Two Years

November 25. I woke up Saturday morning two years ago and Moki was dead. Or rather his expiring, comatose body was no longer shallowly breathing. Body was a little cool, but not stiff. I lost all the family I had. Didn’t know what to do. Went to Facebook, told Young Brian that Uncle Moki was gone. It was around 5 or 6 in the morning. Brian didn’t see the message for months. After all this, and I know I’ve said this before, I don’t really know what I did. I imagine I went out and bought a liter of vodka. Or just possibly I’d bought one the night before. And now drank quite a bit, leaving no diary or calendar notes for the next couple of days. Sunday morning I phoned 911, and the rest is history.

I meant to arrange a memorial Mass for Michael, on either his birthday (the 18th) or his death day. I didn’t. A nice intention, no compelling urge. What we call a velleity. A vocabulary word Moki put on one of his self-learning flash cards about 30 years ago. When we got back in touch, me in Seattle at end of 1997, he tried a few of his new words on me and was impressed I knew that one. I told him it’s very medieval. A Scholastic sort of word. A good intention, a nice thought, a plan without follow-through. I believe some of his flash cards are in a file drawer somewhere.

• No reason I can’t book a memorial Mass at St. Malachy’s in the next week.

• Note to self to phone A.T. Maybe on Thanksgiving.

I spent about an hour this afternoon, searching for my mint-in-box Nike XC Waffles which I never wore (too stiff and heavy) and decided early last year to put up on eBay. They are one of maybe 6 or 8 pairs that didn’t sell. Anyhow, I figured I would put some blanks in the pin holes (these are XC spikes) and just use them as sturdy, regular sneakers. Trail runners. Took me a while to find 8 blanks. Typically a bag of spike pins accompanying the shoes has only two blanks, or none. I’ve bought hundreds of pins and still have ’em but not too many loose pins. So I’ve accomplished that, and in a few minutes I’ll stroll outside. The temperature is now about 50º F, and I can hear the rain. (That is something Moki could never do, in all the time I knew him. I mean even in his 50s he couldn’t hear the rain outside. In his last years, when we were being slugabeds together and I’d put the tea kettle on for coffee, or tea, he’d start when I’d get up for the whistle. “It’s whistling? You can hear that?”)

Colored my hair yesterday. Excellence light ash brown, a color I’d never used, but it was on sale for $1.49 at the D-R on Eighth Avenue, so I bought it on Friday with some Celsius, for the caffeine. No milk in that D-R. Was feeling drained and sleepy then, too. What was I doing on Eighth? Going to Ninth. Ah to get yellow duct tape to fix my Columbia rain slicker. Didn’t fix it too well, I must say. Needed to use a lot more of that stuff. Bought the tape and some gunk-off elixir, because I still have half a mind to clean and fix the Sharp Twin Energy Vacuum. Melted rubber belt that smokes up when you turn it on, all from putting the wrong belt in a year ago. I did once change the belt properly, back in the Fall of 2021, during that little happy period we had after Brian P. Burns’s funeral. I can’t bear to throw the machine out. Moki bought it in the Spring of ’99, during his difficult period, and he neatly filed away the manual in a manila envelope in a file cabinet near his desk.

Later on Friday (Nov. 21) I also bought more Celsius and a pint of v. Drank that through the night, sleeping in bits and fits and starts, till I absolutely had to get out of bed by 1:30 am. And while still on Eighth Avenue with my tape and hair color, I went to Popeye’s for some fried chicken. I don’t do that much junk food, but I had this craving. Wasn’t terribly good. Drumstick, big thigh, okay breast. All a bit undercooked, to my way of thinking. No fried chicken is as good as the Colonel’s Extra Spicy was 45 years ago.

As I say, I colored my hair yesterday. In the morning. Combed it back, still wet, before the journey out to Brooklyn for Grimm. In the back mirror I could see a white streak as well as pink scalp. Wide-part problem. Have not been taking my Viviscal and Maxi-Hair. I suppose the hair is okay now. Last full color was Sept 25. I know I did a root touch-up in between. In the last days of Moki, when he’d slipped away for good, I colored my hair with a kind of auburn or reddish brown I’d never tried. That was November 22, 2023. I had just accepted that he was going to go. I was crying while I searched out various veterans-related sites on how to deal with a loved one’s death. And my motivation for coloring my hair was mainly that I would have to see people, strangers, very shortly, perhaps within a few days. And I couldn’t face that with messy, streaky, grey-white, uncared-for hair. It was right around that time that I started keeping this blog-diary seriously.

• Order estradiol from that Inhouse place.

Listless, low energy, unmotivated. Was going to go to gym, didn’t, maybe run in park, haven’t (getting onto a dark 5pm just now). My big expedition will be a trip to Whole Foods, I guess. [Later correction: It’s rainy, I’m tired. Go to Morton-Williams, get something involving turkey and cranberry sauce. A beer? I just poured myself my last Celsius.]

Not too hungry, but low on food. Drank a 10% tallboy IPA last night and took a Trazodone after two boo sessions with Grimm and C yesterday. Late morning, then early evening. In between I spent two hours on transit, and two hours at home, lying on bed or walking around talking to some new Jew lawyer (when I say Jew I don’t mean Michael Cohen, I mean somebody who sounds like a beardo from Crown Point) who’s now running the VCF thing at Marc J Bern, the law firm that really screwed up my case. Two years it dragged on, bad communication, missed communications, rejection by WTC Health because they claim I was seeing MSK in 2003-2007 because of a pre-9/11 condition. Well that’s debatable. I had two biopsy plugs in mid-2003 at MSK and my treatment was based on that, not something from 2000 or my jabbering about rashes I’d had for 25 years. And now I’m getting phone calls on 0209 from some nog at the WTC Health office, purportedly explaining why they rejected my claim. Well I don’t need to hear their sorry, garbled pretext again. I’m livid whenever I think of it. Having sunk enough cost in time and effort on it, shall I continue or cut bait? I should talk to Anthony.

At Grimm’s I talked up a … what is the metaphor? A blaze, a fire, a streak? Why Word is standard for commercial publishing (which I didn’t know till recently) and how I met the Autopen and why it was secret. I told some of the true parts of the Kingman Brewster story. All about the Steele Dossier, #PissGate, the Mueller Investigation and the SCO; and then Michael Cohen who was ostensibly investigated to see if he and Trump had “Russia collusion” involvement, but all that came up were shady installment payments made to the stripper Stormy Daniels, who, upon seeing the forged pussy-grab tape released by the Dems and WaPo in October 2016, decided it would be a good time to shake The Donald down for a bundle. Maybe they just met across a crowded room, in 2006 it supposedly was. Maybe not even that. So she did the dumb, timid thing, demanded $130,000. And that’s why we kept hearing about Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels: the DoJ mockies couldn’t get Trump or family or associates on the ditsy Russia claims, so they took the consolation prize of beating confessions out of Cohen, a la Stalin Show Trials, till he confessed to whatever wormy stuff they wanted for testimony. And not too long afterwards he retracted most of that wormy stuff. Then the DoJ came down on him hard, put him in the hot box up in the special Jewish Penitentiary near Kiryas Joel in Rockland County. They could do that, you see, because most of those DoJ lawyers were Jews too.

Talking a blue streak.

Grimm and his fancyman have a huge tree, artificial, all set up and lit up, in their crowded little hut. Like so many other things, the tree was free, found abandoned on the sidewalk. He finds the strangest things. A huge shop-vac, file cabinets, a magnificent drafting table, other random bits of furniture. I thought the tree was up just a little bit early, then reflected that Thanksgiving is still a few days off.

And I’m weary not just because of the boo and Trazodone but because I had a bitch of an Nruns shift in PP, on little sleep, 3:30-3:00, with cold rain pelting down from about 4am till after 10. Foot pain, plantar fasciitis.

Slow-burning anger within me these past few weeks about the Nruns business. I’ve been nothing but an extra pair of hands for most of this calendar year. For a little while I was van driving, mat wiring, decoder connecting, clock setting-up. All gone. The time came to give out black puffer jackets to the serious people who’d been there a year or two and I didn’t get one. Charlie Scanlon got one, he just started a few months ago. (“Ah but he’s full time,” Michele said.) But that chocolate Mexican called Bryan got one as well. I think I’ve been aboard longer. Is Garcia the one who bad-mouthed me on the Timing jobs? I set up a few split and finish mats in November and December, and then nothing. So I usually sign up for Start or Finish on Deputy, because the only other things available are Fluid Stations and Amenities and T-shirts and Bibs and Bag Check, and those aren’t bread-and-butter, core production areas. And then I’m usually the last one, or one of the last ones, picked in the choose-up there. The most unpopular kid on the softball team. And so I bitch and moan inside and think about what I’m going to say to Jen, come the start-of-year letter: Wow, it’s just like being a Volunteer again…back when you were just a fungible pair of hands, but they’d tell you on the website Volunteer page  that if you volunteered there’d be a good chance you’d get some paying part-time work out of it! So all these volunteers, generally a very fine bunch (unlike their manager, the ineffable Tina) would stick around for a year or two, or three, and realize that never was going to happen. 

“Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while, a great wind carries me across the sky.”

A burst of cheer just now, however, via Michele Gr*t*n*. They are already planning the production of the ginormous Bklyn Experience Half at the end of next April. And there I am, booked already to drive the sweep truck in McCarran Park. Oboy. Surely I’ll be doing something else. A 13-hour shift, 4am to 1pm. That means 8 or 9 loose hours between arrival in the wee hours and getting ready to pack up. What will I do? Help pack up the start. That will be the end of a very busy week, as I’ll do all the Expo work I can get. That’s the only dependably pleasant work I’ve had with Nruns.

Such tiny little things can turn my mood around.

I’ve had a few shift requests from Anchor but rejected them all. Big demand, Thanksgiving week. All but Eddie Song, and I’ll probably be dinged on that again, as I was a few weeks ago. A lot of shifts from people I don’t know, and often in dodgy-looking places. A little too far uptown, or way down in the LES. Then there is that 100-year-old Caribbean, Margaret, in public housing in Astoria (v. nice apt though), kept by her very trim 70-ish deminog daughter Margot. Pleased to meet me, pleased to have me, a couple of Fridays back. Two shift requests from those, actually. They want someone to work 5 days a week. But at 5 hrs a day, 5 days a week, all my other shifts are nixed. I’d have to rearrange Grimm. Could still manage Rem however. But mainly, it’s an hour trip by subway and bus to the nw corner of Astoria, so the 25 hours work is really 35 hours. I was intrigued by a txt msg about an old lady in Howard Beach, one could get something like two full days (48 hrs) out of that. But what if the penny drops horribly in the first hour and you realize you can’t go home for another day, or two? And you’re in Howard Beach.

Tomorrow, Wednesday, I’m at Rem’s from 9pm on. I have been unable to stimulate myself to stay awake for all 12 hours. Spent a lot of time with Facebook nonsense on iPhone and iPad last Wed. Re-upped with newspapers.com again. A perennial disappointment. Must cancel shortly. I recovered and reread that terrible Sally Vincent piece in the Guardian magazine, Oct 16, 1993. The one where she mocks TS’s in the usual Brit way. This is special because one of her subjects is Letitia Winter, aka Fay Presto, the “close-up magician.” Not identified as such, however. Not a clue offered as to where Sally found her, but of course Fay is a second-tier celeb for her years of magic performance.

Must cancel that account again before they charge me $60. First, check and see if you can find anything else about P. C. Martin.

Book idea that goes around in my head, one that shouldn’t be too much trouble:

LESSER NOTABLES
of the Civil War Era

featuring

The Vanishing Captain, P. C. Martin
Richard Thomas and the Fascinating French Lady, Zarvona
(There seems to be a tie between the two.)
John Urquhart Andrews
(and some other crumbum stirring up trouble in the city, along with)
Richard Sears McCulloh
The lady who married Fernando Wood’s brother Ben, of the Daily News…a Miss Haversham who died in the 1930s
Mansfield Lovell, deputy streets commissioner of NYC and CSA major general
Prof. Thaddeus Lowe and his magnificent hot-air balloon rides in Central Park
“Colonel” Henry F. O’Brien fires his whiff of grapeshot and gets beaten to death.
Rose O’Neal Greenhow and Little Rose
John Banister Tabb
Simon Bolivar Buckner
Lewis C. Levin
Dr. McNulty of the CSS Shenandoah

Well…at long last love! I check my WF app for the umpteenth time and find it’s down by about $900, which means that finally one of my two rent checks for November (mailed in 3 weeks ago) has gone through. Should check the Citi account too. Just a mo’… Ah, here: “Inclearing Check Pending” for $1000. So I have a grand total of $83 in the Citi, all told, but nearly $1500 still in the WF, and almost $400 still in the USAA. I could without fear send in a December rent check at the end of this week, just to spite ’em. I was seriously worried they’d lost the thing or the post office had, and henceforth I’d have to send it certified mail or drop it off at 29 Broadway.

Got fraudulated on the USAA debit card a few days ago, now it’s canceled and I’m getting another one. I fell for a scam supposedly from T-Mobile. I could use my 12,000 reward credits before they expire, and get noise-canceling wireless headphones or an Apple watch, or whatever. I chose the headphones, and then the scammer lifted my info and tried to use the number at 7-Eleven (!) and BestBuy ($411) and someplace else. Talked to USAA fraud alert on Friday when this first happened, and then again yesterday when the charges and text alerts and emails came in.