Authors: Fay Jacobs
Time Fries! (28 page)
We're home, working frantically to get the hell out of one house and into another. And I am having a figurative attack of Mercury poisoning.
All I know about mercury I learned from my 7th grade science teacher. I know it's a tiny planet, often called Quicksilver, and an element on that periodic chart. It's found in fish and the silver stuff in thermometers, which wiggles around the floor if you break the glass. Oh, and there was Freddie Mercury, but he's gone now. Ditto the Mercury auto, now extinct. Yes, I've heard the phrase, “Mercury is in retrograde,” from astrology, but that's a subject about which I am clueless.
Back in the 60s when everybody asked “What's your sign,” I'd piss off the hippies by answering “slippery when wet.”
But after the week I've had, when somebody suggested my problems might be caused by Mercury being in retrograde, I was willing to give it a cursory nod.
Apparently, when Mercury is in retrograde, which has something to do with an illusion that it's moving backward through the sky, our plans go awry. Bad stuff happens. Specifically, one astrologist reported, that since Mercury governs all transportation and communication issues (who knew?), anything to do with those areas can go maddeningly wrong. And this year, the planet was in retrograde at the exact time when every communication, transportation or even plumbing device I owned broke.
First came the iPhone. The Verizon store couldn't fix it, making me iRate. Fuming, I came out to the parking lot and my electronic key wouldn't open the car door. I had to dig the lock open like a safecracker with the tiny metal stick buried in the fob. That set off the car alarm which launched me into a frantic hunt for the button to shut it off.
A snide teen in the lot had fun yelling “Help! This car is
being stolen!!!” and by the time I shut down the screaming buzzer and retreated to the steaming hot car I was humiliated as well as irate. When I ordered a new electronic key for the car it cost almost as much as the iPhone. I want a key, not the whole freaking door panel.
Next, as I drove toward Annapolis and an address I'd never visited, Mercury did what the Incredible Hulk couldn't. It detached the Velcro from my windshield, allowing the EZ-pass device to commit suicide by landing on the floor of the car, where I stepped on it as I accelerated.
By the time I realized Mercury had my GPS in retrograde too, I was headed for an address from a month ago, requiring me to cross the Bay Bridge a second time to right myself. I had plenty of time in the cash line on the bridge to dig the EZ-Pass pieces out of the driver's side foot well.
Back home, as we prepared to empty the house for our move, I pushed print on one last document and my computer printer, after a decade of exemplary service, ate a ream of paper. I watched in horror as it disgorged pages around the room, gagging and choking and grinding to a halt. There's nothing half so stupid as using two hands to try and yank a wad of paper from an inanimate object and losing the fight.
On the day before we moved, I made the error of flushing a Kleenex down the guest bathroom toilet, and after 14 years of exemplary service, water gushed from the base of the device.
“Dammit, we need a wax ring!” hollered my mate. Now there's an item I'd never shopped for before. Minutes later I'm in the Lowes plumbing department grabbing for the wax ring (so unlike the carousel's brass ring) so we could spend the next hour power lifting the porcelain horse and trying to reset it. That's the Royal we. I just watched in fascination.
Following that episode, the vacuum stopped sucking, which totally sucked. Not only did it not inhale, but it spewed last month's dirt all over the living room like a scene from some Ken Burns' dust bowl documentary. If Mercury in retrograde is
the illusion of moving backward, we were suddenly worried we wouldn't be moving at all.
I was cleaning up the vacuum dirt with a broom, when my Sirius radio remote quit working. It stranded the radio broadcasting the XM Sex Channel, which previous to the panting sounds I heard, I never knew existed. I was so startled by someone panting louder than I was at the vacuuming, I ripped my earbuds out and broke them.
Okay, Mercury baby, this has to stop. Thinking there was some credence to this whole planet moving backwards stuff I consulted that paragon of factual integrity, the internet. After wading through pages of astrological advice to the lovelorn and Zodiac based investment tips, I froze at this sentence: “We don't tend to get all the information we need at this time, so it can be hard to make big decisions; it's not always the best time to sign a contract, either.”
Great. What about the real estate settlement? OMG.
Luckily, Mercury stayed at the old house and all went according to plan. But I was still wary of the following internet warning: “Mercury also rules industries like publishing, writing and editing.”
Great. Now Mercury is my editor? When I push send on this column, will my real editor actually receive it? It's enough to give me a low retrograde fever. My apologies to the astrologists among us. Like for Tinkerbell, I am clapping my hands. I believe.
My only blood-relative first cousin passed away this week. He was only 66 which was hideously depressing. But he had been in poor cardiac health for years, so it wasn't quite the shock it might have been.
I loved Kenn dearly; he was really, really odd in a fabulous way. A bona fide opera and theatre junkie, Kenn, a rotund funny man, quick with a naughty joke and even quicker with opera and Broadway trivia, knew how to make us laugh. And think. As Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum from New York's gay synagogue said at his service, he was a humanist, a classical, Renaissance scholar devoted to our world and the people in it.
However, scholar and writer, though he be, the rabbi knew he was not above loudly and flamboyantly booing Maria Callas at the Met or standing up at the family Thanksgiving table singing, “I Yam, what I Yam” in a Harvey Fierstein baritone. Graveside, the rabbi mentioned that she hoped when he got to where his soul was going, he would meet up with his idol, singer Renata Tebaldi, and the two of them would be able to avoid Maria Callass.
We have so many Kenn memories. Opera queen direct from the womb, after one holiday meal he had himself, me, and my sister, ages 11, 10 and 7 respectively, perform the last act of
Tosca
, including miming its famed acts of torture, murder and suicide. We had no idea what we were doing, but Puccini would have been so proud. Or perhaps nauseas. I have no recollection of the looks on my parents' faces, but perhaps that's good.
When Kenn's funky New York neighborhood started to gentrify, with dozens of upscale boutiques arriving, he announced he was surprised the funeral home didn't change its name to Death and Things.
And whenever anybody had a birthday, you'd get a call
announcing, “This is Ethel Merman calling from the great beyond to wish you a Happy Birthday.” Kenn would then launch into the Happy Birthday song in his very exaggerated Ethel Merman voice. It was a tradition. It might have been what caused the break-up of Bell telephone.
I tell you all this because, one, I'm sad and I wanted you to know a little about my quirky cousin. Things like he once was crossing the street and hit a car. Broadsided it. Crumpled the whole side panel. He was fine. In fact, his mother took him, in her words “to get his head examined and they found nothing.” Laughed over that for years.
In the 70s there was a gay magazine in New York called
Michael's Thing
(honest), where he wrote a popular opera column. At first he proudly called himself the only straight writer at
Michael's Thing
. One day he just called himself a writer at
Michael's Thing
. His having dropped the bomb to the family first gave me the courage to come out.
But I'm writing now to tell you about the very last Kenn experience I had. It was a gift.
I drove up to New York the night before his funeral by myself since, for a combination of good reasons, Bonnie could not join me. I borrowed a friend's apartment for the night and faced the prospect of a evening alone in Manhattan. What could be bad?
I took a taxi from my digs in Chelsea, just above the Village, up to Times Square, soaking up the frenetic billboards, throngs of people and general mad hysteria of the scene.
As a tribute to Kenn, I took myself to dinner at Juniors, a deli harkening back to its start in 1950s Brooklyn and Miami Beach. As my cousin would have done, I ordered a towering chopped liver sandwich on rye. It recalled the rhetorical question “What am I, chopped liver?” to which the answer, in Kenn's case, might have been yes, the cholesterol adding to his coronary woes. In his honor I only ate half.
From there, on this clear, comfortable, October night I walked to Sixth Avenue, heading for Bryant Park behind the
New York library. From ten blocks away I could see pink lights projected up into the trees and, the closer I got, the more music and cheering I heard. It was an outdoor Shakira concert, which I joined, standing to watch the performer, the videos and the light show. At one point I looked to the right and saw the lit spire of the art deco Chrysler Building and to the left, the pink-lit upper floors of the Empire State Building. Breast Cancer Awareness Month. New York was in the pink.
Traveling south, back towards Chelsea, I passed Herald Square, as in George M. Cohan's “Give My Regards to Broadway, Remember Me to Herald Square.” There stood Macy's, the biggest department store in the world, withâhere comes the strangeâa long lap pool erected in front of the store, where Macy's was hosting Nyad Swims for Superstorm Sandy Relief.
That baby boomer lesbian dynamo, Diana Nyad, who had just completed the history-making swim from Cuba to Key West, had vowed to swim 40 hours without stopping to raise money for the victims of the devastating storm.
I stepped forward off the street, up two steps of temporary bleachers and leaned over the side of the pool. Diana Nyad, in a pink bathing cap, swam by me so closely I could have reached out and patted her on the back. I wanted to. An inspiration.
Moving on, I was approached by several aggressive panhandlers, homeless I suspect, but I did not stop to fill their coffers. My favorite sign, however, was “Why Lie? Need Beer.” Several blocks later I did spy a woman who appeared to be homeless, camped on the street with her small dog. I handed her a twenty. It just felt right.
By the time I walked the 28 blocks back to my lodging, my spirit was willing to continue but not the soles of my feet. I briefly considered going to the Stonewall Inn or Marie's Crisis piano bar in the Village, but I came to my senses.
Upstairs I went, and walked out onto the apartment's balcony, overlooking the still-busy, brightly lit and noisy streets
below. It was fun being part of it, New York, New York. I popped the metal tab on a diet Coke and toasted to Cousin Kenn. Thanks, buddy for an amazing night on the town in NYC.
I can't believe I won't ever get a Mermangram again.