A post from December 2015 I never published because I was less cranky then. Or. Christmas in July.

---

I spend my days torn.

I am not a patient man and tourists drive me batty, clogging up sidewalks with their ineptitude, their photography, their fear. But when I am working for a group of tourists, New Yorkers and their snarling comments anger me and I find myself jumping in to defend. “They don’t know, cut them a break,” I’ve screamed. “You can walk around them, too, you know.” I once ran after a businesswoman with that brief lecture. She rolled her eyes at me. I must have looked insane.

Today, we were walking out of Central Park and a woman on tour with me from South Carolina asked, “Which buildin’ is the Beresford?”

I was surprised she knew the name, only because it is not as legendary as The Dakota or, say, The San Remo in the same neighborhood.

I pointed it out to her and she drawled, nonchalantly, bored even, “We spent Thanksgivin’ there watchin’ the parade.”

I was speechless for a moment. She could have told me she was a Rockette and I would have been less surprised, she in her dungarees, sensible shoes, and hand-made yet somehow ubiquitous blanket-stitched appliquéd snowman sweater.

I’ve only been in the Beresford once, some twenty-three years ago, to cater-waiter at a party for a surgeon who lived in a sprawling 14-room apartment from whose windows hung copper woven drapes. So finely spun I could see my hand through them, they were weighty and surprisingly so, like lead. This is what naughty angels must wear I remember thinking to myself as I stole a plate of petit-fours.

That this woman had a warm, luxurious front row seat to the parade, in that building in particular, delighted me to no end. A good backstory lay ahead.

I normally only ask questions to which the answer is yes. I like to keep things upbeat on these tours. After grilling her about the particulars, how it was her son’s in-laws who owned the place and how this woman and her husband were invited for the long weekend, it seemed the backstory was, alas, fairly ordinary. So to put a period on our conversation, I tacked on the obvious, “They sound nice, yes?”

I was met with silence.

My hearing is for the birds so I blamed myself and repeated, “I’m sorry,  said, ‘MY, they sound very nice!'”

After another pause she said, “Eh. A little too high-falootin’.”

High. Falootin’.

My sympathy knew no pause and flew immediately to the in-laws. To the New Yorkers. Imagine having this drudge to your home on Central Park West and have her turn up her nose at you because you use the letter ‘g’ at the ends of your words. Imagine being talked about in the shadow of your own building after a four-day invitation where this cow got to watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade next door to Jerry Seinfeld and Diana Ross. Imagine your daughter having to spend Christmas in a backyard in the middle of fucking nowhere while they deep-fry a turkey, set the vinyl on the garage on fire, then shoot one another’s tooth out.

Today was my last tour of the year. And I’ve never been so glad to be a New Yorker. Go home, everyone.

Sunday in the park.

Had I ever been the go-to guy in a medical emergency, I might very well have been a doctor. I am not that guy. When things on the inside end up on the outside? I tend to vomit in kind. Like the time I was atop the lifeguard stand the summer of my junior year in college and this guy body surfing hit some shards of glass and came towards me for help, his chest and stomach in tatters, looking for something like love while I tossed my lunch to the sunny sands below.

I thought that was my least shiny hour. Until one hour ago.

How this has never happened before or never even occurred to me given my clientele for fifteen years seems nearly impossible now. Now that I know it can happen, I’m not sure I will ever expect it not to happen within minutes each time I begin a tour. It unfolded in tableaux. And I can see each frame in my mind like the Zapruder film.

His wife had a look of horror on her face and I was concerned she was having a stroke. She was the color of a Komodo dragon. Next a shock wave belted me and I thought we’d hit a truck. Of corpses. My eyes teared up like Japanese commuters fleeing subway platforms when that Ricin bomb went off. Cries of “We need to stop!” came from all around me. We pulled off to the side of the road right in front of the American Museum of Natural History when the eighty-year old man seated mid-way down the aisle ran off the bus and into Central Park. A bear may shit in the woods, but not this fella. It was far too late and dark and deep.

Lady Macbeth’s line ran through my head. “Who would have thought the old man to have had so much…” as I saw an endless trail mark his path right up to the Naturalists’ Gate where he’d disappeared into a hedge. My god, good heavens, my good god in heaven, this gentleman must not have used the bathroom since our boys were in Korea.

Only one woman rose to the occasion. And of course it was a woman. We men are such pussies. I had sprung pigtails and was gagging, useless, quivering in the gutter in front of the disapproving bust of Humboldt. She gathered towels, found him in a foreign park, triaged him as best she could, I dunno, fashioned a diaper out of twigs and moss, returned to me and ordered me to call him a car. She was stunning. She deserves the Congressional Medal of Honor.

The Dial 7 car arrived and the poor dear mortified man thanked me profusely for my kindness. I hadn’t done a goddam thing except manage not to pass out. I sent him on his way with his shell-shocked wife to their hotel and he shoved a twenty-dollar bill into the breast pocket of my blazer. I loved that blazer. It kills me that the twenty will burn along with it…

The radiant gesture.

When she walked into the office I knew she was a pistol. I was there to have a CT scan of my jaw because it’s been aching. A CT scan with contrast is an annoying affair as they pump you full of iodine and it burns. So I was happy to have her as a diversion.

I knew she was old. She was bent over at the waist with crispy bones and her hands were spotted with time. But she was in full hair and make-up and I give her points for dressing for the radiologist when all of us are specifically told to wear gym clothes.

She sat down next to me and puzzled over her paperwork.

“Could you do this for me? I can’t see a goddam thing.”

I laughed and said, “Certainly.”

Her name was Lillian and she was born in 1923. On December 25th, she reported, then added, “The other Jew born on Christmas.”

I was thrilled I got to go through her entire medical history.

“Do you smoke, Lillian?”

“Of course not.”

“Did you ever smoke?”

“Of course. Until they raised the price to fifty cents a pack in 1947.”

Her body must be a road map of scars, the list of surgeries continued on to the back of the page. Just as we finished, I was called in and got up to follow the technician. Lillian stopped me.

“You’re cute. You wanna grab my breast? I’ll be giving it away for free in there.”

In love with night.

She had a lovely airy voice with crisp consonants supported by her sweetness and an earnestness that gave her simplicity a great depth and unusual gravitas. She was simple. All week long, whenever I asked her what she wanted to be in ten years’ time, she told me, brightly, “A cosmetologist,” and I responded every time, “Cosmology is so exciting; I love looking at the stars, but we can’t see them here in Manhattan because they are usually all in rehab,” and her poor head would spin off her neck. But she was the only student out of forty who asked me how I was feeling every day when all her peers merely complained about their own feet. And at the airport, she seemed to nearly cry as we hugged goodbye. So as she rounded the corner towards her gate I yelled after her, “I’ll come to Kansas for a haircut in ten years!” and she looked back and said, simply, “Oh, you KNEW!”

And tonight, I miss her, the kind girl from Kansas with the sweet and simple voice.

My Facebook posts designed to make you feel better about yourself.

My apartment is in dire need of a paint job. Since 1998.

     *****

I got out of bed today. To get a soda.

     *****

I had to return shoes I couldn’t afford to Zappos. When they received my return, they wrote:

“We wanted to let you know that your return is back safe and sound in our warehouse. That trip over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house went smoothly.”

I wrote back:

“Really? I write copy. Are you looking? Because this…”

They wrote back:

“Yes! We’re always looking! Go to this link!”

I did:

“No job postings.”

     *****

My plants are all dying. They are my pets. Ergo, my pets are all dying.

          *****

I can’t stop eating cookies. Before I eat each one, I murmur, “So what.”

     *****

That thing on my neck has all the ABCs of melanoma.

     *****

I think my air conditioner has toxic black mold.

     *****

I didn’t get into any of the colleges I wanted to go to. And so I occasionally end a sentence poorly, like that last one.

     *****

My longest relationship is with my student loan officer.

     *****

My newest relationship is with the bricklayer on the scaffolding outside my 10th-floor window. I hate him.

     ******

This was the year that people stopped asking me where my parents live and started asking me if my parents are still alive.

     *****

I can’t afford a smart phone. I have a dumb phone. The screen is too small to crack. So, in your face there, I guess…

     *****

There are now automobiles that weigh less than my television set.

     *****

I spent my Spring on the islands. Ellis and Liberty.