My McGreevey Moment

For those readers who care to put a face on this insanity, this is what I look like in my current incarnation as a human being. This shot was taken during a reading I was invited to do at a literary conference in Aardvark, Pennsylvania.

Boy, did those people hate my act! The other writers read essays and freeform poetry dealing with relationships and modern living. The story I read (on the instruction of my editor, Alyce Wilson, though that’s no excuse) featured a passage where three fashion designers named Larry, Moe and Curley slapped down Halston for possession of a jeweled tiara from Bulgari.

I’m not defending my behavior. I am a swine, universally loathed by everybody who knows me and even by people who have never met me. I ain’t no lovable Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise, that’s for sure, and it goes back to when I was a kid. Fortunately, I had the good fortune to be a young adult during the years of the counterculture and I fit in perfectly with those weirdos and misfits, but when society reverted to normalcy I found myself on the outs once more.

What of it? Being out of your mind is a requisite trait for being a writer of any talent, regardless of the current thinking that you have to go to Princeton to know anything. Yeah, right! I have a cousin who went to Princeton. He thought he was a writer but he’s a freakin’ bagel. The guy went to far as to fashion himself into a reactionary so that he could differentiate himself from his environment of Upper West Side cottage cheese cellulite liberals. In a world where modern conveniences have rendered meaningless the traditional characteristics of masculinity, the less reflective American males have fallen on empty gestures and images to buttress their feelings of hollow inadequacy, most notably behaving like irredentist reactionary pricks in the mode of Lewis Libby, who was able to seduce New York Times reporter Judith Miller into introducing many instances of false intelligence into that paper to suit the aims of the Bush administration. This blunderbuss approach, which may be successful for little birds that puff up their feathers or hip-hop fanatics who bulk up using padded North Face ski jackets, are pathetically unsuccessful for impressing anybody but other equally dim-witted bottom feeders. The Upper West Side liberals that this guy was seeking to impress by this lame gambit, while not being geniuses, were vastly too intelligent to be taken in by it, and they scorned him and him to the point where he went crying on his web site that “we are your bastard children.” Oh boy, is that rich: the reactionary pointing the finger of guilt at the heartless liberals!

Women can’t stand me. I never fathered any kids because no woman ever considered me to be an appropriate father for her children. No woman ever tried to trap me into paternity because I never even had enough money to be considered an eligible sucker. Plus which, I am out of control. I have so many personalities that this one woman I was dating broke down in tears, sobbing, “I don’t even know who you are. You have a different personality every day!”

I replied, “Which one of me are you squawkin’ to?”

Finally I met a woman schizophrenic just like me. Comedians have a gag where if one guy laughs in the audience, the comic tells him “Run around the room and make believe you’re a crowd.” Well, between my girlfriend Magpie and me, we constitute enough personalities to create a mob scene.

I met her in a tequila bar, and after a courtship that lasted approximately two hours, we immediately went home and had it off. That was sixteen years ago, and when you’ve got all these multiple personalities bouncing around off the walls together you got multiple problems. We would have walked off on each other plenty of times, except that external pressures forced us back together. First she needed money and I couldn’t let her go down, then I was out of a job and she was working, then our shit collapsed completely and we had to move in together.

I call her Magpie because she is sleek and intelligent. Unfortunately she is so nuts that she needs special software just to manage all her insane complexes. Happily we have multiple points of common interest like tropical vacations, beaches and eating seafood. We are privy to a lot of secrets that are unknown to most New Yorkers, like where to eat the best seafood. The place for that is the Brazilian section of Newark, New Jersey.

New Jersey has always been a huge running joke for me because the people are so retarded. So sue me! It used to be the Garbage State of industrial pollution. Naturally, it’s always been known for the mafia, which in its updated form is now typified by Tony Soprano.

Talk about a New Jersey mafia bait-and-switch! The Sopranos promised a big bang-up series ending and nothing happened, because in typical New Jersey fashion they figured they could milk the show for a few more mil going forward, so all we got was a blackout. That show is about as mobbed up as the real mafia, with one actor on trial for murder and various other ones in court for sundry offenses like assault and robbery. They may be jokers, but as usual the joke is on the civilians, namely us.

But the Sopranos have got nothing on Governor McGreevey, Mr. Gay American. He has added on a whole new layer of idiocy to a state that has always been a laughing joke. Not only was he having sex with strange men in public toilets when he was governor and feeling guys up while he was being chauffeured around by state troopers, but he appointed one of his boyfriends as Commissioner for State Security, to protect New Jersey from terrorists. I sure would feel safer knowing this guy’s on guard! After he resigned as governor and moved in with his boyfriend, McGreevey was ordered by the judge to take down a life-size photo of a fellow with his ding-dong hanging out as a condition of his child visitation rights. Then he called his wife a homophile and she sued him for causing her to lose book sales.

If this wasn’t enough, New Jersey’s new governor, Corzine, broke his neck speeding to mediate a meeting between Imus and the Rutgers nappy-headed ho’s basketball team. Oh yeah, New Jersey’s real normal! Nevertheless, I don’t believe the place is dysfunctional. It functions. In fact, New Jersey is one of the world’s great moneymakers. But when you go there you have to morph into one of them or you’ll never be able to figure out what’s going on. For a New Yorker to go to New Jersey and figure that the regular laws of human behavior apply is a guaranteed recipe for tragedy. Traveling to New Jersey is like walking through the portal in that “Stargate” show on the Sci-Fi Channel, where you’re transported to another world.

Recently I took Magpie to Newark to eat seafood at one of the great seafood restaurants in the Ironbound neighborhood, so-named because it’s a former industrial neighborhood. For over a century it manufactured arsenic-, lead-, asbestos- and mercury-based products, but now they say it’s safe to live there. Suuuure it is! After all, wasn’t it Christine Whitman, former (what else?) New Jersey governor who was head of the EPA, who assured the world that the air was safe to breathe in lower Manhattan after 9/11, and now everybody connected with the place is coming down with mesothelioma and every other disease under the sun?

Anyway, we weren’t going to Jersey to put down roots, just to get a seafood dinner. The restaurant, Forno, has a huge u-shaped raw bar where you sit on bar stools and gaze upon islands piled high with shrimp, lobster and Dungeness crabs. New Yorkers don’t even know this place exists. In fact, they don’t even know Newark, NJ exists except as a depressed crack market with an astronomical murder rate. New Yorkers believe that you have to go to the Hamptons and pay $100 a pound to eat lobster salad. Even if they knew, they’d still be too afraid to venture to Newark.

Fortunately for Magpie and me, the Brazilians and Portuguese who populate the place, having arrived from the slums of Sao Paulo and Belém, have a clearer understanding of what really constitutes trouble and are not likely to be deterred by a few poorly-armed crackheads, and fortunately for us they brought their appetite for seafood with them. When you talk to Magpie and me about crack, we think you’re talking about cracked lobster.

No sooner were we happily ensconced at the raw bar when a guy approached the empty seat on the other side of me and, still standing, engaged the waiter on the subject of a shrimp cocktail. He was no kid, and, with thick arms sticking out of a well-worn t-shirt, would not have been out of place wearing an irridescent work vest and waving a red flag at a highway construction site, or heaving a dumpster full of rubbish into a garbage truck with a forklift. In short, he looked and spoke like he had just stepped out from the set of one of The Sopranos waste management episodes.

It was none of my business, but the negotiations taking place between the construction guy and waiter over the shrimp cocktail seemed to be taking an overlong time, rather like haggling over a used car. The construction guy was insisting on a proper, decorative shrimp cocktail in a fancy dish from the kitchen, with the waiter advising him that that would take too long and instead proposing the guy a big plate of fresh shrimp from a large tub on the serving island behind him, the difference being that these shrimps would have to be peeled by hand.

New Jerseyans, though not being long on metaphysical concepts, are nonetheless capable of being very long-winded about subjects close to their hearts, like shrimp cocktail. Finally the waiter’s point of view prevailed. The construction guy agreed to the shrimps from the service island and said, “Just leave it here. I have to go and get my friend in the other dining room. Just to show you I’m serious, I’ll pay for it now,” and shot the waiter a $10.00 bill. He said to the waiter, “Remember, I’m here.”

“No problem,” said the waiter.

Then the guy said to the waiter in a very loud voice, “And don’t eat it!” and walked off.

I observed to Magpie, “This guy’s off his rocker.”

She said, “That was all for your benefit.”

“What are you talking about?”

She said, “That guy’s gay and he’s trying to impress you.”

“Get the fuck outta’ here!” One of Magpie’s complexes, that she shares with legions of New York women, is that she thinks all men are gay or hiding it. When we first started going out she accused me of it too, even though I had been laying on top of her body so much I was leaving treadmarks on her. I attribute it to living in New York surrounded by men and not being able to get a decent date for years. You know, “Water water and not a drop to drink.”

Our food had come and we were having a blast with paella, lobster, clams, beer and wine. Next to me sat the guy’s plate overflowing with shrimp. At length he returned, but instead of sitting down he just stood there staring at the plate. Then he turned and addressed me. “Did you eat that?” Totally nonplussed, I answered him with my mouth full of food, “No way!”

He said, “Well, you eat it. I’m leaving!” And with that he marched around the raw bar and pushed himself out the door.

“Jeez,” I said to Magpie, “You were right!” Magpie may be bonkers but sometimes she’s right on the money, like a roulette ball that lands on your number by pure chance. Or maybe her interest in abnormal psychology, derived from a lifetime of living amongst New York nut-jobs, yields her a more profound insight into deviant motivations.

Nature, as we all know, abhors a vacuum. The lack of interest that women hold for me is more than compensated by that of homosexuals, who consider me to be absolutely divine. They think that they are going to get rough sex from me. If I was gay I’d be a millionaire by now, to paraphrase Howlin’ Wolf, judging from a lifetime of offers and sighs of longing proffered by them in my direction. Unfortunately for the Rainbow Coalition, these sentiments of admiration are destined to go unrequited. Not that I have anything against rough sex, but a vagina has to be at least peripherally part of the equation.

The waiter came over and asked, “What was that all about?” I said, “The guy told me he changed his mind about the shrimp, and for me to eat them.” With that, the waiter scooped up the guy’s change and walked away, leaving the plate of shrimp for our disposition.

I was elated. Not because of the shrimp, but because in true archeological spirit, I had located the true New Jersey missing link between The Sopranos and Governor McGreevey. Sure, the jails are filled with tough homos, but as Lenny Bruce once delicately observed, guys will do it with mud, and once they are released they generally revert to women. This guy actually tried, in his own ham-handed way, to proffer me a courtship offering, as though he had stood beneath my balcony and recited me love poetry:

I’m a garbage man
With a master plan
To make you love me
In a garbage can
Ooooh baby I’m a garbage man

Now I knew I was really in New Jersey. Not just geographically, but in the New Jersey of the Spirit, like the African veldt where nature’s secrets are unfolded at every twist and turn.

Recently four Newark lesbians were sentenced to long prison terms in a New York court for beating and stabbing a straight guy whose only provocation was to offer to “fuck them straight,” that is, to kindly offer them some dick so sweet that they would forever renounce Sappho and embrace the penis as their true deliverance. Sounds like a good deal, right? These girls didn’t think so, and they signaled their displeasure by almost killing him right there on the sidewalk. If Tony Soprano, a whacked-out murderer with oedipal issues, is the true north of New Jersey popular culture and Governor McGreevey, an imbecilic swish who likes taking it in the behind in public toilets along the motorway, is the true south, then it stands to reason that there exists between those polarities a hybrid of the two extremes – whacked-out, murderous deviates. That would certainly fulfill the promise of modern New Jersey, and I like Dr. Leakey, was thrilled to have been present at a sighting of the missing link, the sogreevey buttfucquis. Maybe I’ll be honored at an award dinner of the Explorer’s Club, as the first New Yorker to brave the wilds of Newark, NJ, surviving the harrowing Meadowlands gridlock, to actually feast with the natives and receive a peace offering from a sogreevey buttfucquis, like a grape proffered by a male toucan to the object of his affections. I can regale the other explorers with home movies of the primitive ceremonial dances and mating rituals that take place in Newark after dark. Maybe I can sell the concept of a reality show between 12 consenting males who frequent the public toilet behind the neon-lit Celia Cruz Memorial overlooking the Union City expressway.

Now, that would be immortality!

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Posted on 6/24/2007 ( Permanent Link )
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