Goodbye, Bathing Beauty -- The Legend of Precious: Part III

She saved a life and ruined a day, and for that we kept Precious around. She spent the winter months stuffed in a corner of our house, all but forgotten. Spring turned to Summer, and the mysterious stenches of hot days in New York City began to emerge.

One particularly sticky and stinky weekend, some guests came to visit from somewhere rural. I can't remember exactly who they were – when you live with 5 guys in their 20s, and have an Irishman as an ex-roommate, your home is basically a hostel – but they decided to spend the better part of their visit to Brooklyn in our backyard. To maximize their comfort, they bought a plastic kiddie pool. There they sat for hours drinking beers and savoring the bizarrely New York moment. No doubt they had Chinese food for dinner.

They left, like all of our visitors did sooner or later, and the pool became the social hub of our house. It wasn't unusual to get home from work and find someone sitting out there with his butt in a chair and his feet in the cool hose-filled basin. Some nights all 5 of us contorted ourselves into the pool itself. Good friends, a cold can of Bud on a warm night, the same old selection of Christy Moore, Dave Matthews, and Van Morrison spinning around the multi-CD changer... for a while, we all forgot about uncertain career paths and the inevitable realities of a more mature life.

What about Precious, you may be wondering. Well, she joined us by the pool, of course. When? How? I don't know. Somebody found her inside, blew her up, and brought her outside for a swim and an embarrassing photo or two.

Pool season ended and the air leaked out her seams, but we didn't bring her inside. Deflated, she was draped over the back of a cheap chair by the time the leaves began falling.

Our house was in Boerum Hill, one of two buildings that bookended two long, perpendicular blocks of brownstones. As such, the backyard sat between backyards owned or rented by more respectable people.

Around the corner, with a yard abutting ours, lived a white lady who always reminded me of the old hag in The Dark Crystal. She was often chatting with a guy who looked like a a member of Sexual Chocolate in Eddie Murphy's Coming to America. They were friendly enough, but we weren't friends. It was just "hello, how are you?" as we walked by. I wasn't even sure which home was whose, or if they were a couple of just neighbors.

One day, on my way home from work, I decided I had to speak with them. It went like this:

"Hi. How are you? I'm J.J. and I'm one of the guys who lives behind you."

"Hey," said Sexual Chocolate.
"Hi," said the hag.

"I was wondering if either of you lives in the house with the dead tree in the backyard. It's dropping bigger and bigger branches on our yard."

"That's me," said the hag, "I've told my landlord about it a bunch of times. He refused to do anything about it."

"Well, if it'd be helpful, I could call him or something. The branches are getting pretty big and it's getting kind of dangerous."

"No, I'll call him again and let him know you complained. Wait, which house are you again?"

"I'm in the one directly behind you. You know, the young guys who make too much noise, hahaha...."

"That's not the one with the...never mind."

Before I could speak, Sexual Chocolate said, "With the blowup doll?"

I debated walking away right then, because, seriously, what do you say to that? The best I could do was, "Oh...ummm....yeah. That's the place...heheheh....It was a joke. Forgot it was there. Sorry about that. I...uhhh."

Sexual Chocolate offering an out: "Don't worry about. It's not offensive...."

The hag jumped in, "It is too offensive!"

Crap, crap, crap. I had to get out of there. While they debated the offensiveness of an inflatable, three-holed plastic lady, I plotted my exit.

"Well anyway, about the tree. If you want me to call the landlord I will. Something has to be done. Sooner or later one of those branches is going to hurt someone, break the fence...or pop our doll."

With that, I left. When I got home, I brought Precious inside. It was getting too cold for her out there anyway.

Fast forward a few months. After an amazing three year run, it's time for us to move out. We had accumulated  a lot of junk – never a good idea to let 5 guys have a basement they don't particularly need. It was like a clutter farm down there: empty boxes, bags of logo paraphernalia never worn, abandoned futons.

Upstairs, the legless chair, broken beer signs, worn-out clothing, and rickety old IKEA tables would never survive in the outside world.

The night before trash day, we built a mountain on the curb. The scavengers came quickly. Within an hour, there was an unholy mess out there. The next door neighbor (not the hag or Sexual Chocolate, mind you) came out to clean it up.

They weren't being generous. They were trying to clear a path to their own door and avoid a fine from the Department of Sanitation. We ran out to stop them.

"No, no, no. We got it. Sorry. This is our fault. "We'll clean it up."

The neighbors protested briefly. To prove the seriousness of our intent to clean things up, I said, "No, really," and reached blindly into the pile for something to tidy.

When I pulled my clenched hand up, there she was. I had Precious by the ankle. The neighbor said nothing, just went back inside.

Precious stayed in the trash heap that night. She was gone by morning.

I like to think she's inflated and strapped to the front of a garbage truck, with an old sweatshirt and swim trunks covering her most unacceptable bits, and the wind tousling her silly tuft of hair as she patrols the streets of Brooklyn looking for new ways to embarrass and amuse.

But maybe the world would be a better place if she were never seen again.

Crashing the Christmas Party -- The Legend of Precious: Part II

Not long after Precious saved Tommy's life, she disappeared. Sure, we spent the rest of the vacation talking about her heroic appearance in the rapids and trying to snap photos of each other holding onto her, but once that week ended she was gone.

My four roommates, including Jim, her rightful owner, and I went back to our place in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. The boys from Dublin came, too, for another week or so before flying home. The rest of the guys returned to jobs and family in Maine and elsewhere.

The leaves changed, the temperature dropped, and one of the best vacations of all time faded away.

Then came December.

December was time for Christmas N The Hood. We'd had the first one a year earlier. Friends came down from Maine, up from DC, and over, through, and around every place in between. The invitation had a chalk outline of Santa in the street. We filled the water bubbler with alcoholic punch, and opened our doors to somewhere around a hundred people. I slept on my bedroom floor because a buddy had already laid claim to my bed when I got there.

The second year we decided to really do it up. The official name was "Christmas N The Hood II: As Jolly As He Wants To Be." The invitation was a fake CD case, featuring songs such as "My reindeer weighs a ton" and "O Little Town of Bedford-Stuy" performed by the likes of Rudy "Red Nose" Gambino, Dr. Dreidel, and Morning Mistletoe. We sent it to pretty much anybody we knew how to reach.

The first guests showed up Thursday for the Saturday night bash. By Friday night our house was jumping. On Saturday we put the finishing touches on the Christmas tree, moved furniture around to create more space, made sure all the decorations were in the right place, and loaded up on obscene quantities of booze.

I have no idea how many people made it to the party. The photos show college friends, friends from old and current jobs, hometown friends, random friends picked up along the way, and even a few folks none of us recognize. The closest I can come to putting a number on attendance is to say around 30 people spent the night. One person slept in the tub for lack of space elsewhere.

In the middle of it all, Jim went into his room. And there, waiting in his bed with plastic arms outstretched and a happy caroler's O-shaped mouth, was Precious.

One of the guy's from Maine had brought her, inflated her, tucked her in, and rejoined the fray.

There's no telling how many people saw her there before Jim did. He squeezed the air out as fast as he could and hid her in the corner of his room.

The party finally ended sometime early Sunday. The last guests trickled out sometime during the day's NFL games. The house had survived yet again and we all rode the high of a party well-thrown for a few days.

Until about halfway through the week Jim came home from work. He wasn't quite right and he didn't join in the typical TV-room banter. If we had Chinese food that night (a safe bet), he didn't eat much.

He eventually shuffled off into his room and called Tommy up in Maine. He needed to talk to an old friend. Apparently the conversation went something like this:

"Hey, Tom."

"Hey, Jim. What's up?"

"Not much."

"You don't sound good. Everything OK."

"Well, yeah, I guess. But I went to the laundromat tonight to pick up my laundry and...."

"BWAAhahahahahahaaaaa!!!! Oh, that's awesome! You drop your laundry off?! Oh man. I had no idea."

That's when we heard Jim shout, "You bastard."

It seems that Tommy had been holding onto Precious since July and was the mastermind behind her appearance at the party. When he went to check on his prank and found the doll deflated in the corner, he stuffed her in Jim's laundry bag. Wouldn't that be funny when Jim was doing his laundry?

But we didn't have a washing machine in the house. Every week or two, Jim dropped his bag at the place around the corner for a little wash and fold. The owners were a nice Asian couple with school-age children. When Jim went in that night, they chatted about the merits of math tutors.

Then Jim noticed an unfamiliar color and fabric peeking out the hole on top of his tightly tied bag. With one touch, his world fell apart. And when he got home and opened the bag, sure enough, there was Precious looking right at him, clean and folded.

"Not only do they think I own a blow-up doll, they think I need to wash it!" he later said.

He took his laundry somewhere else for weeks.

And yet we were still too stupid to throw Precious away.

Rescue on the River -- The Legend of Precious: Part I

Her lobster claw hands weren't sexy, and no woman alive would envy her sad little tuft of hair, but that was hardly the point. She had three holes, including an open mouth that formed a perfect circle.

When Jim pulled her out of the box that day on the Mattawamkeag River in Maine, Jon said, "Isn't she precious."

So Precious she was, from that moment on.

There were 14 of us canoeing for a few days, and Precious was a birthday gag for Jim. The year before, one of the hairiest, roundest guys had dressed in drag and given him a lap dance. This time, he got a plastic lady.

Somebody dared to inflate her and she made her way around the campfire like a hot potato. To be clear, nobody used her in the unimaginable ways the manufacturer intended. We just inspected, imagined, and laughed. The trick was to avoid getting caught on camera with her, lest the photos find their way out of context.

And so we joked and drank and ate and spent another summer night in the New England woods with good buddies. Life doesn't get much sweeter.

In the morning, we stood on a rock looking out at the whitewater. We'd portaged our stuff around after breakfast and were now contemplating making a run down the rapids. This was serious stuff -- standing waves a few feet high; boulders, eddies, and hydraulics scattered all about the place.

Flat bottom canoes, a lack of helmets, and a general shortage of canoeing prowess could not overcome our group lust for adrenaline.

Jon, a part-time rafting guide, was shaking as he gave us pointers on how to navigate our way down. Someone asked if he was nervous. "No," he lied, "That's the hangover."

He and his partner walked off up the shoreline to go first and show us the way. A few minutes later they reappeared on the water, cackling, paddling like hell, and looking good.

Until they reached the first big standing wave. The bow of their canoe went straight up and they spilled out like dirt from a dump truck.

At that moment, the rest of us divided silently into two camps. In one group were those who suddenly realized we were idiots – if the only experienced whitewater guy among us flipped on the first wave, we were all doomed.

In the other group were those who suddenly felt an enormous relief – if the only experienced whitewater guy among us flipped on the first wave, there was no pressure to succeed.

Nobody backed out.

Two by two, we headed upstream to give it a go. Some of us had dry bags filled with air for extra flotation. I think some had inner tubes (that makes no sense, but it's how I remember it). Others had little but their boat, their clothes, and a life jacket.

The second canoe dump-trucked on the second wave. The third flipped sideways.
Once you were in the water, you had to bob, flail, and cling to anything that would float to make it through the rest of the rapids, a few hundred yards of gasping for air and trying not to panic.

Dave later said that when he was underwater trying to figure out which way was up, he thought to himself, "I have a wife and two kids who count on me. What am I doing?" When he reached the surface, he saw an eagle flying overhead and knew everything would be OK. Nobody else saw that eagle.

I hopped in with my old high school buddy Mike, a mellow soul who'd met most of the other guys for the first time on the first day of the trip. They called him "Iron Mike." Through luck alone, we made it about a hundred yards before the river took control and tossed us out like the rest.

The water was deep, fast, and foamy. I bounced off a rock. It felt like I was underwater forever before I pulled myself up on the upside-down boat, took an urgent breath, and turned around to look for Mike. He was clinging to the other end of the canoe.

I said the only thing that came to mind: "You have a huge snot on your face." "Thanks," he replied, and wiped it away.

The river took us around the bend into what later became known as The Bonus Round, another stretch of brutal waves we couldn't see from the top of the run. Spitting, hoping, and holding on to that canoe anyway possible, we made it to the end and caught an eddy to the shore.

Everybody who'd gone before us was there, one guy so dazed he couldn't speak. Most of us were giddy with nerves.

Five canoes in, five canoes flipped. Then came the sixth. Miraculously, Jamie and Jay had managed to stay upright, perhaps because their extra beef gave them extra ballast. They looked like they were sitting on the water, though, because their canoe was totally swamped.

Then we waited. And waited. And started to worry. Because Jim and Tommy did not appear.

Nobody wanted to admit we'd been playing the odds. It was way too easy to get hurt, badly hurt, doing what we'd just done, and the delay of the last canoe made us all wonder if we'd tempted fate too long.

We could not see much from where we were. We just stood there staring at the tail end of The Bonus Round and hoping, hoping Jim and Tommy would show up soon.

And then somebody yelled. "I see something."

We all scanned the water frantically.

"It's Precious!...And she's got Tommy!"

And there they were, crashing up and down the final waves. Tommy wrapped around a blow-up doll, his arms around her neck, his ankles around her legs. When they reached shallow water, Tommy jumped to his feet and shouted, "She saved my life!"

Jim floated into view hanging on to their flipped canoe, and we all began to celebrate.

For the rest of the day and week, we compared stories, relived the fear, and made fun of each other's reactions. One guy swore he'd never go on whitewater again. We all admitted we'd been incredibly stupid and lucky and would probably never do it again. Precious, our plastic hero, said nothing.

Remembering - sort of a poem

8 years ago I wrote this little experiment. Each line is pulled from emails I received in the days following 9/11. Worth remembering.

major terrorist attacks on TV - right now
I cannot sugarcoat this
chaos
a horrendous day
I can't believe what people can do
terrorist crap
ambiguity and misinformation
milling around dazed
in disbelief
horrifying

things are hectic
about 1/4 mile away
saw the whole thing happen
saw the South tower burning
saw the second plane hit it flush
see the towers collapse
evacuated our building
evacuated to nj
find a cabbie
how are you doing?

we're all okay
home without incident
family and close friends accounted for
closest friends are safe
Our family is also safe
people close to me are safe

Everyone on my end is fine
people I know are okay
OK physically, at least
brother is fine
Margot and Paul are fine
Andrea and I are both fine
you and yours are all fine

people are missing
She does not know when she will be home
family friend was on the hijacked flight
father is known to have been on the Newark flight
news of other friends greatly appreciated
friends...I haven't managed to contact
absolutely shocking
I feel so blessed

a mental health break
mortality was never felt so acutely
support from around the world has meant so much
prayers and calculated action by the government are required
total disbelief

Good thoughts, in difficult times
keep a thought in your head and a prayer in your heart
do not hesitate to ask for help
Respectfully, safely, carry on

an impromptu mass at our church
Let There Be Peace on Earth
much love and strength to all
all of my love
love

bless you all
here's to better days

The Day A Duck Hit Me In the Face

If you hang out with Ray and me long enough, one of us will tell the story. My version is a mildy amusing short tale of semi-masochistic animal cruelty. Ray makes it an epic. His eyes ignite and pull closer together. He spreads his arms wide, embracing the listeners. It begins.

"A few years ago, J.J. and Joey came out to my place to waterski. The three of us were on the boat, knocking back beers and shit."

The words burst out of a lifetime of perfect Saturdays. Ray's house, the house he grew up in, is on a shady bluff overlooking Long Island's Port Jefferson harbor. Chris had the truck, Ray had the boat. The ubiquitous lobster pots had lunch if you were brazen enough to take it. Everyone had water toys, fake IDs and a native's disregard for harbormaster rules and weekend warrior courtesy.

They crashed a Jeep into the water one night and pulled it out before the police came. They sped through the no wake zones, with Ray once misjudging a turn and skiing nose first into the bow of a moored boat. Another skier tried to leap a swan and landed on its back instead. They went out on the water every day and never paused to consider how lucky they were.

The first time Joey and I were there - the story happened on our third trip - we were bored on a beautiful day. We called every friend we knew who had a boat. Ray was the first to answer. An hour and a half later, it was all water, sunshine, and laughter. After, Ray's Mom cooked us dinner. We ate lobster on the screen porch and drank cans of Bud while gentle waves crawled among the reeds and docks below.

"We all took a couple of turns skiing. The weather was awesome, nobody on the water. We decided to tube."

Every boat ride with Ray involves a round of innertubing. The idea is to go faster and faster, making tighter and tighter turns and circling back on our own wake, until the guy on the tube goes flying. The more spectacular the wipe out, the more heroic the moment. I once saw Joey do three complete cartwheels before spinning head first into a wave. He hurt his back a bit. The rest of us laughed for hours.

"We went over to Conscience Bay." If there is somebody listening who knows the area, Ray will stab a finger at them and say, "You know Conscience."

"Joey and I both went on the tube and then it was J.J.'s turn. He gets on the tube, and I'm steering the boat. I've got the thing floored and I'm turning all over the place." His arms spin an imaginary wheel left and right. Sometimes he turns to look behind him, surveying the bar or dining room like the sun-spattered bay in his mind. "He's flying."

Ray is one year older than me. He was our fraternity president and one of the only people I knew who came out of college with a career in mind and a job in hand. Today he's a managing director at one of Wall Street's top investment banks, making more money than I care to know about.

As a general rule, if Ray's around, you're having more fun. There's also a good chance that somebody is about to get hurt.

"And then I looked at Joey and said, 'Oh look, Joe, a family of ducks.' Joey looked at me and said, 'Don't do it Ray.'"

"But I had to. I spun the wheel. We're going like 37 miles per hour, and J.J.'s in a full whip."

A whip is when you turn the wheel as hard as you can so the guy on the tube accelerates wildly and is forced outside the wake.

Ray grips an invisible tube and shakes and bounces like it's happening to him right then.

The physics is simple: When the boat turns, the tube swings wide and, therefore, speeds up – it has to cover more distance than the boat in the same amount of time. If it doesn't, the rope breaks. In this case, with the boat was going over 35 miles per hour in a circle, the 75 foot rope held. I was crashing along the surface of the water at more than 50 miles an hour.

"He's just flying along. All the spray is kicking up and he's spitting and squinting and trying to hold on." Ray's got his fists clenched around phantom handles. He's writhing around, head back and eyes barely open, as if a firehose is pointed right at his face.

"The ducks are just paddling along." His hands do a leisurely duck paddle, immersing us all in a few seconds of mallard bliss.

"And then they look back and see this thing coming at them at a hundred miles an hour. They start paddling faster and faster." Ray paddles his hands furiously. "Two of them take off." His hands flap off to the right.

"J.J.'s still hanging on and the one duck's trying to take off and he's flapping." Ray's long, lean runner's arms unfold; he becomes a pterodactyl. "And he's flapping and flapping, but he can't get up fast enough. And J.J.'s still coming. He's like. And the bird's like." Ray is switching frantically between the pterodactyl and the clench-fisted hose face.

"For just a second, the spray stops and J.J. sees the duck." The hose face disappears briefly for a bug-eyed J.J. impression.

"He can't do anything. The duck is only about two feet off the water, flapping and flapping and J.J.'s flying and trying to move but we're going too fast."

"BAM!" He smashes his hands together.

"The duck hits J.J. right in the face." He smacks himself just above the right eye. "It goes straight into the water and disappears. J.J. goes flipping backwards off the tube."

By the time I got my bearings and swam back to the surface, a second or two at most, the boat had stopped. Ray and Joey were bent double, grabbing their stomachs with one hand and pointing at me with the other. They laughed too hard to breathe, let alone ask if I was OK. The swelling had already begun.

"The duck goes all the way under water and then pops up again and tries to fly." A drunken pterodactyl wobbles into the air. "J.J. swims to the boat with this massive shiner and a welt that's out to here." His finger's about an inch in front of his eyebrow.

Then, the inevitable question.

"I don't know what happened to the duck," Ray answers. "He had to die. I mean, J.J. fucking nailed it."

Nobody ever asks about me. They just laugh and wait for the next story. My shiner healed in about a week.

An Irish Biking Tale

Every year the Tour de France reminds me of my own European bike adventure, a few years ago in Ireland.

I was in Dublin for a couple of weeks, doing touristy things by day and pub things by night. One evening my host and buddy Ted suggested I borrow his bike. "You should go to Sally Gap," he said.

Maybe it was his accent, maybe I'm just an idiot, but either way the "Gap" part of the name never registered.

And he neglected to tell me I'd need to bike on the highway out of town. Or that it would be a very long ride, indeed.

So there I was the next morning astride his sweet Italian racing machine trying to find somewhere to ride that wasn't the shoulder of a major motorway. For the first several miles I bobbed and weaved up and down sideroads and exits, but kept finding my way back into traffic.

Of course, I had no helmet. In fact, I had nothing but the shorts and t-shirt I was wearing, a windbreaker, and my camera.

After a while I managed to work my way to the Powerscourt area. That was a good sign, since Ted said it was part of what I should see. That was really the last good sign, though.

I stopped for a bite to eat. Nothing too heavy, just a big snack. Figured I wouldn't be out too long.

As it tends to do over there, the weather started to get a little rainy. First a mist, then a drizzle. I got back in the saddle and headed on up the road. Somewhere I made a wrong turn. At the time, and to this day, I don't know what I should've done differently.

The weather got worse, and there I was pedalling uphill, uphill, uphill alone in 45 degree weather in a downpour. My windbreaker was keeping my camera dry. I thought I was heading in the direction of home (no, I didn't have a map) so turning around made no sense. Stopping was not an option because I became convinced I'd be hypothermic the minute I stopped moving. Did I mention the t-shirt was cotton?

At some point I realized with huge regret that Sally Gap is a mountain gap, not the name of some quaint Irish town.

Up, up, up. Bigger and bigger rain drops. No stores. Few cars.

I remember an acute desire for a cup of soup. Alas, I may have been on the longest stretch of pub-free road in Ireland.

And then the wind kicked in.

It was raining sideways. I'd been out for a couple of hours. The hill was unrelenting. The rare drivers that drove by laughed at this wet dog. I tried hitching, but who picks up a guy on a bike? A whole busload went by and every face stared at me in pity. What the hell was somebody doing biking in this weather in that outfit in the middle of nowhere?

The trees disappeared, the wind intensified, and I began talking to myself. "Keep going. You've gotta be over halfway home. I'm miserable. Shut up. If you stop you'll die."

And then there it was. A sign that said I had reached Sally Gap. Another little sign pointed toward Dublin. I was nowhere near home. In fact, I'd been headed the wrong way for hours.

I exploded at the rain, wind, clouds, and the gods in general. My "Mother fuckerrrrr!" shout would've been heard for miles, if there'd be another soul within miles.

I had pooched the directions so badly my only hope was to keep going, not turn around.

In the plus column, the sun came out. In the negative column, I was starving, exhausted, nursing huge ass apples, without a helmet, and rocketing down a wet road on a very, very fast bike. Honestly, I was scared shitless.

Quite a while later I was in a town at the bottom, where a sign informed me I was 15 miles from Dublin. I found a commuter rail station. The attendant told me I couldn't take a bike aboard. I was too tired to even care. I bought a Mars bar and a Fanta, inhaled them both, and began the trudge home.

I walked in the door around 6 hours after I'd left. Ted was there to greet me when I dragged my dedraggled body through the doorway. "How was your ride?" he laughed.

"If I could blame you for the weather, I'd kill you right now," was all I could say.

It was about a 70 mile ride, my longest that year by about 65 miles.

Parts of my route later were part of the 1998 Tour de France.

Mistaken Identity in Barcelona

The scene: La Rambla. Barcelona, Spain. September 2006. Way past midnight.

The human statues have gone home to scrape off their make-up and count the day's change. Most of the cafes and venders are closed for the night. The only people left are nocturnal tourists, drunk stumblers, drunk nocturnal tourists stumbling, drug dealers, and prostitutes. Lots and lots of prostitutes.

Nearly all of them were African and, therefore, black. They were aggressive, too, groping, glomming, and otherwise blurring the line between solicitation and assault.

As my friend and I attempted to fight our way through the whore gauntlet with wallet and morals intact, we saw two younger Arab-looking men speaking with two pretty, well-dressed, black girls.

One overheard sentence was all I needed: the girl said, in flawless American English, "Well, in my country you look like the guys who work at the gas station, but I'm not saying you are."