A Field of Vaginas...

Most people actually went to work in the late 1980’s. I’m not just saying that they had jobs, but that most people drove somewhere, to an office or a physical place of some kind, for their employment. Those were pre-internet days when only a handful of people worked at home. The parking lots of stores and malls weren’t filled with cars the way they are today.

Given the fact that my partner and I owned our own business, we were among the few men that were able to set our own hours and be out and about during the day. Mark and I were among only a handful of regular guys working out every weekday morning at The Sporting Club. By “regular guys” I mean non-Redskins football players. There were lots of them too, along with an assortment of retired, rich guys.

Very upscale, The Sporting Club was the shit back then. A huge facility offering cutting edge new machines and equipment. They had a café, juice bar, babysitting rooms, sauna, lounge, and all the latest workout gear and supplements. Handsome young men and cute girls wearing Sporting Club uniforms were everywhere, coaching, training & acting as eye candy for the crowd.

Without question though, the main draw was the women’s 10am yoga class.

 Packed full of pretty girls in skin tight yoga gear. Yuppies, trophy wives, rich girls, society ladies, and single women on the prowl for a Redskin or a sugar daddy. They were locked and loaded, hair and make-up primed for a kill shot.

At 10am, they took the field on the main floor in a basketball sized room fitted wall to wall with a carpet of blue rubber. The open balcony above was crowded with weight machines and cardio equipment that bellied up to the railing, looking directly down onto the yoga floor. The edge of the balcony was packed tight with elliptical machines, stair steppers, gliders, and any other kind of cardio machine that allowed men upright exercise while almost leaning over the rail itself. By 9:50am, Monday through Friday, those machines were packed. No more room at the Inn. Elbow to elbow, men exercised casually, waiting for the women’s yoga class to kick off below.

 Sure, the guys loved to watch the girls, but that was no ordinary yoga class. Aside from the fact that it was packed with stunning women on the prowl, most ladies were too vain to allow anything other than smooth lines under their leotards. No panties and no bras unless absolutely necessary, even then the most minimal bras possible. There was little need for bras, no bouncing in that class, just lots of slow stretching.

The ladies pretended to ignore the men above, a whir of cardio machines becoming louder and more desperate with each coordinated stretch of skin tight nylon and polyester on the yoga floor. The men moved faster, like a tribe ready to attack, all eyes locked down on the yoga Rockettes. Of course the women knew they were the show, that’s why they were

there. But their main move, that they repeated many times throughout their class, was on their backs, legs stretched wide open like an invitation, pointing their lady parts skyward.

The girls knew what they were doing but I never did figure out if they knew exactly why it was as wildly popular as it became. Sure, they were opening up wide and pretending they didn’t see or hear the men going into overdrive above them, but it was more than that. What the ladies didn’t realize was that the lack of panties combined with the lycra stretched out as wide as it could get, made the concealment factor null and void. Like looking down through

a screen door. From a little distance, all the men saw was a field of vaginas. All shapes and sizes.

Landing strips, heart-shaped trims, commando, clamando, vajayjay alfresco.

I don’t think the women ever realized just how completely ineffective their Spandex was at concealing anything when the material is stretched wide open, especially when viewed from a distance of around 25 feet, from the height of a balcony, for instance. Like using a kitchen strainer to hide an avocado. Doesn't work.

Word spread, that class became crazy popular, more men than women. Guys started showing up at 9am for the 10am class, just so they could claim a cardio machine at the edge of the balcony. Something had to give. Maybe a fight over an elliptical machine? A catastrophic failure of crotch spandex that could blow the whole cover? We never knew. Mark and I closed our business, going in new directions, and both of us moved out of the area.

 One thing is for sure though.

“Raindrops on roses

And whiskers on kittens

Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens

Brown paper packages tied up with strings

These are a few of my favorite things…”

That’s all well and good for Julie Andrews, but for men? A field of vaginas would pretty much be at the top of the list.

It's OK to Talk About Death...

As parents, we all love our kids endlessly, and we celebrate special moments, both together and apart.

Ruth sent me this note about a breakfast we shared that I had almost forgotten. Now that I've read this, that won't happen again.   

Ruth Wrote:

The shiny chrome diner was packed. Dad and I had driven by several other breakfast places downtown, but it being both Sunday and pouring down fat raindrops, it appeared that everyone had the same idea as us: to pile into the car and seek out the refuge of warm place to be served pancakes and eggs benedict. Dad doesn’t like crowds, or waiting, so as we drove by each restaurant and saw the huddled masses standing outside, poking each other in the heads with umbrellas, he would bite the inside of his lip, and shake his head. We finally settled on a spot that didn’t look promising, but to my delight it had a Greek influenced menu and an eager teenage hostess in combat boots sat us quickly. We squeezed past the soggy folks in their Sunday best and slid into a red leatherette booth. Every time the front door opened, we were hit with a strong whiff of wet pavement, that, mixed with the smell of hot coffee in the damp air, was both intoxicating and slightly off putting.

We knew what we were here to talk about, and for a while it remained the elephant in the room as our eyes darted around the menu and we weighed our culinary options. It had been my idea to talk to my dad about death, namely, his and moms. I am someone who likes to plan things out and to know what to do. I was nervous to bring up the topic over the phone a couple weeks prior and almost chickened out. My dad and I are so similar we have somewhat of an internal ESP system, knowing exactly how the other will react, what they will say, almost as if you were talking to yourself (and answering). But I was surprised when he responded joyfully with, “Yes! We should talk about that! I’m very comfortable talking about what I would like to happen after I’m gone.” Well, I wasn’t, but I rode his wave of optimism and replied “Great!”

A perky but clearly stressed out waitress filled our mugs with steaming black java and scribbled our orders on a ratty notepad. Then my dad looked at me and said, “So lets talk, honey”. For a moment I felt a tickle in my throat. But another thing my dad and I have in common is our dislike/fear of public crying. I had seen my dad cry exactly once in my life. That was when I said goodbye to him when I moved to Orlando at age 19. (He needn’t have worried as I lasted all of about 3 months before I was back and living with them), the next time I moved out (for real that time) there were no tears, quite the opposite as he all but hired a marching band and rolled out a red carpet to see me off). And so, I swallowed and… we talked. For the next two hours we talked: about death, about life, about dreams realized and not. I don’t remember if my food was good, I believe it was, because all I could think about was this moment, this rainy day in this diner, talking to this man. I sealed the moment away, knowing I would always remember it.

A bit later the perky waitress appeared, her nerves calmer, her demeanor smooth, and asked us “Would you two like some more coffee? Would you like to stay here a while before heading out into the weather?”

Without looking at each other, we nodded. We would.

Beware of Dog...and Lawyer...

As a kid growing up, I knew, of course, that my dad was a lawyer. To me, that meant he went to work five days a week, dressed in a dark suit. Gone by 8am when mom drove him to the train station and back by 5:30 after she picked him up again. Dinner was always at 6PM sharp, no exceptions.

Other than wearing a suit and riding the train into NYC, I really had no idea what a lawyer actually did. Along the way I picked up that it was something boring, in an office full of books, talking to a bunch of other lawyers in dark suits, about stuff that would put an insomniac into a coma. In my mind’s eye, everyone would be very serious and smoke lots of cigarettes.

Then one memorable Saturday afternoon when I was 16, Dad gave me a real life lesson in lawyering.

As the youngest among my siblings, when I was in my High School years, it was just Dad, Mom, and me. The house was way too quiet; at night, Lawrence Welk set the tone. I tried my best to grow up quickly so I could get my own place, boredom and I have always had an adversarial relationship. So when the doorbell rang, I perked up at the possibility of something, anything, that could spice things up a bit.

And whenever the doorbell rang, Lucy went crazy. So there was that too.

Lucy was a black dachshund with a severe bipolar disorder, part snuggly bunny, part Wolverine. If our doorbell rang when Lucy was sleeping soundly in the big chair at the far end of the living room, it was as if someone pressed an electric stun gun gently up onto her anus and then fired off a few million volts. Zero to 100 in under a second.

She flew from the chair, gaining speed on the carpet like an arrow from a compound bow, shooting straight at the front door, with only one objective in mind, to kill the doorbell ringer with extreme prejudice. Near the front door, where the carpet ended, was a three-foot path of tile that lead from the front door to the kitchen. That was flanked on the other side by floor to ceiling windows, 25 individually framed, single pane. Five across, five up.

When Lucy got to the tile, she was just a blur, putting on the breaks too late and smashing into the window. We normally kept the shades partly drawn to act as a goalie for a totally out-of-control dachshund. The one time we forgot to draw the blinds that normally prevented Lucy from seeing the front door, she was awake in her chair, watching as the mailman came up the three steps to our mailbox by the door. Lucy did her “shot from a cannon” act, put on the skids at the tile, smashed through the bottom window, and attached herself to the leather clad left foot of the mailman like a shark to a surfboard.

Mr. Postman danced the shark off of his foot while I got her back inside. Mom called a window repair service and the mailman was extra quiet, tiptoeing whenever he came up the stairs after that.

Anyway, you get the picture. Cuddle-bunny wasn’t to be trusted around mailmen, garbage men, or… men. She came by her bad behavior honestly; her mother had been crushed to the thickness of a Pop Tart, running backward while attacking the rear wheels of a slow moving garbage truck that was moving forward. Not a good plan.

Lucy was cool with women, children and other dogs though. I remember one winter morning, when everything was covered with a pristine layer of new snow. Mom let her out to pee, as Lucy ran around to the side of our house, under my bedroom window. I had been practicing my Saturday night, high-school routine of drinking sloe gin fizz in a Staten Island bar that welcomed underage kids with cartoonish fake ID’s. After a blurry ride back home in David Mom’s station wagon, I would stumble to my bedroom and vomit out my window. Blowing chunks in the bathroom made the hallway smell too much and I needed the fresh air anyway. Lucy liked to run around to the side on Sunday mornings to look for frozen vomit Frisbees she could retrieve and offer to neighbors out walking their own dogs. Usually they were charmed by the little black girl, squirming and wagging up to offer them a sloe gin fizz Frisbee, until she got close enough for them to realize it wasn’t a Frisbee at all. I doubt anyone actually figured out what it was, they just knew it was something very terrible that shouldn’t be handled and needed to be buried immediately.

But my point is that Lucy could be very unselfish and giving. She could have kept the vomit Frisbee all to herself, maybe saved it for a light lunch, but she openly offered it to anyone who was blind enough to take it. She tried to be a good girl.

That particular afternoon, Dad was expecting a salesman. He had made an appointment with a guy who wanted to sell us basement paneling, a dreamy sea of walls in intermittently striped brown. Over these last thirty years, people have come to their senses and replaced all that paneling, but back then, it was a must-have for homeowners who felt a need to stay ahead of the curve. It was unusual for dad to actually invite a salesman to the house, but mom wanted paneling and dad, being the practical guy that he was, had lined up the first of three or four estimates.

The doorbell rang, Lucy went ballistic, dad ran to the door, I scooped up Lucy, and Mom waited pleasantly inside.

Mr. Salesman came in, carrying a black leather case, like doctors used to take on house calls a thousand years ago. After placing his case carefully on the living room rug next to mom’s desk, he was invited to a chair and mom gave him an iced tea. All went well for ten minutes as he told dad about his company, prices, warranty stuff, etc.

Knowing that ultimately he needed to please the lady of the house, he got up and headed toward his black case for samples.

By that time, after sitting through a nice chit chat among the humans, Lucy had smelled Mr. Salesman’s feet and settled down. I thought she had exited the stage and was probably in her bed in the kitchen, but no such luck. Lucy had bonded with Mr. Salesman’s black case, thinking it could just be her long departed mother who had been flattened by that nasty trash truck. As our hero reached down for his sample bag, Lucy jumped up from her crouching position next to it and latched onto the right hand of Mr. Salesman as she had done with the mailman’s shoe. With all the teeth and violence of a breaching barracuda, chaos returned to the house like ten doorbells all ringing at the same time.

As soon as Lucy struck, she quit, somehow understanding that she had gone too far. I grabbed her and hustled her off to my bedroom. Lucy was proud to have taken decisive action against an obvious murderer and I was pleased to have some excitement in that morgue of a house.

Mom got a clean kitchen towel to wrap that bleeding hand while the sales guy turned white, telling us that he faints at the sight of blood, especially his own. Mom hustled him to a “more comfortable” chair in the kitchen so he would stop bleeding on her new wall to wall carpet. Not wanting to miss any part of the show, I followed. The wound was clearly minor but the song dad’s salesman was singing was in a major key. I was thoroughly enjoying the whimpering and crying coming from a grown man who acted as if he had just lost his whole hand. It looked like Band-Aid stuff to me at best; but he knew how to milk it.

Mom was doing a great job being motherly about his bad boo boo, when I realized that dad was nowhere around. Usually he was the rock, stable and decisive in all emergencies. It surprised me that he wasn’t there.

Fifteen minutes passed in which Mr. Salesman held center stage, acting out his histrionics, and needing more tissues for his nose than bandages for his hand, as dad walked back into the room, a long sheet of legal paper in his hand.

He had been at his desk, writing a document in longhand.

It was simple, really. Dad agreed to buy the basement paneling if the salesman signed the document absolving dad of any potential legal action against him for Lucy’s bad behavior.

“I’ll sign yours if you sign mine.” was the deal.

Sweet! Mom got her new basement paneling, Dad was safe from liability, Lucy would be kept away from all strangers in the future, and I had witnessed a brief but exciting storm on what was normally a mind-numbingly tranquil sea.

Happy with the outcome after the salesman left, Mom asked me: “Aren’t you pleased to have such a smart lawyer for a Daddy?”

I wasn’t really sure about that, but I did have a slightly better idea of just what it was that lawyers did. I knew that among other things, they specialize in legal agreements involving nasty little black dogs that attack wimpy grown men and make them cry and that the dog owner’s wife gets a new paneled basement out of the deal.

Venice Beach Daze...

Venice Beach Boardwalk, 2013.

Ruth still lived in Venice in those days and Hannah was visiting her old stomping grounds when we took this picture. She was taking a break from what turned into eight years on the road. Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, South America…returning only occasionally to recharge her batteries. Increasingly, she found that other than her desire to visit with family and friends, she had little reason to come back to the States at all.

Ruth lived in a tiny efficiency on the ground floor of a building that had been going downhill for years, imploding in slow motion on some of the most sought after Real Estate in California. Nothing was up to code in her place. I suspect the landlady never went on record for using the space for rentals. Less than 600 sq. ft., Ruth had a bed, a couch, a bathroom, and a little nook with a refrigerator wedged into a corner. The pluming had a problem keeping stuff down, always sounding like it was choking when forced to swallow.

But the rent was dirt cheap. Ruth’s best friend had turned the place over to Ruth when she moved out, and the landlady was fine with that. Old and eccentric, the owner wasn’t ready yet to sell the building for the millions she was being offered. Until she was, the main thing she wanted was to have tenants who paid on time, didn’t cause trouble, didn’t complain about the room and, like her, were happy to fly under the regulatory radar.

The fact that the landlord loved Ruth helped, so the rent wasn’t increased when she moved in. It was a huge bargain for a room in one of the priciest neighborhoods on the West Coast. Albert Kinney Boulevard was a brief, two-block stroll up the street. That’s now some of the most expensive Real Estate in the country.

Ruth was working for a few of the beautiful people who couldn’t be bothered with making their own reservations, supervising the help, or even dealing with their own children. A great gig in an awesome area, and the ability to save some money, was perfect.

We loved to visit, preferring to share that tiny space, than any luxury condo in the surrounding chrome and glass monsters that dwarfed her building. Carla and I got the bed, Ruth took the couch. Breakfast was often the microwaved leftovers from last night’s dinner or maybe some cold delicacies from the fridge.  Ruth had a bad role model for a dad. Like me, if she was down to her last ten dollars, it was best spent on imported stuffed olives or a nice chunk of Stilton. She appreciates the importance of delicious food over delicious lodging.

When Hannah was visiting at the same time we were, everything got ramped up, like a family on steroids. I’ve always said that spending time with Hannah is like being sealed in a mason jar with a beautiful hornet. We played musical beds, taking turns like an immigrant family of ten living in a one-bedroom place, all running the carry out kitchen downstairs. 

Ruth’s little hovel was perfect for us all then and spawned a million great memories.

Now, four years later, Ruth is married and living in San Diego, while Hannah is with Pablo in Austin. Carla and I are in the same house and have no plans to leave.

We often eat microwaved leftovers from last night’s dinner, and I always keep imported stuffed olives in the fridge.

On a mutual day off, we nestled down in the old couch that really should be thrown out. It’s just that the thing makes a perfect platform for pillows of all shapes and sizes. Great nesting material.

Carla was typing away furiously on her laptop, waving flags of protest and leading marches with her passionate diatribes. I stretched out with a UFC fight on the flat screen.

Pausing the action to go get more coffee, uncharacteristically, Carla paused too. It’s not easy for her to break away from that stream of consciousness, in-the-moment Tsunami that often drives her. Turning to me slowly with a serious demeanor, as if surprised by the gravity of her own revelation, she looked directly into my eyes said “I love you, Hugh” and then immediately jumped back into the raging torrent that is her bright mind, chugging full speed ahead down multiple tracks and directions at the same time.

Deep water swimming, while I hold the beach.
She comes up for perspective, oxygen only an afterthought.
Catching my eye, we nod silent agreement,
Unchanged since our beginning.
And once again, I’m reborn.

hmh