Just a number, baby

Last night I bought an amazing thing on iTunes: Dion's new LP, Bronx in Blue. Have you heard about this?? Former doo-wopper (deservedly famous for the raunch that is "The Wanderer," and a bunch of other classics), morphs into plaintive folkie after Dylan hits ("Abraham, Martin and John"), slides into heroin disuse in the confusion of the 60s, and then works his way back into the biz via gospel, then blues. In the '90s I got his Christmas LP, and that was radical enough--the crag of his distinctive voice, combined with wistful awareness of how special it is to stop the world awhile, and realize it's Christmas. Definitely the first CD I pull out on December 15th, when it's time to launch the yule mood.

Dion is 66 years old now. And he's grabbed a resonant acoustic guitar, snagged a playlist of the most down-and-filthy blues ever written, and ripped 'em out into an album. You would never, ever know how old this man is by the sound of his voice and his guitar, friends. Dion is a playa. He's ready...he wants it...he's going after it. He inspires me to believe that age, yeah, is an inconsequential concept. I always try very hard to live by this credo...and here comes a new patron saint of defying convention.

I think what I love the most about Dion is his New Yorkness. I know where he comes from: the ridiculous self-confidence in the face of the odds, the swagger and sway, and the ability to see beauty in unlikely places. The street-corner jive of unaccompanied voices in harmony...magical.

Coincidentally, I also recently bought A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, by Dito Montiel—a memoir of growing up in my old neighborhood, Astoria, Queens. Honestly...I have not cracked it open yet. I'm kind of flinching about reading it, so I keep just touching the cool, shiny cover but not letting myself in. I have long aspired to capture Astoria in literary form, and here comes an upstart (yeah, younger than me) to not only get the book published, but also to get the movie made (coming soon, starring Robert Downey, Jr. Filmed on location. Sigh.) But I must get past the ego-jealousy, and allow myself to sink into flowing nostalgia for that unforgettable place. After all, how amazing is it that someone else valued it as much as I, to center a book on the neighborhood's influence on his life?

 

Queens in Green...okay, a little. Queens in Beautiful Blue...ah, forever.

To honor D.J.

This is partly blog as catharsis, and partly my need for the world to know someone whom they will never know if I don't write about him. It's raw and soaked in tears. I apologize.
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How do I miss thee? Let me count the ways.

 

I miss your raucous, scratchy, knowing laugh, roughened by smoke and years of wicked humor.

 

I miss that you called me "doll" and "darling" and "baby" and "honey" and "bitch". Words I am not likely to hear spoken in reference to myself again.

 

I miss the way you knew my every instinct, my failings, and the way you cheer-led every positive thing about me. I believed those things through you. Now, I am unsure, lonesome, more shrill in my need for guidance.

 

I miss your knowledge of soap operas. Dammit, who else would crow like me: Noah and Scorpio are BOTH back on GH!! Can Anna be far behind?! Are you engineering this from the beyond?? If not, dear God, I hope they have SoapNet up on those clouds.

 

I miss the TV shows you would select for me, tape and send, because you perpetually worried that I didn't get enough down time. The reality shows that we mocked. The dramas that we became hooked on (and dished about, as if those characters lived down the street). The Kathy Griffin outrageousness that was just an extension of our own. The porn you threatened to provide, but never made good on.

 

I miss talking to you about our friends and our families. Sharing the good stories, or raking over the coals as merited.

 

I miss telling you when Peter and I have had ecstatic sex. Eagerly. And I miss that you're the one whose encouragement helped me get to that suggestive self who still entices the man I love.

 

I miss describing women's health issues until you beg for mercy. And my triumph that you actually had a boundary that I crossed.

I miss the fucking phone. Honest to God, no one ever calls me. I guess I crammed in a lifetime of seated, hours-long, receiver-clutching conversations with you.
 

I miss worrying about you, because I desperately wanted to help you get healthy enough for obesity surgery. And worrying was hope, after all. I also miss giving advice that you would gleefully harass your doctors with. Makes me proud, e.g.: I advised you not to take Fen-Phen. Now, when I read about improvements to bariatric surgery, or about some promising finding in a lab, I'm pissed off and thwarted.

 

I miss blabbing about the 70s with you. We both had the exact same outlook on that ridiculous, wide-collared decade. And our worlds both got shaken up by the decade that followed it. Only you know how much.

 

I miss complaining about my mom to you, because she's gone too, dammit, and I'd give anything to have something to say about her, to anyone, but especially to you.

I miss the relish in your voice whenever I told you about my diva Lydia. I know your spirit of impish rebellion and fashion sense has passed into her, but I wish I could update you on exactly how that's manifesting.

 

I miss the New York tang of your voice. The impatience of your tone, keeping the dang conversation moving. The microwave beep that meant your tea was ready. The intake of breath that meant your cig was lit.

 

I miss your advice. Fuck that, I crave your advice. How can I possibly contemplate my future without your input? How can I know if I'm totally crazy thinking something, without you telling me so? Because, honestly, most of the time when you told me that, it was news to me. My psyche needed your take on it.

 

I miss you reading my latest anything. I hate like hell that this blog phenomenon emerged after your passing. I wish you could have started one, too.

 

I miss hearing about your exploits. Your sense of daring outstripped anything I could ever imagine, much less would have ever attempted (or wanted to).

 

I miss the pride in my voice when I told someone about my "best friend." Because you were that, from the first time we met. Remember when we chat-roomed about that a couple of years ago? I saved it, baby, because it made me feel so good:

 

DJ: I thought you were stunning, and lest we forget you were wearing those boots the night we met...grrrrrrr

Nessa: Those boots, the Lil Abners!?

DJ: You were wearing these sort of mohagony colored boots up the knee....
High boots drive me wild....I'm sure I commented that night

Nessa: I have NO recollection of them! Oh man. Did they have spurs? I had spur boots with a spike heel back then....
But they were not past the knee. I never would have been allowed.

DJ: No spurs to my memory, but there were boots and those pants....what were they called?

Nessa: Gauchos??

DJ: No, to the knee

DJ: YES!

Nessa: I wore gauchos and boots. Geez, maybe I was a babe! LOL!!

 

It was like this: I walked up to you on 37th Street. It had rained for hours, and the evening streets were steamy and misty with it, making the orange streetlights glow brighter. We had never seen each other before, but your friend Tom was my burning crush, and I desperately needed intel.

So initially I had cold-called you, which scared me half to death at age 15 (I never did stuff like that). And we talked about music--always my raison d'etre--and you said you loved disco and hated the Beatles.

"WHAAAT??" I yelped into the phone, mortally offended. "What is there about the Beatles that anyone could hate??" (You didn't know it then, but they were my heroes.)

And you didn't back down to impress me, get flustered, or try to be cool. No, you said right back at me over that tinny Queens phone line, flatly: "They can't sing."

Such hubris. No one I knew preferred disco to the Beatles. And your VOICE. It was mesmerizing, dear. Even then, you could have hosted a radio show with that purring, opinionated, bitch-masculine voice.

And so we had decided to meet. And my anticipation was palpable. My hands shook, my heart pounded, I wore my fave of-the-moment clothes (see above). And while there was girl-guy electricity as we drew nearer to each other, coming into focus the closer we got...there was moreso a sense of relief, souls in the same orbit, yin to the yang. A conversation began immediately, no hesitation, and it was a shining thread that never ended until November 3, 2005.

 

Ahhhhh, life goes on, hon. All the ways I miss you are blunted by the busyness of my days. I must nurture my kids, work at a desk for pay, and deepen my love for Peter (an ever-renewing resource, as you well were aware). And I must be the person you always knew I was. Because I am. And I love you forever because you found that person in 1979, and walked with her into the future on a foggy, mysterious spring night.

Grandmother worship

You know, it could take me decades to figure out my relationship with my mom, God rest her soul—and I think I will probably opt not to figure it out, ultimately. I'm cool with that balance of good and not-good...it defined us.

But today I realized that my grandmothers are a completely different story. I openly adore them. In fact, I emulate them. This will be a story with pictures, because part of what I love so much is their demeanor as young women.

Herewith, my nanas:

Theresa, who went by the nicknames "Tut" and "Tutta" all her life:

and Hazel:


These serene-looking young women were both of French Quebecois families, although their lives could not have been more different. Tutta was the "spoiled," cherished youngest of seven children in a small Maine town. Hazel was the eldest of a broken family in Lowell, MA. She and her 4 sibs were frequently shunted to orphanages, despite the fact that both parents were living...they just perenially ran out of money or, I have been told, just decided they were tired of dealing with their kids. Those orphanages were even worse than you think they were.

And yet...and yet, Hazel was a young woman of surpassing optimism, supreme flirtatiousness, and high spirits. Just like her counterpart, Tutta. You could not call either woman complicated. The love they radiated to their families was all-encompassing, and both of them worked diligently without complaint (despite the myth that American mothers never worked until the 1970s. Puh-leeze.)

Tut was a telephone operator. As such, she had her finger (or, in this case, her ear) on the pulse of her small hometown. Knew who was calling whom, and sometimes knew what was said. She was mischievous about this info, but never malicious. And my grampy fell in love with her because every time he tried to place a call through the sweet-voiced operator in his newly adopted town, she sent him astray. He'd call and say, "Connect me to the railroad station," and she'd hook him up with the fire department. Or he'd ask for the grocery store and get a priest. He acted all put out, but inside, he was impressed as hell with her gutsy humor.

When they met, my grampy Fred just melted. She was red-headed and fearless. Eight years older than he, she was also a full foot shorter, and acted younger than he did. And she had long since decided she would never marry. He took four years to persuade her.

This image demonstrates what a spitfire she was. Tut's third from the left, the spunky one. The others in the pic are childhood friends:

Fred and Tut stayed married until her death in 1986. I took this picture of them, and it says it all—the respect, the connection, the fun they shared:

Hazel, meanwhile, toiled at various difficult jobs—nursemaid, textile factory worker, waitress. The man she married was considerably less respectful than Fred, unfortunately, and he drank too much. There was never enough money, there were fights and separations and reunions. When they finally split for good, it was in name only—their hearts stayed intertwined, I'm told. This is the beautiful girl my grandfather Frank met and fell for:


What sass! What shape! I completely admire Hazel when I see this photo.

As she reached midlife, I'm told that Hazel dreaded aging. But she kept her optimism—one friend of hers told me that she was "full of hell," all twinkling eyes and hip-shimmy. And like Tutta, all of Hazel's paramours were younger than she. I recently found this photo of Hazel from the 1960s:


Hazel held me as an infant, and she gave me beloved presents as a toddler. But I cannot remember her. She was killed in a New Jersey bar one night, on her way home from a late shift waitressing at the country club. It was a very famous crime, but I'm not interested in rehashing the gruesome, disputed details. Instead, I concentrate on her spirit: the belief in herself that brought her out of orphanages and sadness, and into determination and fierce love of family.

God blessed me with Tutta throughout my young life. She died when I was 22, and I'll never get over her absence. She was my guiding, calming influence, the teacher who never lectured.


I didn't know anything substantive about Hazel, ironically, until right after Nana died. That's when my father and I spoke for the first time ever in my life, and started exchanging letters. Soon after, his brother Larry gave me the treasured young pictures of her, above. Larry and Dad have both passed away, but I immersed myself in knowing them while I could. Becoming one of them, after years of not knowing that side of myself. Moreover, I now knew whom I most closely resembled.

I guess my grandmother worship comes down to this: I should be so lucky as to have half the integrity of these remarkable women. And how impressive is it that just the sight of them, in photos, suffuses me with love for them all over again?