Brenda and the F Word

The Canyon of Heroes victory parade. Never seen a Wall St parade. Should be exciting. I’ll keep you posted. (I did hear the Yankees drank 2 methusalahs of A Rod’s favorite champagne last night. Let’s hope there were no party fouls!

Overheard outside the Newsbar. Black man watching the people parade, shouting to himself.
“Why white women got such flat asses? Man, they soooo flat!”
I tug up my pants so they fit a little tighter and walk in.

Inside: two Gossip Girls, teenagers. Black leather bomber jackets, tiny camisoles, mini- minis, and black leather boots.
Girl#1: Major party foul, Friday night.”
Girl#2: OhmyGod! OhmyGod! Who?”
Girl#1: Annie. She heaved all over Tim’s bushes. Fucking blazed!
Girl#2:OhmyGod!OhmyGod!
Girl#1: Yeah. You know how into those bushes Tim’s Mom is. She’s gonna delete him.
Girl#2: OhmyGod!
Girl#1: So whaddya get on your SAT’s?

I’m grinning like the Village Idiot. Party foul. How great is that? And ‘gonna delete him.” Love that, too.
Heading home now to disassemble the rolling coat racks. My friend bought them for the book party I threw for her. It was fun, wandering through a crowd of 60 or so total strangers, listening to their running commentary about the loft.
IE: What is she some kind of professional reader? I’ve never seen so many books in my life!

Harlem’s Caped Crusader. He’s sitting in the driver’s seat of a gorgeous 1963, four door Chevrolet on 121st and Lenox Ave. The guy is so fucking cool, it should be illegal. So’s his car. Coal black and polished with black leather upholstery and cherry red trim. But back to Batman. Arms as muscled as a drummer, green eyes beneath a hood and so handsome, he stops traffic. Female traffic. He also happens to be listening to Frank Sinatra.
“Where’s Robin,” I ask.
“Comin’ later,” he says.
“And how come you’re listening to Frank?” I say.
“Because the cat could swing,” he says as my heart melts like an M&M.
“My Dad’s a jazz musician, he adds.”Frank’s been in my house since I was a baby.”
Some baby! I think to myself as a child tugs at my hand, eager to reach the next house, marked with a bright orange balloon.
How amazing. That I never set foot into this part of my own city until a gang of Italians brought me here.

In 1953, a young Swiss writer, Nicholas Bouvier, traveled by car from Serbia (then part of Tito’s Yugoslavia) all the way through Greece, Turkey, and Iran to Kabul, Afghanistan and over the famous Khyber Pass. The journey became a marvelous book called The Way of the World. Here is some of Bouvier’s reporting on a night spent in a cell with a very friendly jailer in Kurdistan.

“The folk tradition of lex talionis, the vendetta and family feuds, was beginning to go out of fashion. But there was still talk of what had gone on three years previously in the Bukan valley. The men of two rival families assembled in a house in the village, with their respective mullahs, to sort out a case that had set them at odds for several generations. For a whole afternoon, the parties feasted, smoked, and discussed the matter without once raising their voices, but without coming to a solution. So they banished their priests and everyone under 15, bolted the doors and windows, lit an oil lamp in order to see each other’s faces, and settled the quarrel with daggers. There were six survivors out of thirty-five guests…”

This is two weeks ago. He forks up $27, 410 for lunch. LUNCH not dinner. This week, it’s another guy, also Russian. He pays $47,810 for lunch. Apparently, his bill is a bit higher because he orders some vintage wine and a couple of magnums of $5,000 Cristal. The tip? A mere $9,400 and change. But the best part of the story is the fact that Nello’s owes vast amounts of money to its suppliers. They’re being sued. You wanna ’splain me how the fuck that happens? Or how bout this? The lovely Stephanie Seymour is settling for a paltry $270,000 a MONTH before her divorce from Peter Brandt. She better not be lunching at Nello’s is all I can say. Or she’ll end just another pretty panhandler….But this is what I love about this town–how it always manages to put your own petty problems into perspective.

In the meantime, if Mike F’ing Bloomberg calls me one more time…I’m gonna. I’m gonna. What am I gonna do? Hang up.
More later…

No. This is not yet another far flung corner of the world where people are reading James Wolcott. It’s short for wolf-fuck. In serbo croat. Which means a rough, arduous place. What a perfect description of Lars Triers’ new flick, Anti Christ. Do not go there. I was riveted, however, by MJ. And not in a seamy, sordid way. The guy was just so uncannily ALIVE, right up until the night before he died. Sure, he looks weird. Wasted. He looks so weird, it suddenly occurred to me that this might explain why he covered his kid’s faces with veils. A classic case of transference; of a parent projecting their own fears onto a child.

But back to vukojebina; to the serbo croat word for a rough, arduous place. I have a young friend from Brooklyn who is living there right now. I’ve mentioned her before. She’s shooting her first feature film in the mountains of Serbia. Her all female production crew from Belgrade call themselves the pit bulls. Undaunted by a foot and a half of unexpected snow, my friend is on day #4, directing the same woman who starred in that dismally, depressing Romanian movie about abortion. I wish I could remember the title. Anyway, aside from the blizzard, a French grip, “hissing like a vampire,” and a cinematographer who prefers to play the tuba, all is well. When her husband asked how to say “Good day, today,” the crew shuddered. “We never say, good anything, in this country. It brings bad luck.”

Easy to believe after listening to my dinner companion on Saturday night. He worked as as a shrink in Kosovo before opening a small “boutique trauma center” here in New York for victims of political violence. “Boutique” was said with tongue in cheek. Needless to say, the guy is not a big fan of the Serbs. “They scared the hell out of me,” he said before we were served dessert.
“Me, too,” I replied before launching into talk about Storm, a new movie about a Bosnian Serb, a Muslim woman, who testifies at the Hague about her experience as a prisoner at one of the country’s “rape hotels.” Set up by the Serbian military, it was run by man who had once been her next door neighbor.

It’s unimaginable. I mean, how does life go on after such horrendous and unspeakable acts? How do people return to villages and carry on with their lives after killing and raping their neighbors? How do they move into abandoned houses, cook on the same stoves, laugh, dance, marry and have children, surrounded by the phantoms of such blood lust? And what about that female production crew, the pit bulls? The ones shooting up in the mountains with my friend? Do their parents ever talk about the war? Do these young people bother to ask questions? Because I remember a man, a friend, named Ali in Cyprus. A short, grizzled survivor of the war between the Greeks and the Turks back in the 70s, he lived in one of these villages. A village on the Turkish side that even years after the Greeks had fled, remained half empty. When I asked him if he ever wondered what had happened to his neighbors, he smiled. “I live like a kitten,” he said. “We all do. Because a kitten is born with its eyes closed.”

I’m the one who lives like a kitten, of course. Me, discussing political violence and Kosovo at a delightfully civilized, candlelit dinner in a Tribeca loft. Me, with my only experience or exposure to rough, arduous places being a somewhat uncomfortable seat at a theater over on on 13th St. How do I dare ask such questions? What do I know about generations of blood feuds? It took me months to even figure out who was fighting who in that particular war: serbs, bosnian serbs, croats. None of it made sense to me. Because I live in a country that has a very short history; that is propelled forever forward and loathes looking back at the past. Because I live in a country where people seem to fear aging and getting fat or gaining weight more than they do the loss of liberty itself. All of which means we end up “vukojebina’ed”. Wolf fucked by health insurance companies, credit card companies, oil companies, banks, politicians…Enough.

“I had a dream that I could speak to. I had a dream I could call my own.”
Etta Jones song

Why do I weep when I watch my daughter sing this on her college video? I weep because I see such promise, such passion. Promise, like a parent’s pride, is a heavy, too heavy, burden to bear when you’re young. Because it’s tied into other people’s expectations. Hopes and dreams. I was lucky in this respect. I grew or stumbled into promise and passion somewhat late in life. Which is why I try to be so careful when it comes to projecting hopes onto the shoulders of my children. Shoulders that are not yet strengthened or broken by the weight of too much disappointment. But watching my daughter sing and thinking of my son, of the gifts that he also possesses, I’m torn. Torn between a longing to shout for joy and the suspicion that such a shout will alert the gods and bring their wrath down upon my house. So instead, I whisper. I whisper and I wish so hard that my children find a dream to speak to. A dream to call their own.

I also wish my son could sleep….

Last week, thanks to Mr. Wolcott (that’s James Wolcott), I had some readers drop by from Wegrow Siedlce. This week, they’re arriving in droves from Prnu Parnumaa, Vasternorrlands Lan, and yes, Jawa Barat. I’d really like to go there. I think…

Maybe it’s a case of mistaken identity. Maybe it’s my doppelganger. But there’s another Brenda out there somewhere who resides at my same AOL address. Occasionally, I receive these fantastically surreal updates on her or is it my other life? This morning, for instance. My dear friend, Jeff Chubb, CC’s me on plans for our weekend. After exchanging vital data re cellphones etc., he says: “You can either hunt/stalk turkey or shoot small game before cutting wood…”
To which I replied: Jeff: I was gonna go see the Michael Jackson movie. But stalking/hunting deer sounds like a blast. We are talking bow and arrow, right?(Shooting small game is out. Dad’s Purdy is in the shop) What else should I bring? My ukelele, maybe?

Which leads to another e mail from my friend Lisa Davis. She wrote last year about a horse…

Subj: Information on Mare
Date: 1/27/2009 10:55 Eastern Standard Time
From: Lisa.Davis@Sternbottom&Tate
To: Brendawhatever@wherever

Dear Brenda:
I was copied on your e mail searching for a home for your horse. Can you give me some information?
How old is she? When did she have the foal and where is the baby? Has she been used strictly for breeding purposes? What are the reasons for giving her up?
Thank you for the information.
Sincerely,
Lisa

Reply:
Subj: Information on Mare
Date: 1/28/2009 9:44 Eastern Standard Time
From: Brenda whatever@wherever
To: Lisa.Davis@Sternbottom&Tate

Dear Lisa,
The mare is four years old. She had the foal three weeks ago and we gave the baby up for adoption. (To a lovely family on E 4th St.) As you might imagine, breeding has become a bit complicated here as space in the back shower room is tight for one fucking horse, never mind two. As for our reasons for giving her up… Sunday she ate thirteen rolls of jumbo paper towels and four tubes of Crest toothpaste. Also her whinnying is annoying the neighbors.
Looking forward to hearing from you soonest.
Best,
Brenda

Why do many middle-aged men leave their wives for their wives’ best friend? Because it’s familiar but fresh? New but not? Because it rocks the boat without getting them too wet? I’ve been thinking about this, lately. Not because it’s happened to me. But because I’m curious. I have this crazy theory that a ‘good wife’ is responsible for planting a seed of doubt in the heart and head of her husband; for keeping him just the tiniest bit uncertain. This is because too much certainty hardens the heart and closes the mind and makes men hard to reach and rigid. Stalin, for instance. Or the Taliban. Now, there’s a bunch of guys whose wives could certainly do with planting a seed or two of doubt in the hearts of their men. Seriously, though…I worked with a very powerful women at the beginning of my career. She would give me tips before pitching the powers-that-be (mostly men, of course.) “Never preface a sentence with the words, I think or I believe,” she would say. “It will only weaken your argument. And men won’t listen.” She was right. Which brings me back to where I started. Sort of. I think (oh dear, there I go) middle-aged men leave their wives for their wives’ best friends not because change is good. But because just a little bit of change is good. Just enough change to free them from the uncertainty that comes, so inevitably, with middle age. The uncertainty that leads them to believe that their wives don’t understand them. Lord! How I love that phrase. “My wife doesn’t understand me.” How many women fall for that one, I wonder? Anyway, feel free to fill in some my blanks. (including the proper grammatical use of wive’s versus wife’s best friend. Is there a possessive plural or not?)