Tumbling West by Turns East and South, Tumbling by Turns

Restored and with an aroused curiosity toward this person to whom I had long been attracted, but also still to some degree a bollixed mess of radioactive emotional unpredictability, back into the cruddy Chevy Malibu and on the road out of the gloriously leaf-shuttered and wet-rivered woods to New Brunswick, NJ. 

The first 5 years of my life were spent in Dunellen, NJ, a tiny little town right along old Route 22, near Piscataway and New Brunswick, in Middlesex County. We had a big corner house with a wooden fence in front, what seemed like a vast expanse of yard and a grid-like system of sidewalks. Nearby, there was Johnson Park, which had a sort of "zoo" that included free roaming peacocks. One of the most vivid memories of my young life, from maybe 3 or 4 years old, was being terrified of the cry of the peacocks. "Bad boodies," I called them, and I really meant, shit, those things are fucking awful, but I didn't talk that way at 4. 




I guess I wasn't alone in my sentiments. 

I was headed back to New Brunswick to spend a night at the apartment of a man who is like a brother to me, with whom I've been friends for 35 years. This person probably knows me better than anyone on the planet, in ways that are only possible after you've been communicating with someone and telling them your version of your life for decades. One of our first heart to heart talks was wandering in a cemetery in Annapolis MD in 1982, probably talking about love and women. It always seemed like an odd coincidence to me that he ended up in Middlesex County NJ. 

The view from the balcony of my friend's apartment in New Brunswick

We reconnected, hung out, ate great Indian food, I got to meet his partner who is a spectacular human being. I was still shaking off some of the heavier emotional energy of the family visits. I felt recurring waves of resentment and depression around the breakup with A, still haunting me, but becoming oddly backgrounded and sort of like a tiresome asshole ghost that you just wish would get a fucking life. Part of the resurgence of the haunting was due to the fact that, the last time I had been up at my sister's on the river, A and her son had been with me-- October the year before shit started to fall apart. So the echoes and memories kept cycling. 

There's also this thing where, when you witness functional, happy couplehood of course you get reminded. The domestic life! There's something so goddamned beautiful about it. Half the time or more I have been basically feral-- for years I haven't known how to nest, how to make a comfortable home, how to work that transition from hunter gatherer to farmer. My spirit would have fit in with those restless weirdos who insisted on picking up stakes and moving ever westward, until they hit the wall of the Pacific (pace Kesey and those rough hewn Stampers). It seems like some people hit Ohio or wherever and were like, cool, let's cut down some trees, build a nice little place, and just stay here until we die. I never had the knack. 

But, with A, I started to get the hang of it. She is a talented and dedicated nester, not necessarily along the lines of comfort or making space for a creative home environment, but more along the lines of assiduous attention to detail, class consciousness and "taste." Many of my personal possessions are brutally functional and unintentionally signal absolutely no awareness of class consciousness or taste whatsoever. For example, I had a weird primary color rainbow kind of rug for use as my drum rug-- the very important rug that goes under the drumset hardware and protects the floor as well as keeping the drums from slipping. The rug worked great. A went to great lengths to pick out and buy me a classy woven jute rug of subtle color and clean lines, a thing I just never would have even thought of. Another quick example: shirts without pockets. I love having a shirt pocket. But no. Classier to not have a pocket. So every shirt she bought for me-- no pocket. And now I admit to being drawn to shirts with no pocket. Pockets are...déclassé. 

I found it astonishing how she spent weeks poring over paint colors in order to choose exactly the right color scheme for the interior walls of the house we picked out together. How she would shop online with dedicated focus in order to obtain some item or other, like a towel rack. I learned from her how to shop cheaply at Whole Foods, how to obey fabric care tags while doing laundry (even down to the weird and mysterious exceptions on a case by case basis, filed away), how to hang art on the walls the right way (including for god sakes using a spirit level and the proper system of drywall anchored screws and hooks, and of course, properly framed, as is classy), how to prepare meals with low glycemic load and high protein, how to fold a fitted sheet *alone*, how to darn socks, how to develop household systems for regular chores (a steam cleaner for tile and sealed hardwood!) that made them automatic and as easy as possible. 

I have no idea why I was suddenly ready for so much domestic life (and fathering life, but that's another story). But I did dive into it, and it was painful to lose that weirdly comforting householder lifestyle when she ended the partnership, in the midst of losing everything else. In fact, one of the first things I did when I moved into the room at my friend's house was buy a steam cleaner for the floors. And I shopped for it the way A would have, too-- research, reading reviews, combining quality with low price, searching like a bloodhound for the absolute BEST steam cleaner for the money. Shit I just never used to do in the past. I would have wandered into Target, bought a cheapass steam cleaner, been pissed by how lousy it was, yet tried to use it for years, cursing. 

So, witnessing the ease and comfort of the domestic life of my friend and his obviously loving and collaborating partner echoed back, echoed back, echoed back. Miles Davis once said that the key to happiness is having a bad memory. Huh. 

The morning of the 12th, I noticed that the woman with whom I had made the emerging connection over the past few days, including more conversation about relationship issues, posted a devastatingly sexy and beautiful (both) picture of herself on Facebook-- let's just say, an unlikely pic to draw in a casual admirer let alone someone interested in pursuing more. Looking back, I realize that, while of course feeling physically attracted in response to the pic, I felt a sudden flash of tenderness and respect, the intensity of which surprised me. My usual strategy when I start to get drawn to a woman is to go to humor, and this experience was no exception. I messaged her that morning trying to sound light and casual. She invited me to say more. I indicated my thoughts in response to her pic were basically unprintable. We deftly and mutually changed the subject. Thrust and parry. 

My friend and I were headed to Long Beach Island, him for one night, me for two. I popped into New Brunswick first for an all-too-brief visit with an old sobriety friend of mine from Phoenix who now lived in New York. We had 20 minutes to eat a donut, drink some coffee and talk. 

But that brief flirtatious exchange of the morning, a few lines over about 15 minutes, a little seductive dance of wit and shy or bold (both) acknowledgement, was on my mind all day. To my delight, that evening, she initiated a return to the experiment and picked up the thread and handed it to me. Basically unprintable. Reply 8 hours later: trying to conjure those unprintable lines, she said. 

One of the hits in an image search for "size 5 rocket boots"

Okay. I'm a writer. Let's go.