Today’s soundtrack: it’s one two three four take the elevator
Today at 12:22am: Activating my E-Z Pass


When the light turns green on the West Side Highway at 57th Street, everyone stomps on the gas and starts jockeying for position.

The entryway to the Henry Hudson is wide and steeply slanted, so you feel like you’re on the on-ramp to Heaven. I love hearing the engines unspool and watching the pathetic taxis in my rearview mirror trying to get the best of me. Beat it, amateur. You’ve got twice the cylinders but half the talent.

I love the city in a way most New Yorkers do not, because I was yanked out of it at a relatively early age and socialized in a suburb. I didn’t get to return until college.

It’s midnight before Thanksgiving Day and I’m headed back towards that suburb, feeling neutral about it. I neither love nor hate the place but I’ve got history there. To prove it to myself I get off the highway early, taking local roads through the area where I went to high school.

Here we go. The now-closed restaurant I used to work in. The spot where I got into my first car accident (I wasn’t the driver). The hospital where I used to drop broken people off in the ambulance (I was the driver). The house where I lost my virginity. The parking lot I almost got my ass kicked in. And on and on.

The ‘80s seems so long ago. I suppose in a multiple-dimensions sense a ghostly version of my 17-year-old self is still driving around these parts in a battered Datsun. I can’t say who’s luckier. At least I don’t get sent to the principal’s office anymore.

I stop off at the diner to get some late-night chow and enjoy my little flashbacks. The place is packed with kids. A totally different generation. Looking out the window, I can see some of these little snits getting into their Saabs. Little whippersnappers...you call that garbage “music”....

The same guy is working the register and he still looks like Jabba the Hutt, but he’s older now. At first he doesn’t recognize me, I figure it’s the shaved head.

In 1989 I had hair and Detention.


“Hi, I hate you.”

Today’s soundtrack: I’m going to the country, baby do you wanna go
Today at 8:02pm: Sucking down a budget V’namese dinner with Handsome Dan, Eggtart and Epak Chopra


Businessgirl went back to her hometown, (sigh).

Day before Thanksgiving. I didn’t get out of work ‘til 6:48pm today, long after everyone else had gone home. The self-sympathy reaction kicked in automatically, but then I remembered I didn’t go in today until 2pm. (Been sick.)

10:51pm and I’m about to get in the car, fight the traffic and head upstate. Burning MDs as we speak so I can crank “Statesboro Blues” on the way up. I have a small German car that was purchased the old-fashioned way so this will take some imagination to complete my drifter fantasies.

First I will have to pretend the car is an Oldsmobile 442 with whitewalls wider than my torso and a fuck-all eight-banger under the hood. Next I have to imagine the car is stolen. This is difficult since I am the owner. Perhaps I won the car from myself in a heated fistfight. Yeah that’s what happened, I came at me with a pool cue and then I broke a bottle over my head and everything.

Next, the altercation should have taken place in a diner parking lot, in keeping with faithful fantasy renditions. Even more difficult, since the shitbox 24-hour diner I patronize up the block has just been closed by the Board of Health, and more importantly they don’t have a parking lot. Well they do but it’s all of Kenmare Street. So now I had a fistfight with myself in the midst of Williamsburg-Bridge-bound traffic.

Fuck! My MD just mis-burned as I was typing this. If I hadn’t experienced my own bad luck firsthand I would think I was making it up. You just know, you just know I’m gonna hit traffic on the way up.

Fucking freezing in my apartment, the heat sucks in here. And now I gotta go to my parents’ place, where the heat is so low you could store fish in the living room. Should I take the West Side Highway or FDR Drive? There’s no stoplights on FDR but you pay for it on the Deegan. Then again the West Side will be jammed with GW Bridge bastards. Ah, what the hell am I asking you for. I should just get in the car and go, go, go.

Have a good Thanksgiving! Each and every one of you, even the ones I don’t really care for and had to block.

Of all the things you have to be thankful for, please be thankful for the fact that as you’re driving home, I’m not driving next to you. ‘Cause when there’s only space for one on the exit ramp, man, I’ll totally put you into the wall. Strains of the Allman Brothers preceding the sound of crunching metal and police are on the lookout for a stolen 442.

Today’s soundtrack: Wake up mama, turn your lamp down low
Today at 7:02pm: Fighting bile.


Today I threw up, yaaaaaakkk. Nice to know that no matter how old you get and whatever jobs may come, you’ll still periodically get sick and have to hunch over a toilet bowl.

I just got promoted, yaaaakkkk.

I run my own business, yaaaaaakkk.

I’m a CEO, yaaaakkkkk.

I don’t remember eating corn.

Been busy with freelance and whatnot and I’m seeing this chick, Businessgirl. She’s pretty down-to-earth but her shoes look expensive and foreign and she uses phrases like “opportunity cost” in regular conversation. She’s funny and I’m pretty into her shit and I don’t have any good idea what she does at work.

She explained it to me but I can’t get a good visual. I picture her sitting at a desk with numbers swirling around her head and spreadsheets with blinking boxes and people getting fired in the background. Cut to a shot of me at work where I’m wearing a smock and covered in fingerpaint, listening to Stereolab and the Allman Brothers while my coffee gets cold.

Have you ever heard “Statesboro Blues”? Highly recommend it. That’s now the first tape I’d pop into the deck after stealing a big American car from the parking lot of a diner in Alabama. I need to make a Car Theft mix. I don’t know when I got so big into the drifter fantasies, I think it was after I had to purchase my own health insurance.

So tonight I was supposed to go meet Businessgirl’s friends at this bar, there was some happy hour thing going on. Unfortunately I woke up sick this morning. My condition vacillated throughout the day but 5pm found me racing home so I could have the pleasure of vomiting in my own bathroom. Needless to say I wouldn’t be making the bar.

B-girl stopped by after work with Nyquil and ginger ale and Vitamin C drops. What a sweetie! The only thing that could have made it cooler would be if she’d boosted the stuff.

It’s supposed to be snowing right now but I can hear the weather on my roof and it’s rain. Weathermen need to be held accountable for their actions. There are fucking witch doctors who get more accurate results than weathermen.

It would be cool if Fox News had a witch doctor instead of a weatherman. “Coming up next, Shaka’s going to tell us what happens when he puts a hex on your firstborn and the walls start weeping blood.”

Chances are Shaka would be coming after me, because he would have parked his Cutlass Supreme in front of Loretta’s Chow Chow by the expressway and I’d hotwire that bitch like it was nobody’s business.

The class was actually pretty good tonight! The French guy didn’t show and the crying chick didn’t cry. On top of which we actually learned some pretty interesting stuff.

The psychotherapist who heads the “class” went into the results of some psychological studies done on how boys and girls are socialized. Just little things, for example the way the average parent talks to infant boys vs. infant girls. They’ll talk to baby boys in a louder voice but with girls it’s a lot of cooing.

The list went on and on. Girls develop the left half of their brain faster during childhood. Boys, the right half. I guess by the time you get around to the whole Having a Penis vs. Having a Vagina aspect of things, it’s no wonder why guys like tools, women like secrets, guys like changing spark plugs and women like changing men.

So the new freelance gig is pretty good, thanks for asking. I work in the middle of a huuuuuge loft studio with big-ass windows and good light and the designers are actually talented. Best of all no one fucks with me and I don’t have to make any chit-chat. Just me and the G4 and headphones and I crank out the product. That’s how I like it.

When they asked me what my rate was I gave them a slightly inflated figure and they said Yes right away. I was like Dammit! Shoulda asked for more. But I oughtn’t be such a greedy little piglet, I should just be thankful for the gig in the first place. ‘Cause right now the market’s about as hot as an eskimo’s nut sack.

Would you date an eskimo? I totally would.

I just got off the phone with this girl in Madison, Wisconsin. She’s laying out plans for University of Wisconsin-Madison’s APA Heritage Month so we’re in light talks about me maybe going up there come March.

I have to come up with ideas for a workshop. I don’t have any yet. I am too busy to think. Drop me a line if you’ve ever been in a good/interesting/inspiring workshop. I hate that word, workshop. Hate the word “lecture” too but I don’t know what else to call it.

Today’s soundtrack: I recently downloaded the BeeGees’ “More Than A Woman” and have been rocking it shamelessly.
Today at 9:32am: Showing up for work at a new freelance gig. Yeah man! Walking distance from the house, I got the Nike commute.


I’ve decided I hate the Dating Class I have to take. To recap: I write a column on relationships for this website, right, and both the editor and I thought it would be funny if we sent me to write about this Dating Class offered by a Manhattan psychotherapist and self-proclaimed relationship guru.

Well it’s a fucking six-week course. I’ve been to the first two and the last one fairly sucked. Not only that but after one of the “flashback” exercises one of the chicks started crying. Talk about uncomfortable.

I had to sit next to this French guy who didn’t smell so good. Anyways I’m not really supposed to write about the class here--supposed to save it for the column--I’m just bitching about it ‘cause I have to go up there tonight. I hope that chick doesn’t cry again. I totally don’t want to go but I can’t just drop out in the middle.

I want to bring soap for the French cat and prozac for the chick.

Hey so the other night I had a date. It went really well. We had dinner at a decent little spot I know in TriBeCa, and talked more than we ate. Damn I like this girl, but I won’t tell you why.

Afterwards we headed over to a bar on Ludlow, where my friend White Roger was spinning. The hot thing was he wasn’t using turntables, he hooked up two iPods. Also there was a live band playing house music. Their first set was some misguided latin-reggae-punk bullshit but then they started laying down house and they got pretty hot.

Anyways Handsome Dan and Mars were in the house. Those guys are so fucking funny they had me crying. Every time I see them I laugh ‘til my face hurts, and on this night they were in rare form. I wasn’t sure how my date would react--in terms of humor, Mars and Dan like to “keep it gangsta”--but she laughed so hard she said she worried she’d get an ulcer.

There were points when I tried not to stare and I think I did a pretty good job. My date looked so, so good and I really like the way she talks. I get the sense she’s seeing multiple guys though. Which I suppose is okay for now. I know what I’ve got and what I don’t, so all I can do is hope it lines up with what she’s looking for. If she’s into tall guys or I-bankers, well, whaddaya gonna do.

See in the beginning I don’t really mind having competition; I think it’s better to date a girl who deemed you the best out of multiple contestants, and if you don’t make the cut, well those are the breaks. She probably needs a little time to get a good handle on me and vice versa. I don’t have very good handles, they got broken off.

A’right I gotta get some chow and go up to this fucking class. Truth is I got nothin’ to complain about so don’t cry for me Argentina.

Today’s soundtrack:
Ooh, a storm is threatening my very life today
If I don't get some shelter, oh yeah I'm gonna fade away
Today at 9:02pm: Chowing down at Yuka’s and damn is it good. Mike got a pressure cooker and turned into fucking Julia Child


I go out walkin’, after midnight like the Patsy Cline song. Went out late to get a pineapple. At 12:05am on the corner of the Bowery and Bond Street I saw a man and a woman embracing.

They weren’t moving or talking, just holding each other, heads bowed, all bundled up in their warm coats against the November chill. I would have found it romantic but two doors away was the 24-hour adult video store, polluting the scene with its unflinching neon stare.

Three weekends on the road in a row is kind of unusual for me. Rather exhausting, too. Last night I made up for it by getting almost 13 hours of sleep, it was killer. I didn’t even get up to go to the bathroom. It felt so good to be warm and unconscious. Like that song by Air, “Playground Love.”

Last week I had a date, for the first time in what seems like a while, with Businessgirl. At least I think it was a date. In terms of being easy to read, this girl is like Sanskrit. It’s obvious we enjoy each other’s company, but whether or not she sees me in “that way” is not.

Anyways I thought I blew it, but it looks like we’re having Date #2 tomorrow. I think she’s still in the intelligence-gathering phase of the operation. Her satellites will make passes over my country, searching for clues, trying to decipher the terrain. It’s a good thing she doesn’t read this journal, I’m afraid it’s occasionally a terribly revealing topographical map.

I have eleven keys, thirteen counting the car & Club. How many do you have?

The nice thing about when I lived in Japan is that I only had one key. One. My apartment building had no front door, it was an open entryway. Go up three flights, third door on the left, one key would get you into my antiseptic, flourescent-lit flat.

The Japanese junior high school where I worked didn’t give me a key, and even if they had, I damn sure wasn’t even close to showing up early enough to unlock the place. I hated the job and it showed in my tardiness. If I wasn’t under contract I probably would have been fired.

That was a different life, yeah. A foreign, flourescent life. They called me “Rain-sensei,” I can still hear the kids chirping it, and I had to drink green tea instead of coffee.

Over a year ago, around the time of 9/11 a college buddy called me with a job lead. I called the number he gave me and a week later I interviewed at some design firm downtown. The streets were still covered in ash. They said they liked my stuff and could use some freelance help, but nothing ever came of it.

This afternoon I got a phone call from them, now they need me. Got a big project they need to get out the door by Thanksgiving. This gig is a stroke of good luck, and hopefully the checks will come in time to finance my Christmas gift-giving.

I’m going into their offices this Thursday/Friday. Coincidentally this will put me within Lunch Range of Businessgirl, who works downtown. I wonder what will happen. My luck is sometimes up and sometimes down.

I dislike odds; you know what they say, the house always wins. Then again maybe it’s not always about winning. Like when you go to Vegas, the casinos try to provide you with lots of other distracting experiences. I have to think about this further, I’m on the verge of forming one of my new (admittedly pedestrian) philosophies.

Last night, thirteen hours. Tonight, five or six. It’s like I have to stop the Air song in the middle.

Today’s soundtrack: extra time, on the ground
Today at 6:12am: Showering with hotel bar soap.

This is what it looks like down below!

This is what it looks like up above!

I think the pretzels were filled with knockout powder.

45 minutes is an awkward flight time; soon as I started nodding off, the plane began its descent.

The half-loaded Airbus A319 touched down in Pittsburgh carrying dozens of random people and at least one sleepy New Yorker. I got two hours of sleep the night before ‘cause I was trying to get my shit together.

(Tangent: If you’re ever in an airplane, don’t drink the airplane’s tap water! After the Smith gig I was watching CNN in the hotel and they had a report about airplane water. It’s got ridiculously high levels of insect eggs and other malevolent bacteria. The health expert guy said you could wash your hands but not brush your teeth with that water. Cable TV provides a wealth of useful information.)

After deplaning I made my way through the concourse. Bought a coffee (at 11:59am, my first of the day) and juggled it with my two bags, trying not to burn myself.

Up ahead I spied two Asians clearly waiting for someone. After awakening my vision is always blurry, and my glasses were buried in one of my bags, so I couldn’t tell how old they were at this distance. Could have been college students, could have been junior high kids.

After closing the distance I realized they were college age, one of each sex. The girl was quite cute and began waving at me. My first reflex when a cute girl waves at me is to ignore it, certain they are waving at someone behind me.

But she was waving at me! I waved back.

Alex and Jean had come from Carnegie-Mellon University to pick me up. Walking to the parking garage, Alex offered to carry my bag but I declined. At Cornell they told me about some speakers they had invited who turned out to be real primadonnas and I don’t ever want to come off like that. But in the garage I spilled coffee on one of my bags and started to feel like a spaz so I let him carry one.

Poor Alex (who drove me everywhere for the duration of my stay) had a driver’s side window that was locked in the open position, and it rained the whole time. I think his left arm is going to catch a cold.

After a 30-minute drive, Jean and Alex check me into the hotel, a Holiday Inn Select. The room is killer! King-size bed! It’s so wide that it’s spanned by three, rather than two pillows. I guess Kings were into threesomes.

The gig starts at 5:45pm and I wrapped up around 7pm. Nice auditorium, brand-new and I had a wireless mic, meaning I would have the freedom to punctuate my lecture with occasional backflips. I mean I can’t actually do backflips but it’s the thought that counts.

Far as I can tell the gig went well, though I realize I’m going to have to start micro-recording myself and analyzing transcripts if I want to improve.

Afterwards a group of students and me go out for a big Chinese dinner. Initially there are sixteen of us seated around two separate round tables.

As the featured speaker I feel I should try to provide “face time” with everyone present but the micro-geography renders this impossible. I debate hopping up onto the lazy susan of each table so any student that wants to interact can simply rotate me into position.

The students are so sweet! Some voice worry that I’ll find the food sub-par, coming from New York’s Chinatown, but the chow easily passes muster. Coupled with the pesto chicken sandwich I had for lunch (a 4 out of a possible 5) this is turning into a very good food day for me.

To cap the evening off Belinda, Alex and Jean take me to this shockingly hip Mediterranean bar/restaurant in Shadyside (killer name for a neighborhood) for dessert. Coffee, smoke, crème brulée and I’m happy as a clam. It also doesn’t hurt that Belinda and Jean are cute as buttons. Why couldn’t I have met girls like this when I was in college? (Alex and Terence, if you’re reading this, you’re lucky guys.)

I like hanging out with all the students but you can get to know people much better in a foursome or smaller. These three are pretty funny and we get along famously. Afterwards in the car while we were making an off-the-cuff joke, Jean stunned me by spitting out a punchline that was, word-for-word, exactly what I was going to say.

Back at the hotel after midnight, I find myself unable to sleep. My mini-vacation here in Pittsburgh comes to an end when I wake up tomorrow. I have to get up at 6am to make my flight and return to the grey comforts of Manhattan.

Getting peckish. I wander the hallways looking for a vending machine that sells cookies, but my mission ends up with the same results as the hunt for Osama Bin Laden.

Dejected and snack-less, I lay supine on the edge of my King-size and flip through the channels. Flip. Flip. Flip. To my right, a backpack in the corner of the room, filled with printouts of my writings. To my left, what feels like a good ten or eleven feet of empty bed-space. This is my lot for now.

Today’s soundtrack: I’m a high school lover, and you’re my favorite flavor
Today at 8:02pm: In Hapkido class, quelling the urge to vomit.


I am very very tired, I haven’t gotten much sleep in the past week.

Hey so tomorrow morning I’m getting on a plane to Pittsburgh, got a speaking gig at Carnegie Mellon. I almost went there for college but the name bothered me, something about the Mellon part. I think if it was just called Carnegie I’d have gone. This is proof that at 17 I was definitely too dumb to be making decisions that would influence the rest of my life.

My friend Epak graduated from CMU. When I told him I was going there, he mentioned it’s one of the few colleges where homosexual-to-straight guy-rape exists as a crime category. I’m not sure why he told me that, maybe he’s hinting that I look like sexual prey. Well if there are any Asiaphile homosexual sex offenders in the greater Pittsburgh area reading this, know that I will bury my ring in your eye before you get a piece of this.

I’m looking forward to the CMU gig, I think this will be a big show. I tried to prepare well. And hey, I will be staying someplace that has cable, yeah man. Perhaps I will drape myself across the hotel bed languidly and eat cookies in a messy, disgusting manner while watching old Moonlighting episodes on Lifetime and wishing I was rich.

Oh man I dislike flying though, and in several hours I’m going to be on an aeroplane. I could’ve drove but it takes eight hours in the car to get to Pittsburgh. The only place I want to stay for eight hours is in my bed. In five minutes I’ll be there, and in ten I’ll be snoring. I won’t eat cookies in my own bed ‘cause I’m not, you know, an animal.

Alright ciao then. Back on Sunday.

Today’s soundtrack: you’re really lucky, underneath it all
Today at 7:42am: Calling in sick. Heh, heh, heh.


It’s midnight and I just got home. Tonight I saw a guy dressed in a tuxedo walking his dog on Lafayette Street. In an unrelated incident I also saw a Ferrari Maranello.

You know what my favorite sound in the whole world is? The sound of immigrants cursing. I don’t know why. Listening to emphatic, colloquial swearing in accented English makes me feel all warm inside.

Couple days ago I had to take a taxi and the driver was from Roumania. He pronounced it Rrrrroumania. Seemed like an interesting sort so I struck up a conversation with him. He had fairly fascinating stories, punctuated throughout with exclamations of “This fucking guy! You know what this fucking guy say to me? This fucking guy, he crazy piece of shit.”

I gave him a huuuuge tip.

Afterwards I thought about teaching an ESL course, I think it would be fun.

See Spot.

See Spot run.

See Spot run to this fucking guy.

See Spot run to this fucking guy who try to rip me off, because he fucking crazy so I crush him. In Rrrroumania we beat a shit out of guys like this, you know?

In Hapkido yesterday I had to wrestle this big Russian girl. She was pretty but really big. I don’t mean fat, I mean like if you took a normal person then scaled them up in a Xerox machine. She was maybe 141%. We were learning groundfighting techniques and she jacked my shoulder up. I wanted to scream “Nyet! Nyet!”

You know how in every crew of guys there’s always one “gentle giant” who doesn’t know his own strength? The guy who goes to change a light bulb and ends up ripping the light fixture out of the wall? This girl was a female version of that. Oh my fucking shoulder.

Driving back from Massachusetts.

You have to be some kind of jerk to
do 90 on the Merritt Parkway in the wet.

Unfortunately I am some kind of jerk.

The Smith gig went okay. Just okay. Tell you the truth I was kind of underprepared. The feedback I got was positive but deep down inside I know I could have/should have done a better, more cohesive, less spastic lecture.

Northampton was nice, like a 1.5-day mini vacation. They put me up in a fairly posh hotel with an unimaginative name (The Northampton). Weird thing was my room had two twin beds separated by a five-foot swath of carpet, like in I Love Lucy. Maybe it was the only room they had, or maybe this all-girl’s school was trying to discourage me from bringing a sexually curious co-ed back to the room.

There were two speakers besides me, a fiftyish JA dude from the left coast and an early-20s KA female from Jersey who’s involved in politics. After the lectures they had dinner in a building called Unity Hall. They laid out a bunch of Chinese food in chafing dishes and there were chairs everywhere.

I doled some grub out onto my plate and looked for a place to sit. It was like high school all over again, there were (this time, all-female) clusters and cliques and then there was me. I didn’t know where to sit so I just grabbed a chair by the door and ate looking at my plate.

Thankfully a lesbian I recognized from the afternoon stood near me, and we started talking, then she sat and ate next to me. Actually I’m not sure she was a lesbian (80%) and I’m not sure what that has to do with anything anyway, the point is I wasn’t eating alone.

Afterwards there was a small on-campus party. A DJ was playing (actually pretty decent) hip hop and there were a bunch of cute girls dancing. I stopped by with the KA woman and felt suddenly old. I ended up hanging out for a bit and then repairing to the hotel, where I enjoyed the splendors of cable. God I love hotels.

The people who set up the conference had left me a gift basket in my room. So sweet! It was filled with cookies and crackers and bottled water and stuff. On the bed I ripped it open eagerly and had a low moment: There’s a party filled with cute girls going on right now, and here I am sprawled on my twin bed with crumbs all over my face, mesmerized by World’s Wildest Police Videos. If I had a therapist we would have a lot of things to talk about.

The lighting guy and the D.P. (Director of Photography) wishing they went to med school instead.

Everyone was behind on sleep. In the middle of the day Wendy and the sound guy passed out wrapped in sound blankets. The sound blankets were really dirty, I wouldn’t be caught dead wrapped in those shits.

Here’s me about to kick the camera’s ass. I am different from most guys in that I will fight little girls and cameras.

Wendy coaching one of the actors. But she wasn’t coaching him on acting, she was coaching him on lovemaking techniques.

Vincenzo didn’t have any furniture but for some reason he had a leather wheelchair. I wrote my college lecture sitting in a wheelchair by the window in the living room.

The final day of Wendy’s shoot was a blur of running up and down the stairs, sleeping on the floor, sparring and freezing on the roof, and trying to act opposite the Japanese girl.

I was worried Wendy would have a meltdown. There was a scene we had to do over and over because I couldn’t get it right. It’s after the part where I try to kiss the girl and she punches me down. I couldn’t react the way Wendy wanted me to, I kept trying but it all felt so unnatural and I couldn’t fake it convincingly. This is why I’m not an actor.

Wendy got pretty upset and just walked away, at wit’s end. The sun was going down, we were running out of light and I couldn’t get this fucking scene right. I felt pretty bad because she had rejected actual, professional actors in favor of me, feeling I’d be better for the part. Unfortunately she was wrong.

It’s one thing to fuck something up when it’s yours, hell, I do it all the time. But it’s a real lousy feeling to fuck someone else’s project up.

I’ll never work in this town again!

I think she’s gonna go with the last take we did.


We finished just before 6pm, after the sun had cast its last over a shimmering sea of Brooklyn rooftops. The tar gets all shiny. Antennas jut skyward like rusted hope. (I ate a poetry pill today.)*

I raced back to Manhattan in the whip, patting myself on the back for quickly cutting through prime NYC rush hour with a series of clever, little-known shortcuts. Having spent eight years in Brooklyn pays strange dividends and I’ll take whatever I can get. I might not be able to feed myself if I were an actor but I’d make one hell of a taxi driver.


Back at the house I packed up some clothes and my laptop and jumped back in the car. Tomorrow I’ve got a speaking gig at Smith so I’m Massachusetts-bound.

When we were little we used to call it Massive-Two-Shits.


The next three hours is vroom, vroom, vroom. Loud music, whining engine, dark lanes, headlights. Best feeling in the world. You only have to stop to put fluids in your car or drain fluids from your body. Note to self: Invent car that runs on pee. No stopping and super-convenient.


*(It was bitter so I spit it back out.)

I always enjoyed being awakened by the sound of a woman’s voice. But only when it’s a girlfriend and the voice is coming from within the same room. Not when it’s over the phone and it’s just a female friend.

At 5:19am I have my eyes closed but the phone is on, and pressed to my ear. “I’m downstairs,” Wendy’s voice crackles.

“I’ll be right down,” I lie.

Ten minutes later I’m stuffing pineapple in my mouth and stumbling downstairs, where I collapse into Wendy’s car. Mornings are not good for me, particularly when I’ve had less than 120 minutes of sleep. To take time off work for Wendy’s shoot, I’m going into The Corporation at night to get my projects done.

“Sorry’m late,” I mumble. It’s 5:30 in the morning, dark out, and the diner isn’t even open yet. Nothing worse than a closed diner.

“That’s okay,” says Wendy. “I actually want to give you a little pep-talk, since now is our only time to be alone.”

“Goforit,” I mumble, unaware I’m about to receive my very first director-to-actor speech, which is of note largely because I’m not a real actor.

“You have to trust me,” says Wendy, referring to the times when she’s giving me offscreen guidance. “You have to listen to me.

“I need you to disconnect, to forget about Rain the Writer,” she continues, driving over the Manhattan Bridge. “I need you to disconnect the cerebral side, the questioning side and just trust me.

“I don’t want you to be that Rain. I want you to get in touch with a certain side of yourself. I want you to be the cocky Rain that knows New York like the back of his hand. I want you to be the Rain that’s always on time, the Rain that throws dinner parties flawlessly. The Rain that everyone listens to.”

I’m awake now, but silent. I don’t know how to tell Wendy that the Rain she’s talking about expired several years ago. I went to Japan, Wendy went to China, and things changed. The Rain that’s always on time, in particular, seems to have gone very far away, I think he’s still stuck on some Japanese train platform.

The conversation goes deeper, I won’t print it here. Wendy continues talking and I continue listening.

We get to Vincenzo’s empty-ass apartment around 6am. All of the crew is already there--except the girl who’s supposed to bring the fucking coffee. While the crew begins setting up on the roof, I head to the bodega on the corner to get my fix.

Hot coffee in hand, I sit on the stoop in front of Vincenzo’s. Freezing, tired, miserable and happy at the same time. You know that feeling? It only comes when you wake up early in the morning to do something important. I put the headphones on and sat listening to “Wild Horses.”

Some songs are only good for some situations; Steppenwolf’s “Magic Carpet Ride,” for instance, should only be played in a car exceeding sixty miles an hour, and Parliament’s “Pussycat” is something you want to blare after you rob a bank. But “Wild Horses” is one of those songs that’s perfect for many situations.

Perfect song for...

...being cold/miserable/happy on a stoop: Wild Horses

...having a crush on a girl: Wild Horses

...just been rejected or dumped: Wild Horses

...just got a raise: Wild Horses

...car’s been towed: Wild Horses

...feeling contempt for life’s larger issues: Wild Horses

...having just won a bar fight: Wild Horses

You get the idea.

Working on a film, even just a student short, is like applying for a green card; there’s a lot of waiting. The female principal is in plenty of scenes without me so when they shoot those I’ve got nothing to do. I traipse down the four flights of stairs and sleep on Vincenzo’s comfortable hardwood floors. Nothing cradles your body and gives you that restful slumber like fucking pine.

Miraculously, my ability to sleep on floors returned to me and I got a couple hours in. One of the co-stars told me I was snoring.

It’s fucking freezing up on the roof but I’m required to take my jacket(s) off for the sparring scene. Then there are the scenes I’m in with the chick, where I have to act warm but my teeth are chattering. I’m not very good at this acting thing. I mean I can pretend I’m angry or sad (not much of a stretch) but I can’t pretend I’m warm when I can practically feel my penis shrinking in my pants.

Back on the floor, drifting in and out of consciousness. Back up the stairs, doing my best to live up to what Wendy asks me to do. Sitting in Vincenzo’s kitchen, furiously scribbling notes for a lecture. Got a college gig in two days and I’m pretty damn underprepared.

We “wrap” around 6:30pm. I was hoping Wendy would say “Okay people that’s a wrap” but she didn’t, which was disappointing for me because I love clichés. I took the subway home, trying not to listen to “Wild Horses,” but the view of Manhattan got to me.

Okay people that’s a wrap. Though technically I guess it’s not, since I’m on my way to The Corporation now and we’re shooting again tomorrow.

--

The film crew (and cast) is a motley mix: We’ve got a Sicilian, a Japanese, a Soviet Georgian, an Arab-American, two African-Americans, a Chinese-American, two caucasians and me, a Korean-American. We’ve got straights, a gay guy and a lesbian. If a nuclear bomb blast destroyed everything except our crew we could essentially repopulate the Earth with all major groups represented.

All of the action takes place on a rooftop in Brooklyn. The building is almost completely empty; the Sicilian has just moved into the ground floor apartment, which is as-yet-unfurnished. The bare apartment serves as our staging area. Privacy seems like a non-issue so I’m free to change outfits in the living room. Wouldn’t be the first time a girl has seen me in boxers! (I’m totally lying, yes it would)

The two principals (me and the Japanese girl) take up much of the screen time. But today most of my rehearsal consists of choreographed, light martial arts sparring with my male counterpart. The attempted kiss scene between me and the female principal is left alone until shooting.

Wendy finally observes some shortcomings in my “acting.”

Wendy decides to cast me in her next short (a move she will later regret). I’m supposed to play a wannabe hip hop thug. Ah dammit.

Needless to say there’s absolutely nothing in my wardrobe that says bling-bling; most of it says brown-brown. So Wendy contacts Jeff, a mutual friend of ours, who owns and designs a streetwear label (Staple). Jeff agrees to wardrobe me for the film.

In Jeff’s LES studio, he drapes me in thug threads under Wendy’s watchful gaze. Although the clothes are quality I look completely ridiculous. Everything is oversized and the bagginess makes me look about ten years old.

I strongly dislike the hip hop look, especially on me; I think I’d rather leave my house wearing liederhosen and a beanie with a propellor on top. Am also worried about being able to convincingly pull off thug accent (not likely). I’m doing this for Wendy.

SUZANNA: You guys have to, have to go to Milano’s. The food is so good there. Order the salad, the salads are sooooo good there.

ME: I dunno, man. Buncha guys sitting in a restaurant ordering salads?

LAM: Maybe afterwards we can talk about our feelings.


Suzanna’s a sweet one, gamely putting up with our kneejerk sarcasm. I’m tempted to tone it down in front of her but I can’t get Lam and Tony to stop using the word “whore” in regular conversation.

Spadina Avenue. At first I was pronouncing it “Spe-deena” like Funky Cold Medina, but it’s actually pronounced “Spa-dyna” like funky old vagina.

On Saturday Alex, Ed and Howard are planning on going to some “sex convention.” Lam, Tony and I decline, because hey, every day for us is a sex convention. Ahahahaha.

On Suzanna’s recommendation, Saturday morning us three New Yorkers head to Eaton Center, a shopping mall, where we see an absurd amount of hot Asian females of the bootylicious variety. They don’t make ‘em like this in New York, that’s for sure. The problem is you can’t tell who’s 16 and who’s 26.

Next Suzanna accompanies us up to Markham, an Asian enclave Tony had heard about located north of the city. We stop off at this enormous Asian mall up there to eat killer Chinese and shop for illicit DVDs. The structure is basically a nicer, more polished version of the gargantuan indoor street markets of Vietnam or Hong Kong.

They have this machine up there called the Aqua Massage. It looks like a tanning bed or a huge sandwich press, except the top half of the press is transparent and contains water nozzles. Basically you lie in the sandwich press, face down. They close the top and the nozzles shoot massaging streams of water onto your back. A rubber membrane covers your body completely so you don’t actually get wet, you just feel the water pressure.

I’m big on massages so I had to try the thing out, and for some reason Suzanna offered to pay! I had to wait my turn ‘cause there was a woman already in the machine. Lam and I made jokes about how I should have climbed in on top of her, ignoring the operator’s protests and closing the lid. The machine would start massaging me while I talked to the back of the woman’s neck.


ME: How you doin’.

SHE: Aaaaaaaagh! Get offa me!

ME: Whoa, lady, you’re totally ruining my massage. Jesus, try to relax.

SHE: Stop the machine, stop the machine!

ME: Do you have something sharp in your back pocket? Something’s chafing me.

SHE: When I get out of this thing my boyfriend is going to beat you into a bloody pulp!

ME: I doubt it; Lam’s gonna get in the machine with him. Guess who’s going to be on the bottom.

In the evening something very, very bad almost happened.

I’m in the car with Lam, Tony and Suzanna, with Alex’s Korean Caveman frame stuffed in the back seat for good measure. Anyways we’re on a two-lane city street and the left lane is jammed up, so I hit the right lane and get heavy with the gas.

To my left is a wall of moving cars; to my right is a stationary wall of parked cars. I’m passing everyone, basically flying.

Out of nowhere, this guy steps out from between the parked cars--directly in front of my right headlight. I must’ve been doing at least forty or fifty. In that split-second, I was sure he was about to get dead.

He somehow shifts a fraction of an inch out of the way, like a Canadian ninja, and I hear my rearview mirror (breakaways, thank god) slap against his hip.

I slam on the brakes, though at this point it’s more of a gesture than anything. I look in my rearview mirror, and get this--the guy is giving me a fucking wave, as if to say Hey, I’m okay! and he keeps walking.

In New York the expected response from him would have been at the very least emphatic cursing, and at the very worst accurate gunfire. My hands were practically shaking; I almost just killed a guy.

In addition to nearly changing this guy’s life forever (by putting a period on it) I nearly altered my trip into something very different. As nice of a country as Canada might be, I can just about guarantee that Canadian jail sucks.


CELLMATE: You’re my bitch, eh?

ME: Fuck off. Hey, what’s this tunnel leading out of our cell?

CELLMATE: Oh, that leads to the ‘States. We like it better in here though.


No one seemed to be as shook up by this whole thing as I was, probably because I was the one driving. I still feel it was the pedestrian’s fault for stepping out into traffic in the middle of the block, but I know Alex secretly thought I was trying to kill the guy on purpose. Right, like my whole plan is to commit Canadian genocide one moving violation at a time.

Somewhere along the way, it became settled: We like Toronto. We like Canada. (We’re still too ignorant to separate the two.) Lam even discussed the possibility of moving up here, but I suppose that’s not surprising.

See, ‘cause most New Yorkers have a love/hate relationship with their hometown, in the same way that Luke Skywalker feels about his father. Lately Lam’s relationship with New York has just got to the part where the city hacks Lam’s hand off in a vicious lightsaber battle.

I can’t place exactly what it is we like about Toronto--the clean streets, the cute girls, the cchow, the multi-ethnicity, or something else.

One thing we’ve definitely noticed is the absolute absence of the underlying threat of violence that permeates a lot of experiences back home. I don’t mean that you walk out of your door in New York and get shot at, it’s much more subtle than that. It’s a weariness that comes with double-checking locks, or touching your wallet every time someone bumps into you, or keeping an eye on the other guy in the ATM vestibule.

It’s about the filters you put up to understand when screaming people are just fucking around and when there’s an actual threat. It’s the ugly racial slurs you hear every race utter about every other race. It’s about making jokes about anal rape so you don’t have to feel anything for the real rapes you read about in the paper. It seems like they don’t have to sweat this crap here, but they’ve still got the good things about a city. Things that places like Albuquerque, Boston and Austin lack. Toronto feels like a world city, even if it is a small one.

After I almost killed the pedestrian we went to a pub for dinner. It was karaoke night and some yahoo was up there singing Marilyn Manson, not exactly dinner music but what can you do.

Following dinner we went next door to Aura, a club/lounge, and I got to watch Alex pick up some chicks. He literally picked them up, like they were barbells.

Suzanna introduced me to a cute acquaintance of hers and we talked for a bit, though it was difficult for me to get a read on the situation because she “knew” me from my web writings. The downside of people having read your work over a period of time is that they have some background on you but you’ve got nothing on them. There’s also the worry that people’s perception of your life far supercedes the reality.

If you’re reading this right now, don’t supercede my reality! You get to visit and leave but I have to live here.

Anyways here are some pictures of the trip.

We wake up in Alex’s living room and the first thing I see is, it’s snowing outside. Hard. The flakes are coming down so thick and dense that the window looks like a TV getting no reception.

For my sleeping surface I scored the couch, because I drove. Tony had the floor, Lam slept on a horizontal surface abutting the windows.

After performing quick self-checks to confirm none of us was anally raped last night, we get up and start getting dressed.


LAM: Did you rape me?

ME: No. Did you rape me?

LAM: No. Tony, did you rape either of us?

TONY: When?

LAM: Last night.

TONY: Last night in Canada, or last night in New York?

LAM: In Canada.

TONY: I can’t remember...probably not.

ME: Let’s get some breakfast then.


Me, Lam and Tony are the only ones here; everyone else is at work.

Last night Alex, Howard, Ed and Suzanna took us to a local pub, which was pretty chill. It was Halloween. I met some people and every once in a while a zombie or an angel would walk past in the background. Our waiter had a crudely-rendered maple leaf painted on his face but no supporting elements to suggest it was a costume. You could tell the boss made him do it, I wish I could have seen that conversation.

Hapachan was there too, visiting Mahalia in town. The last time I saw Hapachan the Twin Towers were standing and Scrubs was just a concept. Time flies if you don’t watch it.

Lam, Tony and I retired from the bar early, because a) we were tired, b) we’re getting old and c) we heard rumors that when Alex gets drunk he likes to put people in figure-four leglocks. Him and Howard are both the size of small studio apartments. You get the sense that when these guys drop a tool under their car, they lift the entire car to retrieve it.


ALEX: Dude, where did you put the Volvo?

HOWARD: I left it on top of the house.

ALEX: I looked, it’s not up there.

HOWARD: I mean I left it on top of Suzanna’s house.

ALEX: That’s on the other side of town!

HOWARD: Well, there was no room.

After feeding Alex’s midget the three of us walk out and have breakfast at a place called I Can’t Remember The Name But The Waitress Was Kinda Cute. They make a variant of Eggs Benedict here with a dill sauce rather than Hollandaise. I highly recommend it. Good breakfast.

Next we hop back in the whip and tool around town looking for a cheap hotel. I used to be good at sleeping on floors but I suck at it now; I need a bed.

We end up at a nearby HoJo’s, located on a street that all of us notice is named Avenue Road. “Man, they’re not even trying anymore,” observes Lam.

After dropping our crap off we wander down Bloor Street and check out this store called Roots. I expected Canada to be lily-white but I was wrong. The store staff is white, black, Asian, and Arabic and everyone generally appears to get along.

Noting this, the three of us soon start discussing the seeming lack of ethnic strife. At the same time the group of us realizes something: Canada never had slavery. America is essentially polarized into an uneasy coexistence of black and white (with Asians, Latinos and everyone else generally hewing to one side of the line or the other) that never quite recovered from acts begun hundreds of years earlier.

U.S. race relations are essentially poisoned by the knowledge that at one point in history, one of these races “owned” the other. The trickle-down effect of this is one of America’s largest negatives and you can see it in the boardrooms and on the streets. But the three of us out-of-towners don’t see that going on here, and it’s a welcome, if unusual, sensation.

The bathrooms are shockingly clean in Toronto. Like, you’d be surprised to find a dead hooker in one. You know what I mean? Like let’s say you walked into your typical filthy New York bathroom and found a dead hooker in there. You might be grossed out but you wouldn’t be surprised. You wouldn’t be like “OH my GOD!”, you’d be like “My day keeps getting worse and worse.”

Anyways, here, you’d be surprised.

Any city I go to, I look forward to taking the subway. You can tell a lot about a city by its trains. The subway is Toronto is spotless and pretty quick. There are only two lines so I’m not sure which one we were on. At any rate it’s fast, at top speed it moves like the 4- or 5-train back home.

What’s weird is that they take cash. You don’t have to buy tokens if you don’t want to, you can just drop cash into this little box by the clerk booth and go through the turnstile. A one-way is $2.25 Canadian but I don’t think the clerk was even checking the amount.

The parking meters here take American quarters! Pretty cool but kind of shady if you ask me. What are they doing with all those American quarters. I was gonna say “Playing drinking games,” but they have quarters in Canada too. Maybe they hand them out to Canadian citizens at the border so they can use American laundromats, or call home to report anti-Canadian atrocities.

Speaking of which, I almost committed an anti-Canadian atrocity (quite by accident, I assure you) but I’ll get into that later.

leaving NYC at sunrise

entering Toronto at dusk

I’ve been asleep for ninety minutes when the door buzzer goes off. I roll over in denial. The clock unapologetically reads 5:30am.

It’s Lam, followed shortly by Tony. Tony observes that I have packed “like a kamikaze pilot”--everything I’m going to need for the trip has been laid neatly on a bench by the front door. (I like to view everything at once before putting it into a bag.) We grab all of our shit and head to the diner for coffee.

At 6:14 we hit the open road. Or the closed tunnel, to be more accurate. The Holland is our gateway to freedom.

All of us are sleepy but I’m the only driver so I have to stay awake. Traffic is light but my foot is heavy. The car is a rocket spewing exhaust fumes and Steppenwolf across the New Jersey Turnpike.

Four hundred miles, three states, a McDonald’s and a Wendy’s later we’re at the border, being questioned by a cute Canadian border guard. She’s all-natural, brunette and freckled. Got sort of a winsome-but-tough thing going on. The “winsome” part is her face, the “tough” part is strapped to her hip and presumably loaded with live ammunition.

She asks us typical border questions like “What is the purpose of your visit?”

“To propagate an American cultural hegemony, take advantage of the weaker Canadian dollar and buy maple syrup” flashes through my head but instead I say “Vacation.”

“Where are you staying?” “What’s the address?” “Where are you from?” et cetera, et cetera. I answer all questions politely.

The last question she asks us is “Do you have any firearms in the car?” and for some reason Lam laughs out loud. For a moment I’m worried we’re about to have a Jackass moment but the guard lets us through. We drive on in silence, all of us obviously wondering what it would feel like to ride around on horseback with the cute border guard.

The ATM at the gas station spits out Canadian money, the first I’ve ever seen. It’s blue and has a picture of some guy, maybe Bryan Adams. The gas is sold in liters so I have no idea how many Bryan Adamses it will take to fill the car.

On the highway the speed limit is posted in k.p.h., meaning I have no real idea what the speed limit is, though I’m fairly sure we’re exceeding it. Everyone on the northbound QEW (Queen Elizabeth Way) drives like America’s about to be nuked. The pack of cars I’m folded into is doing 90, 95 m.p.h. easy.

I look around for Canadian cops but don’t see any. They call them Mounties, right? Do you address them as “Mounties?” All this confusion with terminology and metric units could get us in trouble. I can just picture us getting pulled over:


ME: Good evening, Mountie.

MOUNTIE: Good evening, gentlemen. You have any idea how fast you were going?

ME: No, I don’t! In fact I have no idea how tall I am or how much I weigh.

MOUNTIE: I beg your pardon?

ME: I mean I know I’m more than a meter but less than two meters. And I probably weigh, I dunno...fifty liters.

LAM: I bet I weigh sixty.

TONY: Oh please. You so do not weigh sixty liters.

LAM: I’ve been working out, so why don’t you shut up.

MOUNTIE: Er...“Liters” is a weight measurement for liquids, gentlemen. Solids are measured in Kilograms.

ME: Oh, so you have to type the word “STOP” instead of using a period, right? ...Oh wait a sec, that’s Telegrams.

TONY: I bet I’m two meters tall.

LAM: If you’re two meters tall then I weigh at least sixty liters.

ME: Alexander Bell invented the Telegram. Who invented the kilogram?

LAM: No one invented the kilogram you fucking idiot. They discovered it.

ME: Oh okay, well I guess you know everything. Douchebag.

MOUNTIE: I’m going to let you fellows off with a warning, for no reason other than that I feel sorry for you.

ME: The human body is 90% liquids, so I must weigh at least fifty liters.

Couple hours later we blow into Toronto. You know you’ve reached the city because you can see the skyline coming up in the windshield. They’ve got a space-needle-type building that’s pretty distinctive.

Lots of people say God is their co-pilot but I prefer Tony. He breaks out the map and begins navigating us through the unfamiliar city streets: “Bloor,” “Spadina,” “Glebe”...seems like the streets here were named by someone who just finished reading “The Jabberwocky.” We find a parking space in Chinatown and pull over to stretch our legs/cultural dominance.

Okay, Chinatown was fucking depressing. Back in the car, we head over to Alex’s early, even though it’s only 5pm and he doesn’t get home until six.

I park on Alex’s street, recline my seat and go to sleep. Lam and Tony get out to stretch their legs/heavy-handed foreign policy objectives.

By 6:15pm the three of us are sitting in Alex’s living room with his two roommates, Ed and Howard. Their apartment is spacious, white-walled, high-ceilinged and clean, which surprises me; I totally thought it would be a pig-sty.

Alex’s bedroom, on the other hand, is much what you’d expect: A storage facility for porn, with cumshots all over the ceiling. The bed had been humped into a hideous wreck and the headboard was smashed. In the corner was a locked wooden box (about the size of a midget) that shuddered and thumped violently until Alex kicked it and whispered something through a blowhole in the top.

“Have a seat,” said Alex, dropping some cookies into the top of the box and kicking some blow-up dolls aside. Okay I’m just fucking around.