Entries from September 2014 ↓

Summer’s over and G. called up for a dinner date, the son now safely ensconced up at university. Dinner, a drink back at his place, stayed over as usual but he didn’t fuck me. I sucked him for a while, and he liked it but didn’t come, and he barely fondled me. He did, however, bring me a gift from Paris, and invite me up to his country place. I think he’s just getting older. Not sure how I feel about this change – it’s not like I like him so much that a sex-less relationship is going to cut it.

We get together more regularly now, my old friends and I. I try to make sure to see them when I go down to see my parents, which is more often now that Dad is so frail. But after a certain number of beers, the conversation inevitably turns to the tragedies. I know not everyone had teen years like these. I’ve met a lot of people over the years, and  I know this isn’t normal. After dinner, we drink and talk about our dead friends. We’re damaged, B. maybe most of all, he was in the room when D. shot Leon., but all of us, interrelated in our damage for sure. Maybe it helps to talk about it, at least it’s not a secret here. But I can’t have the same conversation over & over. It’s not your fault. You couldn’t have done anything more. We tried. We failed.

My father has not been well. He’s 86, a multiple cancer survivor, and he’s tired. He’s frail. He’s 139 pounds and 6’1″. His legs are about the circumference of my arms. He looks like the pure instantiation of will.

I was visiting this weekend to help out and run errands. We bought him a new suit, a statement of hope that he will be here to go to the next party. But he also had me type up the details of his career for his obituary. He wants to be remembered for what he did, who he helped, that he made a mark in this world. I can feel him pulling back. He’s almost ready.

I’m not afraid of death, and I’m not opposed to choosing your time to go. But I cried on the train home.

It’s the weekend before 9/11 and I am coming back home to the city on Amtrak. We pull out of Newark and around that curve and I don’t see the new tower, I don’t see the current landscape at all, all I can see is that burning plume of smoke through my tears.

I took an overnight train Thursday into Friday that week in 2001, a train chock full of heartbroken New Yorkers, all of us desperate to return home. Most of us had been up since Tuesday and crying and/or drinking ever since.I had been drinking vodka nonstop since Chicago. It doesn’t actually dull the pain but it made me feel like I was trying.

We all knew what had happened, we had watched every detail on tv. But this was our home, and we hadn’t been there, and we had this unbearable compulsion to bear witness, to help, to just fucking be there.

We came around the curve, and there was a collective sob. We gasped. A few of us wailed. You couldn’t breathe. All you could see was this hole in the skyline, these giant plumes of smoke rising high in the sky. The train practically tipped over, every single one of us staring at the eastern skyline and what wasn’t there.