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.
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.
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.
I. LOVE. YOU.
ReplyDeleteSo good.