Brenda and the F Word

The most intriguing detail about this Lindsay Lohan photo in the new Vanity Fair is the fact she’s missing her bling. Namely, the alcohol monitoring bracelet on her left ankle. (See how it’s been airbrushed out?)

I’m a stalker; a Shorty groupie. He’s the ‘bone man’ from Treme, New Orleans. A skinny, scrappy charismatic kid who blows as good as Wynton.  And last night, in a tent down by the East River, he blew the stars right out of the sky. He shook the Brooklyn Bridge. He had us shrieking till 1 am. What follow is a re run of what I wrote about him back in September.

“C’mon! Gimme some chicken grease on that guitar. Torture me, man!” shouts this ridiculously young boy named Shorty as he picks up an old beat-up, dented trombone, the shine long gone, and blows a fucking whole through the roof. And he doesn’t stop blowing for three straight hours. No breaks for breathing. No small talk. Nothing but funk, blues, and a little bit of rock n roll.

I don’t know what it is about me and ‘bone men.’ (and yeah. don’t let’s go there.) Maybe it’s the way the whole body works it. The slide, the reach, the muscle. Maybe it’s the combination of restraint and recklessness. The control. And of course, the joy. The first time I fell for the bone was at some dump in New Orleans. A guy named Eddie Beau who blew from midnight to 3 am in a joint so small, so packed, there was only room to shake your head. There have been many others since. But I have never heard a man like this 22-year-old blue-blooded prodigy from Treme. At the end of the set, he turns his back, stretches his arms straight out, and drops his hands like some kind of black Christ figure. And I think: Yes! Any man who fill a room with joy  like this is a god. And what a miracle, his city of New Orleans. How it continues to make its way back from such unspeakable grief and despair, how through its music, it gives so much and asks nothing in return but a willingness to ‘feel it.’

Our country house was on the market for 165 days. Last week, it finally went into contract. The offer, when it came, seemed as surreal, as unlikely, as flamingos falling out of the sky in the middle of Siberia. (An event reported by Ian Frazier in his yet-to-be published journal, Travels in Siberia.) There was relief but little joy. We’re selling at an enormous loss. Unless you consider the gain: fewer sleepless nights, worrying about finances and money in the bank for college. But it’s funny, how intensely one begins to love when faced with the possibility of loss. I mean, I’ve bitched about this place since we bought it. I called it the ‘money pit.’ I hated the fucking deer and wild turkeys and the sound of buzz saws and power drills in the morning. I hated the silence at night.

Weeks ago, I started slowly dismembering it–removing favorite objects and bringing them home to New York. It was my way of severing the connection, of letting go, I guess. But even if I loathed it, it wasn’t a total loss. Being there reinforced family connections that might well have been lost forever if we hadn’t been nearby. And the inside of the house was happiness itself.

“I don’t paint with color. I paint with emotion,” Picasso once said. And man, did I take his words to heart. Those colors were precisely the reason why the house didn’t sell. Or so we were told. They were too vivid, too personal, too scary. Then, in came the buyer everyone hopes for. A petite, perky brunette in her mid-forties–a woman whom if I had met in other circumstances would never have imagined being ‘the one.’ And yet, she and her two daughters fell so madly in love with the house, they want everything in it: sofas, chairs, beds, lampshades. So now R. and I are breathing a bit easier. Not jumping for joy but relieved.

This ambivalence pretty much defines how I feel about most things these days. My daughter’s departure for college. The optioning of my novel  in Hollywood. The house. All somewhat complicated emotional transactions that demand weighing loss versus gain.

P/s/ the link will take you to a funny place(just scroll down to the hills are alive)

Once upon a time, two years ago, a very lonely, rich man lived alone at the top of the world in the center of the universe. Through sheets of sparkling, floor-to-ceiling glass in a space so immense and soulless, it echoed only emptiness, this man would gaze down at the city he had conquered. A city, like himself, that never slept. One of the fascinating things about this man was the fact that he couldn’t lose money. Even in the midst of his country’s worst recession, he just kept making more. So much more, it forced him to dream of something else. And what he dreamed of was love.

Unfortunately, like most rich men, he had very few friends and depended on his servants for company. One of those servants was a personal trainer, born in the faraway Balkans. We’ll call him Zoltran.

“Listen, Zoltran,” the man said one morning after yet another grueling session in his private gym, pumping, crunching, lifting and peddling nowhere. “I’ll pay you $100,000 to find me a wife.”

Now, Zoltran, the personal trainer, was not a man who wasted time dreaming of love. He was as tough as an old cudgel. A man from a small mountain village who had survived one of the cruelest, medieval-like civil wars in recent history. A war in which neighbors murdered neighbors, raped daughters, and buried babies. Yet here he was at the top of the world in the center of the universe helping a man fight an enemy he knew nothing about. The enemy we call, aging. How Zoltran must have laughed, knowing what he did about real enemies.
“I’ll do it,” he said. “I’ll find you a wife.”

Months drifted by as they tend do in this rarified, part of the world. A whirring blur of solitary trading, exercise, desultory meals, and more money. Then, one morning, the man padded out of his office in search of a cup of coffee. And there in his kitchen, he saw a young girl hard at work, cleaning. (The kitchen, of course, was never actually used for cooking. So the cleaning must have been confusing.) The young girl spoke very little English. They communicated with gestures and smiles.

“Who is the girl in my kitchen?” the rich man asked at his next session with Zoltran. “And what happened to my regular housekeeper?”

“She’s sick,”Zoltran replied. “And the young girl is from my village in the Balkans. She arrived here three months ago.”

“Well, I like her,” the man said. “Maybe she could stay for a while and help out?”

“Sure,” said Zoltran. “I’ll tell her.”

Six months later, the lonely man and the young girl were married.  It was an intimate,  quiet wedding. But when one of the man’s friends gave the pair a set of very expensive ceramic knives from Japan as a gift, the bride blanched. “We can not accept this,” she said in now fluent English. “Knives are symbols of blood feuds.  They bring bad luck.”  Then, when the bride’s mother arrived to visit, people assumed that she would be surprised to see her daughter living at the top of the world in the center of the universe. Gazing down sixty stories to the street, the mother just shrugged. “Isn’t this how all of America lives?” she said. “I’m not surprised, at all.”

Oh. Zoltran got his $100,000 and still reports for work every day.

OK. Guys, you can believe me here or not. But I tried three times to embed a photo of Gurumai from Google Images. Every single time,  my computer shut down with HUGE announcements from Norton that recent attacks were blocked. I’m talking malware and viruses in everything from my documents to my hard drive. So I get the message…She’s controlling the fucking ether now!

So I got up and left the movie when America’s Sweetheart sat down to meditate at Gurumai’s ashram in India. (more on her in a minute.) I have no problems with Hinduism. None, at all. I love the idea of nirvana and spiritual enlightenment; of reaching that divine state of being indifferent to everything from hunger, personal attachments, and physical desire to ambition, and even or especially death. But this was a faith  invented thousands of years ago to meet the needs of a people, a desperate people, locked into a caste system for whom the only way to endure a lifetime of incessant suffering and NO OPTIONS was to focus on achieving that indifference, followed by death, followed by rebirth. Does any of this seem remotely relevant to the life of our lovely Julia Roberts? I mean, being a movie star is a bitch. True.  I think getting only 15 to 18 mil a picture sucks, too. It’s blatant sexism. As for Ms. Gilbert, the author/wanderer. Sure, divorce also sucks. So does depression and feeling numb. But Holy Ganesh! If only the solution to India’s problems were as simple as learning to speak Italian, eat pasta, meditate, and fall in love in Bali.

I also have a major problem with Gurumai. Back in the 80′s and 90′s, I knew women who had her portrait tattooed on their backs, deserted young children, and gave away all of their savings to her. I knew men who ran hugely profitable media/fashion companies in New York and commuted upstate every weekend just to be near her ashram. Then there were the high=powered, influential women who abandoned successful careers everywhere from Hong Kong to London and also surrendered their fortunes. All for the privilege of prostrating themselves; of venerating, a spectacularly beautiful, albeit venal, cover girl guru who traveled around in a fucking Jaguar, wearing $1,000 couture hats. No, I say. No, No, No. There was definitely something very wrong with the whole picture.

On a happier note… One of the original Blue Men came for dinner last week. And let’s talk about real nirvana. I saw these guys eight times back when they first blew the city away with their hyper kinetic explosion of music, and color, and physical hijinks down on Astor Place. They re-invented the concept of spectacle: pre Stomp and Cirque de Soleil and Gaga and Madonna. And now they’ve opened a school for kids. I was in heaven, sitting there and listening to him talk.