random convo with Claudia to bring back the past

 Onions

I used to hate onions Claudia. I hated them growing up and my mother always made horrible shit food with onions in them and we would have a test of wills. She would say you cannot leave the table until you finish and I would just shut down and say fine I will sit here until my bones turn to dust. all for onions. then when I was freshman at uni i joined a frat (not jerk jock frat but cool guy frat) and part of the initiation was to eat a feckin onion whole like an apple so after my youth trauma you can imagine how bad that was but i managed to do it anyway...nowadays thanks to years of smoking killing my taste buds and learning that onions subtle in sauce can be ok, I see that they are edible and that I can have them in sauces now and red onions not so bad.

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mine was sort of by accident I think although I provoked it maybe with photos. something humiliating happened to me once; i was like (sorry for the graphic nature but it is needed for the story) humping what I had set up to be the very general shape of a female body that is, the back of the sofa, two cushions they were, lined up on the floor together and humping it but the worst thing is, I fell asleep after the orgasm, I mean I had no idea what happened, the orgasm made me scared at first because I didn't know what was happening but the pleasure was overwhelming so that the fear went away but then you know, I fell asleep and guess who walked in on me like that, buck naked over a pair of sofa cushions with dirty magazines spread out?

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Animal?  Who knows.  I don't have any pets.  I think this freakish sort of idolisation of cats and dogs is almost as weird as the embrace of the superheros as a solve-all for a fucked up society with no real hope for the future.  I don't know.  Animal.  Is monkey and animal or cheetah?  If I could have a pet, nah, somebody else would have to take care of it, not me.  I've had cats before but always had to leave them with someone because I was moving to another country.  Never had a dog although my parents did so I grew up with them a little, a dog dachshund named Heidi and a cat named Hiawatha or soemthing like that.  It died, I remember the cat dying and burying it or having some ceremony about it.

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I remember I dated this girl whose father was a truck driver. Her name was Tammy. We had sex all the time, like five or six times in a row mechanical not passion just the experience of sex like it was a novelty or something. Trying it out, getting it right. We didn't love or I didn't love her. I thought it was weird she had a truck driver for a father. That was in Minnesota, like near the North Dakota border separated by the red river. Tammy had a water bed. We used to have sex on it all the time and it was weird. Like making sex waves. Also, she had a brother who was ok although I used to get terribly drunk back then I was only like 18 or 19. Once I went out with her brother and go super drunk and threw up while he was driving out the window all over the side of the car. Later on,i broke up with Tammy. I used to go with my roommate to this bar in the freezing winter and stand in a queue just because it was three-for-one drinks. Anyway she was in the bar and she came up to me and told me her brother lost his arm in a work accident and then tried to use that as a way of getting my sympathy and getting back together. Can you believe that? Also, that same town in Minnesota is where I met the only "real" redhead since you. I mean she was red down below as well fire in the hole, darlings. She sang, had a lovely voice, sang in a band, Also she sang on a commercial on the radio that I could hear that was weird. We had sex a lot too. That was how it was in those days. Anyway my fat brother worked as a bouncer at this bar in Fargo and he got me in even though I was under age and I moet Diane who was like 28 and I was 18 but told her 25 so she would talk to me and then weeks and weeks maybe months later I tried to break up with her and to do so told her I was only 18 not 25 which you know, would be weird for a woman who was 28 but she wouldn't break up with me. She didn't like that I was only 18 but she liked how I made her feel physically and maybe emotionally I dunno, maybe she thought I was special. Anyway, she stuck with me. I can't remember how I finally managed to break up with her.

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I was an anomaly and worse, the partying wasn't killing me, it was just slowly breaking me down like a space shuttle exploding in slow motion.

I didn't really have difficulty coming to terms with it because it was like something snapped in me...I was feeling like death warmed over in Riga and going to the airport to fly to Helsinki for the second leg of the tour and I had to roll down the window like a dog just to breathe fresh air and avoid throwing up in the taxi. When I got on that little twin prop engine plan to Helsinki in the middle of a blizzard with a bunch of Russian migrant workers, chain-smoking, joke-cracking, heavy-drinking half-wits, I felt so back that literally, I got sick into one of those little paper bags for the first time in my life, you know, like, the symbol of a low point, got sick in such a subtle, almost subliminal way, that the guy next to me didn't even notice. In the Helsinki airport all the Russians made a beeline for the smoking lounge and I just couldn't bring myself to join them and I knew it was over. I knew I was done drinking and smoking and that whole lifestyle after a 40 year long binge and I was ready to try a different way of living .

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I realise that very few things are linear or play out in a linear fashion even though it you place them one in front of the other, they seem linear.  In truth things pick up randomly in a certain place and can either go backwards or forwards from there and each day it is like hitting the reset button and reinventing yourself.  I have been with somebody as long as 10 years, far beyond the days when it should have ended and each time we got back together, I mean beyond the edge break ups, two of them for months and then somehow getting back together but there is no real love.  I mean there is some sort of amicable love, an occasional modicum of tenderness but by and large it is like we are chained together like two Russian circus bears.  So yeah, I think a lot of relationships fall into that trap and if it weren't for children people would probably never stay together more than three years, maybe five.  Beyond that, unless you are some sort of commited soul mates you are just living on fumes or the relationship is.  

******

yeah and I know - it's not even like "stuck", you just can't imagine anything else.  I could easily imagine being with a different woman in a new relationship but all the memories, (we seemed to have a lot of good times over the years even if it became essentially a sexless relationship the last many years) would be difficult to overcome.  Maybe not though.  I was seeing this bird from Latvia and we kept going places that were like religious shrines to my relationship with K (the previous girlfriend) because it was Paris after all and this was her home and I was only an interloper but each place, with this bird from latvia, supplanted the previous memory that had been there...

Yes it was weird.  It terrified me at first.  But then once I did it in one or two different places I started to remember what I'd learned long ago and that is that there are no sacred places, only sacred memories and you can go to the same place over and over with different girlfriends and each one will have a different experience if you let it and this place would eventually become a shrine in which all of your memories eventually found there distillation point, one layer upon another.  I remember going to the Rodin museum for example and thinking I can't do that, I went with K on Valentine's Day night once and it was beautiful but you know, this was daytime and the bird from Latvia and I created our own separate memory and nothing felt that bad any more.  

Yes of course.  But you know, Paris will always remind me of her even though I'd been here dozens of times before I ever even met her.  So many of my first love experiences or romantic experiences, were with her in Paris so that the city became like a living scrapbook.  Walk down one street or a café and this or that reminds me of her or something we did and it seemed haunting and the first time we split up, when I was infinitely more fragile and uncertain of myself in Paris, it did haunt me literally.  But over the years, by the time of the second break up I was more my own man and knew Paris on my own accord so the impact was a little bit less.  

yeah but you see there is no sexual fantasy behind it, just some sort of odd image, a thin brunette chain smoking sounding bitter about life or confused, at times self-confident....you know I used to be friends with this sort of woman when I lived in Prague...she was married with a kid and the kid and I got along and the husband I'd met a few times but he wasn't around much and the woman was typical Czech; intelligent and witty and she smoked a lot and had a sort of sexy, raspy voice and a rail thin body and maybe that's who I am thinking of without knowing it. We never did anything even though she invited me to their house when the husband was gone quite often and even had some shitty Czech weed she smoked with me. However I could very easily have imagined some sort of gritty, taboo love story or affair emerging out of that into a novel...not by one of those Czechs like Klima or Kundera or Skvorevsky who had been in some way permanently scarred by the experience but maybe something sort of vaguely avant garde or postmodern...Czech women were falling from trees back then there were so many of them chasing Westerners, notoriously hating Czech men because they weren't attractive or were drunken wife beaters, it's hard to know...

I mean I sort of left Prague rather suddenly without taking many contact details at the time.  One girl actually followed me all the way to NYC.  She ended up kind of moving in with me in my tiny studio flat in the Lower East Side and I had not expected that or wanted it but dealt with it anyway for some reason.  She moved into my flat one other time, in Prague, and left after one day, I remember that.  She was very impulsive.  Anyway, she moved in with me in NYC and I kind of just dealt with it but went on with my life, like going to work and leaving her in the flat and then one day one of my so-called best friends showed up at the flat looking for me and they started talking and like two weeks later they were married or engaged to be married.  I mean, he'd done me a favour by taking her off my hands but at the same time, I was kind of pissed at him about the lack of respect.  I mean what if I'd liked her?  The thing is, and this is maybe even the weirder part, is that he and I had shared several exes, like I'd slept with his ex wife and several of his ex girlfriends and he'd slept with many of my ex girlfriends as well;  It was a very weird period.  

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oh you don't know the half of it...you see...we were supposed to be faithful not sleep with other people despite all this time and distance like some sort of monks...neither one of us were able to do it but that didn't seal our fate.. what sealed our fate were two things...first, she cried about getting her haircut for the first time in her life and I couldn't understand it, thought it was dramatic and stupid at the time and didn't react well to her overreacting (sorry, it's the past and I had no understanding then but for male thouights also she was pretty butch being in jungle and all , kind of touch but dainty at the same time which I find deeply alluring and she made us wait until I got an AIDS test before sleeping with me for the first time because she knew I'd slept with a lot of different females and I resisted for a long time but finally broke and the night I came back to her place after confirming the negative test, she had her ENTIRE flat lit up in candles so we could make love in that environment, we really bathed in passion all the time for months and months until we were apart...anyway, she moved to SF and I moved to NYC and I kept trying to get back together with her because I thought it was the end of the world together and she kept resisting or playing hard to get or whatever and then like the snap of the fingers I met this new woman and we got mararied like two weeks later believe it or not, Alexandra called me up shortly after, not knowing, and said look, I want to try to get back together and I said too late, I just got married...man that was weird.  anyway, that whole thing my whole life when I think back on it like this, has been pretty crazy...

*****

it was an affair actually, she was married.  We worked int he same law firm together, i was a translator and she was a solicitor and once we went to this hearing and I was supposed to translate for her client and the hearing got cancelled at the last minute and she's like i don't want to go back to the office yet so somehow we ended up day drinking and dropping more and more hints about our atrraction to each other, I mean massively, not only was she hot, little beautiful round bum beautiful skin and smile, little afro but also a writer and well into good lit and she as the person to acccompany and drink lots of beer with the very first poetry reading i ever did  at an open mic at a biker bar, imagine that

yeah, it was, we never went back to the office that day, went back to mine and went at it like savages passionate sex and then the next day of course we were like uh oh, what did we do, you are married, etc etc and we had to work together and keep it cool but wow...later on, I moved to LA and she came out to visit and said she could move there with me if I wwanted and we almost did that and then I sort of chckened out in the end.  

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come to think of it we did get tanked alot and go to red neck bars and hang out flaunting being a white and black couople so all the red necks could stare at us and people used to try to listen to our conversations because we seemed so intriguing as a dynamic mixed race couple writer singer poet matched with beautiful hot solicitor it's almost like a cartoon or a tv series

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with the first girl, Karen Bernardo I'l be honest, I can't remember how she found out, if someone saw me stuffing it in her locker or if i said something, I don't really remember.  It's almost like it never happened, those days when I was like 14 or something.  Karen Bernardo was cute and kind of sexual even at that age and she used to put her makeup on front of the boys bathroom mirror every morning and I think I would dtalk to her.  She was probably a bit of a trollop though, I don't know why I thnk that, but you know, the kind of girl who was probably an unwed mother at 19 or married an alcoholic auto mechanic or soemthing.  The second girl, Lori Hoff, was older than me and regal, like a beautiful, tall queen and her sister lived in Paris as a model, etc.  i wrote to her love letters in French and the french teacher who Lori brought the letters to to help her translate, recognised my handwriting and Lori wrote a funny, pioignant sort of thing in my yearbook at tthat was like the idiot highlight of my highschool career, Lori Hoff writing in my yearbook, jesus, I was an idiot back then, pathetic.  Is that embarassing enough for you?  

Mob youth

Events. January – Seven Rochester mobsters, including Frank D. Frassetto, are convicted in a federal court of racketeering crimes including several mob-related bombings. March 7 – Joseph Coppolino is stabbed to death and then decapitated, his headless corpse left on the street to be discovered by authorities.

Salvatore "Sammy G" Gingello (1939 - April 23, 1978) was an American organized crime figure and made member of the Rochester Crime Family who ruled as underboss to Samuel Russotti. Active in the mafia throughout most of his life, Gingello was arguably the most colorful of Rochester's mobsters and held the unique position as the most recognizable man on the streets at a time when most of his counterparts were quiet and discreet. Despite never officially becoming boss, Gingello was seen by many as the face of the mafia in Rochester and would frequent various restaurants throughout the city such as Eddie's Chop House, Ben's Cafe Society and the Blue Gardenia. Stories of Sammy G entering an establishment and buying rounds of drinks for strangers, giving money to young women and gifting expensive luxuries to friends for no apparent reason were common examples of his generosity, but contrasting stories of his foul temper and violence provided a glimpse into his ruthlessness. Nonetheless, Gingello was considered by many the glue that held Rochester's family together during a time of great strife.

Gingello was born in 1939 to an Italian-American family in Rochester and grew up in the neighborhood surrounding Bay Street on the city's east side and rose through the ranks of organized crime under Frank Valenti, becoming a capo in the 1960s. He was promoted to underboss in the 1970s and ultimately met his demise at the hands of a car bomb in 1978 during the Alphabet Wars, the first victim of the B-Team.

I could have had friends.  I was good at football and people cared about that.  But i felt like i didn't like these people, I couold see right through them.  after or during my junior year it all became evident to me that these people weren't going anywhere so i started hanging out wwith the nerds in the chess club and math club etc drama club, people who were not going to be in the same place fifteen years later.  

yeah, even though I didn't really know myself back then, you know?  I was just confused.  I saw what I didn't want but didn't know what i wanted other than getting out of rochester and out of america

well, I had my own world to live in you see, my fantasies.  Always in my head.  I would walk and disappear in my mind into other worlds where I preferred to be even though I hadn't travelled much yet by then.