OUT OF FOCUS

Call me and let's talk trash

As I edit my book, I will be posting some rewrites...

The only time I have ever been in jail was for an avant-garde art project I presented at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia.  The only way I’ll ever do time in jail is if the tenants above me don’t start recycling. Soon. 

I have always recycled in New York, even in 2002 when the city was suffering a budget crisis and recycling plastic and glass was suspended that year. I don’t know whether my plastic and glass ended up on a barge heading for Staten Island but, needless to say, I still recycled.

No, I am not one of those fear mongerers running around the city as if my hair’s on fire screaming, “Global Warming!” nor am I the sidewalk stalker with a clipboard getting in people’s paths asking buoyantly, “Excuse me, ma’am, do you have a moment for Gay Rights?” 

“Yes”, I tell them, “but that was one drunk night in college and I can’t even remember her name.” I walk on.

Our upper west side building has three garbage pails as does my kitchen: one for paper and cardboard, one for plastic and glass, the other for food and non-recycled materials. When I order Chinese food, I request that all my food be delivered in paper cartons, not plastic. If they do not happily oblige, they are blacklisted from my take-out list of restaurants. After my meal is finished, I place my paper cartons in the bin marked paper/cardboard and recycle any foil accompanied with my meal and reuse it in my toaster oven.

When I buy a new tube of toothpaste, I flatten and recycle the box it came in.  When I receive a UPS package stuffed with Styrofoam peanuts I inform the shipper of my disgust and then seal the peanuts in a plastic bag and drop them off at the nearby day care center. For the ones that don’t end up in the mouths of small children, Styrofoam peanuts are perfect additions for arts and crafts.

Recently, I befriended a new neighbor and invited her over for dinner while our dogs played together as we got to know each other over a vegetarian take-out meal.  It wasn’t until after she left, I noticed she had placed foil and a plastic ice tea container in my kitchen can. I let it go that night and sent her an email the following morning:

Dear Jenna,

I was looking through my garbage last night and I noticed that you didn’t recycle.  This might be something that I can help you address.

 

Sincerely your new neighbor,

Kali

Her response?

Why don’t you just write the city a damn letter of complaint?

That put an end to our doggie play dates and Jenna will not be coming over for dinner again.

What is even worse is the too-lazy-to-recycle tenant living above me. Three days a week, I help take the garbage cans to the curb for pick up and I often find myself wearing surgical gloves while sorting out his trash. I know he doesn’t pay his cell phone bill on time because the bill is in with the plastics.  I know he has a subscription to Penthouse because the nudie mag is mixed in with my margarita mix bottles.  After a week of putting up with his crap, I finally posted a note on his apartment door that read:

Call Me and Let's Talk Trash.

He never did.

Last night, around 12:30 am, I am outside, leaning against the wall, shadowed by the building next door.  I see the tenant from upstairs bringing out his Un-Recycled garbage. Perfect timing to nail the anti-green machine.

I crept up behind him and whispered eerily in his ear, “Yo, Kimosabe, is that a pizza box?”

He jumped.  “Oh, hey, I didn’t see you. Yeah. Good stuff”, he said smashing the box into a plastic Kohl’s department bag and then into the wrong trashcan.

“You’re a big man with big feet,” I teased.  “Why don’t you stomp on it or should I have your Mommy do it for you?”

He looked at me as if I had a hunchback.  “Huh?”

“It gets recycled,” I sneered as I grabbed the box from his big man-hands and performed the Riverdance on it until it was the size of a Post-It pad.

“What else you got there, Amigo?” I asked, confiscating the brown Macy’s bag that housed three perfectly round Tuscan loaves of bread, still holding their freshly baked scent from early this morning.

“I didn’t know Macy’s had a bakery?” I interrogated.

“I catered tonight. They had us take it home", he said witness-stand-style.

“I realize you’re still being spoon-fed by the floozy girlfriend upstairs, but this bread can be recycled and just might feed the homeless in the neighborhood. Why not leave it in a nice bag with a note?”

“Don’t you have anything better to do with your time? Mine your own f*ckin business!” he barked, grabbing the bag from my hands, slam-dunking it into, again, the wrong can and walked back into the building.

“So, you wanna talk trash?  How about I go to the local pet store down the street and release a bag of mice on you and Medusa up there?”  I only fantasized saying that line but it made me feel a lot better imagining that I said it.

Over the last couple of months I have noticed that the thug upstairs started recycling.  I guess my late night threats worked.

In the mean time, I will still parole my block looking for the next non-recycling candidate I must convert. Because every bit helps. Hey, I can’t save the whales right now but I can boycott maple syrup since Canadian Eskimos are still clubbing baby seals. But that’s a whole other topic.

I don’t think I will ever fall out of love with my planet.  Nor will I ever take the sticker off my front door that reads,

Will kill for paper and plastic.

 

Greetings from the Jersey Shore

We called it the army camp, the rocky beach secluded by giant sand dunes and military barracks, a getaway where my friends and I cut class, smoke what we thought was “prime pot” and listened to the loud decibels of 80’s Big Hair Rock; Bon Jovi, Def Leopard and Quiet Riot. We would finagle dime bags filled with pot seeds or “shake” from Produce Bill, a local vegetable wholesaler who ordered the same 12-inch roast beef sub each time he came into Mulligan’s Deli, the place we occupied our previous summer months.

When you are sixteen and unaware of your true sexual prowess, asking a hungry blue collar male in his thirties how he would like “his meat sliced” carried massive sexual overtones, so much it lead to a steady supply of free mediocre weed. It was a watered down version of our own Coyote Ugly, teasing and manipulating our male customers in exchange for things the law wouldn’t allow us to buy. 

The Army Camp became symbolic for losing ones virginity and earning ones manhood; the initiation into adulthood. We had spent nights lighting bon fires, drinking Bartles and Jaymes white wine coolers and smoking Virginia Slims while contemplating life’s great unknowns; why is it that the first sexual experience a female loses something while a male gains something? These were topics of conversation that arose between community puffs with my female posse.   But today I was alone.

Today, I am alone because our horrid, six-foot history teacher Mrs. Myldal, who we referred to as Ms. Midol, caught me read-handed bumming a drag off of a community smoke being passed around in the girl’s bathroom. Principal ‘tight-lip’ Landry sentenced me to five days of what he considered punishment; suspension. With two parents working, suspension to me meant a five-day, all-expense paid vacation to the sunny, syringe-filled, beaches of the Jersey shore.

I swam alone. I listened to music alone. I ate a popsicle alone. I later found myself in front of a payphone alone.  It was after school hours and I knew that in ten minutes my best friend, Jen, would be walking through the double doors of her Victorian style kitchen, and would make her first call to this pay phone; our designated pre-cell phone era communication headquarters.

Jen didn’t call.  Maybe she and the girls got a case of the munchies and walked to Tim’s Variety Store where they loaded up on 10-cent mini favorites like Charleston Chews and Bit-O-Honeys, the gluey hard candies that yanked at your molars. Perhaps they would follow up with a chocolate peanut butter shake at Gay 90’s, our favorite after school eatery whose management never questioned the dilation of ones pupils. 

The phone still didn’t ring.

“Hey, need a ride?” Calling from the driver’s seat of a red Mazda RX-7, was a sexy Mike Reno look-a-like, the lead singer of Lover Boy, who sported the most historically sexy red leather clad ass.

He moved with an entourage, an equally cute friend in the passenger’s seat and a less-than-equally-cute friend in the back seat.

“Sort of”, I said. “Main Street’s fine.”

“Any plans?” the lead singer asked. 

I smiled coyly and thought this one over like a dreaded Iowa Tests of Basic Skills math equation:

If a Mazda RX-7 is leaving the station at noon and traveling east at 65 miles per hour and a train has left the station at 11:30 am and traveling in the same direction at 120 miles per hour, at what point would train meet up with the Mazda?

I sure as hell didn’t know nor was did I want to be left at the station.

“No plans”, I smiled, wrapping my beach cover around me, grabbing my beach bag and hopped into the backseat of the Mazda.  In the front seat, Lover Boy’s friend was busy concocting the perfect mix of Absolut Vodka and OJ.

“Cheers”, he announced, handing me the carton that held a heavily poured Screwdriver. I gulped down more than my sun-drenched brain could handle to the sound of Bon Jovi’s, Living on a Prayer, blasting through the car’s tiny speakers.

We approached Main Street.

“This is fine guys.  Thanks.” I shouted over the guitar solo.  In the rearview mirror, I saw the eyes of Lover Boy whose stare acknowledged that he had heard me.  He adjusted the mirror so I could see him mouth the words, “We’re going for a ride”.

A quick nervousness came and went in my stomach.  I figured chances are Jen and the girls were not waiting for me and the other alternative would be to go home.  I opted, without choice really, to go for the ride.

Twenty mile-markers later, the alcohol was animating the Mazda’s every move, my head  hanging out the window like an excited dog on his Sunday drive.

As Lover Boy pulled the car over in front of an immaculate, vanilla-colored condominium complex, a handful of guys were leaving the building.

He finally called himself Sean.  Maybe I was too inebriated to ask but hearing a name took my nervousness away. As he escorted me through the front door of the condo, it felt like a real estate agent’s model home. Ignored and out o place, I felt like the home-buying client getting an unexpected tour of an undiscoverable place I had no intention of buying. 

“Where’s the drumbeat coming from?” I asked Sean. Like an overly anxious real estate agent eager to lock the sale, Sean finally spoke, “Now this is the room you have got to see.” 

This was definitely not the room that I wanted to see; the stale stench of male teenage laundry, broken accordion blinds tugged too often by drunk hands, forgotten coke cans and empty beer bottles tipping over side tables.  A dirty spotted comforter. He locked the door.

For the first time, the face that now had a name turned dark and uninviting.

“Why are you hear?” he asked.

“Where’s the drum beat was coming from?” I asked, my irritability masking my suspicion.

He placed two hands on my shoulders and whispered, “You’re one dumb fuckin’ bitch. A little fuckin’ dick tease. Walkin’ around with your little titties bouncing around us guys.”

My sarong-wrapped self hit the hard, squeaky bed. My mother used to tell me that of her three kids, I was the one that had the temper of all three wrapped into one. Where did that temper disappear to?  Why was it failing me when I needed it now?  Was it my innate desire to please, the free-spirited, non-confrontational one in the family?

His 180-pound body felt hard and suffocating, and disturbingly, titillating at the same time. 

“I can handcuff you to a fuckin’ bed.  Who would find you? Huh, who would find your skinny virgin ass?”

He pushed himself off me and started walking toward the door, unlocking it.

“I hope you learned your lesson”, he said.  The door shut.

I didn’t want to stop and think about what had just happened knowing that these are the very moments in life that you are supposed to stop and think about.  And I was not one to conform.

Outside, as I was walking aimlessly, humming to Loverboy’s hit song, Working for the weekend, I looked beyond a giant billboard that read, Greeting from the Jersey Shore, to the glowing red sun sinking behind it. Everything was OK, I thought. I just needed to find my may home. I shook the song out of my head and thought to myself, I wouldn’t be buying Loverboy’s next album.