June | 2012 | johnozed

It’s a Tuesday and it’s another day that I’ve spent mainly indoors. Bill’s birthday is Friday and I am trying to clean up the apartment since it’s been looking a bit shabby and for the past month despite having the time to do it, I’ve been too depressed and easily distracted to do anything. Over the weekend I had the idea to start cleaning so yesterday that is exactly what I did. There are/were lots of things to be thrown out, or categorized. Things that hadn’t been used, or are broken or held some now forgotten sentimental value have been resigned to the bin.

When I was working at the cigar shack, almost every night I would come home with papers. Papers with the store totals for the day, papers with the employee sales. Looking at these papers before I shredded them I noticed that my quotas were quite good, usually higher than whomever I was working with, though the person I was ‘competing’ with was usually Thomas. And I also noticed and remembered giving sales to Jerry Vale, sometimes steering a customer to him, sometimes ringing items up under his name since I hit the quota I had set for myself.

The funny thing is Zack never noticed and one of the last staph meetings that I attended, Zack felt that not enough was being done to help Jerry Vale meet his quotas. I kept quiet and listened to Zack go on about teamwork. Zack’s ‘Iago’ probably put him up to it and I was the understudy for the role of Desdemona though I didn’t know it at the time. But that’s all done with and the past has been shredded. Why I took Frank Pennino’s invoice home, why Tim Denny’s packing list existed here- I couldn’t say. A halfhearted attempt to recycle perhaps.

I don’t need Christian Gluck, James Weber, Robert Telli or Keon Sims’ information here so now it’s all slivers of paper laying at the curb waiting to be picked up and disposed of. I do not need Miguel Estrada’s email nor do I need Steve White’s favorite cigar list. I will never see these people again and that door has been slammed shut. Sure there were a few hotties I wouldn’t mind hearing from again but it seems most unlikely that our paths will cross once more and that’s fine by me. Whatever relationships that were formed are over now.

Another thing about cleaning up is the fact that I found a couple of notebooks from years ago, as well as letters that never made it to the post. Some are funny, some are maudlin and some are wondering when Carlo will be showing up with the blow. After Carlo showed up, the writing generally stopped. It was over when the fat lady sang with a couple of grams of cocaine. And there are photographs and some albums that have been rediscovered. Some will be scanned somewhere down the line to my chagrin as well as some of the other subjects in the photos.

I do want to wish Kevin Threat congratulations on the birth of his daughter Zora and I sincerely wish Kevin, his wife Jen and their other daughter Dee Dee all the best wishes for their future.

RIP Nora Ephron

Fire (live)

Saturday night, after I wrote I walked over to the river and enjoyed a cigar and sat reading Maggie the Mechanic, a Love & Rockets compilation by Jaime Hernandez. I started reading Love & Rockets soon after it came out in the mid-1980’s and loved it. It initially reminded me of a punk rock version of Archie Comics but I soon found it was a lot more than that. I really identified with the many stories written and drawn by Jamie and his brother Beto. Jamie’s stories took place in Dairy Town and Beto’s stories took place somewhere under the border in Palomar.

I think I wrote last week that I initially was drawn to Jaime’s stories a little bit more than I was to Beto’s. Jaime’s compilations ate softcover trade paperbacks whereas Beto’s is quite a heavy tome. But reading Beto’s stories I felt how he put so much heart into his work, so much so that I would just look at a page and then the next thing I knew an hour or so had passed. The same thing happened with Jaime and the Maggie the Mechanic stories. I know Harpy understands what I am talking about. And the stories, reread 25 years later were all so very familiar. Just sitting by the river reading reminded me how I used to envision the music and art scene in Hoboken back then as very similar to what was going on in Dairy Town with the Hoppers.

And as I sat and read, I started to think that it still resembles the Love & Rockets stories somewhat, only all the characters in Hoboken, myself included are just a little bit older and perhaps a little bit heavier. Children that I saw back then are now adults and some of those former kids have children now. It’s the nature of things and it can be unnerving a bit. One kid I used to babysit for in the 1990’s is now a young man with a website for his musical endeavors. He’s quite talented and a good singer. It also helps that this young man is quite a handsome man and the ladies just love him.

Yesterday was Gay Pride day and it was good. I didn’t make it to the parade, I stayed in the apartment waiting for Bill and once he got home I waited for him to wake up. Rand wanted to explore a bike path to Newark but I decided not to go, just staying local, and staying online. I posted a ton of videos of gay and lesbian musicians, starting out of course with the Tom Robinson Band’s Glad to Be Gay. Bill was up a few hours after sleeping and had an errand to run in Harlem. I stayed home and eventually took a nice nap. There is nothing like a Sunday afternoon nap.

We did make plans to see the fireworks on then Hudson for Gay Pride like we do every year. We watched News Radio and an episode of WKRP in Cincinnati on some cable channel that plays old TV shows like that. The WKRP episode was all about the fateful Who concert in Cincinnati where 11 kids were crushed to death outside the arena. Bill had a vague recollection of what happened but being a rock and roll fan I remember it vividly. In fact the next week’s issue of Time Magazine had the Who on the cover asking them what happened as if they had any idea.
It was a fun night out once we turned off the television and went outside. It seemed there were a lot more people out for the fireworks this year than previous years. I told Bill a few stories and as I was telling him I realized that most of my stories finish off with ‘And then we all wound up at Maxwells.’ The fireworks were nice but ended rather anticlimactically. Usually there’s a big finish but this year it merely seemed to peter out.

We made it home a few minutes before it started to rain. Bill went to sleep after that and I stayed up watching the west coast broadcast of True Blood and Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom. True Blood was good, since it was only the second episode of the season I can hope things will really kick in. The Newsroom was clever, Jeff Daniels playing a Keith Olbermann type, not that likeable. I enjoyed it the way I used to enjoy watching Lou Grant after the Mary Tyler Moore show ended. That was the first episode so I hope things will get better, though I did enjoy it.