The Comandante is Dead

I was watching the French news last night when what should appear but a video of el Comandante himself in a crappy nylon tracksuit with F. Castro stitched over his heart like he was about to run the 100 meters for Cuba.

If the point was to prove the old guy's not on ice somewhere, they should have stuck to still photographs with a willing visiting dignitary.

As it was, the shrunken disoriented figure we saw toddling across the room confirmed a kind of death in life. There'll be no miraculous recovery, no more three hour speeches.

Like the revolution, he's a shell of what he was. If the rest of the regime had any sense, they'd hold the funeral for both and get on with it.

Autumn in France

It's that time of year again, with brightly colored gourds in the market, the nip of fall in the air, along with that distinctive scent of burning busses. In Paris anyway, where this week marks the deaths of two kids last year that set off three weeks of rioting.

I have mixed feelings about violence. The impulse to go out there and smash everything in your path is something I have on the average of once a day. You'd think I wouldn't, being a writer and all, and able to express myself. But it's when words fail, and you feel no one's listening, that you pick up a crowbar or a gun.

And in France, where there's political logorrhea, but mostly confined to the incestuous political class, it almost seems reasonable, refreshing, really, to try and bash your way into their monologue and change what's an abstract discourse about jobs and racism and immigration into something a little more real, maybe with your face on it. Read my lips.

Only that's not what's happening. The guys burning stuff seem to be mostly thugs, jumping onto busses with guns in their hands, scaring the crap out of people, just so they can drive the thing a few yards away and set it on fire. Why? So the busses will quit running and their few neighbors with jobs can't get there? Some kind of macho satisfaction? Woohoo. Look what I did. My fire's bigger than yours.

The worst is, they don't always bother to let people off the bus before they pour on the petrol. One driver was severely burned a couple of days ago. Last year during the riots a woman died because she was disabled and couldn't get off the bus in time. That's just murder. Nothing redeeming about it at all.

Marriage and Queers

I always like those segments on TV when they show some happy blinking slob just set free after twenty years in the slammer and a DNA test vindicating him. Usually, all his family is around him, with the mother beaming, and a sister off to the side with a lawyer gearing up to sue the crap out of the State.

I thought of that last night, when they were covering the New Jersey Supreme Court decision that we queers ought to have civil rights after all, at least in the marriage category.

At first, they featured a couple of pairs of gay guys all in love, some giddy with the prospects of wedding bells, and others cautiously optimistic the legislature would do the right thing and fix the gender language in the current law, not try to slap together a separate but unequal civil union.

But in this case, after all that joy, the TV people followed it up with some sleazy, smirking politician with a bad black dye job, or maybe just his heart leaching out his head, declaring how horrible the decision was, and something about activist judges and something else that boiled down to them pervs ought to be done away with.

That's the media for you. Impartiality when you don't need it. If you're going to have it when we're on the verge of something as all American as equal rights, why not add an opposing view in a car wreck story? Somebody must be glad the old lady got run over.

Or that prison thing. If they try, they can probably find some screw that wants to keep the innocent guy in jail. Freedom isn't for everybody.

Gypped at the GYN

Yesterday, the GYN. Today, the IRS. Tomorrow, what? Torquemada having his way with fingernails I've already chewed to bits? Why not? With my luck he'll also charge me for it.

After all, the docs do. To top off the Monday fun with the speculum, my insurance card didn't work and paying their sliding scale rate still leaves me $80 in the red. Who do they think they're kidding, "Community" Health Center?

No wonder dykes drop dead with no medical attention. Next time some stranger wants a gander at me, let them pay.

Junkies Vs. Drunks

Lately, the neighborhood's like a bad pair of underwear getting up my ass every time I go outside. All I do is writhe.

The scraggly weedy lots where rats peacefully bred have all been pimped into fat ugly apartment houses in gleaming suburban office building styles that the horribly riche pass in and out of instead of secretaries clutching their handbags.

And the cheap little bodegas that you could get milk in or smack are now boutiques or bars that fill up with drunken slumming NYU students that are puking and pissing everywhere by 2 A.M. in some bohemian fantasy.

As for me, I don't live here. I'm just an extra on a set carrying my fake Cheerios in my fake plastic grocery bag, my scowl just a bit of local color.

All that's left of the East Village edge is the garbage and rats. Too bad, you fat, screaming red-faced drunk from Idaho or Long Island, you missed the boat.

Give me junkies any day, that quietly slump somewhere, or stand on the corner waving back and forth on jelly legs.

At least that's what I was thinking walking down the street Saturday night when I saw these three teenagers, two Sids one Nancy, the guys propping up a skinny blond dreadlocked girl between them, pulling her along, holding her hands, and saying "Squeeze, squeeze," like she was on some kind of bad trip, or had overdosed just enough to worry them.

Reality intrudes like that.

Ségolène Royal: Scaring Socialists

Ségolène Royal's knocking the socks off the other Socialist candidates in France, at least according to the polls. I don't know why more of my French friends don't like her. The most approving thing I've heard so far was from this gay guy I know who thought it would be good for the country to have a woman President, but as far as enthusiasm went, I didn't detect any.

Maybe it's because her enemies have been pretty successful styling her as a bourgeois provincial and mother of four aiming to hijack her Party and drag it to the right. Or because the whole stiletto heel thing doesn't go over with dykes -- which is mostly who I know there.

As to a conservative underbelly, Ségo did grow up in a strange right-wing Catholic family with a father that kept his sons in military buzz cuts and under an excessive discipline. But I grew up Southern Baptist in Kentucky, and ended up a Lesbian Avenger in New York. So pooh pooh to families. Nurture isn't everything.

The most conservative thing she's said so far was that it was time to quit talking about adolescent crime and do something about it, even if it meant sending teenagers to boot camp type programs rather than give them a slap on the hand and sending them home to watch TV. (No, jail wasn't an option.)

But regarding race and national identity, she's gone further left than most Socialists in her recent declaration that French politicians should not distinguish between those who have "roots" in France, and those who don't, code language for those of immigrant descent. To Ségo, born to a colonial family in Senegal, if you're French, you're French.

To my surprise, she's also come out in support of gay marriage, which is more than most of her brethren can say. And she's also supported campaigns against homophobia in schools. So as far as I'm concerned, vive Ségolène.

I think the real problem with Ségo is not that she strays too far from her ideologically unfocused party, but that she's going outside the party hierarchy, using American-style campaigning to deal with supporters directly, listening, thinking, responding through her interactive chat focused website Hopes for the Future and her "town hall" style meetings.

For the last couple of decades, the Socialists have been more the party of leftist academics and theoreticians than labor or "the people." As to their alliance with unions, the syndicates have tons of demos in France, but hardly anybody's unionized so who do they really represent? A very small minority, an elite, really. The average worker's out in the cold.

They don't even have a voice. It's the average diplomaed Socialist leader that studies the problems, gets up on a soapbox, pontificates a while, maybe even legislates something, then leaves the stage, equating action with words.

For instance, they've passed plenty of rules about gender parity, but do they put up women candidates for election? No! They'd rather fine themselves. And they're so far out of touch on questions of racism that even though the heads were gathered together in a national conference when banlieu riots erupted last fall, they didn't even issue a relevant press release. How could they as long as there was some punctuation that needed fixing, a semi-colon out of place?

The most "populist" thing they've done in recent times is oppose a ban on smoking, puffing themselves up as defenders of individual liberties. Screw all those people excluded from a public life because they need to breathe.

Ségo at least listens rather than talks. Her interactive website announces right up front, "I've become convinced that citizens -- because the problems are near to them, or because they're the ones hoping for progress -- are the only real legitimate "experts" on any of the questions facing us." Them's fighting words in France.

And as far as action goes, she was also one of the few Socialists that actually campaigned in 2005 for a "yes" vote to the European Constitution, which her party supposedly supported, but mostly ran from.

In their primary on November 16, we'll know if the French Socialists have any credibility left at all. Will they pick the only candidate that can beat the leading conservative candidate, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, even if she strays from their orthodoxies? Or will they go for the loyal party man who'll get stomped at the polls, but has been anointed by the party bosses? It's hard to call.

When former PM Lionel Jospin, party hack extraordinaire, withdrew from the race a couple of weeks ago, he said he'd support anybody but "la candidate," the female candidate. What a lot of balls the old bastard has. But like the other candidates, he's short on almost everything else.

Queer-Bashing

It's luck, most of it. You walk down the street and it's not a bus that kills you, but some homophobic freak who can't stand a swish in a guy, or a strut in a girl.

They say it's the sex that repulses them, but I know that it's enough that we live on the same planet.

A couple of days ago, Michael Sandy, another young gay man was lured to a deserted place, and beaten by a group of men and teenagers. When he tried to escape, he ended up in a lane of speeding traffic. One of the kids went through his pockets after a car hit him. When an ambulance finally took him to the hospital, he was brain dead. The day after, his family took him off life support, so there you are, another black gay man dead.

The cops caught some of the little thugs without too much trouble. Even from the TV, you could see the shock in their eyes, hands cuffed behind their backs, all those cameras. They didn't think a little queer-bashing would matter. We're not human, not really, not to them. And because Sandy was black and they were white, maybe he was even less than that.

I wasn't surprised this summer when a teenage dyke was arrested for knifing some guy on the street. Good ole Dwayne Buckle told the rags that all he did was pay a compliment, and she and her friends took offense. The New York Post presented all this as if it were perfectly innocent. He wasn't queer-baiting a bunch of girls that were obviously dykes.

No, according to the Post the girls were a bloody-thirsty gang of monsters. Any reasonable girls would have accepted the compliment gratefully, bowed their pretty little heads even when he spat on the object of his affection, called them dykes and said he was going to screw them all.

When I heard, I thought that the creep was lucky all she pulled was a steak knife.

I can only imagine how many times that girl had been harassed, hooted at, made fun of. Almost every day as a young dyke you're humiliated, or frightened, then you're angry you're afraid, or embarrassed. Maybe she'd even heard of a young black New Jersey dyke like her, Sakia Gunn, who was killed after the same kind of taunting, and had begun to think, not me. Screw that, not me. So she started carrying a knife.

It wasn't a reflection of the ugliness in her, but what's all around us, every day. The razor of a thousand cuts finally turning back outwards.

Baseball & Bigotry, National Pastime

I love baseball, except when the Mets are playing and I'm so anxious my tongue is stained black with Pepto-Bismol.

It's safer to watch other teams. Except Friday.

I was on one of those machines at the gym -- the new version of Nordic Ski -- and had just plugged my headphones into the Tigers and Angels game when Lou Piniella said a word or two in Spanish and this other guy laughs about him "hablaing español, my goodness. I don't know if I want to sit next to you. Better watch my wallet."

Smack. Like a mackerel in my face. Later, I saw that Fox actually fired the guy, Steve Lyons, who didn't seem to understand why. It was meant as a joke, after all.

I'd give kudos to the devil Fox for quick action, but a week ago Lyons had already made jokes about the glasses of a Mets fan who turned out to be partly blind, and in 2004 got a few laughs at the expense of a Jewish player missing a game during Yom Kippur.

Please. Put tape over the guy's mouth instead of giving him a salary and a microphone.

When Cubans Hoard Cheerios

I live in a house with six boxes of Cheerios, and almost nothing else.

At first it was just one. That was in the old days when it was just me and Marina. When her mom Faustina got here, it was two enormous yellow things, then four. Now, inevitably, six.

I blame Cuba. It instilled in Faustina a horrible sense of scarcity and thrift. She can't walk by a sale without buying two of whatever because they're cheap. And after years of scarcity, she's afraid General Mills may never in the long days and weeks and months of her lifetime offer another sale of breakfast cereals again.

Marina is just as bad, in the other direction. Our apartment is so Spartan a group of nuns could move in here and not notice it wasn't a convent, provided they brought their own crosses. We have plenty of plants, and sun, and polished wood floor, but little else.

Stuff offends her, frightens her, even, as if she suspects that things sometimes gang up against their unwary owners, and put invisible trapping manacles on them. We buy two rolls of toilet paper at a time and wonder where to put them.

I feel extraneous, myself, sometimes, tending as I do to make nests of paper and books in the empty corners next to couches and beds. Marina tries to adjust, but we squabble now and then and I hide a few things. I think if she could cast off flesh she would. I expect her to one day. She'll rise up like a kind of flame.

I err on her side this time. There's something about seeing those two and four and six yellow boxes of Cheerios all lined up that makes me want to puke. But I eat them anyway. There's nothing else in the house.

Yankees Crash and Burn

They say it was Bomber pitcher Cory Lidle that did the deed, flying into the building with his instructor. Are we really sure? Couldn't there be a camera somewhere in every household here with Big Brother snickering behind? Mr. Lidle taking his metaphors seriously after the Yankee collapse in the post-season? And a big ha ha to all of us New Yorkers that were gut-struck when we saw images of those flames coming out of the building like a burning bush, those flashbacks, brushing away fear to find out it was a local athlete taking a turn around the place.

All the newscasters were teary-eyed and mournful about him, with only a few words about the people he wounded. We should do like Paris and ban these screwy little flights over the city, and for that matter the helicopters that wake me up every morning. Get outa my airspace!

Plane Crash Déjà Vu

Jesus. Another plane-shaped wedge in a New York City building. I see the news on the web a few minutes after it's posted and feel like hell, worse when I turn on the TV and all that smoke and fire is billowing out across the screen from footage taken an hour ago, a replay, I guess.

At least it didn't go into the building like on 9/11, just slammed in there and fell down, the plane or copter or whatever. There's a black streak where it slid.

I notice there are a lot of floors, more than fifty, which means plenty of potential victims. I feel like throwing up, but try to reason it out. This being working hours, and the building an apartment house, there won't be so many after all. And probably it won't fall down, though I don't think many New York City high rises were built to take that kind of impact.

Faustina, my mother-in-law, rushes to the TV when somebody calls her from Miami, and I switch to the Spanish coverage and leave the room so I won't have to talk about it. A bunch of sirens scream on their way uptown, and TV copters beat through the air from the helipads downtown.

The FBI says it's not terrorism. I hope they're basing that on real information. It would be nice if they shared it.

Aging

When I get old, I'd like to do it around people I trust, so that when they tell me I can't see for crap, I'll believe them and get my cataracts fixed, and ditto when they make signs and shout that I can't hear. With any luck, there'll be love, too, a lot of it, so it won't matter -- much -- when I leave a trail of crumbs from one end of the house to the other because I didn't notice a piece of cracker stuck to my arm, or see it drop in the hall, or hear it crunch when I stepped on it, heavily, thinking about how nice my lunch was.

North Korea

Wow. So North Korea exploded a bomb and joined the nuclear club. They didn't have an invitation, but what the heck. I couldn't be more surprised than if a chicken laid an egg, or a rat popped out of the pristine New York subway. What news will amaze us next? The sun rising?

The only astounding thing is the air of astonishment in the American response. You shouldn't need an actual explosion to know what will happen when you ignore a pissed off power busy splitting atoms in their garage.

Saint Sans Culotte

If I was a Saint, I'd be Our Lady of Perpetual Annoyance. And when things were going so perfect in your life you'd be afraid the gods would pay you back with a couple of disasters just for the fun of it, you'd pray for me to take the edge off all your joy with a couple of petty annoyances. Maybe I'd send a snotty cashier at the grocery to make fun of your breakfast cereal, or loud amateur rappers outside your window playing for an endless street fair. Paper cuts, broken nails, slightly sour milk, and piss on the toilet seat are good. You want flies? Two or three will work, or an inbox full of chain letters, and an itchy allergic nose that makes you look like a coke addict ready for a nice long stint in rehab. All you gotta do is ask.

Anti-Torture Demo in NYC

Coming home on the subway, I noticed the slogan on the back of my metro card, "SI VES ALGO, DI ALGO" "If you see something, say something," which is supposed to prevent terrorism on the subway by having Joe Citizen identify bombs left in unattended bags, but mostly causes a lot of alarm over old tuna fish sandwiches and social studies homework. To my mind, the phrase works better as a political imperative. Democracy only works if we get off our butts and participate.

Today, thousands of people took to the streets demonstrating with others around the world against Bush administration policies, and in particular the use of torture by these United States of America.

The noon "World Can't Wait" rally kicked off with a couple of Latino musicians on trombone, sax, trumpet and drums playing a new ditty called, "Sí, se puede," or "Yes, we can" to warm up the lunchtime crowd which in the first half hour seemed to be restricted to a bunch of artists types, an equal number of cops to monitor them, and a whole lot of insidious retirees with grey hair and not a few lethal canes and walkers.

By and large New York lefty firebrands and gasbags couldn't resist dragging in their pet issues until there was a whole zoo arranged on the podium. More compelling were the speakers with family members in the armed services, some still serving, some dead in Iraq and Afghanistan.

One woman told the story of her brother whose son was killed in Iraq. When somebody tried to console him with the phrase, "You should be proud your son died for his country," the boy's father said, "My son didn't die for his country. The suicide bomber who killed my son. He died for his country."

My own cousins have been in the military for years, joining the army when that was the best option for poor Kentuckians who wanted to go to college and have decent careers. Their kids are in the army, too, and now in the front lines of this endless, undefined War Against Terror. They face death every day in the Middle East wondering why they're there, and what they're accomplishing. All that while the Commander-in-Chief encourages them to throw American values to the wind with the ashes of the twin towers and engage in what we accuse our enemies of -- torture, and inhuman abuses -- that not only degrade the victims, but the perpetrators.

I wish they'd talked more about torture and Americans, and less about Bush and Cheney and housing and the kitchen sink. After an hour, I nipped out for coffee, returning when the demonstration moved from the little park at 47th Street and entered Second Avenue for the march downtown. By then, the crowd that had tripled in size, and gotten mixed enough in age and race to look like New York.

Sure, if you see something, say something, but make it short and to the point.

The Mets Win!

At the pizza parlor across from Marina's Mom's Co-Op in Queens where they had the Twins game blasting on the TV and $3 playoff pints, the gordo behind the counter razzed a friend for having an "ugly face, but whadaya expect from a Yankee fan?" He had on a Mets cap, of course.

A couple of other pizza slingers were in front of the joint with paraphernalia declaring them the fans of one team or the other and waving their hands around a lot, though their red noses and watery eyes hinted that what they really were fanáticos of was meth. Or that's my idea, anyway. Maybe they were all choked up over the national pastime, and were teaching each other the words of the Star Spangled Banner. I could use a lesson myself. But I'd settle for the recipe of their eggplant parm.

Even the little kids wandering in after school had their jerseys and hats on. Queens is a real hotbed of sports fanaticism. During the Soccer World Cup and you couldn't swing a cat without hitting a Ronaldo tee shirt. And people that couldn't name the U.S. Secretary of Defense could give you the scores to all the games, who scored the goals, when, and what color underwear the player had on.

If you don't see the same kind of enthusiasm for politics as we approach another election, maybe it's because the politicians we saddle ourselves with are more ashamed of one legislator sending dirty emails like the suddenly infamous Representative Mark Foley, than all those insignificant, morally justifiable little things like torture, and secret prisons. Perspective is everything. Go Mets!

Judgment is Now!

There was this black lady on the train, sixtyish, comfortably padded around the middle with short graying hair. She had on tan slacks, a white and blue striped shirt, and sneakers like she was ready for a day at the beach, and maybe she was, but her immediate mission was salvation -- ours. I didn't catch much of what she said between the rattling train and a ferocious Jamaican accent, just, "Jesus something something, dear Brothers and Sisters something something, and finally, "Judgment is now. Judgment is now." Which is a closer any speech writer would be proud of. Then she got off, at Fourteenth Street, I think, and climbed the steps upward in a kind of daze.

I wondered if she was crazy, or a real street preacher. Most of them are a little cracked, too, but better prepared with pamphlets and crosses, and collection cups, all the accoutrements of the trade. Or maybe the spirit just moved her, and she won't preach again all day.

Before, on 42nd Street, near the UN and not too far from my credit union, I saw a white guy with a folding table and a bunch of homemade posters including one with a nice blowup of Cheney declaring "Send Him Home" or something like that. He hadn't shaved in a couple days. His clothes looked rough, and he declaimed just a little too loud to a guy who stopped to take a flyer, so I gave him a wide berth like almost everybody else.

It's not politics, really. New York has the image of this brash, let-it-all-hang-out metropolis, but the truth is that most everybody here is so stressed out, so close to the edge we're all suspicious of a little too much passion, so we do like we did to the lady in the subway, avert our eyes, close our ears, and try to rein ourselves in, even when the silence is what's unspeakable. Nothing else. Judgment is now.

Carpet City

Monday morning, I wake up to no money, bad breath, and an eighty-three year old mother-in-law hacking her lungs up in the kitchen where she gets more sugar on the floor than in her coffee, and I'm a bitch for caring.

Of course Adriana picks today to turn up on time when Marina and me are only halfway through our first cups of coffee and I'm still considering hara kiri with a bread knife at the thought of carpet shopping, which is what we're stuck doing because the board at Marina's mother's Co-Op -- where we're trying to unload her apartment -- has suddenly decided all the floors have to be completely carpeted and threatens enormous fines if we can't tread lightly by Wednesday.

The weather's an affront, too, sunny, cool, with birds twittering cheerfully, along with one or two car alarms. Even the traffic is good, and we zoom from the East Village to Jackson Heights in ten minutes flat, like we're diplomats or dipsomaniacs with a cop escort and the United Nations in session uptown.

We hit three different places including the National Wholesale Liquidators Warehouse where you can buy all kinds of crap you never knew you needed including a rug that looks like a cat has already been clawing it. After checking out all the prices everywhere Marina decides we can lay the stuff ourselves, which is when I tell her not to count on me. I thought we were just buying area rugs and slapping them down when I was hornswoggled into coming on the trip.

I was supposed to spend the day applying for jobs or pulling out my fingernails one by one, I forget which, but it's still better than laying carpet, so we go back to Carpet City where she makes a deal with the guy not much more expensive than us doing it. We give him a lift to the apartment where he measures the place, and makes arrangements for it all to get done today, even as I type. Can you hear the angels sing?

Domestic harmony, if not actually restored, at least stands a chance again.