Classic NYC Story

So I’ve finally checked out that video everyone’s been telling me about and holy shit!

I don’t know what made me call him back, but I did, just about five minutes after I hung up the phone. I took the cordless and went upstairs to my room, pulled my robe a bit tighter around my body and hit the redial button. He answered with a raspy voice and on the first ring. There was a metronome beeping rhythmically in the background. I had disturbed his practicing. I told him I had a question for him, and that he was free not to answer if he so chose, but I requested that if he chose to answer the question, that he would answer honestly…

I stretched myself out with my feet by the headboard feeling like my body was leaden and my head was helium-filled. I wondered if this was the other side of suicide. I wondered if I was already dead. I did not think about bleeding. I knew somehow that if I thought about it, it would happen..

The first time I ever heard this song was the night of/morning after my birthday, in Penn station, being performed by some wicked street musicians. The second time I ever heard it, I was in the passenger seat of my friend in Queens’ car listening to a mixtape of MJ cuts.

7. What did your family do for Thanksgiving when you were a kid? Do you still do it? Exactly the same as we’re doing now, except that the aunt and uncle we go to visit used to live in Co-op City in the Bronx in an apartment about the size of a large canoe and now they live in New Rochelle.

The chipper quality of my voice in this message belied my intent for the call. A nearby Polish woman smiled at me while taking a drag on her cigarette. I smiled back at her, and descended into the subway for the last time in life…

This little “gem” was written while I was high on pills on the B44 yesterday evening.

It’s almost as though every so often, my body decided that I must have IVed something toxic into my bloodstream which now has to be expurgated through any possible orifice. It makes me wonder what it is that I have done from which I now need to be cleansed.

I told my mother and cousin earlier today that my friend in Harlem had said this. My mother’s reaction was that he had no right to make comments about her children. My mother doesn’t like my friend in Harlem. Granted, I don’t like him all the time either, but my mother doesn’t know one tenth of what has gone on between us over the last couple of years. All she knows is that he’s older than I am, and to her, that’s a good enough reason for both she and my sister not to like him.

Sorry, I’ve been reading tea party rhetoric. That’s where that last joke sequence came from. “Classic, why were you…” Shut up! But no, seriously though folks… actually I don’t even remember where I was going with this one. Eh, fuck it. They can’t all be gems…