Alzheimer Dad

Editorial (universal health care)

Hi, My name is Joy Ryder. I’m a rock & roll singer. I

want to know if you know this one:

Question : What do you call a guitar player with no

girlfriend? Give up?

What do you call a guitar player with no girlfriend?

Homeless!

You see, most of us musicians live a rough life. Only the

70 odd stars of MTV live the life of the rich and famous.

The other 99.99 percent of blues, rock, folk and jazz

musicians live from gig to

gig playing in clubs that pay less than nothin’.

And, most of us don’t have healthcare. That’s a fact.

That’s what most musicians have in common with 47

million other Americans. I had a musician friend who

had to sell her house to pay for her lung cancer

treatment.

The good news is, is that she survived. The bad news?

She lost her house.

We always say that America is the greatest nation in the

world. It’s a great place, but I ve got news for my fellow

Americans. If my friend had lived In Canada, N. Zealand,

Germany, England, Holland, Switzerland, France,

Sweden, Norway, Finnland, Belgium, Italy or Ireland, my

friend would not have lost her home. Why? These

countries have universal healthcare.

Want to know another little secret? These countries

also have free medical schools. In some cases, they

pay students a salary to go to school. Have you ever

noticed that there aren’t that many American doctors in

hospitals? That’s because most young Americans can’t

afford medical school. We import our doctors. Many of

our doctors come from other

countries. I don’t have a problem with that, but we need

to invest in OUR kids. Make medical and nursing

schools available to young Americans, free of charge.

Then we’d have enough doctors. The more doctors, the

lower the cost of healthcare. If we had too many, they

could work in countries that didn’t have enough doctors.


Do you want to have to make a choice between having

your health or having a roof over your head?

In the greatest country in the world? I don’t

think so. As .....once said...You don’t have to live like a

refugee....

Today I'm on unemployment after my company was bankrupted by the last owner, a former Arthur Anderson Accountant. I stayed with the company for 4 years, thru 4 different ownerships. They all were idiots...None of them listened to us...the sales people had ideas, but people are so happy to be pashas, they don't know how to listen to the rank and file. The losers don't, at least. My company went belly up..... I'm looking for a gig, preferably one that hasn't been sent to Indonesia. I'm too old to be shackled to a workbench at a Nike factory. I'm gonna cut and paste some ruminations I wrote, after working on the Congressional campaign of Frank Barbaro... (a campaign that we lost, unfortunately...Frank would not have voted against the bankruptcy law , against privatization of social security, and would have not accepted the new tort reform. )

7/03 to 7/04 was my Annus Horribilus. After my father’s death and my subsequent surgery for a brain aneurysm, I needed to rethink my life. Where was I going? Why was I still living, after the aneurysm, when others died? Friends said the Lord had spared me to take care of my teenaged son. This made sense. But other kids have been left without parents. What was so special about our case?

I prayed a lot, during the long months after burying my father, after the surgery. I was collecting disability insurance income, and was attempting to mend, laying on a sofa in the dining room, watching tv and dozing through a sweaty summer, followed by a non descript autumn and landing in a drafty chilly, damp and slippery winter. I couldn’t lay in my bedroom, because I would wake in a cold sweat, under my 20 pound feather comforter, freaking out with a panic attack. I found I could doze a little if I had the TV on, if some idiot was prattling on the idiot box. Otherwise, scary, depressing thoughts overwhelmed me. My father’s death had precipitated the aneurysm, and my brain was leaking blood as my father lay in his final days of hospice, at my sister’s suburban adobe manse in El Paso. A few days after his burial, I went to the doctor, and was told not to leave. I had a craniotomy, and they cut my skull in two. A young, beautiful doctor with a Jewish last name and the eyes of Ghandi did the surgery, so I didn’t fear. My fear began after I was out of the hospital.
It was hard, at first, to get up to go to the bathroom. It took me a week to go by myself, steadying myself by holding onto the wall. It was hard to take the garbage out. I began doing that at week three, holding the side of the house and walking in baby steps so that I didn’t fall down. Noone came to see me. Noone from my band, not my man friend...I saw my downstairs neighbor, once every week, otherwise I was alone, except for when my son came home from school. It was hard to cook for my son. He was 14, and at first he cooked for me. After a week of his taking care of me, I sent him back up to my first husband, because I was such bad depressing company...but when he came back, I was able to muster up a meal every day or so to help him out. It was hard to walk two blocks to the bodega on the corner. I shuffled to the store with an eyepatch and an unsteady gate. I tried to make small talk in Spanish. I don’t speak Spanish. The grocery man gave me new words in Spanish every time I came to the store. Carne moulade. Leche. Azucar. I was the gringa student wih a shaved head and a patch over my right eye.
I still didn’t know what I was to do with the rest of my life. I prayed until I heard a small voice in my head. It said first, “Work for World Peace.” Then, “Get a House”. Huh? I said to myself. That small inner voice. Was it me? Was It my Creator? Was it a hallucination? Certainly, it was good advice. I’ve been renting for years. Even with a rent subsidy, I was pissing money away, money that could be used for equity. A house is like money in the bank, only better. And oh yeah, World Peace. If it was God speaking, this was a major tall order, but it is his world. If it was my superego talking, the world was in big trouble. I was no match for the powers that were. Without divine intervention, the maniac cabal known as the Neo-Cons would continue on their merry way. Bush had been making a whole lot of hooplah, trying to get us to invade Iraq. Colin Powell had gone to the General Assembly of the UN with a forged 12 year old doctored aeriel photo of reputed chemical weapon manufacturing sites in Iraq. Fortunately, I had read the Policy for a New American Century, and understood that the Neo-Cons planned to take over the Middle East before Europe or China grabbed it. I was against the idea A fight to grab oil seemed so ugly, so unAmerican. /Didn’t we have the smarts to get to the Moon? To Mars? Couldn’t we come up with new energy sources? Bush, Jr. said that Saddam was evil. He had tried to kill his father.
I remembered my childhood days when Kruschev pounded on the same desk at the UN with his shoe and yelled “We will bury You!” America just laughed in his face. We didn’t invade Russia. Mao Tse Tung talked about killing the US running dog capitalists in his little red book, and we didn’t bother invading China. We ignored him.
Bush decided that because Hussein said he wanted to kill us, that was reason enough to deck him, and all his people. Bush and his disciples ignored the CIA, the UN, and any other intelligence, and went about selling the Americans on the idea that Saddam was in Kahoots with Osama and we needed to invade Iraq, or face impending doom. Kaboom.
It was after reading two books, one about Osama and the other about Hussein that I figured this was a crock. Hussein was a secularist. In his nation, women went to university, were doctors, lawyers, architects, wore their hair loose, and drove cars. In Osama land, Afghanistan, the Taliban made sure that women walked around with bags on their heads, weren’t allowed to read or write, or even work. If their husbands were dead, they and their children were expected to die, too, just so they didn’t go out of the house. Women died because men who were not married to them were not allowed to touch them, and women were not allowed to be doctors. Clever system. Anyway, I figured tho they were all nuts. Hussein was more like a Stalinist kind of nut, anti God, while the other one was Allah mad. Oil and water. Like Larry Flynt and Pat Robertson being pals, these two were on opposite ends of their cultural vision. No way were they working together.
I wrote to my congressman to protest the Iraq invasion. Who was my congressman? i didn’t know. i knew charley rangel from harlem..it wasn’t him. neil abercrombie from honolulu..nope..this guy was vito fossella. a republican...never heard of him. he was a shadowy figure...i didn’t know his position on anything...To my mind bush needed impeaching...but i only wrote to my designated Congressman to protest the planned invasion... he wrote back how we had to back our president, because, no matter what, he knew what was right. cheeze..i thought..blind obedience?? how very un american...this guy must be a dope...right then and there, i figured someone else must be running for his seat. whoever he was, i was gonna back him, even if he was a Yellow Dog.

The Yellow Dog came in the form of tall grey haired gentleman named Frank Barbaro.
“Bar bar bar, bar bar ba ro..”
.i sang the lyrics in my head to a beachboys tune barbara ann..no use trying to get permission to use the melody..the beachboys were brain injured republicans. the lyric went

‘do you know, frank barbaro? do you know? he’s the candidate, lets’ get him on the slate..bar ba ro bar bar bar bar ba ro..he is the man, yeah he’s got a plan, get us out of iraq keep us out of iran, bar ba rooo... etc,,etc.

.i’d wake up with little couplets on the brain “ send him to dc, he’ll fight for you and me, bar ba ro, bar bar, bar bar ba ro..”it was no use..the beach boys were not gonna change parties, anytime soon..I would hum the tune during the day, to keep me going. the groove was pretty good.
After my disability ran out, I had to go back to my day job, or face the shelter system with the aforementioned teenaged son. Not a lovely prospect. I went to the paper, but it was looking pretty grim there. .After 9/11 the European executive publisher and moneyman had dropped the paper like a hot potato. The two Soho chic lady publishers were hemorraging cash, and the Euros were no longer amused, regardless of how cute the “Babes” were...the company changed hands twice, downsized by 2/3rds, and moved to the Butt end of Brooklyn, called Dumbo, cause you’d have to be pretty dumb to move there. ...some painters had homesteaded there, and then some big money creeps came in and bought the buildings then evicted them...making yet another safe haven for mindless rich yuppies with their wretched brats in third world nanny tended strollers...not only was the commute an hour and a half each way (ferry to subway to bus, then subway to ferry to bus on the way home) the circulation at the paper had plummeted, and most of my old happy customers had that wary sound in their voice, like nice middle class folks do when they throw a party, and find that a couple of crackheads have crashed the event and have been eyeing the electronics....My old customers liked me, but instead of 100,000 copies of our weekly classified ads paper being bought, we were lucky if we sold 4 thousand. All for the same great price. I figured i couldn’t find that many masochistic business people, even in a city as large as ny. I was exausted. I wasn't a sociopath. I couldn't lie to them. I took my savings, and took a leave of absence.and went to work for the BARBARO CAMPAIGN.
It was June. I helped my friend Annie get Frank's name on the ballot. Annie knew Staten Island. I knew nothing, but I was a Democrat, so I felt I could help. We had to get Frank on the Ballot. I still didn’t know who this guy was, but I got names on the ballot. I was a sales person. I could talk to strangers. Plus, I was working for World Peace. We had to take over the House, to impeach Bush. I got tons of names. I met many wonderful and strange people. I met Barbaro, too.

Frank was tall, about 6 foot 4. He had grey hair, and was a bit, well, over weight. Not in a bad, obese way. In an older guy way. Frank was 76. The same age as my recently deceased Dad, Phil. Like my Dad, a Brooklynite. Played stickball. Served during WWII. While my Dad used his Gi Bill for U of Miami Music Department, Frank had gone to Brooklyn Law. Before that Frank had worked as a longshoreman. Supported his 3 sisters when his parents died too young. In the same years as Marlon Brando had filmed “On the Waterfront” Frank was actually loading cargo and organizing labor. There were 23 years as a state assemblyman, and several years as a state supreme court judge. AND..FRANK had been a Kucinich delegate. Great, I thot.

Annie and i went to a waterfront festival. The Dems were there. There were all these people around. Chickens with their heads cut off. I liked Frank and his bodyguard, Ray.. Ray had the same last name as me. We talked ouf our common Irish clan roots. O”FAolain..Little Wolf..Dungarvan Castle, Donal of the Decies, overthrown in 900 by the Fitzhughs and the FitzGeralds..as in John Fitzgerald Kennedy...1100 years of hovering in the Celtic backround with the odd Bill Whelan of Riverdance, or Nuala O”Faolin, or Sean O’Faolin or Alfred Hitchcock (maternal Whelan) or Wendy Whelan, the ballerina.popping up from time to time. When you have an illustrious history of emptiness, nobodies, peasants and serfs, you grasp at straws. Erin Go Bragh..Ray and I had both lived in Berlin. Compared European Health and Education to the US version. There was a meeting of the minds. It was a done deal. I was in like Errol Flynn (no relation)...I was a VOLUNTEER.
On the weekend would be events, and Frank would go with a handful of us. Little music festivals in the park. Little events on the beach. Supermarkets. Lots of Supermarkets. Houseparties. Meet and greets..As the weather got better, there were baseball games. The SI Yankees weren’t very great, but a lot of Staten Islanders enjoyed the games. Frank went out in his shirtsleeves, and we handed out the fliers.
June turned into July, and there were weekend block parties. We went to lots of them. Kids on trampolines. Neighborhood discjockeys blasting lousy music. Water slides. At the end of July I took my leave of absence, and made it my business to be down at the office at least once a day.

Mike and Ray were in the office most days, 7 days a week. Two guys who had been fundraisers and organizers for an upstate environmental organization, they lived in Brooklyn, so had to take a train and a boat to work. They got in by 11. that left 2 hours in the morning that the office was unmanned. I started going in early. I started cleaning up the office, tossing garbage, straightening up papers, being a live voice on the phone.

There were two computers, and by afternoon, they were manned by graduate students and teachers on summer vacation. Emails were composed by Mike and a Cornell student, sassy little messages about how Frank was going to change Staten Island.

Frank had his work cut out for him. The incumbent, Vito Fossella, was a lifelong Staten Islander, whose parents had been active in the local Democratic party, til they changed parties. While his father became known as the engineer who was behind the illegal bulldozing of the house of Dorothy Day, (one of the only Americans ever considered for canonization by the Catholic Church), Vito had become a yes man to the Bush administration, amen-ing everything the President did...whether invading Iraq under false pretenses, or attempting to privatize Social Security. i could not understand the behavior of the Congressman who represented working class people in working class Staten Island. Fossella voted against raising the minimum wage, voted to give tax breaks to companies who took jobs overseas, and voted against allowing time and a half pay for overtime. This was eerie. It was if noone cared, he was a paisan, and he named streets after Islanders who had fallen on 9/11.

I spent all my extra time in the office, or out handing out literature, except while I was gigging in the Village. The Aneurysm had disrupted most of my bookings, but in June I got a gig in the Village at a little lounge that featured live R&B bands. The manager was a somewhat pretty woman who seemed at first friendly but eventually devolved into behaving like an alcoholic cokehead going thru menopause. In fact, I think that’s what she was. Sometimes she would yell. Sometimes she would cry. She told me she told fortunes. I wouldn’t let her near my cards. I was thankful, regardless of her irratic behavior, for a little regular spot. I was able to sing a little. The lunacy was disruptive. She immediately 86ed my drummer, saying he was disrespectful. She would call my house at 4 in the morning looking for microphone cables. She’d ask me to fill in a date for her, with 24 hour notice, because a band would quit, then would harangue me because of the small crowd. Then it was decided they wouldn’t pay for my guitarist. I was stuck with a trio and a million hours of music every night. The grateful dead never played as much, in one night. WE did everything. tried stream of consciousness rock and roll. There was no spotlight on the band. We played in the dark. Someone’s cousin would come out from staten island to set up the PA, cause it was blown up by some drunken nitwit each week. Me, a former owner of a recording studio, couldn’t comment on the rigging. We weren’t allowed to touch it. ugggh.. Every tuesday, we were booked right after a private lesbian kareoke event. Officially, they ended at 10pm, but, if they had the spirit, they went on til midnite, even tho we were booked for 10pm. How do you argue with a group of drunken lesbians?? How do you argue with an 800 lb gorilla? Young gay women, when drunk, are known for wanting to pick fights. We could stand outside the club with our equipment, or go inside and get glared at.

The silent partner didn’t like me. i wasn’t a sexually available 20 year old. Even the bartender had to put out. Tony had fixed her up with a midget with a HumVee. if she wouldn’t put out for him, she was gonna put out for the jockey. Everyone had to be useful. At some point the silent parter spoke up, and wanted me out. if i had been gay, it would have been okay. i was a dyke, therefore it was understandable that i wasn’t available. but a heterosexual female? i was no good for business...oh well. l still don’t think music drove their business. they were into something shady, but i never found out what, and i didn’t want to know. A few months later, they folded..from mismanagement, I assume.

In the mornings, I would go back to the office and answer phones and talk to the myriads of volunteers who would come in on a daily basis. Lots of nuts. Some nice people. The campaign manager was a labor organizer who had never handled a Congressional campaign. It was explained to me by Liz, who ran he Brooklyn office (who was Mike’s girlfriend) that Larry was a totem pole guy. That means he was very aware of a pecking order, and tried to maintain that order. We were squid, without brains or opinions.
Those who did matter were the folks who rand the media consultancy, Madison Avenue types who couldn’t care less if they were selling soap or a candidate. They refused to set foot on funky Staten Island.,..and set up press conferences in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the week, where noone was present. For this they bilked the campaign of thousands per month.

On the other hand, I was going thru my tax return money. By August things got tougher. We were short of money. All these high paid knuckleheads were bleeding the campaign. We needed mo' money. We needed a commercial. Only 40% of Staten Island knew Frank. The campaign had not set aside money for a commercial. I had an idea. Run a radio ad asking for money, and use that money for the TV commmercial. It took a monthfor them to okay. Ken and I taped Frank after a local public access tv show. We ran the ad and earned 1500 in the first day. the next day was the same, as was the next. they said we couldn't do the tv commercial..this was like dealing with enron.

Today I'm on unemployment after my company was bankrupted by the last owner, a former Arthur Anderson Accountant. I stayed with the company for 4 years, thru 4 different ownerships. They all were idiots...None of them listened to us...the sales people had ideas, but people are so happy to be pashas, they don't know how to listen to the rank and file. The losers don't, at least. My company went belly up..... I'm looking for a gig, preferably one that hasn't been sent to Indonesia. I'm too old to be shackled to a workbench at a Nike factory. I'm gonna cut and paste some ruminations I wrote, after working on the Congressional campaign of Frank Barbaro... (a campaign that we lost, unfortunately...Frank would not have voted against the bankruptcy law , against privatization of social security, and would have not accepted the new tort reform. )

7/03 to 7/04 was my Annus Horribilus. After my father’s death and my subsequent surgery for a brain aneurysm, I needed to rethink my life. Where was I going? Why was I still living, after the aneurysm, when others died? Friends said the Lord had spared me to take care of my teenaged son. This made sense. But other kids have been left without parents. What was so special about our case?

I prayed a lot, during the long months after burying my father, after the surgery. I was collecting disability insurance income, and was attempting to mend, laying on a sofa in the dining room, watching tv and dozing through a sweaty summer, followed by a non descript autumn and landing in a drafty chilly, damp and slippery winter. I couldn’t lay in my bedroom, because I would wake in a cold sweat, under my 20 pound feather comforter, freaking out with a panic attack. I found I could doze a little if I had the TV on, if some idiot was prattling on the idiot box. Otherwise, scary, depressing thoughts overwhelmed me. My father’s death had precipitated the aneurysm, and my brain was leaking blood as my father lay in his final days of hospice, at my sister’s suburban adobe manse in El Paso. A few days after his burial, I went to the doctor, and was told not to leave. I had a craniotomy, and they cut my skull in two. A young, beautiful doctor with a Jewish last name and the eyes of Ghandi did the surgery, so I didn’t fear. My fear began after I was out of the hospital.
It was hard, at first, to get up to go to the bathroom. It took me a week to go by myself, steadying myself by holding onto the wall. It was hard to take the garbage out. I began doing that at week three, holding the side of the house and walking in baby steps so that I didn’t fall down. Noone came to see me. Noone from my band, not my man friend...I saw my downstairs neighbor, once every week, otherwise I was alone, except for when my son came home from school. It was hard to cook for my son. He was 14, and at first he cooked for me. After a week of his taking care of me, I sent him back up to my first husband, because I was such bad depressing company...but when he came back, I was able to muster up a meal every day or so to help him out. It was hard to walk two blocks to the bodega on the corner. I shuffled to the store with an eyepatch and an unsteady gate. I tried to make small talk in Spanish. I don’t speak Spanish. The grocery man gave me new words in Spanish every time I came to the store. Carne moulade. Leche. Azucar. I was the gringa student wih a shaved head and a patch over my right eye.
I still didn’t know what I was to do with the rest of my life. I prayed until I heard a small voice in my head. It said first, “Work for World Peace.” Then, “Get a House”. Huh? I said to myself. That small inner voice. Was it me? Was It my Creator? Was it a hallucination? Certainly, it was good advice. I’ve been renting for years. Even with a rent subsidy, I was pissing money away, money that could be used for equity. A house is like money in the bank, only better. And oh yeah, World Peace. If it was God speaking, this was a major tall order, but it is his world. If it was my superego talking, the world was in big trouble. I was no match for the powers that were. Without divine intervention, the maniac cabal known as the Neo-Cons would continue on their merry way. Bush had been making a whole lot of hooplah, trying to get us to invade Iraq. Colin Powell had gone to the General Assembly of the UN with a forged 12 year old doctored aeriel photo of reputed chemical weapon manufacturing sites in Iraq. Fortunately, I had read the Policy for a New American Century, and understood that the Neo-Cons planned to take over the Middle East before Europe or China grabbed it. I was against the idea A fight to grab oil seemed so ugly, so unAmerican. /Didn’t we have the smarts to get to the Moon? To Mars? Couldn’t we come up with new energy sources? Bush, Jr. said that Saddam was evil. He had tried to kill his father.
I remembered my childhood days when Kruschev pounded on the same desk at the UN with his shoe and yelled “We will bury You!” America just laughed in his face. We didn’t invade Russia. Mao Tse Tung talked about killing the US running dog capitalists in his little red book, and we didn’t bother invading China. We ignored him.
Bush decided that because Hussein said he wanted to kill us, that was reason enough to deck him, and all his people. Bush and his disciples ignored the CIA, the UN, and any other intelligence, and went about selling the Americans on the idea that Saddam was in Kahoots with Osama and we needed to invade Iraq, or face impending doom. Kaboom.
It was after reading two books, one about Osama and the other about Hussein that I figured this was a crock. Hussein was a secularist. In his nation, women went to university, were doctors, lawyers, architects, wore their hair loose, and drove cars. In Osama land, Afghanistan, the Taliban made sure that women walked around with bags on their heads, weren’t allowed to read or write, or even work. If their husbands were dead, they and their children were expected to die, too, just so they didn’t go out of the house. Women died because men who were not married to them were not allowed to touch them, and women were not allowed to be doctors. Clever system. Anyway, I figured tho they were all nuts. Hussein was more like a Stalinist kind of nut, anti God, while the other one was Allah mad. Oil and water. Like Larry Flynt and Pat Robertson being pals, these two were on opposite ends of their cultural vision. No way were they working together.
I wrote to my congressman to protest the Iraq invasion. Who was my congressman? i didn’t know. i knew charley rangel from harlem..it wasn’t him. neil abercrombie from honolulu..nope..this guy was vito fossella. a republican...never heard of him. he was a shadowy figure...i didn’t know his position on anything...To my mind bush needed impeaching...but i only wrote to my designated Congressman to protest the planned invasion... he wrote back how we had to back our president, because, no matter what, he knew what was right. cheeze..i thought..blind obedience?? how very un american...this guy must be a dope...right then and there, i figured someone else must be running for his seat. whoever he was, i was gonna back him, even if he was a Yellow Dog.

The Yellow Dog came in the form of tall grey haired gentleman named Frank Barbaro.
“Bar bar bar, bar bar ba ro..”
.i sang the lyrics in my head to a beachboys tune barbara ann..no use trying to get permission to use the melody..the beachboys were brain injured republicans. the lyric went

‘do you know, frank barbaro? do you know? he’s the candidate, lets’ get him on the slate..bar ba ro bar bar bar bar ba ro..he is the man, yeah he’s got a plan, get us out of iraq keep us out of iran, bar ba rooo... etc,,etc.

.i’d wake up with little couplets on the brain “ send him to dc, he’ll fight for you and me, bar ba ro, bar bar, bar bar ba ro..”it was no use..the beach boys were not gonna change parties, anytime soon..I would hum the tune during the day, to keep me going. the groove was pretty good.
After my disability ran out, I had to go back to my day job, or face the shelter system with the aforementioned teenaged son. Not a lovely prospect. I went to the paper, but it was looking pretty grim there. .After 9/11 the European executive publisher and moneyman had dropped the paper like a hot potato. The two Soho chic lady publishers were hemorraging cash, and the Euros were no longer amused, regardless of how cute the “Babes” were...the company changed hands twice, downsized by 2/3rds, and moved to the Butt end of Brooklyn, called Dumbo, cause you’d have to be pretty dumb to move there. ...some painters had homesteaded there, and then some big money creeps came in and bought the buildings then evicted them...making yet another safe haven for mindless rich yuppies with their wretched brats in third world nanny tended strollers...not only was the commute an hour and a half each way (ferry to subway to bus, then subway to ferry to bus on the way home) the circulation at the paper had plummeted, and most of my old happy customers had that wary sound in their voice, like nice middle class folks do when they throw a party, and find that a couple of crackheads have crashed the event and have been eyeing the electronics....My old customers liked me, but instead of 100,000 copies of our weekly classified ads paper being bought, we were lucky if we sold 4 thousand. All for the same great price. I figured i couldn’t find that many masochistic business people, even in a city as large as ny. I was exausted. I wasn't a sociopath. I couldn't lie to them. I took my savings, and took a leave of absence.and went to work for the BARBARO CAMPAIGN.
It was June. I helped my friend Annie get Frank's name on the ballot. Annie knew Staten Island. I knew nothing, but I was a Democrat, so I felt I could help. We had to get Frank on the Ballot. I still didn’t know who this guy was, but I got names on the ballot. I was a sales person. I could talk to strangers. Plus, I was working for World Peace. We had to take over the House, to impeach Bush. I got tons of names. I met many wonderful and strange people. I met Barbaro, too.

Frank was tall, about 6 foot 4. He had grey hair, and was a bit, well, over weight. Not in a bad, obese way. In an older guy way. Frank was 76. The same age as my recently deceased Dad, Phil. Like my Dad, a Brooklynite. Played stickball. Served during WWII. While my Dad used his Gi Bill for U of Miami Music Department, Frank had gone to Brooklyn Law. Before that Frank had worked as a longshoreman. Supported his 3 sisters when his parents died too young. In the same years as Marlon Brando had filmed “On the Waterfront” Frank was actually loading cargo and organizing labor. There were 23 years as a state assemblyman, and several years as a state supreme court judge. AND..FRANK had been a Kucinich delegate. Great, I thot.

Annie and i went to a waterfront festival. The Dems were there. There were all these people around. Chickens with their heads cut off. I liked Frank and his bodyguard, Ray.. Ray had the same last name as me. We talked ouf our common Irish clan roots. O”FAolain..Little Wolf..Dungarvan Castle, Donal of the Decies, overthrown in 900 by the Fitzhughs and the FitzGeralds..as in John Fitzgerald Kennedy...1100 years of hovering in the Celtic backround with the odd Bill Whelan of Riverdance, or Nuala O”Faolin, or Sean O’Faolin or Alfred Hitchcock (maternal Whelan) or Wendy Whelan, the ballerina.popping up from time to time. When you have an illustrious history of emptiness, nobodies, peasants and serfs, you grasp at straws. Erin Go Bragh..Ray and I had both lived in Berlin. Compared European Health and Education to the US version. There was a meeting of the minds. It was a done deal. I was in like Errol Flynn (no relation)...I was a VOLUNTEER.
On the weekend would be events, and Frank would go with a handful of us. Little music festivals in the park. Little events on the beach. Supermarkets. Lots of Supermarkets. Houseparties. Meet and greets..As the weather got better, there were baseball games. The SI Yankees weren’t very great, but a lot of Staten Islanders enjoyed the games. Frank went out in his shirtsleeves, and we handed out the fliers.
June turned into July, and there were weekend block parties. We went to lots of them. Kids on trampolines. Neighborhood discjockeys blasting lousy music. Water slides. At the end of July I took my leave of absence, and made it my business to be down at the office at least once a day.

Mike and Ray were in the office most days, 7 days a week. Two guys who had been fundraisers and organizers for an upstate environmental organization, they lived in Brooklyn, so had to take a train and a boat to work. They got in by 11. that left 2 hours in the morning that the office was unmanned. I started going in early. I started cleaning up the office, tossing garbage, straightening up papers, being a live voice on the phone.

There were two computers, and by afternoon, they were manned by graduate students and teachers on summer vacation. Emails were composed by Mike and a Cornell student, sassy little messages about how Frank was going to change Staten Island.

Frank had his work cut out for him. The incumbent, Vito Fossella, was a lifelong Staten Islander, whose parents had been active in the local Democratic party, til they changed parties. While his father became known as the engineer who was behind the illegal bulldozing of the house of Dorothy Day, (one of the only Americans ever considered for canonization by the Catholic Church), Vito had become a yes man to the Bush administration, amen-ing everything the President did...whether invading Iraq under false pretenses, or attempting to privatize Social Security. i could not understand the behavior of the Congressman who represented working class people in working class Staten Island. Fossella voted against raising the minimum wage, voted to give tax breaks to companies who took jobs overseas, and voted against allowing time and a half pay for overtime. This was eerie. It was if noone cared, he was a paisan, and he named streets after Islanders who had fallen on 9/11.

I spent all my extra time in the office, or out handing out literature, except while I was gigging in the Village. The Aneurysm had disrupted most of my bookings, but in June I got a gig in the Village at a little lounge that featured live R&B bands. The manager was a somewhat pretty woman who seemed at first friendly but eventually devolved into behaving like an alcoholic cokehead going thru menopause. In fact, I think that’s what she was. Sometimes she would yell. Sometimes she would cry. She told me she told fortunes. I wouldn’t let her near my cards. I was thankful, regardless of her irratic behavior, for a little regular spot. I was able to sing a little. The lunacy was disruptive. She immediately 86ed my drummer, saying he was disrespectful. She would call my house at 4 in the morning looking for microphone cables. She’d ask me to fill in a date for her, with 24 hour notice, because a band would quit, then would harangue me because of the small crowd. Then it was decided they wouldn’t pay for my guitarist. I was stuck with a trio and a million hours of music every night. The grateful dead never played as much, in one night. WE did everything. tried stream of consciousness rock and roll. There was no spotlight on the band. We played in the dark. Someone’s cousin would come out from staten island to set up the PA, cause it was blown up by some drunken nitwit each week. Me, a former owner of a recording studio, couldn’t comment on the rigging. We weren’t allowed to touch it. ugggh.. Every tuesday, we were booked right after a private lesbian kareoke event. Officially, they ended at 10pm, but, if they had the spirit, they went on til midnite, even tho we were booked for 10pm. How do you argue with a group of drunken lesbians?? How do you argue with an 800 lb gorilla? Young gay women, when drunk, are known for wanting to pick fights. We could stand outside the club with our equipment, or go inside and get glared at.

The silent partner didn’t like me. i wasn’t a sexually available 20 year old. Even the bartender had to put out. Tony had fixed her up with a midget with a HumVee. if she wouldn’t put out for him, she was gonna put out for the jockey. Everyone had to be useful. At some point the silent parter spoke up, and wanted me out. if i had been gay, it would have been okay. i was a dyke, therefore it was understandable that i wasn’t available. but a heterosexual female? i was no good for business...oh well. l still don’t think music drove their business. they were into something shady, but i never found out what, and i didn’t want to know. A few months later, they folded..from mismanagement, I assume.

In the mornings, I would go back to the office and answer phones and talk to the myriads of volunteers who would come in on a daily basis. Lots of nuts. Some nice people. The campaign manager was a labor organizer who had never handled a Congressional campaign. It was explained to me by Liz, who ran he Brooklyn office (who was Mike’s girlfriend) that Larry was a totem pole guy. That means he was very aware of a pecking order, and tried to maintain that order. We were squid, without brains or opinions.
Those who did matter were the folks who rand the media consultancy, Madison Avenue types who couldn’t care less if they were selling soap or a candidate. They refused to set foot on funky Staten Island.,..and set up press conferences in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the week, where noone was present. For this they bilked the campaign of thousands per month.

On the other hand, I was going thru my tax return money. By August things got tougher. We were short of money. All these high paid knuckleheads were bleeding the campaign. We needed mo' money. We needed a commercial. Only 40% of Staten Island knew Frank. The campaign had not set aside money for a commercial. I had an idea. Run a radio ad asking for money, and use that money for the TV commmercial. It took a monthfor them to okay. Ken and I taped Frank after a local public access tv show. We ran the ad and earned 1500 in the first day. the next day was the same, as was the next. they said we couldn't do the tv commercial..this was like dealing with enron.

Hi Donna,

When the summer comes here on Staten Island and the Queen Anne's Lace is in bloom and the fireflies are out, and the smell of mulberry is in the air, I think of us and our summers at Greenwood Lake. I hear the icecream truck, and feel the stickyness of oilcloth tablecloth on my forearms, as i drink a cup of sweet coffee with condensed milk and sugar at the kitchen table, reading Ann Landers. I remember the outhouse, and remember when the indoor bathroom was finally built. I remember the cold water pump in the kitchen sink and the one in the yard, the drama an finesse needed to prime the pumps, and I remember boiling huge pots water on the stove to rinse the dinner dishes and to make chippy baths in the kitchen sink for us, on Saturday night. I remember the 2 big bedrooms upstairs for everyone, and the handmade quilts and the saggy bed and you me and Lauralee slept in, giggling at the nakedness of Aunt Annie (who couldn't hear us, since she was deaf) as she got undressed to sleep in the next bed. I can hear the sound of the creaky springs. I remember the red glow in the dark of Nanny smoking her last Chesterfield before getting into bed. I remember Bobby's twin Terry, in the crib, and the parents being alarmed that she was projectile vomiting. After Dad's stroke, I remember Dad on the porch in a wheelchair with his brace on his leg, I remember the white enameled chamberpot and the outhouse and the dock. I see Bobbi Cunio from next door saving me from drowning, jumping off the dock into the water in her flowered housedress; pink haircurlers standing out against her black hair, house slippers flying everywhere, as I slipped out from under the big black patched inner tube, I remember not being able to reach the inner tube and going under and seeing the seaweed, and not being able to touch bottom, I remember going up for a moment, but feeling calm, knowing Bobbi was going to come out to get me.. I remember her granddaughter Debbie, and hearing that they lived in West NY and me trying to picture a NJ town called W. New York, I remember THEIR summer house, with boats on the walls, their hammock and mosquitoes and marshmellows, I remember the milkman, the icecream man and the breadman. I remember trying to catch a sunny with Lauralee, baiting a safety pin with white Wonderbread when we ran out of hooks, watching the Sunnies nibble the bread right off of the pin.I remember going to buy a can of earthworms down the road when we had money, and when the old man was there (Lauralee said he was an old fishing buddy of Dads)..I remember checking the traps for catfish and finding crabs, I remember the seaweed and rowing across the lake to go to the store,( three of us, two rowers, and one bailing with an old tin can) I remember kissing the Riccardi boys and their cousin, smoking cigerettes we'd bought and throwing cherry bombs into the lake, I remember the intense plotting which took place to get the aforementioned cigerettes, and I think we smoked every brand from Lark to Parliment, I remember the Riccardi's cousin who smelled like Dixie Peach, and Gary Riccardi who had a boa constrictor who ate a mouse once a month, and Greg Riccardi, who I had a crush on, but who liked you, I remember playing war in their backyard, and they'd get shot and we'd be the Red Cross nurses who would drag them accross the yard to the pup tent. I remember their ham radio set, and learning to speak radio "Ten-4", "I copy that", "Roger", and all that cool Sky King lingo. I remember how lovely it was to take out Dad's boat, and go further up the lake, seeing all the little islands and wanting to go further...I rememeber the stumps in the lake, and our fear of them, I remember peanut butter a jelly, and he-man breakfasts of pancakes and bacon and eggs and sweet milky coffee, and Dad (before the stroke) saying, now don't come back till supper time. I remember bringing soap to the swimming hole and washing up there, I remember swinging from the Weeping Willow and jumping into the water like Sheena of the Jungle, and wanting my hair to be long and messy like her's and Brigitte Bardot, I remember wanting to be Brigitte Bardot when I grew up, and you wanting to be Marilyn Monroe, I remember poring Ben-Gay and mercurachrome on a piece of bologna and leaving it on the kitchen floor to poison the mouse, I remember jumping onto the kitchen table as the mouse appeared and grabbed the meat, I remember the cries of the mouse in the wall. I remember the sound of the rocks and gravel under my Keds, waking up the dirt road. I remember we were kids in Peter Pan land, with no adults to bother us, except to tell us to come in to eat, or to go to sleep. I remember sitting around the fire and hearing Dad sing his mountain songs, and telling spooky world war 1 tales, about babies crying in houses, but noone knowing where the crying was coming from, or how to find the baby. Scary stories, before we went to bed. I remember the railing to the steps down to the house, made from hand hewed saplings, and the cinder block steps, all made by the uncles. The house, the steps, the wells, the parking lot, all built by the uncles on the weekends, before we were born. I remember our mudpies made from sand, water and sugar (and Nanny wondering outloud about what these kids wanted with all that sugar) I remember hearing Fabian and the Everly Brothers, Brian Hyland and "See you in september".."Sealed with a Kiss" "My Boyfriend's Back" . Hearing "Fingertips Pt.II by a 12 year old Little Stevie Wonder, Smoking cigerettes in the leaky rowboat listening to music on the scratchy transistor radio. Heaven.

WORLD PEACE AND THE HOUSE (of Representatives)

After my father’s death and my subsequent surgery for a brain aneurysm, I needed to rethink my life. Where was I going? Why was I still living from this aneurysm, when others simply died? Friends said the Lord had spared me to take care of my teenaged son. This made sense. But other kids have been left without parents. What was so special about my case?
I prayed a lot, during the long months after burying my father, after the surgery. I was collecting disability insurance income, and was attempting to mend, laying on a sofa in the dining room, watching tv and dozing through asweaty summer, followed by a non descript autumn and landing in a drafty chilly, damp and slippery winter. I couldn’t lay in my bedroom, because I would wake in a cold sweat, under my 20 pound feather comforter, freaking out with a panic attack. I found I could doze a little if I had the TV on, if some idiot was prattling on the idiot box. Otherwise, scary, depressing thoughts overwhelmed me. My father’s death had precipitated the aneurysm, and my brain was leaking blood as my father lay in his final days of hospice, at my sister’s suburban adobe manse in El Paso. A few days after his burial, I went to the doctor, and was told not to leave. I had a craniotomy, and they cut my skull in two. A young, beautiful doctor with a Jewish last name and the eyes of Ghandi did the surgery, so I didn’t fear. My fear began after I was out of the hospital.
It was hard, at first, to get up to go to the bathroom. It took me a week to go by myself, steadying myself by holding onto the wall. It was hard to take the garbage out. I began doing that at week three, holding the side of the house and walking in baby steps so that I didn’t fall down. It was hard to cook for my son. He was 14, and at first he cooked for me. I was able to muster up a meal every day or so to help him out. It was hard to walk two blocks to the bodega on the corner. I shuffled to the store with an eyepatch and an unsteady gate. I tried to make small talk in Spanish. I don’t speak Spanish. The grocery man gave me new words in Spanish every time I came to the store. Carne moulade. Leche. Azucar. I was the middle aged gringa student with a shaved head and a pirate patch on my eye.
I still didn’t know what I was to do with the rest of my life. I prayed until I heard a small voice in my head. It said first, “Work for World Peace.” Then, “Get a House”. Huh? I said to myself. That small inner voice. Was it me? Was It my Creator? Was it a hallucination? Certainly, it was good advice. I’ve been renting for years. Even with a rent subsidy, I was pissing money away, money that could be used for equity. A house is like money in the bank, only better. And oh yeah, World Peace. If it was God speaking, this was a major tall order, but it is his world. If it was my superego talking, the world was in big trouble. I was no match for the powers that were. Without divine intervention, the maniac cabal known as the Neo-Cons would continue on their merry way. Bush had been making a whole lot of hooplah, trying to get us to invade Iraq. Colin Powell had gone to the General Assembly of the UN with a forged 12 year old doctored aeriel photo of reputed chemical weapon manufacturing sites in Iraq. Fortunately, I had read the Policy for a New American Century, and understood that the Neo-Cons planned to take over the Middle East before Europe or China grabbed it. I was against the idea A fight to grab oil seemed so ugly, so unAmerican. /Didn’t we have the smarts to get to the Moon? To Mars? Couldn’t we come up with new energy sources? Bush, Jr. said that Saddam was evil. He had tried to kill his father.
I remembered my childhood days when Kruschev pounded on the same desk at the UN with his shoe and yelled “We will bury You!” America just laughed in his face. We didn’t invade Russia. Mao Tse Tung talked about killing the US running dog capitalists in his little red book, and we didn’t bother invading China. We ignored him.
Bush decided that because Hussein said he wanted to kill us, that was reason enough to deck him, and all his people. Bush and his disciples ignored the CIA, the UN, and any other intelligence, and went about selling the Americans on the idea that Saddam was in Kahoots with Osama and we needed to invade Iraq, or face impending doom. Kaboom.
It was after reading a book or two about Osama and Hussein that I figured this was a crock. Hussein was a secularist. In his nation, women went to university, were doctors, lawyers, architects, wore their hair loose, and drove cars. In Osama land, Afghanistan, the Taliban made sure that women walked around with bags on their heads, weren’t allowed to read or write, or even work. If their husbands were dead, they and their children were expected to die, too, just so they didn’t go out of the house. Women died because men who were not married to them were not allowed to touch them, and women were not allowed to be doctors. Clever system. Anyway, I figured tho they were all nuts. Hussein was more like a Stalinist kind of nut, anti God, while the other one was Allah mad. Oil and water. Like Larry Flynt and Pat Robertson being pals, these two were on opposite ends of their cultural vision. No way were they working together.
I wrote to my congressman to protest the Iraq invasion. Who was my congressman? i didn’t know. i knew charley rangel from harlem..it wasn’t him. neil abercrombie from honolulu..nope..this guy was vito fossella. a republican...never heard of him. he was a shadowy figure...i didn’t know his position on anything...To my mind bush needed impeaching...but i only wrote to my designated Congressman to protest the planned invasion... he wrote back how we had to back our president, because, no matter what, he knew what was right. cheeze..i thought..blind obedience?? how very un american...this guy must be a dope...right then and there, i figured someone else must be running for his seat. whoever he was, i was gonna back him, even if he was a Yellow Dog.
The Yellow Dog came in the form of tall grey haired gentleman named Frank Barbaro.
“Bar bar bar, bar bar ba ro..”
.i sang the lyrics in my head to a beachboys tune...no use trying to get permission to use the melody..the beachboys were brain injured republicans. the lyric went

‘do you know, frank barbaro? do you know? he’s the candidate, lets’ get him on the slate..bar ba ro bar bar bar bar ba ro..he is the man, yeah he’s got a plan, get us out of iraq keep us out of iran, bar ba rooo... etc,,etc.

.i’d wake up with little couplets on the brain “ send him to dc, he’ll fight for you and me, bar ba ro, bar bar, bar bar ba ro..”it was no use..the beach boys were not gonna change parties, anytime soon..I would hum the tune during the day, to keep me going. the groove was pretty good.
After my disability ran out, I had to go back to my day job, or face the shelter system with the aforementioned teenaged son. Not a lovely prospect. I went to the paper, but it was looking pretty grim there. .After 9/11 the European executive publisher and moneyman had dropped the paper like a hot potato. The two Soho chic lady publishers were hemorraging cash, and the Euros were no longer amused, regardless of how cute the “Babes” were...the company changed hands, downsized by 2/3rds, and moved to the Butt end of Brooklyn, called Dumbo, cause you’d have to be pretty dumb to move there. (*not really..it’s kinda cute, but way over priced)...some painters had homesteaded there, and then some big money creeps came in and bought the buildings then evicted them...making yet another safe haven for mindless rich yuppies with their wretched brats in third world nanny tended strollers...not only was the commute an hour and a half each way (ferry to subway to bus, then subway to ferry to bus on the way home) the circulation at the paper had plummeted, and most of my old happy customers had that wary sound in their voice, like folks do when they throw a party, and find that a couple of crack heads have crashed the event and have been slurping the eggnog....my old customers liked me, but instead of 100,000 copies of our weekly classified ads paper being bought, we were lucky if we sold 7 thousand. All for the same great price. I figured i couldn’t find that many masochistic business people, even in a city as large as ny. I took my savings, and took a leave of absence.and went to work for the BARBARO CAMPAIGN.
It was June. We had to get Frank on the Ballot. I still didn’t know who this guy was, but I got names on the ballot. I was a sales person. I could talk to strangers. Plus, I was working for World Peace. We had to take over the House, to impeach Bush. I got tons of names. I met many wonderful and strange people. I met Barbaro, too.

Frank was tall, about 6 foot 4. He had grey hair, and was a bit, well, over weight. Not in a bad, obese way. In an older guy way. Frank was 76. The same age as my recently deceased Dad, Phil. Like my Dad, a Brooklynite. Played stickball. Served during WWII. While my Dad used his Gi Bill for U of Miami Music Department, Frank had gone to Brooklyn Law. Before that Frank had worked as a longshoreman. Supported his 3 sisters when his parents died too young. In the same years as Marlon Brando had filmed “On the Waterfront” Frank was actually loading cargo and organizing labor. There were 23 years as a state assemblyman, and several years as a state supreme court judge. AND..FRANK had been a Kucinich delegate. Great, I thot.
There were all these people around. Chickens with their heads cut off. I liked Frank and his bodyguard, RAy Whelan. Ray had the same last name as me. We talked ouf our common Irish clan roots. O”FAolain..Little Wolf..Dungarvan Castle, Donal of the Decies, overthrown in 900 by the Fitzhughs and the FitzGeralds..as in John Fitzgerald Kennedy...1100 years of hovering in the Celtic backround with the odd Bill Whelan of Riverdance, or Nuala O”Faolin, or Sean O’Faolin or Alfred Hitchcock (maternal Whelan) or Wendy Whelan, the ballerina.popping up from time to time. When you have an illustrious history of emptiness, you grasp at straws. Erin Go Bragh..We spoke of our common residency in Berlin. It was a done deal. I was in like Errol Flynn (no relation)...I was a volunteer.
On the weekend would be events, and Frank would go with a handful of us. Little music festivals in the park. Little events on the beach. Supermarkets. Lots of Supermarkets. Houseparties. Meet and greets..As the weather got better, there were baseball games. The SI Yankees weren’t very great, but a lot of Staten Islanders enjoyed the games. Frank went out in his shirtsleeves, and we handed out the fliers.
June turned into July, and there were weekend block parties. We went to lots of them. Kids on trampolines. Neighborhood discjockeys blasting lousy music. Water slides. At the end of July I took my leave of absence, and made it my business to be down at the office at least once a day.

Mike and Ray were in the office most days, 7 days a week. Two guys who had been fundraisers and organizers for an upstate environmental organization, they lived in Brooklyn, so had to take a train and a boat to work. They got in by 11. that left 2 hours in the morning that the office was unmanned. I started going in early. I started cleaning up the office, tossing garbage, straightening up papers, being a live voice on the phone.

There were two computers, and by afternoon, they were manned by graduate students and teachers on summer vacation. Emails were composed by Mike and a Cornell student, sassy little messages about how Frank was going to change Staten Island.

Frank had his work cut out for him. The incumbent, Vito Fossella, was a lifelong Staten Islander, whose parents had been active in the local Democratic party, til they changed parties. While his father became known as the engineer who was behind the illegal bulldozing of the house of Dorothy Day, one of the few Americans up for canonization by the Catholic Church, Vito had become a yes man to theBush administration, amen-ing everything the President did...whether invading Iraq under false pretenses, or attempting to privatize Social Security. i could not understand the behavior of the Congressman who represented working class people in working class Staten Island. Fossella voted against raising the minimum wage, voted to give tax breaks to companies who took jobs overseas, and voted against allowing time and a half pay for overtime. This was eerie. It was if noone cared, he was a paisan, and he named streets after Islanders who had fallen on 9/11.

I spent all my extra time in the office, or out handing out literature, except while I was gigging in the Village. The Aneurysm had disrupted most of my bookings, but in June I got a gig in the Village at a little lounge that featured live R&B bands. The manager lwas a pretty woman who was sort of friendly but eventually devolved into behaving like an alcoholic cokehead going thru menopause. In fact, I think that’s what she was. Sometimes she would yell. Sometimes she would cry. She told me she told fortunes. I wouldn’t let her near my cards. I was thankful, regardless of her irratic behavior, for a little regular spot. I was able to sing a little. The lunacy was disruptive. She immediately 86ed my drummer, saying he was disrespectful. She would call my house at 4 in the morning looking for microphone cables. She’d ask me to fill in a date for her, with 24 hour notice, because a band would quit, then would harangue me because of the small crowd. Then it was decided they wouldn’t pay for my guitarist. I was stuck with a trio and a million hours of music every night. The grateful dead never played as much, in one night. WE did everything. tried stream of consciousness rock and roll. There was no spotlight on the band. We played in the dark. Someone’s cousin would come out from staten island to set up the pa, cause it was blown up by some moron each week. Me, a former owner of a recording studio couldn’t comment on the rigging. We weren’t allowed to touch it. ugggh.. Every tuesday, we were booked right after a private lesbian kareoke event. Officially, they ended at 10pm, but, if they had the spirit, they went on til midnite, even tho we were booked for 10pm. How do you argue with a group of drunken lesbians?? How do you argue with an 800 lb gorilla? Young gay women, when drunk, are known for wanting to pick fights. We could stand outside the club with our equipment, or go inside and get glared at.

The silent partner didn’t like me. i wasn’t a sexually available 20 year old. Even the bartender had to put out. Tony had fixed her up with a midget with a humvee. if she wouldn’t put out for him, she was gonna put out for the jockey. Everyone had to be useful. At some point the silent parter spoke up, and wanted me out. if i had been gay, it would have been okay. i was a dyke, therefore it was understandable that i wasn’t available. but a heterosexual female? i was no good for business...oh well. l still don’t think music drove their business. they were into something shady, but i never found out what, and i didn’t want to know.

In any event, I would go back to the office and answer phones and talk to the myriads of volunteers who would come in on a daily basis. Lots of nuts. Some nice people. The campaign manager was a labor organizer who had never handled a Congressional compaign. It was explained to me by Liz, who ran he Brooklyn office (who was Mike’s girlfriend) that Larry was a totem pole guy. That means he was very aware of a pecking order, and tried to maintain that order. We were squid, without brains or opinions.
Those who did matter were the folks who ran the media consultancy, Madison Avenue types who couldn’t care less if they were selling soap or a candidate. They refused to set foot on funky Staten Island.,..and set up press conferences in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the week, where noone was present. For this they bilked the campaign of thousands per month.

On the other hand, I was going thru my tax return money. Where's the fairness? Not on this planet.

I saw Jesus at the Staten Island Ferry terminal., right near Saint Elisabeth Seton's birthplace. It's a magical place, and I've had many mystical experiences there. Maybe because of Seton's home being right across the street from the ferry, or because my great grandfather used to preach near there, at the bottom of Cherry Street, after nearly getting his head shot off in the Civil War, I don't know, strange things happen near the Staten Island Ferry. Staten Island is was also the home of Dorothy Day, the co-founder of the Catholic Worker and a person up for canonization as a saint by the Vatican. I get dreamy a lot, and I was being dreamy, smiling at the pigeons who live in the terminal, and was thinking back to a conversation I had had with my teenaged son, Jess. Jess had looked at the birds in the terminal, and had made an off hand remark , that maybe pigeons are just dirty doves.
"They're definately a part of the dove family", I said. I jumped through the teaching window opportunity. The dove/pigeon remark grew into a big conversation about mutation and the white moths of London changing color, and becoming grey during the industrial revolution, to blend into the sooty air. I was relieved that Jess knew doves. That would be a good entre into a future conversation about Holy Spirit symbology. Doves are so symbolically important to a Christian. I'm hoping that he becomes a Christian, sometime in his life. I don't want to batter him over the head with it, but I catch myself nervously trying to pull him into the fold. Ultimately it's not up to me. If it's meant to be, the Holy Spirit will enter his heart when and if he's ready. I can only show him what i know in word and deed, and hopefully he will find Christ's teachings as beautiful as I do..
.Anyway, thoughts of doves and pigeons made me think of the Holy Spirit, and remembering the moth conversation made me think of Monarch butterflies, and my Mom, dead these twenty odd years. When I was down in Florida, while my father was dying, Monarch butterflies were always swirling around me, when I went outside the front door for a smoke. I would go on the front lawn to take a break after bathing or dressing him, and the butterflies would come around, sometimes excitedly, sometimes lazily to say hello. I was so fried as I stood by powerlessly watching my Pappa rapidly declining into dementia. I often thought that Mom was a monarch butterfly,her spirit zipping around me to say, Hello, Cheer up and I Love you. When I would sit on the front porch with Dad, I would imagine it was her fluttering around her beloved Phil who was in such pain and confusion....
So my thoughts of butterflies and my mother's spirit in Florida had come back with me to NYC and the Staten Island ferry. I was thinking sort of ironically how that now when I saw a NYC pigeon I would think of Christ..when THERE HE WAS! HE was the same guy, i think, who had been preaching on the subway the day before. He was smiling at the pigeons, too. Today he was wearing a woolen hat and was sitting on the bench in the Ferry terminal, and he was beaming. What did he look like, you might ask? Well he’s got sort of biracial coloring, and has hair like wild dreads, like the guys in Living Color. He’s about 6’1”, and very beautiful, as good looking as Mario Van Peebles, but a little more Middle Eastern. Yesterday, while riding on the train, I had heard a booming voice the subway car. I tried to block it out, psychically, figuring it was yet another homeless panhandler. (When beggars are obviously strung out on drugs, i don’t give them money, because I figure I'm just fueling their addiction, and when they’re wild eyed, I don't give money because, i’m just afraid of them, so I try to ignore them by reading and by avoiding eye contact.) Anyway this one wasn’t asking for money, he was just talking about church..He said" I know some of you don’t like organized religion"...I giggled to myself, "I only believe in disorganized religion" The preacher went on He said" Christ doesn’t want us so much to be IN church as to BE a church".. I was bowled over. I had gone to church a lot for a while, but when I moved to Staten Island, I got further and further away from it. I tried a few other churches, but All Angel's was an incredible place where artists and homeless people and lawyers and nurses and teachers and all kinds of folks got together. It ws a hard act to follow, and I was kind of in love with the place. But I also got lazy and enjoyed my Sabbaths of quiet at home. I also got bored with repetative prayer. I couldn't express why i had run away from Church,cause I'm mad about Jesus....then This subway train preacher had put my feelings into words....My sentiments exactly..When I meet a fellow Christian, I am in Church. Where 2 or more are gathered in my name, there i am also. In my vision, I am in church, on a walk to work with a fellow Christian, or at an AA meeting, sometimes, or in a telephone conversation with another Christian. These are the churches I love.
After my cerebral aneurysm, this year, my eyes are stll not right. the right one is still paralyzed. i asked for my sight to be restored, and i can see, but i see double at some angles, and my eyes go every which way when i’m tired, like a chameleon. does God want me to see with another kind of vision? Certainly seeing a Christ vision is no joke, and certainly a beautiful thing. Also, two nights ago, i visited with my mother in a dream. she was beautiful and young looking, with dark red hair. she was enjoying her grandchildren, and she was delighting in how beautiful they were. She had a modest house , L- shaped with a front yard, in some tropical place, maybe like Northern Florida. I was so glad to see her, and so glad that she wasn’t dead. the night before i had been with Jerry Nolan and Johnny Thunders from the NY Dolls and the Heartbreakers and they told me not to worry, that i was a wonderful singer. i felt accepted and loved for my work, in a way that i have not felt in a long time. Often i feel like a disfigured, old hasbeen/never was who is not accepted by people, for my work. they both have been dead for about 15 years, so it was another visit to the other side. if i’m able to visit with my beloved family and friends, i guess being disfigured is okay.
I've got a new kind of vision.

You came into this world
serious
covered in blood
an astronaut from
outer space
(well, inner space)

You were pretty tired from the trip.
Obviously a noble being
from a more civilized planet

You looked at me and everyone else
sternly
as if we were a pack of idiots

You came into this world
with the latest word
Speaking in a strange new tongue
With a message from the King
and we were there to
translate.

SOMETIMES I FEEL LIKE SPAULDING GRAY
I JUST WANT TO THROW MY LIFE AWAY
OFF THE FERRY
INTO THE DEEP
BUT THERE ARE MILES TO GO BEFORE I SLEEP
THE KID TO RAISE
MY HEALTHS A WRECK
A STONE OF BILLS AROUND MY NECK
SO I MUST LIVE ANOTHER DAY
AND NOT OPT OUT, LIKE SPAULDING GRAY


SOMETIMES I FEEL LIKE SPAULDING GRAY
I WANT TO THROW MY LIFE AWAY
OFF THE FERRY
INTO THE DEEP
WITH CANS AND FISHES WOULD I SLEEP
(there are miles to go before I sleep)
FROM the HELL I RAISED
MY HEALTHS A WRECK
A STONE OF BILLS AROUND MY NECK


BUT IN A SINGLE PARENT FAMILY
THERE’S SOMEONE ELSE WHO COUNTS ON ME

A SOLE PROVIDER
NOONE’S WIFE
I MUST STRUGGLE IN THIS LIFE

SO I MUST LIVE ANOTHER DAY
AND NOT OPT OUT, LIKE SPAULDING GRAY.