Getting my hustle on

I’m getting my hustle on for my book and may be doing more readings.  I envision waddling up and down Broadway wearing a flappy sign with a picture of my book Mean-Spirited Tales on it, front and back.  Maybe I’ll hurl copies of my book from a tray to passengers on the A train.  Really — no.  I did read an article about a man who makes boo koo dinero selling candies on the train this way.  Hurrah for self-employment!  High falutin publishers, kiss my grits — no I totally take that back.  But the threat of the self-published author is on the rise.  Just saying.

I used to think it was cheesy.  But it’s not now — not since I’ve done it.  It is more reputable than it was in the past.  Though there is snobbery about it.  At this point I’m just glad to have sold enough to buy groceries, socks, candies, and Styrofoam skulls.

It’s brilliant that people have read something I’ve written, and that they’ve paid either ninety-nine cents for the Kindle version or nine ninety-five for the hardcopy.  I’ve always dreamed of making money writing.  You’ve all helped to make that come true.  Each and every last one of you out there in TV land.

I spoke to a woman who manages space for vendors.  She explained the system to me.  It wouldn’t be cost-effective for me to buy space to sell my book.  But I appreciated the feedback.  Much love to her.

I spoke to a gentleman at a bookstore today.  He said they were always concerned in getting numbers in for book signings.  He told me that he had been disappointed in the numbers of people that writers had brought in for their readings.  He asked if I thought I could bring in 20 people.  I told him I had 25 people for my last reading at the Indian Road Cafe.  I believe more people would have come if it weren’t at 10:30pm on a Halloween weekend.  I hope I didn’t exhaust my numbers in the last reading.  I so hope some of you come to my next one.  I’ll give out candies and promise not to read War & Peace.

Haha!  — Wouldn’t it be messed up if I invited everyone to my reading, and read a technical book on statistics instead – leaving everyone baffled? – Hey, wait a cotton picking minute! – I must back track to what I said up there about the Kindle version of my book – it’s only ninety-nine cents!  So why isn’t, like, everyone buying it?  That WSJ article about marketing my book is a liar – yes, an article can be a liar.

I thought titling my book Mean-Spirited Tales would be cheeky.  But maybe people don’t like “Mean.”  They take it literally.   Maybe I’ll change it to Saccharine Tales of Banality.  Haha!

The earth is just toilet paper for us to wipe our asses with until it’s all gone

When my friend Jeff lived on Fourteenth Street in the eighties it was sleazy. He lived in an SRO, a three story walk up. I went there once and we smoked a lot of cigarettes. He introduced me to Charles Bukowski, underground comic books and OTB.  He wrote me a poem that had the word ‘equatorial’ in it. Sometimes he was called Angry Jeff. Fourteenth Street isn’t what it was years ago. But nothing is what it was years ago — silly me.

Now there are modeling agencies in that region so there are gorgeous people parading up and down that street. Union Square is there with that farmer’s market everyone loves. Whole Foods is there and DSW. I like to go to that Halloween store on 10^th St. Today I went looking for green spider webs and purple candles.

When I left I walked across Fourteenth Street to the west side. There were so many people sucking at the air. You had to scoot and slide to get around them all. Oh my — I’m glad I didn’t breed. There isn’t enough air. Some of the people didn’t look happy to be here. I always say I wouldn’t want to create another lost soul. There are just so goddamned many people and a lot of them are populated here – oh I know there’s China but – good lawd!

What are all of us doing here? I suppose we buy things, use energy. Some of us think we’re special but if we thought about how many of us exist, maybe we’d change our minds. How could so many of us be special when there are so many of us?  It’s like bugs.

There was a tall man in green scrubs on the train. Maybe he was a doctor. I guess we should make more people to fix other people. Doctors are needed to fix all the people being born. And people have to have cars, so there have to be people made to make all those cars. And then there have to be people made to sweep the floors and there have to be people to put in jail so other people can feel lofty.

So I get it — generally, people have to be here to make stuff for others to buy and use. That’s it. In other parts of the world they have different notions but the idea of having stuff even in those places is seductive. The ‘good life’ is pushed on us like heroin. A lot of people imagine they’re here looking for something better or to be a part of some phenomenal movement that they’re going to start and they think their kid’s gonna help. Maybe. But like I always say, maybe the earth is just toilet paper for us to wipe our asses with until it’s all gone.

Ma wants to sit down yo!

A mouse had babies in my apartment.   They don’t know shit from shamrock because they’re too young yet — they don’t know they’re supposed to run when they see me.  The one today just walked around my apartment with impunity, exploring, sniffing at my books on the floor.  He stopped to drink droplets of water on the kitchen floor — while I stood there.    Maybe he knew (she?) that I referred to mice as cute Disney creatures in a previous post.  Maybe he knew that I don’t kill mice, that in the previous days I merely trapped his brother and sister in a shoebox with bread, took them outside and let them free in the woods.  “This nice lady likes us,” they think.  How did the one sibling wind up in my bathtub like Sisyphus?  He’d get so far up the porcelain curve before sliding down.  I gotta admit he was kinda cute.  But how?  It couldn’tve climbed up the outside of the tub.  Baffling.  The one today I didn’t capture so it could still be in here.  It just better stay the hell out of the crack of my ass!  One time a couple years ago I swear one flitted across my ass while I was in bed.  I’m not infested.  And I’m not a dirty girl.  I think they just know I feel their pathos.  I left the little runt here today and went on my way.

On the train I fell asleep and was awakened by a man who sat across from me grumbling about some fellow black folks he was fittin’ to kill.  Talking to himself the whole time, using the rapper’s expletive, the so-called N word — he promised to kill up all of them because they had done something to him.  He was so angry, spewing all that killingness that I left the car.  I have a choice you know.  As this was one of the cars that you couldn’t walk through, at the next stop I got out of the car and ran to the next car before the train pulled off.

I went to my doctor’s.  She thinks the tingling in my face and arm may be because of a nerve healing after the oral surgery I had — so I’ll have tests.  I left there and tried to find humane traps at Whole Foods and Home Goods.  No go.  I thought my friend who I’m hanging out with tomorrow might know where to get them.  She knows about stuff like that.

The train going home was crowded so I had to stand.  “Yo ma you want to sit down?”  A man says, pointing to a seat next to a giant suitcase.  I thought he wanted me to sit on the suitcase at first.  I knew he was off — I shook my head and cast my eyes down.  He was a white male using black street vernacular, tall, wearing urban gear.  He had piercing eyes and a threatening demeanor.   He then yelled at passengers with a psychotic testosterone fueled rant, “Ma wants to sit down yo — let ma sit down!”   He walked toward me.  I shook my head and moved further away.  He targeted an Asian gentlemen reading a book.  “Yo, you smart.  Let Ma sit down.”  The poor guy looked at me and began to rise.  I shook my head furiously, determined not to speak as I didn’t want to say anything this man could attach himself to.  Thank God this was a car you could walk through — I made my way closer to the area between the cars.  The man continued bullying, “Ma wants to sit down, somebody gotta git up yo!”  He waved an arm at all the passengers.  A woman offered me her seat.  I thought about her personality type.  Was she easily intimidated, somebody who didn’t feel worthy of her own seat?  I swiftly made it to the next car while the train was still moving — I love being able to escape a car if I have to.  Looking behind me constantly, I could see the champion of my cause peering through the window.  I leaned back so my view would be blotted by a standing passenger.  I wondered if I should move still further, but I was fine for the rest of the ride — what the hell was going on in New York City’s subway system today?

At home I called my friend about our date for the museum tomorrow, planning also to ask about the humane mouse traps.  She has a consciousness about these things.  She’s into healthy eating — her sister is into holistic health.  I imagined a little box with compartments for food and water, maybe with a steel mesh window so the little buggers wouldn’t feel claustrophobic.  “Hey, do you know about humane mouse traps?” I said, telling her my mouse stories.  “Just kill the little motherfuckers with a bat.  You let ’em go they’re gonna be killed anyway,” she said.   Ah yeah, the day.

Red Leather Wedge Shoes

My train ride wasn’t so hellish today.  There was a mummy with her baby on there.  It was screeching.  It looked like a monkey – oh it was so, cute!  I looked at it and smiled.  Its mummy fed it crackers.  I was calm and giving out good vibrations because of it.  I don’t enjoy the trains they usually have on the A line because the doors at either end are locked.  They make me feel like I’m in a coffin.  The train I was on today was an old one.  These trains have doors that open on either end so you can walk through them to the next car, or take a piss between them.  Years ago on my way back from The Bottom Line with my boyfriend and another couple, I had to pee.  We were drunk.  On one of these trains, we all went between the cars, so that they could guard me so I could pee unseen.  It was winter and freezing cold between the cars.  They sang while I pissed, “Don’t freeze your booty hole!”  Good times…good times…

So it was nice, having to do this difficult errand and being given a big old silver train to ride.  I listened to the baby screeching and looked at different passengers.  The man across from me had a horrible patch of psoriasis on his arm, but I said, hey, I have a rash on my arm too, from food allergies, I’m guessing.  I must take care of it soon. There was a nice-looking woman wearing a short skirt and some old scraped up red leather wedge shoes.  The shoes were cool looking, high.  The wedge part was red leather as well and the toe part was like a pump shoe.  The rest of the woman’s clothes weren’t beaten up, only the shoes were.  She allowed me to look at her – she didn’t look back defensively, or give off a ‘why is this bitch looking at me vibration.’  So I looked at the monkey baby, the man with the rash and the lady with the red shoes between thinking about my mission.  When the train pulled into 59^th Street, the man sitting next to the woman in the red shoes told her that he liked her shoes too!  It was good to see that somebody else ‘got’ that kind of a look.

Mariah Carey’s

 

On the A train platform a man banged on plastic pails with drumsticks.  He sat on a low wooden stool.  His spectators were a tall well-dressed woman, a few men, and some fidgety kids.

It annoyed me, this banging in the cavernous station.  Perfect venue, I suppose for a street ‘musician’ wanting to expand his acoustics.  With his head turned upward, he banged repetitively, furiously, entranced.  I was impressed by his dexterity, but I wondered how he’d do on real drums — the rhythm was so isolated and his instrumentation was limited.  He was good enough for a plastic pail drummer I supposed.

I could have done without it.  I had just finished shopping at Whole Foods after a long day.  Because of my run down status, I pat myself on the back for doing anything more than just going to work.  This day I had come from the other end of town after work and a meeting no less.  I forced myself to be out and about, alive and moving, living, bleh blehhhh.  When one does this, one must accept that they are mixing with the forces, unable to control what happens around them.  Bang, bang, bang, bangidity, bangidity, bop, bop, bangidity, bang, bip, pop, pop, pop…

I didn’t like the pounding on the plastic pail drums coinciding with my movements, my heartbeat, footsteps.  It was intrusive.  When I got down to the platform and began walking toward the middle where I like to get on the train, I walked purposefully out of synch with the plastic pail beat – I didn’t want to appear as if I enjoyed walking to the beat – plus it would be corny, as if I were perhaps fantasizing about being in a video, or being a runway model.  I have my own agenda.

I walked to the newspaper stand and put my Whole Foods bag on the floor between my feet.  I wondered briefly if I should hold it in my hand in case some urchin tried snatching it away.  These are the kinds of bad things I think about when my body doesn’t have its defenses about it because it’s run down.

Standing at the side of the newspaper stand I entertained myself by staring at the various and sundry magazine covers, glass encased on the side panel.  There were glamour magazines, sport magazines, those ‘very specialized’ hip hop magazines like XXL, and fashion magazines.

Mariah Carey.  She lost weight.  She was on one I don’t remember which one now – in a jogging bra type shirt and, panties.  The plastic pail banging went on.  I fixated on the magazine cover.  Probably airbrushed, but nonetheless the bitch has googobs of money and can afford expensive exfoliates and probably has skin like honey.  She looked like candy.  I like Mariah Carey, even if I don’t have any of her albums.  I thought, I’ll bet her pussy is really nice.  Pretty.  On the cover of the magazine it is easy to imagine with that luxuriance. I’ve seen different ones.  I thought about it.  It probably doesn’t have any hair on it.  Oh well, and then the train came.

What can I say, I escaped the drumming, but there was a man sitting across from me on the train whose looks I didn’t like.  He was generically dressed, pretty average, but there was a sinister undercurrent about him, soulless.  He looked like one of those guys you could mistake for being a nice guy, and you might go too far with him but get a rude awakening because he would have no qualms about shooting or stabbing you.  Also he was one of the million assholes who turns his iPod or headphones up too loud.  I could hear hip hop.  I like hip hop.  I used to love it.  I don’t know what’s happened to it now – maybe I’ll start listening to it again and see.  I told you in other words that I really had no business being out because there were poison vibes coming out of me, so everything seemed worse than what it really was.   Except for Mariah Carey’s…

This guy, when he didn’t close his legs when a nice older woman sat next to him, I really hated him then.  The woman could easily have had more space but this guy wouldn’t budge with his legs wide open.  He stared ahead, but you could tell he was really conscious of people around him like he could see you though he wasn’t looking at you.  He drooped his head down then toward his knees and started bobbing his head to the hip hop beat — which of course irritated me.  There was a deadness to him though.  He scared me.  When more people got off of the train, I moved my seat because I couldn’t stand being near him with that music too loud and, just him!

When I got home I thought about how wild this world is, and how you had to get something good out of the day because all you really have is the moment.  I also thought about how wrong I could have been about that guy that I hated on the A train.  I’ve been wrong before — especially when I have poison gasses coming out of me…

Corporate Sheet Cake

 

Dawn of the millennium, 1999:  my nervous breakdown manifests itself as clinical anger.  I smear on war paint and get on the A train.  Beware the person who opens a newspaper too wide into my space, who sits next to me and bangs me with their elbow while searching for gum, who rests a bag on a seat while the train is crowded…

Flowing with the stream I’m a fucking human lemming on 42^nd Street.  GOD FORBID I walk west while everyone walks east — these gray-suited motherfuckers would knock me down!

I get to the corporate hell-hole without a bruise, without running into co-workers on the way demanding exhausting talk.  I don’t like a lot of the people here.  Most are aggressive, game-playing, conniving, shit-eating grinners – back-stabbing, pus-filled goons.  They keep the system going in circles with great numbers of casualties all over the world.  Consciousness doesn’t negate my complicity, as I purchase the shoes made in Chinese factories, consume the items that require the going elsewhere and sucking out resources and labor for this never-ending demand of we who seek great distraction for the cost of a gaping hole filled with Zoloft.  Ahhhh, but what soothes a mind heavy with routine and knowledge?  A call from Martin Lemmon’s secretary Gabby on the 57th floor – “Sandee, let everyone know there’s cake left over from the meeting in conference room B.”

You Called Me a What?!

 

I had planned to write about the crushes that I’ve had on the men in the Hasidic community on Bennett Avenue, or on how erotic armpit odor is (hey look, it has raging pheromones in it, I think – or something like this).  But as I was getting ready to broil my meat, thinking of phone calls I had to return after eating, I thought about one woman on the list, and how she was the first woman who had affectionately called me a bitch.  Now this was back in 1993.  Because I am mad corny, or shall I say, incredibly corny, (okay, really, I’m not that corny) I was absolutely taken aback when she casually said in the most laid back, sexy voice, ‘Okay bitch, so I’ma call you back tomorrow aight’.  ‘T-tomorrow – oh, okay’, I stammered.  I’m thinking, she called me a bad word but in an affectionate tone.  Does this mean, like, I am her bitch, or is it a new way of saying honey, or baby, or dear?   Did she mean to offend me?  Should I get on the A train to her house and invite her downstairs for a round of fisticuffs?  This apparently is some newfangled way of speaking that I haven’t been acquainted with as of yet, I figured.  Maybe when she calls back tomorrow, I’ll show her I know what time it is and say ‘Why, good morning to ya bitch!  How are you today?  So, bitch, what’s on the agenda?’

Since then I’m everybody’s bitch.  ‘Bitch!  You drank all my Jack Daniels’ – ‘Hey bitch, what’s up,’ they all say.  And I’m down with the program today, reciprocating this term of endearment with the utmost jocularity.

Peace out bitches!

Subway Car Break Dancing Hate

 

Hey, I’m all for self-empowerment.  I like the mindset of the entrepreneur, especially the young entrepreneurs on the train, the ones selling candy, the comedians, those a capella guys.  At times the entertainment value of these performances leans towards the alternative — hell, I even like that tone deaf guy who bangs on the bongo with the hole in it, and that guy who sings with the two-stringed guitar that he found in the garbage.  And who says you need teeth to be a subway car performer?  The subway car break dancers, they’re the ones that I’m on the fence about.  I’m a very nervous train rider.  I have panic attacks in tight places where I’m confined for a period of time.  When I start thinking that there isn’t enough air in the car, I start hyperventilating.  And most of the cars you can’t walk through, so you’re trapped.

The break dancers, a jaunty bunch who tend to burst in on the scene suddenly, while you’re preparing to read your New Yorker.  On the A line, they generally come in on 59^th Street where the train going uptown is non-stop express all the way to 125^th Street.  So for 66 blocks, over three miles, you’re part of a captive audience.  They engage in lightening speed acrobatics to the chants and yelps of their fellow break dancers, and of course to the accompaniment of the boom box.  That screaming, the sudden movements, the loud music in the tight car — now this is enough to make me take my clothes off and go screaming up and down the aisle – for some reason claustrophobics like me think there will be more air if they take their clothes off.  Yeah, I know it doesn’t make any sense…  My neurosis, it also involves a fear of being kicked in the jaw by the one doing back flips to ‘It’s Just Begun’ by Jimmy Castor.  What am I supposed to do if he breaks my jaw with his flailing foot?  This ain’t Cirque du Soleil, but a rag tag bunch who probably don’t give too much thought about the precision of their movements.  Ah, see – I’ll bet you never thought about that one.  There are people who are amazed at the spectacle of these performers, and some who find them novel.  But I watch through fear-widened eyes.  I strain my head as far back as I can into the wall of the car, take shallow breaths, and pray for the performance to end without anybody getting kicked in the face.