Writings

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My back pages, Sketches

Two Boys

May 10, 2008

Once I believed, a long time ago, that he and I were different. Others thought so too, as I’d discover over the years. Even after his death, friends and acquaintances might recall something he said, a peculiar mannerism that made me cringe, or an act of kindness or derision—their reminders forced recognition of how dissimilar we were….

Sketches

If I’d Words for the Texture of His Hands

May 1, 2008

If I’d words for the texture of his hands, Rough would do, as would worn, weather’d or dry. My father’s lives etched along bold fingers, Dusked palms, and creased knuckles cracked with the cry Of a guilty murderer’s confession. When he revealed he’d killed a man, my mind, Submerged with selfish eighteen year-old woes, Came…

Current Affairs, My back pages, Sketches

The Quality of Tears

February 10, 2008

At first glance I mistook her for a child. She was tiny, but it was also the way she dressed, in a short dark pleated shirt and denim jacket that made me think Catholic schoolgirl. And it was the size of the man she clung to; he was large and boyish with a drop of light brown…

My back pages, Sketches

Boy Meets Boy

January 20, 2008

“Hi—you’re Eee-nis, right? Baritone, breathless: without warning, the voice over his right shoulder brushed his ear in a sigh of panic, as if the speaker had been chased by dogs. He hadn’t heard footsteps, or the usual whoosh from the door separating the auditorium’s main stairwell from this tiny chamber that housed the theater department’s bulletin…

Deep Songs

Loving the Sinners

November 1, 2007

Even saints have their purgatory. My mother’s is her bedroom, on the second floor of a sunless two-story edifice that she and my late father purchased a few years after I moved to New York, a house that telegraphs its sepulchral aura as soon as one steps across its threshold. One look inside her room and…

My back pages, Sketches

Marks of Memory

March 6, 2007

When my father died, he bequeathed neither money nor property. He did, however, leave a motto: “You have to shave everyday.” As a child I watched him tackle this most manly of tasks, a bespectacled black Santa with a face swathed in aerosol foam. No sign of awkwardness or fear informed his razor’s slow, sinuous…

My back pages, Sketches

When He Knew

January 15, 2007

Perhaps he might have noticed the headache first. With the onset of HIV it would have been atypical, a persistent buzzing immune to aspirin, ibuprofen or acetaminophen. Rolling from the base of his skull to the crest of his furrowed brow, it would have been a sensation freighted with the heaviness of an eternal cloudy day. Dan might…

My back pages, Sketches

The Boss

January 5, 2007

Ted Davidson’s desk was perched on a platform in the middle of Save Discount’s headquarters, so regardless of where you were in the store, his head and shoulders were always visible, like a judge poised to rain down wrath. Hell sitting on top of heaven, one of the female cashiers mumbled, though everyone knew why he’d…

Deep Songs

Summer 2005

September 25, 2006

I don’t like change. Worse than the dawdling crowds of small-tourists jamming every midtown Manhattan corner, this particular eccentricity threatened to topple my sanity. With the first warm days came palpable shifts in the landscape: tiny disappearances, incremental vanishings welled up like unexpected storms. Early warnings came in April, when the Plaza announced it would close its doors for…

Sketches

The Domestic

December 12, 2004

I hadn’t been there five minutes, and already the Sisters of Suds were on my back. My patience had already been tried; never mind my aching shoulders, the result of having lugged my filled-to-overflowing laundry bags through a windy spray of rain, or that my morning toast, smeared with peanut and strawberry preserves, seemed to…