Down by the Riverside

                Perfection for me is riding down the Riverside park cyclist path alllllllll the way down from my house on 156th st. “Way way upstate” as my friend calls it with a thick Valley girl accent. That’s what she calls my lovely neighborHood, emphasizing a hard H in hood. Being the borough snob that she is, Harlem is just one blurry bubble of ghetto. We’ve migrated uptown for the square footage honestly. The mirage of what should be a Starbucks sign is really a Twin Doughnut.  I’m an uptown boy. I’ve made the transition to fried chicken joints, T mobile kiosks, and Bail Bonds Lawyers. This pretty much wraps up why my peeps are so anti Hamilton Heights. Almost all of my city friends need five days notice for a dinner party. My girlfriend who is spoiled to death by living 200 blocks South of me usually shows up with mace, a hiker’s backpack with an easily accessible water straw, and camping gear, as she dares to risk going north of 59th street.  You would think she was climbing Everest!  “Call me when you get IN town!” she says jokingly as she leaves, as though I’m living in fucking Westchester!

         Riding down to the gay Chelsea Piers dog park on 23rd street feels a lot like slowly walking down the center line of the German Autobahn blindfolded with bikers, swooping and zooming past like lightning bolts in skin tight aerodynamic spandex. These assholes couldn’t be bothered to say "On your left!" or "Right Side!" No, these hard core speed Nazis carelessly command the shared city asphalt that my tax dollars also pay for. “I have a kid here!” I scream…referring to my little dog Harley in a wire basket mounted to my front handle bars. I mean do these people ever achieve their addiction and craving for adrenaline and speed? I mean how fast is fast enough? Do these guys ever get there? Or is it just about the journey? In New York I’d say 99% of all the people living here would say fuck the journey, we want to see some results! These speed demons are like ballerinas, stomachs full of cotton balls, never thinking they’re thin enough or whose leg is just not quite high enough. Or perhaps a model that is probably hungry as Hell, sewing her mouth shut because it’s down to her on one other model for the new Vera Wang spread in Vogue Magazine.

         BAM! A fast flash of brilliant color rushes past my left side like a rainbow school of fish. It’s as if I was competing in some high profile Tour de France getting my ass kicked! If you’ve ever seen the trippy cartoon The Triplets of Belleville you’ll get the desperation I sense in these guys and know what I’m talking about. How can these people bully their way around my meditation highway? Sure I have my pedal to the metal moments of sunlight inspired adrenaline when it comes to an exceptionally nice day. I get excited too and it makes me want to push it and kill it as hard and as fast as I can. But for me the light at the end of the south bound tunnel is all the salt n’ pepper daddies with Puggles and Yorkipoos! 23rd st. on the west side highway is the Bermuda Triangle of homosexual dog lovin'. The cement dog park itself looks like a Matthew Barney exhibit at the Guggenheim during his wax phase. Cruising to cruise boys, I keep it to a medium to safe speed with the safety of my basket-child in mind of course. My first priority is to fasten Harls safely into the basket and perfectly situate little Cleopatra for the ride. Then I go straight to ITunes and choose one of three albums: Lady Antebellum, the soundtrack to Shine the movie, or Quiet Letters-by an artist called Bliss that I discovered in the first Sex and the City movie. Riding a bike is free and it keeps me from doing what comes naturally which is going to brunch and then running into H&M and buying the same shirt over and over again but in a different color.

             I swear the aggression I release from biking and rollerblading by the Hudson keeps me out of the Hudson! After a good workout I’m too tired to hate. The misplaced urban energy is exploding all around us with loud, invasive, gunfire-like fire crackers igniting the hot summer nights... probably set by some very bored inner city kid growing up quite literally on the street. You would think this weekend mosey would be a pleasant experience for everyone, but alas, these damned sneak attacks come from behind and rob me of any comfort-zone I might get into. These peace-killers; these holier than thou ballsy rocket cycling psychos! I swear I’d lay down a Benjamin Franklin for a little warning bell from behind.

         The beautifully maintained parks are a saving grace to everyone that lives here if they know it or not. If Donald Trump bought Central Park and threw up some private gated-off community of luxury condos and high rises inaccessible to the public, the very soul of New York would implode and collapse in on itself. Millions of people would loose their own personal Eden. The Yin to the Yang of Manhattan life is being able to leave it, miss it for a few days, and then come back refreshed. That’s the trick. But if you’re like me you never have the money to travel when you have the time. And you never have the time to travel when you have the money. People are escaping in droves on the first Jitney out of here to the Hamptons.  I myself am usually trying to avoid stepping on Heroine needles at Coney Island!  Harley could realistically come proudly running up to me holding a human femur bone she'd found.......washed ashore from some Russian mob hit!  Ahhhh....nature!  I’m not one of those gay guys with a disposable gay income (DGI). Central Park is the poor man’s escape from the loud taxi cabs, the meetings, or to kill a couple of hours before a dance class or audition. Every day people make a mad dash for the park on their lunch break looking for that one seat on a park bench under a tree. Aloneish is the goal. I’m personally in natural withdrawal myself when it comes to all things green.

            My only sibling is probably dangling from his chalky fingertips from some terrifying cliff’s edge in the grandest of canyons where he works year round as a tour guide. I always wondered if we were truly related.  If I think I’m active, then this boy puts my little city adventures to Shizzame. Emails from my brother Jason sound like episodes of Lost! I’ll get a casual email saying “Living in Costa Rica now, couldn’t go to work today because there was a huge python wrapped around the ladder leading up to my self constructed tree cabana."  Or, "We are in Nicaragua killing ten days because of crazy visa problems.  No worries, but we found some trouble in town and ended up running from a gang of angry, desperate bandits throwing bricks and glass. Don’t tell mom but I'm all f*d up because ran into a barbed wire fence!”    WHAT?!?
My beautiful bro is a banshee of the wildest nature.  He's the best brother a gay guy could dream of having growing up, especially in the deep dark South. He was the popular straight star athlete standing up for me even though I was the older one. Jason’s greatest role was bridging the gap between me and my parent’s religious differences, thus explaining his emotional maturity far out reaching my own. My mother thinks Al Gore invented global warming for political purposes! When things like this come up and get confrontational I tend to clam up and shut down making it impossible to have an effective healthy debate. I get pissed, impatient, and flustered with anger that’s useless to any of my causes. In the city my nickname has always been Tank. But my brother was the original Tank and so I'm referred to as T2 (or tdos). We are very close because it's just me, him, and our parents. Tank was the one building our forts and Indian tepees and I was going in after him and doing an interior design fort makeover at ten years old. “Dream catchers and feathers are so last year” I say gayer than a fucking rainbow. We are close but wildly different. Being a licensed tour guide with EMT safety training, my straight younger brother is like the hippy Brawny man with long blond dreadlocks and crystal sea blue eyes. He is gentle, open minded, wildly spontaneous, and seemingly stress free. He will pack three or four weeks of food, water, and canned goods and bury it in a remote hole deep in the canyon. A week later he’ll disappear over the rim like a possessed Avatar on a meditation mission and live inside the canyon for weeks and weeks without once coming up for air! My idea of camping is sleeping at the Sheraton by the airport or on a friend’s couch. I hate to confess that I never even slept outside till I was thirty years old, how embarrassing. It was so fitting that I should pop my camping cherry deep inside the Grand Canyon at Phantom Ranch, the only establishment in the entire national park that functions as a working lodge. It was built in 1922 for hunters and other hard working folk that found themselves at the mercy of the desert. It’s about a fourteen month wait to get a beautifully kept private cabin if you know someone! But if you’re a friend of my brothers the dusty red carpet is rolled out with all the employee perks. The huge twisssssst here is that this hugely famous ranch is run by a bunch of gay guys! Every Fourth of July they hold a huge drag queen parade all throughout the ranch.  Burly dudes from all over hike in for hours to get to the bottom of the canyon where they pull out wigs and dresses from their North Face bags. Shoes and accessories are planned out with as much detail as rationing food and water for the ass kicking walk to the bottom. In the spirit of the event my brother hiked to the bottom in a mini red sundress!  It is an honor to know this boy. These are my people! After one fiercely humbling hike to the bottom I'm delighted to wash my hands and face with my favorite........classic Method hand soap! There’s no deli in these here parts.

             Now keep in mind that most of the people that visit the Grand Canyon believe the Earth was made in about six days. Jason drives these country bumpkins around in a white National Geographic van all day long spouting approved, legitimately solid scientific evidence. He puts evolution, and the obvious proof of it, in the faces of people like the woman that asked me if I “believed in the Lord?” “I believe in a lot of things” I said sarcastically, getting lost in her puzzled searching look. Long tours like this one with ol’Martha really make my brother want to break free and move to the Southern most tip of South America with nothing more than he can pack on his motorcycle. By the way that’s his latest email. Capuella reigns for this skinny hand-standing Buddha boy.

         On our trip in it took us about three hours to make it all  the way down to the bottoms. And within fifteen minutes of putting my exhausted,  calloused feet up in that gay lodge, I was eating Mongolian duck Pad Thai leftovers from that evenings four star menu, listening to Lady Gaga sing Paparazzi, while getting a foot rub from one of the boys! Why did I ever wait to embrace my natural side? My bro. jumped from crunchy munchy colleague to platinum VIP member by pulling the gay brother card. After all these years it finally paid off for him!

           All the time I find myself sitting at Riverside Park staring at the shimmering Hudson and all the boatloads of people coming and going in and out of the New York City based cruise ship ports...off to Bermuda or anywhere not here. Every day I pull a fucking Harlem chicken bone out of Harley’s greedy little mouth, moments away from getting stuck in her throat. The park makes me momentarily forget about the four am fiestas happening on the front stoop of my surrounding buildings and the hot Harlem nights with infants bouncing up and down on Spanish knees till the sun comes up. These kids obviously have no bed time. This is the uptown shit I’m trying to escape. What was once my parents’ huge three acre Tennessee back yard, is now a small cement courtyard at the entrance of my building. I think about all the times I bitched and bitched about sitting on my dad’s deluxe lawn mower for a couple of hours every weekend and how ironically now my favorite smell in the entire world is freshly cut grass. It's a scent that I can only find now in overpriced soy candles from Urban Cottage. Every single blade of grass counts here in New York just like finding a moment to be alone. What is magical about the city is that you can meet all kinds of crazy people from all over and have delicious, out of the ordinary conversations. But sometimes the best sound is no sound at all.

Unchained mElody

        

         My brother John's fiance' Elody gave me a critical piece of advise the other day that I've been challenged to take to heart and chew on. She said,"Be very very carefull about the internal dialogue you have with yourself about your life and career because what you think about daily will manifest....be it good Or bad!".  My continued worries and fretting (about things totally out of my control: like my auditions and the limited state of affairs in the American musical theatre) leaves me nervous and anxious.  It's no way to live wondering about all the close calls and what ifs.   Believing a kind, empowering word can be like climbing Everest and its so hard to do.  Why can't we step out of ourselves and see what the world sees?  We are always the last to understand our own beauty. I guess that that's the journey everyone is on....to find a stillness and peace within our insane circumstance. This is a lesson Ive learned from my little brother Tank.  His future is brighter than his past and he knows it. I spend so much time reflecting on the past and being worried about the future that I miss the perfection of the present moment.  "What a waste", he would say, "of our life-time!"  Happiness is a full time hobby and requires diligent focus and attention otherwise you end up seeing the world through my eyes.  And that's a world blurred behind an unnecessary scrim.  This must be the final chapter of that person........that guy.  The End.  It's like faking a smile.  Eventually you end up smiling right?!

212

        My "back yard" is really a front entrance cement courtyard three fourths of the way closed in.  Getting a dog and having no other immediate place to throw a ball has forced me to get to know all the neighbors that I've been purposely ignoring for years.  We sneak in like spies quickly fumbling with the keys to our huge glass front door. I try desperately not to get pulled into the annual awkward Christmas party that happens right within view of our lobby. I always pretend to not see the sincerely nice folks trying to get my attention by frantically waving us inside.  "No Fucking Way!" my best friend Johnny will say to me. "Go go go go go....damn it...hurry up.....faster!" The front door jams and the key (as usual) feels foreign to the forty year old rusted lock.  My shaky hand betrays me under pressure and the idea of drinking mulled cider with people that have moved my wet clothes out of the dryer before they were done makes me feel jaded. 
       The reason we can all live here for so many years and not meet any of our neighbors is because our entrance is set apart and private from all the other tenants.  We inhabit a corner part of the first and second floors...a wing if you will?  I've never even taken the elevator before because roof access isn't allowed anyway.  Mail and laundry are the only reason I ever enter the freaky 70's John Water's lobby at all.  We've been the mystery men living in the five bedroom-three bath apartment of dreams with a constant stream of people constantly peeking in our down stars window to get a glimpse of the five singl(ish) ghosts that live here.  When the leaves fall off the trees just outside our front window you can see the sparkling water of the Hudson and the huge ships passing. This is my rented castle and I love it here.  It's all about locatione' locatione'.  What business do I have paying high New York rents in my unemployed state you may ask?  I can't answer that.  I hate that  I'm one rent check away from total poverty and disaster but there's no place like home I suppose.
         I compare my New York existence to a Salmon frantically swimming upstream pushing against the natural flow of absolutely everything.  It is as exhausting as it is exhilarating and I wonder how many years I have left in this tough city or where my motivation will come from to boost me forward.  Will I be here till I'm forty doing the same shit?!  Oh god the idea of still auditioning at that age for mediocre bit parts in regional productions makes me want to run for the country hills or the Hudson!  There is no way I can deal with this kind of rejection and instability at that age (or this age for that matter)!  I think I've had my fill of disappointment for a lifetime already by 31.  I already feel too old for shows like West Side and Hairspray and to young for Jerry Mitchel's latest thing.  Am I supposed to just add testosterone and water and poof I'm a leading man!?  I confess that I'm freaked because how does a 31 year old guy maintain momentum when the young kiddies are filling out of the musical theatre academies in enthusiastic droves and bus loads?  And it seems that all the good shows are going out non-equity anyway.  I don't want to throw in the towel before I've achieved my original goal...to do a Broadway show for more than six weeks and go home every night and sleep in my own bed!
           Right now I am blessed to have just finished a sweet little two month gig that helped fill up the gas tank a bit.  I can't believe that I can celebrate an opportunity to dance my ass off for four hundred dollars a week and have that be enough.  It was great to be working when I know how many of my friends were struggling to stay afloat during the hot city summer.  Even the regional gigs feel like a lottery these days.  There are so many gorgeous guys and so few jobs.  Every day on stage is the Tonys for David Tankersley!  Because I've been an off stage swing for three years it was so unbelievably special for me to have been first cast again (finally) and have someone else writing down my blocking for a change.  I'd almost forgotten the excitement that comes from a half hour call.....instead of tracking down the equity cot first thing for a sensible nap during the show.
        Speaking of equity cots makes me think of one of my major tours that was a nightmare for a couple of reasons. The stage manager was a cunty gay man straight out of the exorcist!  He was a passive aggressive bastard from hell that held an undefined grudge against me.  Let's just say that he wrote up the entire company because there was a traffic accident on the freeway!  The first act alone was an hour and a half...three hours in total and I wasn't allowed to leave the theatre even after the numbers I covered were finished.  Weirdness trickles down from the top.  If your Company manager is cool then your tour will be smooth and hopefully drama free. But then there's those jaded queens that slip through into positions of power and write up 35 people just because.  Doom and Gloom!  I'm not one to use his blog to smear a reputation but.......should his name come up on a list of production staff in a show I was cast in I would seriously consider not taking it even in my desperate state.  I wish I could choose the high road but I guess it's too late now.  I believe in karma and I'm sure this entry is setting me back a few lifetimes but nonetheless my fingers continue to type and have taken on a bitter life of their own.  In my next regretful incarnation I'll probably end up being his son!
          New York City can feel like a turtle neck that's three sizes too small when you're enduring long stretches of unemployment.  I end up being a total insomniac because the idea of waking up, improvising, and filling yet another long day makes me not want to shut my eyes in the first place.  I've got to rethink my approach because I'm nursing a cancerous depression.  I can't tell you how frequently the sun rises on my denial of the coming day.  This perspective is eating away my courage.  I seem to be on vampire time and my DVR list is my Antichrist!  No Law and Order has gone unwatched....no case gone uncracked.  Night after night my counterproductivity thickens and calcifies until I'm rendered useless the next day.  It's a domino effect of disastrous proportions....snap out of it Tank!!!
       My other brother John Sexton wrote a fantastic line in one of his songs that says "Dreams are easy to make....it's time to follow through!"  Interior design.....massage therapy......?   So what's the back up plan?  Perhaps I should become a high end escort or "happiness consultant"?  Nothing sounds more like a slippery slope to disaster I'm thinking.  Nor am I rocking some kind of sweet trust fund like a couple of my friends.
       I never wanted this blog to become some poor me masturbatory sob story of a boy unsalvagably interrupted.  That was never my intention at all but I wont deny that treading water is my full time hobby here in the 212.  Survival is a success.  I'm still here damn it!  But it's time for this "journey" to arrive at a mother fucking destination already!!  I think all cliches expire when you turn thirty don't you?  I don't want to be like the 50 year old guy I saw at the Mama Mia dancer call wearing a peachy-flesh colored unitard and black character shoes and long black socks!  This was disastrous denial and I was embarrassed for him a little bit......if not totally.  I wanted to ask him if he was ok.  Will I recognize my swan song when it's time to hang up the dance belt?  Did I miss it while I had my earphones in or was playing Wurrdle on my IPhone?  There are some dudes that need a reality check and I'm at the front of that line.
       The business of show is infamously inconsistent and unloyal unless you're in Wicked.  I'd never leave that show if I booked it.......possibly ever!  They'd have to call security to escort me out of the building at gun point before I'd let them pry my white knuckles and teeth from Elphaba's broom.  Wild horses couldn't drag me away from a juicy pink contract if they tried!  I would rock that green reality till my crows feet turned to stone and my muffin tops hit the floor.  I would have to be wheeled out of the Gershwin theatre on a stretcher where I would be immediately rushed to an old folks home and put on a regiment of pure oxygen, intravenous fluids, prune juice, and memories.  Some people need to bounce from show to show like a ping pong ball but not me.  Give me a gig that lasts longer than two months and I'd be living the f*n dream!
        An equity card seems to be a hindrance these days because everything good seems to be going out non-eq.....wah wah wah (insert descending tones here).  Que the violins and tissues.  Sometimes my Broadway dream feels like a fading cell phone that's got one tiny bar of service with no outlet or charger in sight....beeping dangerously low on power.  Run thin?  Yes.  Regretful?  No.  There is definitely nothing to regret for me because I've always followed my heart all these years and I'm proud of what I have accomplished in regards to the great American musical.  I've threaded over 12 years of sweet shows together like a candy necklace and I take tiny little bites to remember.  My shows are just geographically challenged that's all.  Off off off off off off off off Broadway if you will?  Just being surrounded by such outrageous talent in glamorous downtown Little Rock elevated my soul and reminded me that it's worth it.  It's a risk I'm still willing to take.  I'll look back in a few months when I'm nine hundred and remember the extreme glamour of gigs like West Side story in Milan, Japan and Beirut.  Security guards and traveling massage therapists......rock star moments frozen in my mind. But the awkward grey areas of unemployment must also be honored.  And I have found undeniable artistic fulfillment from doing great work no matter what the zip code!
       I'm not a cubicle kinda guy and I know my choice to quit competitive figure skating was a big one but I've accepted that path.  I just think that money buys happiness contrary to the popular belief and chorus work leaves me financially dazed.  But I'd rather be a chorus boy with no lines in a Broadway show or the thirteenth dead body from the left on Cold Case than ice skating every day at 5:20AM with no life, no friends, no vices, and puking into trash cans overwhelmed with competition nerves! I literally gag when I think about those freezing early morning freestyle sessions and endless four minute programs that began hours before dawn.  Pair skating for the boys meant cutting the fingers off your gloves if you were allowed to wear them at all!  Oh my god to describe that endless cold is impossible. It hurt your eyeballs.  I wanted to be a performer eight times a week instead of having three major skating competitions a year.  You can't enjoy that.  Each performance felt like I was at gun point with absolutely everything to loose.  There is no relaxing into that life my friends. In fact, it was an absence of life.  When those skaters fall on TV my heart breaks because I know the devastation is irreparable emotionally.  Either you are in Stars on Ice making ten grand a night or you are doomed to becoming a pair skating jelly fish on the Finding Nemo traveling ice show for two hundred dollars a week (in Europe)!  Or you become some washed up skating coach teaching kids in Central Park that couldn't care less about doing a double toe loop or a sensible camel, much less going to nationals.  No thank you!  Anyway there will always be some Russian diva sending money back to his home land that can do quads for tuppins! 
        Evita in Arkansas rocked and the daily rehearsal fed my hunger for excellent choreography and flawlessly calm direction.  I never wanted the show to open because the process was so truly sweet that I wanted it to last forever.  It also gave me the high that comes from putting something on it's feet and being part of a group that talented.  I'm grateful for the opportunity to feel fierce for a few weeks and give that ghost town a Tony worthy performance every time.  Despite the tumble weed blowing through that no horse town I had more fun there than I'd ever expected to.  But it's because of the work itself and my show wife Ann Stonehengeningaengine of course!  She alone made life worth living!  I truly loved this stage left ASM and this Webber show more and more every day.  It was meant to be and it makes me realize that I'm on the right track despite the abhorrent inconsistency of the biz.  This is where I belong......smack dab in the center of the stage on zero.