Mallory's Camera

Birthday trip was fabulous.

Rendezvoused with the BoyZ on Stone Street, which, back in 1658, became the first cobblestoned avenue in New Amsterdam:



Had dinner at a Cuban salsa bar & RTT paid! (An exciting new development. 😀) I was expecting the food to be touristy & pedestrian, but in fact, it was very tasty:



Our fourth at table was Brian, Madeleine's very pleasant BF. (Madeleine herself is in Tustin.)

Brian was exceedingly impressed that I play D&D! Amusingly so. I could have told him, Why, yes, I did cure cancer, and last year when I was in Oslo accepting the Nobel Prize for literature... and still the most impressive thing about me would be that I play D&D!

After dinner, we went to NYC's hottest production, Life and Trust, which is an immersive event that takes place in a bank, one block away from Wall Street. The bank was originally built in 1931—a bad time for building banks—and subsequently overlaid by a 59-story skyscraper so that the original bank is now underground.

Now, I ❤️LUV❤️ immersive events because they combine all the best elements of theater and museums.

And Life and Trust did not disappoint—although I will say my ❤️LUV❤️ was not entirely unreserved.



Life and Trust centers on a Faustian deal. The action itself takes place on October 23, 1929—the day before the stock market crash that launched the Great Depression.

At some indeterminate point in the past, a man named J.G. Conway sells his soul to the devil in exchange for a recipe for some kind of magical green and highly addictive liquid, which he then mass markets as cough medicine. (This segued into a private Family Joke: I have been telling the BoyZ since they were kids that they were heirs to the DiLucchio Cough Drop Millions.)

Then, in the only spoken part of the show, the devil invites the paying audience to travel back into the Past and watch Bad Things transpire.

Since the paying audience are wraiths in that past, we had to wear these incredibly uncomfortable masks. Mine gave me a headache! Plus it was impossible for me to fit my glasses under it! Plus it was really fuckin' hot and my face sweated buckets!

We also had to do an incredible amount of running around—my FitBit logged more than 10,000 steps—including up and down an incredible number of stairs. My 73-year-old body was barely up to the challenge. (Pretend Nazis are chasing you, I counseled myself at the two-and-a-half hour mark.)

###

The sets were unbelievably wonderful! Bedrooms, parlors, business offices, bank vaults, Dr. Caligari-like labs filled with vials of sinister green liquid & Weird Science specimens, ballrooms, secret gardens, a forest, a lake, a livery stable, a movie theater, a burlesque stage, a boxing ring! All of them meticulously designed and outfitted in the most amazing detail. Dreamlike! You could pick every object up and study it. You could sit in the chairs and lie in the beds. You could work out with the boxing bag! This was my favorite part.

###

I don't know how many characters there were that you could follow around. Dozens & dozens. J.G. Conway. His sister (who is having a Lesbian affair with her maid.) A mad scientist. Many Bohemians, bankers, politicians. A tarot card reader. Several clowns. Cameo appearances from Gilded Age celebrities like Stanford White and Evelyn Nesbit. Mephisto and his various demonic adjutants.

But here's the thing: The characters didn't talk. They danced.

And I'm not that into dance.

And the dance was pretty repetitive. I mean, none of the individual Life and Trust characters had an individual mode of dancing that distinguished their unique personalities or backstories. It was all your basic Martha Graham arm-flinging and back-bending.

And I got—well. Bored. Philistine that I am.

###

Our airbnb was in Brooklyn, and Ichabod had to go back to Brian-and-Madeleine's place in Queens to pick up a suitcase he'd left there (long story), so RTT and I subway-ed alone and got into the Customary Big Fight ('nother long story), which we always seem to get into at least once on every family vacay.

I always forget that as innocuous & defenseless as I seem to myself, in RTT's eyes, I am the Loch Ness Monster, dripping with the kind of deep-water archetypal power that only parents possess!

Anyway.

We resolved the fight, but before we did, we were treated to one of those awful late-night-NYC-subway vignettes that are so massively depressing—namely a homeless guy, crawling with lice, sprawled on one of the hard, fused-plastic subway seats, ostensibly trying to sleep but unable to sleep—the subway car was brightly lit—so he reached down into the crotch of his pants and began to masturbate—

"How's that for immersive theater?" I murmured to RTT.

And we began to laugh.

This guy was once somebody's little pink innocent baby, I reminded myself.

But it was a hard sell.

###

RTT had to leave at the crack of dawn to accept the Working Families Party endorsement back in Ithaca on the Day itself. It meant so much to me that he went to all that trouble to make the trip down for such a short time!

"What do you want to do on your birthday?" Ichabod asked.

What I wanted to do on my birthday was visit the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, which is a touchstone in my personal mythology, a place where I spent many happy, happy hours when I was a kid.

So, that was what we did.









We had lunch at a Jamaican restaurant that had the best mac 'n' cheese I have ever tasted. It had a texture like kugel! Except... It was mac 'n' cheese!



And absolutely amazing banana pudding ice cream at the Ample Hills Creamery.

And then went back to the airbnb and watched all six episodes of the just-dropped seventh season of Black Mirror.

###

Yesterday was hard, hard, hard because saying good-bye to my kids is always so hard. I love them both so much! Not just because they're my kids but because of the people they are. It's like when I'm with them, the world is in color.

There are other people who turn on color for me, too (one or two of whom may actually be reading this.) But I have to say, most of the time, I float in a world that, if not exactly grey, is deeply unsaturated.

And also—WT-fuckin'-F???—it was snowing in the quaint & scenic Hudson Valley! Hideous White Stuff From the Sky!!! I passed six accidents on the country roads as I wended my way home. The roads in Ulster County were unplowed and covered with about three inches of slippery slush. I drove with my knuckles in my mouth, absolutely convinced I was gonna end up in a ditch.

But I didn't.

And today, I have an enormous amount of work to do and very little interest in doing any of it.

What else is new?

The big deal on NYC subways right now is ads that don’t mention the product they’re advertising.



What the hell is Makiage?

I’m one high maintenance B…

It could be makeup. It could be Ben Wa balls. It could be an app that reminds you when it’s time to pick up your drycleaning.

The only thing that’s clear about Makiage is that it’s something aimed at women.

The dude in the black shirt pictured here, who between 53rd and Court periodically sprang from his seat and crouched on all fours to perform pushups on the subway floor, was not at all interested in Makiage. He stopped doing pushups when we got to Manhattan.

There’s another product that dominates the vast underground grotto between the 42nd Street shuttle and all the other subway lines. Its ads were all about gorgeous and racially diverse individuals trying to look casual in various beautiful locales. Lots of children but no adults over 40.

I can’t even remember the name of the product this campaign was pitching.

But then, I’m 66. That ad campaign would probably be deemed a failure if I remembered the name of the product.

###

Also overheard on the subway:

Girl One: Do you do Father’s Day?

Girl Two: Not really. You know my mother used to watch Jeopardy twice every day. Once at three in the afternoon. She’d memorize all the answers. Then when my father got home from work, she’d switch to an affiliate station, and they’d watch together. And my father was always really impressed by her because she got all the answers right!

Girl One: It would be hard to celebrate someone that stupid.

Girl Two: Tell me about it.

###

I took my pesto ingredients and traveled into the city to hang out with (not her real name) Camille.



I decided V didn’t deserve my pesto because V showed up two hours late to a house-hunting assignation.

Meet me at 11am at De Laval Place, she’d messaged me.

So, at 11am, there I was at De Laval Place.

But no Val.

“The real estate agent called me up 10 minutes ago and canceled the viewing,” the woman who owned the house told me. “But why don’t you come in and take a look? Maybe you can tell her about it.”

She was an incredibly sweet-faced woman, and omygawd! That house! If I had $150,000 lying around, I would have bought it on the spot. A jewel of a domicile, lying back maybe 100 yards from the street with secret gardens and a vine-covered terrace and a greenhouse. Its interior was equally incredible. The owner is an artist and had decorated it amazingly. There was a bright blue colander instead of a conventional lampshade on one of the kitchen overheads! (I know that sounds weird but it was both whimsical and utilitarian.) She’d placed these glass shelves on her dining nook windows and put antique wine glasses on them, all different colors, so that in the morning, you could tell, her kitchen was filled with shafts of colors as the sun shone through glasses:



“Why are you moving?” I asked. “Don’t you know you’re my new best friend?”

“I know, right?” she laughed. “My kids are all on the west coast. And they’ve kept up the pressure. So, I guess it’s time for me to move to the west coast, too.”

###

V showed up a couple of hours later. She was barely apologetic.

The house was wrong for her since she has two about-to-become-teenager sons, and the house is tiny and jewel-like. But the faults she found with it were the wrong faults.

“I won’t be able to keep chickens here!”

“Well, Val,” I said, “You won’t be able to keep chickens anywhere within Poughkeepsie city limits. I believe there’s an ordinance against it. It’s okay in Hyde Park, though.”

V is one of those pals I’ve collected through… I guess you’d have to call it attrition. She’s someone I know from my circus days. There are people from my circus days I liked much, much better, but I am simply awful at staying in touch with people; I live in a kind of protracted present tense where past and future both are alternate realities tethered to the real world of here and now by the most insubstantial of valences. V puts her claws into people and never lets go because she’s never sure when she may be able to use them. So, I’ve stayed in touch with V. By default.

I like V okay, and I admire her resourcefulness. She’s also an immensely talented photographer. So, you know. Not all bad.

Still. I was not about to cook for her.

I took them instead to the Jamaican restaurant where my ESL student Imane used to waitress.

“Does Imane still work here?” I asked.

“Who?”

So Imane. Through the cracks. Hopefully, not into the sewer. Though I’m not optimistic about that.



I hadn’t seen V’s boys in some time. I’d known them well as babies; it was fun to see how they turned out. I thought they were behaving remarkably well considering how bored they must have been and wished I had adhered to my earlier plan, which was to bring them some comic books. (Whenever I meet up with pals and their kids, I always try to bring distractions for the kids. Grownups are so-o-o boring; I figure it’s the least I can do.)

But V was cutting them no slack at all. Dylan, the older and taller of the two, began drumming on the table with his knife and fork.

“I told you: Cut that shit out!” V barked. “You are getting on my nerves, and there will be consequences!”

Ah! So Dylan is the fuck-up in the family dynamic. See his skeptical right-looking, upwardly slanting glance away from the camera. NLP fanatics would say, Ly-ing! Nicolas beaming full-frontal is Mama’s little suck-up.

Over lunch, V caught me up on all the circus gossip and berated the boys’ father ten different ways while I studied her (new!) buzz haircut and wondered whether I was a baaaaaad person for speculating that she’d found a new gender preference. I mean, she could be getting chemotherapy, right? Or maybe she just likes the look.

“So, why did Juliet and Corey the World’s Best Tiger Trainer break up anyway?” I asked.

“Because Corey couldn’t keep it zipped!” V snapped. “Men and their fucking dicks. These two Australian contortionists joined Kelly Martin in Fort Smith. Twins! By Mountainburg, he was doing one of them. Or both of them. She walked in on him and a twin. Turned around, walked out of the room, packed up the kids and the dogs, and boom! She was back in Paris, Texas in 24 hours.”

“I can’t imagine anyone cheating on Juliet!” I said. “She’s one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen.”

“Nice, too!” said V. “But crazy religious. Anyway, you probably heard: JDK bought Kelly Martin. So, it’s a piece of shit now.”

“No!!!!! Really? Is Fernando still working for him?”

“Fernando’s running the circus. But JDK isn’t paying him shit. Why did you ever work for him anyway?”

“Because I made sure he paid me a lot of money,” I said. “Are you still married to Fernando?”

“Yeah. That lying sack of shit.”

Dylan looked anxiously at his flatware.

###

In NYC, Camille and I spent the day at Rockaway Beach. A new ferry! It left from the old Brooklyn Army Terminal! It was fab!

So great to lie on a sandy beach and bake. So European! They don’t bake on California beaches. If you go to a beach in California, it’s generally with a specific purpose in mind: You’re going to surf, or dive for abalone, or collect shells, or if you are going to sunbathe, it’s a nude beach, and you’re showing off the results of three weeks on the Paleo diet.

I lay on the beach and emptied my mind of all thought.

I went swimming! For like five minutes, but still! The Atlantic Ocean experience! I got my hair wet.

For the rest of the time, I read and eavesdropped on various slice-o’-life groupings around us. Four Caucasian princesses who had obviously patterned their lives after the protagonists of Girls. A sextet of pallid, pot-bellied, French-speaking guys and their hot bikini-clad girlfriends. An older man and two younger men.

(“Father and sons?” I asked Camille. “Or aging homosexual and two young lovers?”

“Father and son,” Camille said. “And friend of son.”)

“The reason I started smoking dope is because I’m individual and different,” one of the young men was saying.

He launched into a long explanation of the many manifestations of his individuality and differences, but David Sedaris was more interesting. That’s one of the great things about Camille: She reads as much as I do, so we spend a great deal of time when we’re together reading rather than worrying about trying to make relevant conversation.

The young man did eventually hit the water. I watched him watching the shore; he wanted to make certain his companions were looking at him. He reminded me so much of RTT!

When we got hungry enough, we braved the line at the one food place on Rockaway Beach, an awesome Venezuelan restaurant, and then ferried back.



And I got to use Camille’s beauty products!

So, you know.

Just the best weekend.

Summer took me on a tour of Flushing yesterday, which was great fun and highly educational.

Craving ovine afterbirth products? This is the place to find them:



Flushing is one of NYC’s oldest inhabited settlements, colonized by the Dutch in the early 17th century and, of course, occupied by the Matinecock Indians for millennia before that. (The Matinecock were all but wiped out by smallpox by the beginning of the 18th century and so, are mostly absent from European historical accounts.)

When I was growing up in NYC, the neighborhood was very white.

Starting in the 1970s, progressive waves of Asian immigrants tilted the demographic balance so that today, Flushing is as convincing a simulacrum of Chinese culture as you’ll find anywhere outside the mainland. Much more convincing than those little toy Chinatowns you find in San Francisco or lower Manhattan.

###

Summer and I met up at the Hall of Science, which is one of those buildings left over from the 1964 World’s Fair. It’s filled with many hands-on, experiential learning exhibits for children, and it was kind of fun watching Summer watch the kids: First time I’d ever seen her be broody. But, of course, she is that age.

After that, we trotted over to Flushing’s Main Street, which was as crowded as Time’s Square on New Year’s Eve.

“It’s the last day of Chinese New Year’s,” Summer told me. “Like Valentine’s Day is here. So people are going shopping for gifts and out for a meal.”

Summer took me to a mall that was kind of like the King's Cross Platform 9¾ in Harry Potter – Muggle that I am, I would have never noticed its entrance! A vast shopping complex, crammed with food shops, food courts, all sorts of retail stores. All the signage in Chinese characters; English sometimes added as an afterthought.





Then we went out to lunch. I asked Summer to order for me, and what she ordered tasted very unfamiliar to my Western tongue. A meatball dish made from crab and beef hoof meat, dumplings filled with crab and shrimp broths, turnip puffs, and a soy milk curd that tasted like tree sap. A very unusual flavor palette.



“So, tell me,” I said. “What does the Chinese community think about the Presidential race?”

“They do not care about it at all,” Summer said.

“Really?”

Summer shrugged. “In China, people do not vote. So even if they can vote here, they don’t. They don’t have the habit, and they think it is a little bit ridiculous that individual people think they can have an influence on what gets decided. Maybe people who own businesses care about it a little. They like Trump – he is successful at business, so he’ll bring good luck.

“There just was something, though, that was very odd. Not typically Chinese.”

“What?”

Summer frowned. “There were protests when the Chinese police who shot the black man by mistake was found guilty. Very unusual for Chinese to protest. But it was very unfair. The police was scared. His finger trembled; he hit the trigger by mistake. Of course, a lot of people in the community thought, That’s what he gets for becoming the police! But he is still one of us. So…” She shrugged.

###

Afterwards, we wandered around for an hour or so, peeking into stores



And took the obligatory selfie, which pleased me because I did not look like Atilla the Hun’s elderly grandmother in it. Recently, I’ve been obsessed with how much I look like Atilla the Hun's grandmother. Of course, I'm old, so I should look somebody's grandmother -- even though the offspring have not yet reproduced.. But vanity, vanity, vanity…



On the subway ride there and back, I read Michael Lewis’s The Big Short and had a mini-epiphany – no, not about the world economy, but about a topic that’s even nearer to my heart – ME.

Lewis was writing about Michael Burry, the one-eyed Aspergers ex-neurologist who founded Scion Capital. Burry always felt like a complete outsider, but he figured he was right, and the rest of the world was wrong.

I’ve always felt like a complete outsider, but I figure I'm wrong, and the rest of the world is right.

A failure of agency on a very deep psychological level.

Better parenting would have saved me from that.