D O G P O E T

I bring a book of poems down to Riverside Drive. Find a bench in the shade, green paint peeling from its slats. Mud, dried leaves and narrow sticks spread in continents across the cracked pavement beneath my feet. A fly crawls across the ledge, where a pigeon spins in a circle, burrowing its beak into its tail feathers. Below us the traffic song of the West Side Highway. A boy walks by clutching a skateboard, knows I’m watching him, his eyes flitting between nervousness and determination, a sleeve of ink stretching up his arm. Behind me a man sits in a parked car mopping his chest with a t-shirt, passenger door open, Al Green’s voice carrying to me beneath the trees’ canopy.

Not yet settled I study new friends for cracks, find that when stirring jasmine rice in the pot that I remember streets: Lyndale Avenue from our second-floor window - October in Minneapolis - cars coughing up leaves in their wake. The empty road near the Sarasota airport, night, languid warmth, driving past the dying motels, pool chairs with their arms facing the road. In San Francisco the wide avenues near Saint Ignatius, the single night I drove out to the second-run theater near the ocean, ate popcorn alone, drove back through the dark, the fog, that single night caught in my head, a memory that crowds out others till it becomes something I used to do.

About 25 people walked out of the 5:30 showing of The Aristocrats last Sunday. Which means you should go see it, because you’re all a bunch of perverts.

Last night I dreamed that I was at a party in the middle of a group of people who were all feeling up my bicep while I stood there and - modestly, of course - flexed for them.

Then I woke up with my arm trapped between my head and the mattress. I was drooling.

p.s. My friend Kelly, who drove me out to Trader Joe’s in Jersey yesterday, pointed out that if you rearrange the letters in “dogpoet” you can spell: “Got Dope?”

One Year in New York

Well kids, today’s the anniversary. I’m too sentimental to let it slide without comment, and too tired to do it justice. How about a list? Everybody loves a list.

Read about three books a week during the school year.

Let a bitch in my fall workshop work my every last nerve.

Wrote about it later.

Wrote the first fifty pages of my memoir.

Rented an absurdly large number of dvd’s over summer break.

Read maybe two books.

Grew much more conscious of my physical appearance and clothing, producing more confusion than results.

Eventually grew to understand that grocery shopping in New York is not about driving to Safeway once a week, but requires daily trips to about three different stores in my hood: One for meats, one for produce, and one for chocolate sorbet.

Bought raspberries from a sidewalk vendor around the corner at midnight.

Became slightly more aggressive about putting myself out on the dating market. Grr.

Fell in love every two blocks with some straight boy. At least the ones who hadn’t started plucking their goddamned eyebrows.

Realized that wasn’t getting me anywhere.

Went to a gay bachelor party and a gay wedding. Stayed out till nearly five a.m. both nights.

Accepted after much kicking and screaming that one has much less personal space in New York.

Felt constantly overwhelmed by the embarrassment of riches the city has given me through new friends. Flaked out on hundreds of phone calls and emails, trying to figure out how to be an introvert in New York.

Realized that New York is the ideal city for introverts.

iPods help.

Accepted the inevitability of everyone reading over everyone else’s shoulders on the subway.

Discovered that the subway was the only place I was ever going to keep up with my New Yorker subscription.

Realized that a New Yorker’s most important possession is a decent apartment.

Spent an amazing amount of time in said apartment, frequently described by visitors as “cozy.”

Lived without a pet for the first time in ten years.

Became all-too-familiar with the comings and goings of Little Miss Slammy Slammerstein across the hall.

Lived through four seasons for the first time in seven years. Bought a parka. And later, some shorts.

Became a much better writer.

After I wrote that last sentence I spent about thirty minutes attaching all kinds of qualifiers and defensive clauses to it, anticipating those who’d argue otherwise. But ultimately it doesn’t matter. I know it, that’s what counts.

Moving to New York was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Getting sober and watching my mother die were the others, and quite honestly I’m not sure which one takes the cake. There were so many moments, especially in the beginning, when I didn’t think I was going to make it, moments where I still don’t think I’ll make it. I whined a lot this year. At school I grew cranky because I wasn’t twenty-five anymore, till I realized that the twenty-five year olds didn’t have much to write about. In Chelsea I got sick of hearing about everyone’s half-shares on Fire Island, but only because I’d never been invited. “New York has more snobs per capita than any other city,” I told friends back in California, “and the gay boys are all legends in their own minds.”

But it takes one to know one.

I made the rather humbling discovery this summer that the most important weapon I have in the New York battle is my gym membership. Endorphins, vanity, who the fuck cares? I don’t whine after the gym.

I miss my friends in San Francisco so much some days it hurts. I miss day trips to the Marin headlands and beer busts at the Eagle. I miss Joe’s Barbershop. I miss Peet’s Coffee and Trader Joe’s.

I only realized after I moved away how much Wade aka Bearbait saved my life.

New Yorkers have ambition. San Franciscans have, arguably, a better quality of life. There may be, as someone once told me, something “lotus-eater-y” about SF, but it makes for ripe daydreams. I’m still stuck between the two.

New York has more artists, and they’re the best kind of peer pressure. New York has the fall. On Sundays I can walk two blocks to Riverside Park and sit on a bench under the golden leaves and call friends back in Cali. At midnight I can get raspberries from a street vendor around the corner and on the nights I don’t he’ll still smile at me. At one a.m. I can get sorbet. I can hear Joan Didion read at the 92nd Street Y. I can get tickets to “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.”

I can walk towards the 23rd St station in Chelsea, carrying a carton of Chinese leftovers, and a boy with big arms in the window of Better Burger will smile at me and everything’s okay in la vida dogpoet.

I guess that’s my way of saying that I love New York, on the days I don’t hate it, and that I’m not leaving anytime soon. And if I ever do it will be on my own stubborn, pig-headed terms.

When I first arrived it was so very important to me that I not look like a tourist. Of course all that nervous tension probably marked me as a newcomer to any disinterested local. I might as well have worn a fanny pack. Thankfully I’ve lived here long enough that I can refer to my Streetwise map of New York in public without much self-consciousness. I might even refer to a guidebook, if pressed. I would not, however, sit on the subway like the two girls on the 1 train yesterday with a book titled “New York City for Dummies.”

Timmy the Beach Monologuer continued. “Yeah we went by the house last night and the lady had all this trash piled up out on the driveway like paint cans and newspapers and a dead mower and there’s no way we’re moving in there with all that crap I’m gonna call the realtor we got plenty of work to do already got the window people coming in we’re gonna do all the windows well all the windows except two which are kind of shaped funny and would take too long but anyway we’re getting the kind with the cranks and the first thing I want to do is paint the garage Harry wants to move everything into the garage but I said there’s no way I’m gonna move stuff in to the garage and then try and paint it later, take down all those shelves and paint it no I said let’s paint it first when it’s empty then we can move everything into the garage all the storage boxes and stuff and they can stay in there while we finish up on the house and…”

He went on like that for awhile. I gazed past his head, at the sky. A plane glided by, trailing a banner: “Party 2Nite at D’Jais!! Ladies free B4 Ten!!!” All day long planes flew by trailing banners, most of them the cheap kind with red letters, but occasionally you’d get full-color movie or television banners: “Beach Girls with Rob Lowe and Julia Ormond!”

It was my first time at the Jersey Shore. I’d come with friends, a couple from Staten Island, regulars who had formed a ragtag community on the Belmar beach of queers and the occasional enlightened heteros, like James and Helen, the retired couple. James kissed all his gay friends on the cheek. Helen, a broad-built woman with flaming red hair, was like a cross between a Chelsea boy and Lucille Ball.

“What’s that?” she asked, pointing at the fruit my friends had picked up at the farmer’s market.

“Plums.”

“Why are they yellow? Are they gay plums?” She burst out laughing. “Gay plums!”

She quieted when James pulled out the blueprints for a house they were building in Delaware.

“I don’t know what she’s gonna do without the beach,” my friend told me later.

To reach the water we had to cross through a formidable circle of mature lesbians who sat cackling under their umbrellas. “Look,” said one, as the three of us passed. “They brought some boy with them today.”

I was actually sponsoring one of them in sobriety, but I appreciated their sexier first impression. Later, in the water, a north Jersey native named Craig told me that when he first saw me with the couple he thought that, well…

“I was the meat in the sandwich?” I asked.

“Something like that.” he said. “Where you from?”

“Originally? Minneapolis,” I said.

“Oh yeah? I go there on business sometimes. Nice place. Could never live there though. I don’t like white boys.”

His Puerto Rican boyfriend bobbed past us.

“I hear ya,” I said.

“Yeah? You like men of the Latin, uh, persuasion?”

“Depends on the Latin.”

The water was warm but filled with strange objects: round pale squishy balls. Rumor had it they were baby jellyfish - too young to sting - or bluefish eggs. Helen had another idea.

“Look!” she cried, wading toward us. Dozens of the white orbs were cupped in her hands. “It’s sperm!” She chased after Craig. “Yoo-hoo! It’s sperm!” They splashed away.

For a few minutes I watched a beefy specimen of manhood, packed into a pair of knee-length jams, wade towards me. Huge chest, ripped abs, buzz cut. Straight out of Colt Studios.

He got closer.

“Shit,” I muttered. “He plucks his eyebrows.”

“Yeah, and he dyes his mustache,” my friend said, surfacing beside me.

“How can you tell?”

“I dated a hairdresser once. I can spot a rug from two hundred yards.”

Having successfully taken the specimen’s physical inventory, I glanced down at my own body. My skin, having seen more of the library and subways than sun this summer, had been coated twice in 30 spf spray, which seemed to be holding up a little too well. My chest hair was flattened wet against my skin, and if the sun hit me at just the right angle one could even see the barest hint of my upper six pack gleaming above the surface of the water. Since the lower six pack was still in hiding, I stood at such a level that the waves lapped below my shoulders and pecs, which were, I had to ad-

A wave smacked me in the back of the head, snatching me from my reverie. Salt water went up my nose. I swiped a handful of eggs or sperm from my chest hair and sank down into the murk, where I pondered more serious matters, for a moment or two.

Last August, my father and I swapped coasts. I left San Francisco for New York, and he moved from D.C. to Nevada, ten miles outside of Lake Tahoe. He and his partner retired with full pensions after thirty years each with the federal government.

My fathers are practical men. They choose glamorous locations, but buy real estate just beyond the truly desirable neighborhoods, ten, twenty minutes outside of sexy. For the past fifteen years, since I’d left home, they’ve gravitated towards housing developments: little communities of carbon-copy, freshly-built homes surrounded by curving streets named Thistle, Willow, or Tulip. There’s little shade below the young trees. Nearby are similar communities, distinguished from one another by varying shades of roofing tile.

I visited their Nevada home in June. They picked me up from the Reno airport and drove me the hour through Carson Valley, which is, like much of Nevada, experiencing a phenomenal population boom. We passed dozens of new developments on the side of the highway. I imagined what it would be like to return there each evening, to wake each morning in a house that looked just like every other in the neighborhood. It felt suffocating: my life diminished, sliding from view among housing tracts devoid of character, my hand waving for attention before slipping below the surface.

One could say the same for living among millions of New Yorkers, but I would gladly settle for living in a row of Manhattan brownstones. Is it merely the difference of a hundred years that makes a housing tract appealing? What’s “character,” except age and higher heating bills?

They kept apologizing for the bucolic atmosphere of their new home. But coming from New York I found it peaceful, and beautiful: the green Carson Valley surrounded by snow-capped mountains, cut through with slender silver creeks, horses grazing in rolling pastures. It was, to my mind, a substantial improvement over D.C., a town whose appeal I never really understood (save for some high-class bloggers).

Their new house (on Tulip Court) was typically immaculate, with all-new furnishings from some Reno megastore. They’d recently subscribed to XM Radio, with a port in both their car and their living room. Satellite radio has a few hundred stations, but during my visit I only heard two: the first was elevator music, and the second was something called “The Heart”, which featured ballads by such compelling performers as Celine Dion, Whitney Houston, and Mariah Carey. Somehow the elevator music was the worst. They left it on all day at home. After forty eight hours I began hunting for their sharp instruments.

During a tour of the house, they showed me the master bathroom, which contained this framed artwork:

“These are just a few of our new local friends,” my father joked.

I choked back my horror and attempted a smile. “I should move to Nevada,” I said. “Make some friends.”

We bought tickets on a sailboat excursion around Lake Tahoe, which was typically glorious.

After silently capping on my father’s taste all weekend, I realized with dismay that we wore the same shoes.

As soon as I got back to New York, I replaced them.

“You’ve got skinny ankles,” my father said. “Like me.”

Though I’ve been going gorilla on the sitting calf machine, there are some things that resist replacement.

Something got in my eye that day. Tanning lotion, maybe, which I put on too late. For the next several hours my right eye threw a tantrum, reddening and watering till my left eye - sympathizing, no doubt - joined in. After the boat ride we hit a casino. My father’s partner handed me a five dollar voucher, pointing me towards their favorite nickel slots.

But the dark ages reign in Nevada. People smoke in the casinos, cigarette in one hand, cocktail in the other, their bifocals reflecting the whirling, flashing lights of the slot machines. I lasted five minutes, then stumbled out into the merciless sun. I hiked a hot stretch of strip mall road till I found a grocery store. Five minutes later I sat outside, by the rocking horse machine, drenching my eyes with a new bottle of Visine. I held my head in my hands, saline dripping from my lashes to the sidewalk, and listened to the hot engines of SUV’s gliding behind me through the parking lot.

“Are you okay?”

My left eye cracked open. A gray-haired woman, her hands gripping the handlebar of a shopping cart, paused before me. I gave her a tear-stained, squinty-eyed smile, and she wheeled away. Further down the strip mall was a sporting goods store. Five minutes later, hiding behind a ten-dollar pair of shades, I wandered like a drunk into Starbucks where I bought a grande chai that only cost me three bucks.

“That’s it?” I cried. “Three even?!?”

The blonde barista, stunned, nodded slowly, as if I had a learning disability. I grabbed the chai before she could change her mind, and pushed through the doors back into the parking lot, cursing Manhattan under my breath.

Of course I lied. I had told the woman with the shopping cart I was okay, but I wasn’t. By the time I made it back to the casino an hour had passed, and my fathers were sitting by the fake plants in the lobby. Shades on, I waded like a rock star through the waist-high bank of cigarette smoke.

They watched me approach. Self-conscious, I read both sympathy and amusement in their expressions. I’d seen those expressions far too often for my comfort.

Once, during Thanksgiving vacation, shortly after my father had stumbled across dogpoet and found out I had HIV, I caught the flu and hid like a miserable recluse in the seedy motel room down the road from their Palm Springs condo.

Last summer, visiting them in D.C., I’d twisted my ankle while wandering around the Holocaust Museum. I limped well into the next day, the day I discovered that my two-year online relationship had been delusional, that I wasn’t the only one wooing the space monkey, and that nearly everything he’d told me was a lie. When I finally pieced it all together, outside a coffee shop in Dupont Circle, I literally stumbled across the sidewalk into traffic. When I got back to their townhouse in Alexandria I locked myself in the spare bedroom for the next 24 hours.

What pissed me off was my inability to keep up a strong, mature appearance in their presence. Life conspired against me, locking me into the role of pathetic dependent. It was like attending my high school reunion, over and over, unemployed, overweight, and alone. Later that afternoon I lay on the bed in the spare room, eyes throbbing, head pounding, the blinds shut tight against the brilliant Nevada sun, feeling like I’d been taught some kind of lesson.

I’d spent many years feeling superior to my fathers. My whole life had been a refutation of practical: the nomadic artist with the addictive personality, trailing across the country from one glamorous city to another, renting (never buying) tiny apartments I could never quite afford.

That weekend I realized, as we sat together on the living room couch (serenaded by the instrumental version of “Copacabana”), that I was going to profit from my father’s practicality. Due to his financial savvy, his ability to invest, his lack of debt, his choice of value-doubling real estate, I’d be financially set for my retirement. He went through his living will with me; each document prepared, completed, filed in place. It was more than practical: it was his expression of love.

I’d always sneered privately at their tastes, the carbon-copy townhouses, Celine Dion on the stereo, the guest bathrooms designed with an “Asian theme.” I secretly scoffed when my father’s partner told me that The Da Vinci Code was his favorite book. The truth was that I wanted his approval: I worried that - should I ever get published - he’d find my book less than compelling, and set it aside half-read.

I didn’t like knowing these things about myself. I held my breath till I got back to New York, where grande chai’s cost $4.27, to my little studio, to my less-than-practical life, to my everlasting faith that one day I will arrive, one day I will be my own, self-fulfilled, self-possessed man, the success story at his school reunion.

I’m obsessed with adidas. I currently own three pair, and am holding out for a fourth. I’m relieved to hear that adidas is buying Reebok, and not vice versa. I’ve cultivated this sweatshop-produced obsession over the years, though it’s come to full fruition in New York. Say what you will about stereotypes; people care more about clothes here than they do in San Francisco, and I’ve gradually indulged my inner GQ. (It’s a slow process, people, cut me some slack.)

My old staple, the flannel shirt, has been pushed to the back of the closet, waiting for invitations to spend a crisp autumn weekend in upstate, or Vermont, which are undoubtedly coming my way. Here I am, practicing for such a weekend, last year in Big Sur:

Don’t be sad for the flannel shirts. Eventually, when I make enough money to buy a little cabin somewhere, they’ll come in handy. Until then I’ve somehow made it through a near-year in New York without a suit, though that will change soon, especially if more of my friends keep having big fat gay weddings.

Why are my adidas on the fire escape? I feel conspicuous in brand-new ultra bright trainers, so I figured a few days out there would encourage the New York City air pollution patina to settle in and take the bite out of the bright. Undoubtedly I am placing too much faith in the nasty barbed wire topping the chain link fence out back, but as Stephen says, who the fuck steals shoes? When you start worrying about shoes on the fire escape, the terrorists have won.

We’re on the 1 train headed uptown when Jeff leans over and says, deadpan, “There’s a clown sitting next to me.”

Slowly, casually, I lean forward and peer across him. Whoever’s next to him has orange pom poms on his chest. I lean back.

“Maybe I should ask him out,” Jeff says.

“Totally. He could, like, pull things from out of nowhere.”

“Right.”

“Surprise!”

“Right.”

“Pigeons or something. No, wait, I mean doves.”

Jeff’s quiet.

“I think I’m getting him mixed up with a magician,” I say.

“Whatever, I’m getting off here.” We pull into the 79th Street station. “Later,” he says. At the door he turns around, looks at me, points at the clown and mouths, “Go for it!” He steps out of the car. The doors slide closed. I can still see him through the window. He gives me the thumbs-up.

As the train pulls away, I glance over. Red suspenders. Patchwork baggy trousers. A big, floppy purple hat. He turns to me, slowly, and gives me a nervous smile.

In June the MTA discontinued the 9 subway line, its stops absorbed by the 1 line. Within a week virtually every reference to the 9 was erased. Signage in the stations were changed, as were the recorded voices on the express line. It remains on the laminated Streetwise map a friend gave me before I moved to New York, the map I carry in my bag and still refer to weekly. The end of the 9 had no real effect on me, as it diverged from the 1 north of 137th Street, far beyond my stop, though I do miss the internal rhyme of “the 1/9 line.” What pleased me was the fact that I had lived in New York long enough to see something disappear.

…

Last month, taking the N train to the Angelika to meet Norman, I sat next to a woman with beautiful legs, which at first I overlooked. Two young Latino guys boarded at 34th Street. One was dressed simply: t-shirt and work pants. The other wore a straw cowboy hat, Wrangler jeans, a silver-buckled belt, and pointy-toed cowboy boots. On the underside of his hat’s brim was stitched the word “Cowboy”, in case there was any doubt. Half the passengers were wearing flip-flops, and he was handsome, so I watched him for awhile. He gave the car a cursory glance, his eyes gliding over me and settling for a few seconds on the legs of the girl sitting beside me. I finally took notice.

All the seats were taken. He stood with his friend in a group clustered around a handrail, which he could not reach. When the train pulled away from the station he gently placed one hand on his friend’s shoulder, and held it there as we rocked through the tunnel. They talked quietly, easily. At each station he would remove his hand and take another look around, his eyes settling sometimes on the girl’s legs, sometimes on the new passengers boarding the train. Each time the train accelerated he placed his hand again on his friend’s shoulder, and each time I found myself holding my breath. I wondered where he was from, and where he was going. Where would he buy tonight’s first drink, and where would he hang that hat at night’s end? Every few seconds I’d look away, assume an expression of indifference, scan the car as if every occupant held my interest, my eyes returning to him, reassuring myself that each time we left a station his hand fell again on his friend’s shoulder, where I felt the heat, the light pressure, against my skin.