July 2004 Archives

Last night we were leaving Nick's Pizza in Forest Hills, walking back to the subway to get back to Alekz's place, and I put my arm around Gina and was about to say "Don't you miss living in the city sometimes?" when she said "God, I'm glad I don't live in a big city any more."

Completely out of sync, once again.

I miss it. I've been having city moments all morning. Today's the day we don't do any tourist shit. Alekz took the kids to see Spiderman 2, and Gina and I are just lounging around Queens all day.

I took a copy of Bukowski's Notes of a Dirty Old Man from Alekz's room and walked down to the park this morning. Lovely urban concrete park. All the kids must have still been in church, 'cause there were just a few Latino gang members and a couple of winos there today. But the weather and the setting and the book all were just perfect.

I had a San Francisco flashback a little while ago, walking back from the grocery store, when the sun came out and hit the sidewalk just right. I remembered Sunday afternoons, walking up Haight Street from our basement apartment, down to Nightbreak for a few pints of Sierra Nevada and some of Koji's sushi, with all the traffic and the tourists and the sky all blue and sunny because it was too early for the fog just yet, feeling good and happy and not caring about anything at all.

It seems like you should be able to have moments like that even in places like Austin, but it's not the same. Because the city makes you hard, makes everything difficult, and so makes the little things like a sunny day and some good beer and cheap sushi within walking distance of your house seem so much better.

Just a few days in New York is already making me hard again. And I guess that's why little things like walking down a crowded sunny sidewalk with a bag of groceries can be so nice. Just nice.

I know Gina is more practical than me, and I know that living in the city with kids and all the hassles of parking and transit and shopping and crime would get old really fast. But I don't care what she says. I miss it. Maybe I just miss being young and not having to give a shit about anything but good beer and cheap sushi. But I still miss it.

New York City is absolutely huge. And it is totally full of women. I mean full. There are literally hundreds of them here.

The Guggenheim isn't the biggest museum in the world, not nearly as big as the Met. But it is crawling with women. Beautiful ones. They're practically stacked all the way to the rafters in there. (They also have some Cezannes and Picassos and a couple of Van Goghs. I managed to stare at the Van Gogh even with chicks around.)

The Lion King? Tons and tons of women. In great dresses. Women dress nice to see a Broadway show.

Being in New York with the wife and kids, I feel like a diabetic in a candy store. The wife and I, we really really need an hour alone.

[Note: Despite what Gina promised me, you cannot really rent a skateboard at the top of the Guggenheim and ride down to the bottom. What a gyp.]

I love walking around Boston with my Dad. Actually, I love walking around Boston with either one of my parents, but they both have completely different perspectives on the city.

My dad is 67 years old. He grew up in a poor Irish family in East Boston, one of five kids born to my grandparents, who were immigrants from Newfoundland. Dad used to take the ferry over from Eastie to the North End to work when he was a teenager, washing dishes in Durgin Park. This was back when Quincy Market was a real market, not the overpriced tourist trap it is now. Fishmongers, produce vendors. Most of the inside of the market building itself was taken up by butcher's shops. The place was always crawling with sailors ("white-hats", Dad calls them) and merchant seamen.

My dad quit school in 8th grade. Ran away to sea when he was 16, in the Merchant Marine. At 17 he got his dad to sign the papers so he could enlist in the Coast Guard. He enlisted at the Customs House in Boston, a block away from Faneuil Hall. Worked on a light ship off Monomoy Island, worked in Chatham Light for a while (actually he lived in Chatham Light, which is kind of cool, considering what a big tourist attraction it is now). Shipped off on an icebreaker as part of Operation Deep Freeze, made three trips to the Antarctic, four to the Arctic.

We got to walk around in the Mariner's House in the North End yesterday. It's right next to Paul Revere's house, but most tourists don't know anything about it. It's basically been a boarding house for seamen for the past 200 years. They've renovated it now so it's outrageously expensive, but not even ten years ago, Dad would pay only $3 a night to stay there, since he had his papers showing he was active in the Merchant Marine.

$3 a night to stay in a room overlooking Paul Revere's back yard. Only in Boston. And only if you're a sailor.

So we got to hear lots of stories, over Italian ices outside the Aquarium and steamers at Legal Seafood and walking up Hannover Street and down Richmond Street past the old Italian guys sitting on the sidewalk in their chairs outside a non-descript building that said only "Members Only" on the door (and Gina and I both were thinking how much this looked like something we see on HBO every Sunday night). And we got to hear about how everything is different now, but how everything is so much the same.

Oh, and of course we went to the aquarium. I love aquariums. Hate zoos, for some reason; they smell bad, and I always feel sad for zoo animals in captivity in a way that I don't feel for fish in an aquarium. I've been going to the New England Aquarium ever since I was a little kid, and sure, it's starting to look kind of old school compared to places like Monterey Bay, but I love the big central tank, I love standing at the window with my kids and waiting with them hoping the shark will glide by, and when it does all three of us go "coooooool!" and wish we were in there with it to pet it.

That was yesterday. Today we're taking the harbor cruise with Dad, and I'm quite sure it will be just like the North End tour, with his stories more colorful and interesting than anything the cruise guide will have to say, because he didn't learn any of this from a guidebook, he learned it by growing up with the neighborhood, with the harbor, with the sea, for his entire life.

I think I might just fill up a disc of video of just him, looking out at the water and the islands and talking like he's just talking to us, and he'll be totally oblivious to the crowd of people who will gather behind him to hear his stories.

I love my Dad. My crabby Dad and his crazy, tragic, fascinating life.

Down by the river, down by the banks of the river Charles
That's where you'll find me, along with lovers, fuggers, and thieves
Well I love that dirty water, ooh, Boston you're my home

Some classic rock station was playing the Standells' "Dirty Water" when we were driving back into town from dinner in Framingham to pick up a bag we'd left behind at the hotel, and there is nothing that makes the Mass Pike whiz by quite like blasting "Dirty Water" at full volume all the way down to the weird curly-Q Copley Square exit.

My usual smart-ass reply about where I'm from is that the town where you first got drunk, first learned to drive, first got laid, and had your first shitty job in food service is the town where you're really from, and for me, that town is New Orleans. My dad was in the Coast Guard and got transferred from Woods Hole to New Orleans when I was 7, and right after, that through a long series of weird events, my parents called off their divorce and we all moved down there to be with him. So I spent only about 1/3 of my childhood in Boston and vicinity.

But if you're born in Boston, it's in your blood. The ties are too strong, even if most of them really are only second-hand. My father, Ray Sr., spent his entire life here in either the Merchant Marine or the Coast Guard; his father Brendan was a cod fisherman, pretty much living the life you see in movies like The Perfect Storm (pretty much the same boats too, only rigged as trawlers instead of swordboats). I mean, if your dad used to actually live in Chatham Light, you're probably a native.

I managed to become a computer geek instead of yet another drunken Boston Irish sailor, but that was probably my mom's fault. (Thanks Mom!)

One of my first multi-syllable words was Yastrzemski (but I still have to Google him to spell it right.) I used to have the most god-awful working-class Boston accent. I could take apart a lobster on my own by the time I was five. I first learned to build sand castles at Nantasket Beach.

And even though I didn't even learn to drive here, the first time I did, I felt like my eyes had finally been opened. If you've never driven in Boston, you won't get this, but if you have...well, you would hate me. Driving in Boston is exhilarating. It is liberating. Getting from the North End to East Boston at rush hour, I feel like I have found my calling. Boston drivers aren't terrible drivers, they are simply operating on a different plane of existence, a higher, more abstract level of understanding that transcends lanes and laws and courtesy. Boston drivers rock like no other drivers in America.

So like my mother did to me when we moved to the bigoted, ignorant (and as I later found out, charming in its own right) swamps of New Orleans, I am doing my best to make sure that my kids know that part of them is Bostonian. They know when they get here that within the first 48 hours, we have to get pizza from the Pleasant Cafe in Roslindale, a family hangout on my mom's side since she was a kid. The kids have got Make Way For Ducklings memorized, and they can show you on a map where it really happened. They know when we drive through JP that Daddy is going to point out Doyle's Cafe yet again and tell them how the former owners are distant cousins of ours (rumored to be, at least, according to my mom's brother John Doyle who is the family genealogist.). They can both take apart a lobster on their own. They know good chowder from bad chowder. And they're Red Sox fanatics who know that section 14 in the grandstands at Fenway is one of the holiest places on earth.

We did the whole Esplanade Fourth of July fireworks with the Boston Pops last night, and the kids now agree...Austin fireworks really do suck. Sometimes I think the rest of the country doesn't really get the 4th the way people up here do. After all, it all started up here. The Boston Massacre, The Boston Tea Party, "one if by land, two if by sea", Lexington and Concord.... I know a few Virginians who might disagree, but to me, the American Revolution was always Massachusetts' war. To be from Boston means to be connected to the Founding Fathers and the war of independence in a way that I don't think people from Texas or California or Colorado can really understand.

I think my kids get it. I hope so. It took me forever to really get it, but now that I do, I miss this place terribly. This place where I barely lived at all, where I can't get around half the time without a map, where I have trouble being understood now unless I remember not to say "y'all" all the damn time...this is really home.

Now I have to go. I've got a date with some Brighams.

My daughter Cassidy just got her first pair of Chuck Taylors yesterday.

Black high top Converse.

The pinnacle of fashion in casual footwear.

I got my first pair of punk motherfucking Converse when I was 19. A white pair, which I then dyed black. My next pair, I got real black ones. For years that's the only kind of shoe I wore. Nothing but my punk motherfucking Converse. If it was good enough for Johnny, Joey, and Dee Dee, it was good enough for me.

But see, I thought I was invincible. Especially my feet. I knew you were supposed to wear good running shoes with lots of support, but in New Orleans, it was always preferable to go barefoot as close to 100% of the time as possible. For me, that meant my daily run to the levee and back when I was a teenager was almost always barefoot. On cement.

Ouch! Yeah, yeah, I know. But at the time, it felt great. I felt like fucking Tarzan. I wasn't much for getting anywhere fast; I was a distance runner on the school track team, but I sucked, always came in last or close to it. But I could run forever without getting tired.

Then later on, after college, I gained a few pounds. Then a few more pounds. And somewhere around age 32 or so, my feet, probably damaged from the years of running barefoot and the years of wearing a shoe that was basically just a thin flap of rubber with some canvas stitched on, and suffering under the indignity of having to support a guy approaching 200 pounds when they were clearly only designed for 150 pounds or less...the feet just finally said "FUUUUUUCK this shit". And my arches crashed.

And Cassidy, bless her heart, is a big old pronator like her daddy. Her right foot turns in at a somewhat alarming angle.

I thought her mother and I had a deal, that Cass could get the Chucks as long as she also got a pair of nice healthy New Balance cross-trainers, but she and her mother apparently "ran out of time" on shopping day, so she's going to hoof it around Boston for two weeks in the Chucks. Curmudgeon dad stymied by yet another mother-daughter conspiracy.

Apparently I don't understand the needs of a ten year old girl. She's taking guitar lessons. And she's turning into a big old Ramones fan. And she does not want to wear some big clunky orthopedic New Balance astronaut shoes. She wants to look cool. And her mom wants her to look cool too.

And I want her to look cool. I just want her to not have to go through all the shitty physical therapy and contrast baths and all that shit I had to go through when my feet first committed suicide. I want to protect her.

I need the practice, protecting her through proper footware. And it's obvious that I can't. And then I worry about the big stuff coming. I want to protect her from inheriting my alcoholism, I want to protect her from boys like me (because I know what boys like me were after when I was a teenager and it was pretty much all bad), I want to protect her from the acid and the speed and the coke and the X, because even though I managed to leave all that behind, I know people who didn't and I worry that she won't be as strong and as lucky as I was.

And it's obvious that I can't protect her from any of that stuff either. I can give her tools, I can give her advice, I can give her comfortable shoes, and then that shit will all come and she will have to go through it all on her own.

Gina's friend Lori says that having a child is like forever letting your heart walk around outside your body. Dangerous dangerous stuff. How do parents do this? How did my mom face all that shit?

My heart walks around outside my body. In very cool high tops. And her feet don't hurt.

On the way to Providence, via Baltimore. On Southwest, which has its hassles, like no assigned seats, so Liam and I are sitting 10 rows behind Gina and Cass. But the flight attendants are hilarious. "Due to Federal regulations, this is a no smoking, no whining, no complaining flight". Liam is fascinated by the safety instructions card. We talked about why the masks might drop out of the ceiling, why there's a slide for the door, which exit is closest to us. He's well prepared for any and all disasters. I think he imagines he'll get to save all of us when we crash; he'll be the critical "no high heels" monitor on the escape slide.

He used to be scared of flying. Not so much any more, and he's too big now to admit he's scared (he's a manly 7 year old). But you could see him starting to tense up when we were taxiing out to the runway. I told him that mom always blesses the plane. I told him that I always imagine that my dead grandparents who are now angels help the plane take off. Nana Truscello in front, Nana and Grandpa S. each get a wing, and if the weather's bad sometimes I get Jesus to help get the tail off the ground. I told him all this and he looked at me and said "I think I'm just gonna hang on". Seven years old and he already thinks I'm a dingbat. He wouldn't hold my hand when we lifted off...too cool for that. But he grabbed onto my thumb pretty tight for a few minutes.

This is the Romper Room flight. Typical for a holiday weekend. I used to hate babies on planes. They scream, they stress people out, they occasionally smell bad.

Now I love when the flights are crowded with kids. You can almost always get a kid to laugh if you make goofy faces at them. I love making kids laugh.

Grownups ought to do that more often. Make goofy faces at each other. A great stress reliever. Flight delayed? There's gotta be some travelling sales geek around who still remembers how to turn his eyelids inside out.

Liam got bored with Legolas after 10 minutes. For some reason Legolas is missing one of his daggers, and I won't let him shoot the bow and arrow on the plane. Not so much because he might put an eye out, but because, well, that would be the last time we ever see those arrows again. And the arrows look cool.

"I'm bored with all the stuff in my bag." "Well, you didn't pack very wisely then, did you? Why don't you read your Captain Underpants?" Captain Underpants and the Big Bad Battle of the Bionic Booger Boy, Part I: The Night of the Nasty Nostril Nuggets. Kids today have some cool shit to read.

Peanut-free flight. I thought I'd be bummed, but you know, when I'm not drinking, the lack of peanuts doesn't seem like such a big deal. I'd rather have something sweet. Maybe I could trade my pretzels for an extra pack of Lorna Doones.

Flying without drinking took a while to get used to. I was always one of those people who had to have 12 dollars or so stashed in my pocket to get me enough to drink to get through a whole flight. When they came around to pick up cups, I'd order my second. If it was a long flight, I'd order a third. Usually I'd have one of those mild "I drank in the afternoon" hangover headaches by the time I picked up my rental car. When I flew up to Boston last winter when my grandmother was dying, surviving the drink service on the plane and surviving a three hour layover in Dallas were probably the biggest tests of my fledgling sobriety I had ever faced. Because I was traveling alone, I was stressed out enough that I certainly deserved to drink, and when it comes right down to it, who would know? I could drink all I wanted on the trip and nobody would be the wiser.

But I knew if I told that lie, then I could tell bigger lies. And bigger lies would give the opportunity for bigger drunks. And if I wanted to be drunk all the time again, well, shit, I didn't need AA any more, I could just go back to drinking. Permanently. I know I could convince Gina it's a good idea; she still doesn't completely understand why I can't just keep drinking, but drink less.

But I knew I didn't want to go back to that. I wanted to go back for a little while, just medicate today, and then return to my sober life.

If only it worked that way.

There are a lot of AA slogans that irritate me, but one that I fully grok is the one that says you can have all the relapses you want, but you only get a limited number of second chances at recovery. A few months back I might have been able to make the case that drinking again now and quitting again later would be easier than staying sober now.

But now, almost nine months into it, I don't think that way any more. I feel like my sobriety is almost on autopilot. I barely notice the people on the plane getting their Crown Royals and their Coors Lights. I don't automatically seek out the airport bar, if only to gaze in wistfully at the taps, looking to see if they have Guinness. And I don't want to fuck this up. It's a lot easier to stay sober than to quit again.

Liam has discovered that the laptop in the row in front of us is showing Finding Nemo. So he's got his eye pressed to the gap in the seats, like I used to have my nose pressed to the window of the airport bar. I guess I should have brought a movie for him.

Oh well.

All talked out. I arranged a pretzels for cookies swap with the boy, so it's time to feast. Maybe if I sit up really tall I can catch some of Nemo.