From what I hear he doesn't shop, he gets the same take-out order from the same Chinese place every day."

            "Hah, like you and your General Tso's chicken on Fridays."

            "Exactly like that, asshole." Faruk elbowed me in the ribs, joshingly. "Do you think that will happen to me, if I don't graduate? Walking off the blocks of Hyde Park uttering fragments of the Arabic words I failed to learn in school."

            "Nah, you got this degree, easy."

            "I was supposed to be done last year."

            "Yah but then you'd be gone, and we'd be over."

            "What is it that you think we are?"

* * *

            Twenty-nine is the last age you can be drunk, hopelessly romantic, and people think its cute, or tolerate it in any kind of way.

            Before text messages and cellphones, there were voicemail messages...waiting for the phone to ring four to six times before a recording picked up the call. I always said something stupid. So to avoid that, I chose instead to drop folded notes through Faruk's apartment building mail-slot in the middle of the night. After riding down the Lake Michigan bike path, post-exit the all-night-bars of Boystown.

            A series of love doctrines, drafted at bar tables while most of the men caterwauled and danced with the beat of bad music, or smoked cigarettes and spilled drinks, leaning flirtatiously out the open windows of cafes with a beer in the hand.

            I was preoccupied, he wasn't. That's what we were. To anyone's eyes, an unlikely couple. He was the impeccably educated, super handsome, well-built son of an Arab Christian businessman and an Irish Nurse. They fled East Jerusalem during in the 1967 war.

            Me, I was a the thin ever-cycling arts-geek son of a fallen-apart Massachusetts family, a wealthy mother cut off from her funds, and an upstart computer whiz dad who left town after he became bored with his suburban life.  

            We were a legacy of mismatched amour played out a generation later...Faruk's striving intellect and my frayed artistry. Spun off in a hundred directions like blobs of Silly String sprayed out of can.

            There was a backstory to our pairing that happened in Boston a few years before. For lack of a better term, I was the other woman to his happy household. Which had been a typical mid-1990's gay partnering. Because living with a man back then was still something of a political statement, it was imperative to look happy, and to be as typically functioning as any straight couple appears to be.  Nine to five jobs, retirement accounts, Friday night cocktail parties with other couples. Boring.

            I can forgive myself, somewhat. Because you can't be the other woman if you don't know the man you are having an affair with was quasi-married.  He kept that from me. Faruk and I had both been lied to by our common love interest. Betrayed and made a fool of, we both fled, and somehow ended up here. Him for school, me to get away.

            Faruk hated me, when we met at the house party of a common friend. He said so. But was just curious enough to want to get to know me.

            Meanwhile, I had a love story playing in my head. That the cheating asshole in Boston represented a mutual wrong turn on the way to what was actually meant to be. He was the car wreck that brought us together.

            Though in truth, it was simply lust in the back of a taxi cab on Cinco de Mayo. Accidental intercourse fueled by Margarita's, Faruk's final exam fatigue, and a night dancing at Berlin, a gender-bent semi-Goth/semi-gay dance club located next to the Belmont El tracks. The plan was to share a cab. But then, curiosity surging, Faruk kissed me in the backseat (I never would have made the first move, he was far too good-looking for me to even try). Our infidel make-out session pissed-off the Pakistani cabbie, who asked us both to get out of his taxi at my house, instead  Faruk staying in the taxi the rest of the way home which had been the plan. We slept together in Lincoln Park where I had rented a mattress-sized spare room in the oversized apartment of my brother who had moved out to Chicago the year before me.

            After our first few weeks of revenge sex, I intonated to Faruk that perhaps the whole bad scene back in Boston must have happened so he and I could be together. His response was swift, "You and I are not forever."  He wasn't about to hitch his wagon to my mess.  I didn't fit the profile of the Gay Doctor Husband or the South End Condo.  That was my ego's interpretation. In truth he was hurt, crushed by the disappointment that Boston didn't work out for him. And no matter how it happened, I was a part of why it hadn't.

            Thus began a decade of interpersonal decadence and inter-relational dysfunction. A prophylactic that prevented a serious relationship involving anyone else. The whole time I was up and down like waves on a tidal chart. Sometimes announcing that I am done with this, but then coming back for more. All the while he was a flat line across the chart.  Where the lines cross, we were together. He never got mad, never got excited, but was happy to open his door to me.

             

 * * *

            Eight months into whatever it was that we had, we journeyed together into the zero degree sunlight of a January morning in Chicago. Eight AM.  The air was bright white and dry. The sound of the snow so cold it tinkled like broken glass as our boots kicked it away, sending tiny rainbows of light onto the sidewalk.  

            He kissed me on the cheek, and gave me a hug the way men do, right shoulder to right shoulder, but bodies otherwise disconnected. "I love the coat," he said. "Perfect for this weather, shukran." He had begun the habit of using short Arabic phrases on me as he entered his final semester of Grad school. Thank you, you're welcome, congratulations....mabrouk.

            For Christmas I had given him a heavy, full-length duffle coat imported from England, the kind with the buttons cut like whales teeth. The hood, when worn, made him look like a monk, or the Ghost of Christmas Future, his face lost inside a tunnel of dark navy wool. 

            "Al'afwa,"I tried to answer in the language he practiced on me. Noticing how the winter sun elicited amber flecks in the retinas of his eyes.

             What Faruk didn't know was I had bought myself the same coat, in my size of course. On those frigid wind chill days where the cold steals the air from your lungs, I would wear it outside and imagine I was walking with him.  I never wore it when he was around. I still have it hanging in my closet, though really Chicago is the only place it is really needed.

            I watched him head to class at the Oriental Institute, an archaic name for a contemporary program, while I walked perpendicular across the park toward the Garfield Avenue bus.

           

            As disarming as winters in Chicago can be, nothing is more jarring then suddenly seeing a small flock of parrot-green birds in the barren trees. I had heard about them before, but never seen them. Monk parakeets, the offspring of someone's pets that have miraculously wintered over in Hyde Park for the past 40 years. Probably released by a student after they graduated.  Out of their element, unmatched for their environment. Not thriving, but persisting.  Bursting with elongated tropical cheers and screeches, finding some edible seed to eat amid the frozen silver branches of the park. I'd swear that I could see their breath exhale, in the arid vacuum-packed air of winter.

            In warmer months I would ride through the same park at night. A drunk man on a bike, with a love manifesto scribbled in my hand. Sometimes knocking, if it was the weekend. Other times dropping it through the door, if I knew he had class in the morning.

            Looking back, I was an honest-to-god stalker. If he didn't like me half as much as he did (which is still a fraction of my adoration for him) he would have cause to file a restraining order. A stop against the reckless beautiful love that tugged at me day and night.  

            A bird let go in the wrong place. A madman singing a genetically derived song from a place inside no one could see. Refusing to recognize that not forever is always the safest bet.

January 2015 - Christmas in Jail

Christmas in Jail

-by Eric Beeman

Living on the other side of the red kettle, the donation side, I receive what the bell ringers collect.  Praise the donators, the chain-store cheese-shop offerings, and the past year's unsold gift boxes. It's fine. Like a grateful Cratchit, I accept what the prison guard tosses my way, his keys chime from the waist and jingle all the way from his wide jack-booted stance, as the box flies toward my hands. I inspect the foil sealed cheese-wheels and shrink-wrapped pub sausages, an inmate in a Federal prison. Breathe deep, no smell.

Such calories of fat are an aid to the holiday mess-hall meal. I am grateful. Food today has been festive, but scarce: a three-by-four inch slice of turkey about quarter-inch thick, a spoon of stuffing and jarred gravy, with a whole lot of canned spinach, and over-boiled carrots. The full portion of food, was craftily commandeered by wannabe Mafiosos yesterday. Jailhouse dons, wrangle and barter with the Three Latin Kings who prepare our meals.  Erase a year's worth of penny poker debts, then sweeten the bargain by offering a few smuggled tobacco cigarettes. Great roasts of meat rolled into winter coats and spirited away. Half turkeys and cans of corned beef, carried under the arms or hidden atop the sucked-in bellies of couriers, up the slope and into to the cellblock units that squat against the edge of the prison compound, built on a dynamite-blasted ledge in the Adirondacks.

Constructed to serve as the Lake Placid Olympic Village, the five identical beige-brick buildings were repurposed as a prison when the Russians left town. The second-place team left behind their silver hockey medals for the fence company to find in the brush, when they erected two sixteen foot high chain-link rings around the yard. And filled the gap in between with coiled slinky tubes of Constantia wire. Razors that catch and kill low-flying quail attracted by the alluring green of the Warden's lawn.

The stolen meat becomes an over-sized private dinner, re-heated on hotplates jimmied from a plug-in iron stolen from the laundry. Greedily the crooks tear at the flesh and gobble it down. Gastric revels of joy sing inside their bellies, while Franco-Canadian Christmas tunes wobble over the mountain via contraband radios that pipe in music from Montreal.

If the Salvation Army gift boxes were something they really coveted, they would have controlled the distribution of it, too. They really can't help themselves, driven by a compulsion to consume what belongs to someone else. Already they plan their next heist.

I am as guilty as them all, of course, but pray that my future lies on the other ide of the red kettle. No gambling, no drugs, no sex. No problems!  That's what my lawyer advised me on my commitment day. And so far he's been right.  

I work harder here than I ever have. Cutting grass all summer, pushing a motor less mower in laser sharp lines, and shoveling the constantly blowing, constantly falling snow in the winter. I'm always tired and always hungry. Instead of food I consume daydreams. At night I sleep with a belly-full of hallucinations, projected by a light in my head that only three years of incarceration can conjure.

But tonight I have a gift, a hot-mustard sausage-dipping dream.

* * *

This Christmas, I asked my family not to visit me. Honestly visits make prison harder for me.

Two yeas in a row during the holidays, my family made the incalculably long trip to Saranac Lake from Oregon, Colorado, New Hampshire. Gerry-rigging their own kind of celebration, exchanging presents in roadside motels and taverns along the old scenic routes of pre-interstate New York.  They'd spend the maximum two hours with me, making small talk, sitting congenially in hard plastic chairs lined up in rows on a high-gloss linoleum floor.

It was a brief reminder that you are human, immediately clobbered to death by a full-cavity search exiting the Visiting Room. A little something to remind you of your status in life, stripped naked, you stand cold in a closet as the guard tells you to shake out your hair with your fingers, lift your sack and spread your cheeks, a sterile preamble to homoerotic porn that never delivers any action.

I can't remember what I even talked about when the family visited. The day the Cubans rioted? Lunging at anyone alive after Immigration arrived to hear their cases, only to offer them all the same photocopied letter from the INS listing their release date as "undetermined." Imprisoned since arriving in the US more a decade before, on a ragtag flotilla of boats. They were soon jailed without any trial, only the reasonable suspicion that they were convicted murderers, rapists, thieves, or all three. Some were, but not all.  Many simply boarded the wrong boat after Fidel emptied his penitentiaries as a big joke on America, easing his own prison budget substantially.

Or did I tell them I now practice yoga? Taught to me by a killer named Bob. He was shipped up from Pennsylvania after a riot there. As a peaceful man (now) he was deemed safe for reassignment to a medium security facility. We practiced weekly in the chapel under the watchful eye of the travelling Chaplin, until the Warden walked by and deemed it "martial arts." Worried we were practicing a khaki-drab coup toward inside his slave-labor fiefdom. I still practice everyday. Alone in my cell: the Five Tibetan Rites, followed by a White Skeleton Meditation.

Two of my visits ended in car accidents.  My grandparents drove into a ditch trying to find Cooperstown. Surely telling friends back home they were going to visit the Hall of Fame, not their convict grandson.  My ex-lover's rented car careened into the woods, flattening a forty yard row of baby fir trees before coming to a stop in tears. That was the day I told him not to come back. I told him I didn't want to be marked as a jailhouse bitch. Because people always talk about your visitors, and men in jail will take advantage if they see a young gay guy to have prison-sex with.

The truth is, I don't plan to go back to my ex anyway. I've spent three years unpeeling a thousand-layer of the onion from around my life, only to find nothing inside of it worth cooking.  The American Express bills, the exposed brick loft apartment, the cocaine nightclubs, and Neiman Marcus shaving salves...that's all his shtick, not mine.  

I think he got the message.

* * *

Christmas is a special time for my cellmate, or "cellie," as they say here. He's serving the eighth year of a nine year sentence for importing heroin. He abused his father's import license, using to smuggle opium into DC from Asia. The big mistake, of course, was using nearly as much as he sold. He was only nineteen when he was sent to prison. Being a denizen and citizen of the Axis of Evil, he was deemed a "kingpin" so they sent his Persian ass as far up the river as they could, spending three years in a maximum security penitentiary before coming here. He dealt with rape and beatings, and everything you expect.

So when I arrived, he took pity on my youth, and schooled me on how to he keep safe from the similar, albeit less violent,  tribulations that could have come my way in a correctional setting. 

My cellie arranges for checks to be deposited in the commissary accounts of the poorer criminals street criminals.  The black guys from DC, where spitting is a federal offense, whose only money comes from the fifteen cent per hour wage the prison pays to work in the textile factory assembling army uniforms. They get to spend half of my cellie's deposit on themselves. With the other half they bring him extra supplies of Spam, ramen noodles, tubes of TV commercial toothpaste and  tiny bottles of shampoo.  

Because Christmas here thankfully arrives with lax policing by the guards, causing their interest in random cell searches to wane. And, since cavity searches can't catch balloons stuffed with heroin, swallowed to and eliminated later, his DC allies got paid even more this week. They kiss their girls goodbye then swallow a tiny balloon of powder to deliver to our cell when colon delivers it.

I tolerate his penchant for inhaling dope, and frightening attempts of intravenous injection via an altered ballpoint pen. Once the deed is done, his intoxication becomes an internal process. The room smells a bit pukeish at times, but otherwise, he seems quite content, and never does me wrong. In exchange for my lassitude about his drug use, he tolerates the four-in-the-morning clatter, the knocks at our steel door, and the guard unlocking the door.  "On Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, and Vixen! " Someone laughs, the overnight guard startles me awake, hollering my last name. I dress in a flash, and leave my cellie to chase his dragon through sugar plum dreams.

The night guard is handsome. Hot really. Jet black hair, strong Mohican profile, long eyelashes, tight round ass, and thick thighs, that walk with Quebecois swag. He follows me to the Unit door, and I wonder if he's checking me out too, or if my gaydar is simply out of whack after three years of celibate jamming. The key in the slot, he turns.  I am greeted by an artic blast , and the unappreciative white face of a grounds crew officer handing me a plastic shovel.

***

I love being outside in the cold, one of only a few men. The loners, and the lovers of frigidity. Those with shovels, the hungry and the sober. Worker elves.

Wind clips. Snow drifts as fast as it is removed. The path is never clear. Outside the fence, prisoners holding security clearances use snow blowers and drive government plows. Inside, to keep combustible fuels out of the wrong hands, all labor is done manually.

I stand and face the blizzard. It is Christmas, and this is my gift, a North Pole snow. It whistles with the buzz of the light towers, whose sodium lamps shoot prisms of color through the crystals.

A force pierces my coat, penetrating both pair of pants, my long underwear and doubled-up wool, stockings. Six-points enter my veins a hundred times, a race of cold shoots into my blood, molecule by molecule, and forces the darkness of my past out through my pores. Purifying me, until I am new again. Unlayered, free, easy and strong.

As I return to my cell the young, maybe-gay, guard looks up from his sleepy eyes. Hat off, feet on the desk, he gives me a smile. Today, it feels like love. I accept your charity, and return it in kind.  Whatever it is that you want to put in the box.