This is for 3WW

New York 1987

She was tired.  Her whole body hurt.  Really she should leave the mosh pit to younger girls but she had been caught up in the moment at the Iggy Pop concert.  It had almost felt like flying, being thrown from guy to guy.

OK it had felt great.  As if she were weightless and highly desirable though she had no idea what being thrown from person to person had to do with being desirable.

But this morning she felt as if her whole body had been trampled on.  She had stayed too late at the VIP room and the after hours club downtown where everybody but the bartender and her were sniffing coke.  She stuck to plain soda and pot.  At least she didn’t have a hangover.  Though it sure felt like one.

After the half hour shower she drank Bustello that she had filled to the brim. It gave her a jolt but not the jolt she needed.  She decided she needed a brain and body transfusion as she tried to remember what she had to do at work today.  Some meetings she could talk her way through in her sleep.  Nothing important.

Shit.  She had been staring at the red ribbon without remembering its significance.  Tonight there was another memorial service–the fourth she had gone to in the past seven weeks.  After the memorial service there was going to be a rally, and tomorrow she was committed to bringing meals all day to boys apartments.  Young boys, beautiful boys, successful boys.  Boys cut down in their prime.  Boys who maybe wouldn’t have had to die if the government hadn’t considered this a “Gay/Haitian” disease until too late.

She called in sick to work. Something that was really anathema to her but….She needed to prepare her eulogy.  She really should have stayed home last night writing it but Will would have wanted her to be carried over a mosh pit.

The coffee kicked in as she thought she really did have the zeal of a convert when it came to AIDS though she had never needed to be converted.

••••••••••

There was a time when AIDS was thought to only hit Gays and Haitians.  I wasn’t consciously thinking about Haiti when I wrote this but…

The Red Cross makes it real easy to donate to Haiti.  They accept Amazon one click.  For most of the day today I thought about running away from my life and going to Haiti.  For some reason of all the fast moving tragedies of the last decade, this–well it’s one too many.

I heard it’s really hard to get through to the Red Cross and the other orgs collecting money.  You can donate directly through Amazon.

Remember the first time we went to London as a family? Elka and I were in high school, and very into English rock–oh no that was me. We were all into Carnaby Street and English fashions. It seemed so foreign then; the ambulances that blared a noise that sounded a bit too much like Nazi movies; tinned fruit for breakfast.

I apologize for thinking it cute that you and mommy liked Carnaby Street so much and that Elka and I kind of made fun of and kind of loved your blue Carnaby Street blazer you were to wear for the next 20something years. I don’t remember what mommy bought. Mini dresses and skirts I know as she had better legs than I did.

You were younger than I am now. Bummer. I was going to ask if you thought about death and/or getting old and then I remembered two things: that trip where you “misplaced” our passports and other things constantly as you were convinced you were rapidly becoming demented. Your father and mommy’s father had died at 55. You thought if you were going to survive physically your mind wasn’t.

Your mind survived and you went onto as much glory as a CPA can have. It’s strange as I can’t remember you loving the arts particularly, but you loved artists, writers and a certain Russian male ballet superstar who agreed with your political views. Fortunately I have blocked your politics from my mind. Alone we hardly talked politics. After the teenage and post teen years when all we did was fight except on vacation or in restaurants–the neutral zones, we worked hard at getting along.

When I moved back to New York and Boston University said I could take any three courses at The New School to graduate you lobbied hard for me to take Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s course on Death & Dying with you. Wow daddy what I would have done later to have taken that course. But then I didn’t want to take a course on dying and I didn’t want to take a class with you. What if I met somebody? What was I supposed to do? “Oh I would love to go out with you. Let’s just say good night to my father.”

Of course you were a big draw. Most of my boyfriends and male friends adored you. I sometimes wondered who they liked better. I know it wasn’t your politics though I think you toned it down a bit for my friends. Poor mommy. I don’t know if you ever knew that you were permanently kicked out of husband’s night at mommy’s Brandeis group.

As they met one Saturday night a month and most of your friends and immediate cousins were dead or worse–worse meaning living in Florida–that was a big thing. Mommy could still see then and would literally graph your nights as you needed to be out every Saturday night or have company. I think I vowed then to truly learn to like myself as we’re all left alone at certain times in our lives.

I have to remember all the little things about you. What made an artist ask if he could draw you when we were at a restaurant your last Father’s Day?

After you died a nurse from the hospital called and spoke to Elka–mommy and I were at the diner:
I just want you to know how handsome your father looks.

In retrospect that’s kind of weird but it was very comforting. You never faded into the woodwork. I was so proud when we meet somewhere in Manhattan as you looked so great. Though I hated it when maitre de’s would try to give us the private banquette for lovers. You of course found it funny, and funnier when I would say rather primly “he’s my father. Please.”

When I came home from the former Soviet Union, I remember thinking how old and tired you looked. It was the first time I had ever thought that about you. You were 75 and had less than two years left on this earth.

One night you were waiting for me on a Ralph Lauren bed outside 40 Carats in Bloomingdales. I was two or more hours late as I was working in Jamaica and the subways had been out. It was the first time I added “not quite frail” to you. You said you were going to leave if I hadn’t come then but I know you would have waited.

The Academy Awards were on four or five days later. I told you I wasn’t going to watch and you yelled at me for not watching a “historic important” event. You didn’t understand the concept of having to be up at 5:30 to be at work on time, and I was so energetic and young….You went on and on. I ended up yesing you just to get off the phone. I yes’d you a lot. You would plan a trip to Europe for me, I would get there and change all the reservations. You never minded. You just had to be right, had to do the planning and probably would have traveled for me or with me if given the opportunity.

I always have wished that wasn’t our last conversation but you know, we had enough great ones.

On March 31, it will be eighteen years since your death. I badly need a center. Somebody to talk to. I hope you don’t mind if I chose you.
Both this house thing, and blogging have me crazed. Many of my blogging friends have stopped blogging or blog randomly now. I don’t feel part of a community. When I first began to blog I loved that feeling of being part of a fairly new grassroots movement. Sometimes I feel very much my age, suffering from early dementia, and jealousy of every younger blogger who can remember her name and do ten things while spelling her name for the order taker because the web site’s she’s ordering from is down. I know I sound bitter and really don’t mean to. The past two and a half years have been overwhelming and the two years before that–constant dental work–weren’t a picnic. I should take all my skymiles, earned from the renovation, and go somewhere, but I live at the beach and would feel too guilty. And the rapidly dwindling resources…unfortunately a lot are dwindling because of the stock market not my buying. This has led me to scale down the renovation. Oh life, can’t live with it or without it…

I feel sad that blogging wasn’t around when I was in my 30′s or even a bit later as I led a much more exciting Sex in the City type life. Few people care about memories, it seems. They want it to happen today or preferably sometime tomorrow if they can learn about it today. I will probably feel different about this after I move in and the shock of actually living in a house I own with all my own stuff wears off.

I just ordered a day bed with extra mattress for the guest room and a very conservative, for me, couch. Almost everything else can wait until I’m in the house. The kitchen cabinets are coming next Wednesday. Guess I’m free to tackle taxes and find the source of misinformation the health insurer underwriters have about me. Though how I can prove I never was hospitalized, without doctors notes affirming to that, is beyond my understanding. Please excuse my frenzied anxious state. I know that if pre-existing clauses end next year, they’re going to add a clause saying it doesn’t affect me and me alone. I am my father’s daughter. We major in worrying and thinking up absurd things that nobody else would think of and then it does come true. I’m very into positive thinking and I strongly believe we’re in charge of our destinies to a point, but old habits die hard–and the to a point means we have to acknowledge somethings in life can’t be changed just because we want them to be

My bff Lucia and I saw Jersey Boys
A new type of Broadway show that brought me some faith in Broadway. I don’t generally like it or even Off-Broadway anymore. As both are very pricey I can be picky But that’s a whole other post

She wanted to leave when she was 40 in 91 but her father died suddenly and her mother was needy.

Her office on Jerome Avenue in The Bron_ had graffiti all over the windows No matter how often it was taken off it would be back the ne_t day. The strange thing was she found The Bron_ a relief from Manhattan. She knew chop shops were all over Jerome, and she was never more than a few minutes from crack and drive by shootings, but her office was a DMZ. When she would walk the streets, men would come out of the buildings “Ms. Savage, that’s Ms. Savage. She cool.”

Generally she hated that type of attention. The roar of the construction worker, whistle of the Con Ed worker, but there was something almost innocent, something refreshing, in these boys.

She trusted them to keep her out of death’s door. She wouldn’t trust them for anything else and they knew it. Though she smiled and laughed more easily than the other white women she worked with, there was a certain coolness about her. A sort of “don’t fuck with me, mother fuckers,” resonated from her cream turned gold in summer skin

Though she lived in what was then the richest zip code in the city, probably the country, she would count the Olde English malt liquor bottles strewn on the sidewalks as she practically tripped over homeless people sleeping and would make her e-cuses.

That spring or summer a subway motorman went postal and killed a number of people Service on the East Side IRT was disrupted for months. The normal 20 minute ride took two hours.

She was the last legal tenant on her floor. On one side of her apartment the new landlord put $10 ho’s; on he other side small time drug dealers. She had five floods the landlords refused to do anything about and soon she had cockroaches coming from the ceiling. It was vile. It was gross. Call the city to complain and give her address, yeah really. She would hear ten minutes of laughter before they hung up. For years the city had ignored the lack of heat complaints also.

She could take not having heat. But cockroaches, mice and rats that ran from the fireplace once the new 63rd Street subway had opened, that was intolerable.

She could have waited to be bought out but she would probably be dead from something. She was only 40; the best dressed white woman at the Jerome Ave Social Security office where all the other Jews her age acted as if they were going to be eligible for SSI tomorrow.

Her laughter was infectious but half the time she felt it was the hysterical laughter of the soon to be legally insane. When her best friend would come to the office to meet her for lunch at the Paradise Coffee Shop, beloved by generations of native Bron_ites, all work would stop. All the guys wanted to meet her. Only later would they notice the wedding ring.

Claimants would ask for the “pretty well dressed” white girl. “Well dressed” she laughingly told her friends meant that if she were to wear plaid, and she wouldn’t, it would clash as a fashion statement. She was always shocked at how often “well dressed” was applied to her. She was just another city girl.

She moved to Riverdale, The Bron and the high point of her day was walking down the hills of Riverdale, over The Major Deegan and up the hills of Kingsbridge Heights and around The Reservoir that stunk of mold most days.

She wore silk short suits and would put on her pantyhose once she got to the office no later than 7:30 AM so she could do “undertime” or OT in the morning. Not because she wanted the money but otherwise the work would just pile up. She hated that job and didn’t yet realize if she was to remain in New York it was Manhattan she needed.

When the crack/drive by shooting years were safely over she moved back but never loved it as much as she had before the days of the $10 ho’s.

As others dreamed of the city she dreamed of escaping. It wasn’t Final Payments She didn’t live with her mother. Her mother didn’t stop her from doing things, but she couldn’t leave as long as her mother was living on her own. And her mother had no intention of ever giving into age and fraility.

Her mother died a month after 9/11 and it was so hard. She felt wounded and alone. First she couldn’t leave because of estate and patriotism reasons. Then there was another reason and still another.

Si_ years after her mother’s death she began to get her apartment ready. The closing is scheduled for midway between 9/11 and her mother’s death.

Every New Yorker has their 9/11 story. Hers isn’t that fascinating. She didn’t know anybody who died in the attacks but many who lived.

On Wednesday or Thursday she will walk down to the old Trade Center, walk further to the water ta_i to the new Ikea in Red Hook, Brooklyn and come back at night to look at the twin beacons of lights emenating from the site. Her best friend, daughter and some other friends went yesterday but she couldn’t go. They mainly talked about the ride and the food in the after event phone call. The beacons of light will always be meaningful

It’s been seven years. A missing person can be declared dead after seven years. Bankruptcies e_punged, debts cleared. Crimes e_cept for murder and rape are usually no longer prosecuted. Seven is the age of reason. Seven means so many many things, but most of all it means letting go.

She’s made up with the friends she fought with seven years ago, and hasn’t spoken to the false friends.

Her new future awaits not where she thought it would seventeen or even three years ago in Santa Monica or San Diego but in South Carolina.

She’s tired. Oh so tired. It took forever to sell her apartment and sometimes she think hers was the last one bedroom in Manhattan to sell for a half decent price. The doormen saga–she doesn’t want to go there.

She’s tired of people with their hands out. She’s tired of living in a city that’s so pricey and so crowded and people are defeated as living here is hard. Her neighbors are jealous–but there’s no longer a market for their apartments

She thought she suffered from a terminal case of bad timing but it turned out to be pretty darn good.