Here We Go.

Look at how weird my life is getting now. Meetings with lawyers, agents, producers. It’s crazy. I have to keep reminding myself to keep breathing and enjoy the ride because, frankly, it’s about fucking time.

I went for a 3-mile run on Monday and that made me feel sane and stable. I run on the hike and bike trail between the West Side Highway and the Hudson River down to the George Washington Bridge and back. I want to increase the distance so that I can get past the bridge to where the trail goes down closer to the river, but I don’t run regularly enough yet. I’m pretty lenient with myself about that stuff; it’s hard to do those things – run, work out, meditate – every day when every day is different from the one before and every week is different from the one before and every year is … Anyway, the run is beautiful and invigorating, lots of traffic and the gorgeous Hudson and that bridge is awesome when you’re right next to it. It’s so high up.

The temperature dropped yesterday from the 70s to the 50s and 40s overnight. I made a big pot of white bean soup with pork and chipotle. The apartment got all steamy and smoky and the soup was over-the-top delicious. Add cooking to my list above. One of the things that kept me happy and sane (and not fat) the last few years was cooking and eating regularly at home. But it’s a different life here. In the end, I’d rather be a successful theatre artist than a successful homebody.

Where I Am Now.

Now, several months after the end of my relationship with M, it’s easy to see all the things that may not have been perfect about us being together, to see how maybe we weren’t as absolutely compatible as I was convinced we were, as perfect for each other as I begged him to acknowledge, and to say, “Look at all these wonderful things that are happening in my life now that I’ve moved on,” to adopt an it’s all for the best attitude, because of course now I’m doing this, whatever it is I’m doing without him, and if we were still together I wouldn’t be doing this and what a shame so obviously it’s meant to be, or not to be. Whatever. I still go to bed at night and sometimes just ache because I want so badly to throw my arm over him, my palm against his chest. To kiss his neck. To fall asleep and wake up not alone.

Saturday night I made out in a bar with a young man for what seemed like hours and maybe was. Long enough for my lips to be chapped the next morning. He was shorter than me, and several times he stopped kissing me to rest his head against my shoulder, and with one hand I cradled his skull. Near closing time, he took my hand to lead me to an area of the bar where it was dark, where guys go if they want to do more than kiss. As we passed the stairway to the exit, I let go of his hand. He was swallowed by the crowd. I ducked down the stairs and out the door quickly and went home alone. We never said a word to each other.

The last week or more it’s been generally in the 50s at night and the 60s and 70s during the day. The heat has been turned on in T’s building and apparently, like the heat in all these old New York apartment buildings, can’t be regulated much. There’s no thermostat; it’s either on or off. Even with the radiators turned off, the steam pipes that run through the apartment to the upper floors are still blazing hot. So, we have the windows open, because of course you don’t need heat when it’s 65 degrees outside.

Computer Love.

I’m sure everybody knows by now because I haven’t stopped complaining about it that UPS lost my computer monitor on its way to New York from Columbus, Ohio. I visited my brother there on my way here, and I left my car with him because he has room for it in his airplane hangar. Since that was the end of the road for my car, I shipped my boxes from Columbus.

I insured my computer but forgot to insure the monitor, so of course that’s the box that went missing. It was a big, fancy monitor, 27” screen, I edited my film Life in a Box on it. It and my computer were paid for by the film’s budget; I never could have afforded such nice stuff. I was sad to lose it. Since I got here, I’ve been using a 10-year-old Mac G4 notebook computer, which is functional but pretty jenky. It doesn’t play video, for instance.

But, UPS automatically insures every package for $100, and I found a similar monitor on ebay for $60. (Nobody wants a 7-year-old computer monitor except someone with a 7-year-old computer whose monitor was lost.) And the shipping was $40, so I just broke even. It arrived today, by Fedex, which is a New York miracle because this is the only day I could have been home to receive a package since I’m in rehearsals every day now.

I love happy endings.

Speaking of happy, we’ve had a couple rehearsals now with the cast. Three of the women are back from last fall’s production and one is new, the woman who plays Emma, Lizzie’s sister. The new girl is great. The old girls are still great. Our director is wonderful, very smart. She loves and understands the show. And our music director is some kind of perfect.

There was a moment in yesterday’s rehearsal, during the scene in which Lizzie begs Alice Russell to lie for her to the police, and Alice, though she loves Lizzie, cannot do it, when I started crying, and I looked to my left and Tim was crying and then to my right and Alan was crying. All three writers were crying. Hate to brag, but this show is heartbreaking. I’m awed by what this cast brings to our words and music, to these characters and this story. It’s a wonder. And it’s a privilege to work with such talented artists.

There's A Place For Us.

The song "Somewhere" from West Side Story is constantly in my head because the A train, which I take every day to wherever it is I might be going, as it approaches the station sings the first three notes. At first I thought it was an effect of the wheels on the tracks, but it is too regular and it happens at every station.

"There's a place..." That song always fills me with nostalgia. West Side Story was the first musical I worked on in a community theater production in Greencastle, Indiana. I was 13, on the stage crew, and Mike Van Rensselaer, who was lanky and handsome in a mid-70s way, played Tony. Every night as I stood backstage waiting for my cue to roll out one of the brick walls for the rumble scene, it was like Mike was singing to me. "There's a place for us...."

Anyway.

The other thing that's new about the subway since I lived here last is a woman's recorded voice on nearly every platform announcing the arrival of each train. She's super-cheerful and sounds like she's from Kentucky by way of Minnesota. It cracks me up every time, those hard nasal "a" sounds, an accent and tone so out of place here where daily one hears dozens of different accents but seldom that one. And she is announcing the arrival of trains, which is useless information. It's obvious when the train is arriving. It's big and loud. Information that might be helpful -- schedule changes, tracks changes, etc. -- is still bleated over a p.a., almost always garbled and incomprehensible. Just like the New York I remember.

I've been working part-time in a prop rental shop in Greenpoint. An old friend got me the job very soon after I arrived, and I'm grateful to have some income and to be working in a congenial place with varied enough tasks that I'm not dying of boredom.

The commute from Inwood to Greenpoint is almost an hour and a half door to door. So far, it's not bothering me a bit, though. After living in places where I had to drive everywhere -- if you know me, you know I hate driving -- I'm falling in love all over again with public transportation. I'm getting lots of reading done. I'm reading In Search of Lost Time again, the new Lydia Davis translation. (Which is great, by the way. If you've always wanted to read it but you're intimidated by its "great modernist masterpiece" reputation, don't be. It's a huge pleasure to read. I read the whole thing a few years ago when I was living and working in a very quiet, remote village in southern Utah for 8 months, but it's so long and rich and dense and entertaining that the first thing I thought when I finished it was that I wanted to go back to the beginning and read it again. Lots of time for reading may be the only thing the New York subway has in common with southern Utah.)

I work Monday next week and then I have two weeks off. I'll be working, but not for the man. As I’ve said, the two main reasons I moved back to New York were, one, because my heart was broken and I needed a change of scenery and, two, because big things are happening in my career. (I guess the real main reason I moved back is that I couldn’t make a living in Austin, but the heartbreak and Lizzie Borden are what spurred me to move now.)

The National Alliance for Musical Theatre festival of new musicals presentation is happening in a couple weeks. (If you're in New York, you can come to this event free. The performances are on Oct. 21 and 22, during the day.) I know I’ve said this before, but this is a huge fucking deal for the show and for me as an artist. Theater producers from all over the U.S. come to this conference to check out the most promising new musicals, and only eight are chosen each year to be presented. Eight. We start rehearsals on Tuesday!

Bags!

So far the hardest thing about being back here, after having been away and cultivated a different way of living, and I knew this would challenge me, is shopping and eating the way I want to. I just stopped at the neighborhood supermarket on the way home from running some errands. I didn’t have bags with me. I was buying some fruit, lettuce, a quart of half and half. As the cashier was ringing up my items, I said to the guy bagging groceries, “You can put it all in one bag,” and he nodded as he pushed one plastic bag into another. While I was paying, he put the lettuce in the double bag and then grabbed another bag and started putting lemons into it. I said, “One bag is enough.” I don’t think he understood me – stressful moments like this are exactly when I need to use my Spanish, but they are the moments when I am least able to -- because by the time I had paid the cashier, he had my 8 or 10 items waiting for me in 4 double bags.

Feeling like a total asshole, I started pulling everything out and putting it in one bag. He said, “It’s too much!” I said, “It’s not too much. I live less than a block away. I don’t need 8 bags to carry home my groceries.”

Eight bags! It’s so absurd. I can’t even get my mind around what motivates that kind of behavior. On the other hand, I was able to buy local apples.

But it’s not just the bag issue. It’s the fact that natural food stores are in neighborhoods I can’t afford to live in, and it’s not easy to find local produce, especially not in the cold months. And because life is very busy and hectic here, I won’t be doing as much processing and preserving and cooking all my meals from scratch at home.

I’m not going to fret too much about it, not so soon. I’ll allow myself time to discover ways to get as close as I can manage to the kind of conscientious life I want to live given the circumstances of living in New York. One thing that will help a lot is having a bigger kitchen.

*

One thing I’ve noticed, living in so many very different places in the last 10 or 15 years, is that the dust in different places has very different qualities. Different texture and color, different rates of accumulation. I think it was Jersey City where the dust was blue. Like blue blue. Here it’s more black, but it has a bluish cast and it’s very fibrous, almost wooly. In Austin our yard was mostly dirt and there was often some kind of construction going on, so the dust was more like dry earth, powdery and brown, and it built up fast. I’d wipe things off on my desk and within a couple hours there was a visible layer of dust again.

I Love Where I Live.

I just remembered that I got hit in the head with a chair last night! The first thing I thought after it happened was, “Now that’s why I moved back to New York!”

I had a date last night. A man I met and chatted and exchanged numbers with at the Eagle, a handsome man, a painter, asked me over for “dinner and drinks.” I left my job at the prop shop in Greenpoint at 5, came back to T's to shower and change. It would have been easier not to come all the way up to Inwood and then back downtown but I needed a few moments to relax and get my second wind. The new job, getting up at 6 a.m., walking everywhere again ... I was dog-tired.

He lives in a little apartment in Chelsea filled with his paintings. He made cocktails with ginger vodka and lemon juice. They were potent and I had two of them before dinner, which was beautiful and delicious: a chicken breast broiled with New Mexico chili, a baked sweet potato, spinach with lemon and capers, Israeli cous-cous. We smoked some pot.

I hadn’t noticed the night I met him the deep creases at the sides of his mouth which could have been age but more likely were the result of HIV drugs because he also, and I hadn’t noticed this before either, had the tell-tale distended stomach and lack of ass. I won’t say I didn’t have a slight reaction of, if not fear, apprehension, which of course is completely irrational because, even if you were going to have risky sex (and you always have the choice not to) you’re much less likely to contract HIV from someone who is on long-term anti-viral drugs than from someone who is not. But who ever said we were rational creatures?

At any rate, he was charming and eccentric, gracious, sweet, and the vodka and marijuana… After dinner, we had amazing sex -- if the quality of sex is measured by the intensity of physical sensation and I question more and more whether that is the best metric; my experience with M showed me that the whole sex and love thing may not be just propaganda -- the sex of experts, a kind of sex completely without mystery that only people who’ve been around the block so many times there’s nothing to discover can have. It was hot because we knew exactly how to make it hot.

But then it was over.

He said, “I hope you can stay,” and I said I wanted to wake up at home which meant I didn’t want to sleep with him.

It was only 11 when I left, and I was in the neighborhood, still a little drunk and high and craving a beer, so I stopped at the Eagle. Usually the Eagle is sort of all about horniness but I was a little spent so I went up to the roof and sat looking I imagined aloof and handsome. Maybe not too aloof because within a few minutes a very cute bearded man, young I thought, sat next to me saying, “There wasn’t anyone sitting here, was there?” I said, “Not that I know of.”

I tried to steal glances at him, sitting there right beside me, but I wasn’t at all sure if he’d sat there because he wanted to sit next to me or sat there just because it was a place to sit. Is he shy? Should I say something? Or should I pretend I don’t even notice him and thereby avoid humiliation? (Despite my feeling that I might look attractive, I always believe that anyone who I think is handsome is almost by definition handsomer than me. I’m not even sure what that means, but it’s true.) He lit a cigarette. He said something about the porn playing on a TV over the bar. I think he said it was mesmerizing. I said, “They usually play really good porn here, but tonight it’s kind of bad.” Which it was. But it was a TV screen and impossible not to look at. Then I said, “But I guess everyone has their own particular taste when it comes to porn.” And he said, “You just said a true thing,” or something like that. He had a strong Australian accent and used a lot of idiomatic expressions I couldn’t make out. I think he called the bathroom the dunney.

We sat and talked and got drunker and drunker till almost closing time (which in New York I’d like to mention is way too late). He’s a solicitor taking some time off to grow a beard and travel. He’s more or less backpacking with a buddy. They’re staying somewhere on the Upper West Side sharing a single bed to save money. We talked about traveling, the places we’d been. He was small with a bright disarming smile, black hair and eyes, and I told him I thought he was very handsome and he said, “Likewise,” which could have meant that he too thought he was handsome, but I don’t think that’s what he meant.

Several times he said things that, because I was drunk I can't recall today, made me think he was very insightful and sensitive and emotionally self-aware.

I was glad that I’d just had sex because, though I wanted to touch him and I did put my hand on his leg a couple times, I didn’t feel that intense urgency to go somewhere and fuck that usually backgrounds these types of encounters. I told him I’d like to see him again and he took my number. He texted me so I would have his, but it’s an Australian number and it came through as a regular phone call, not text. When I heard last call I said I had to go. I asked him if I could kiss him. I don’t remember if he said yes or nodded or if I just kissed him without waiting for an answer.

On the street outside, I texted him saying I’d enjoyed hanging out and looked forward to seeing him again. I’m doubtful I’ll hear from him, but who knows.

Around the corner on 10th Avenue, I stopped for a slice. There was something happening on the sidewalk in front of the pizza place, a big group of people shouting and looking agitated but I didn’t think much of it since at 4 in the morning on 10th Avenue there’s nothing unusual about that sort of behavior. I made my way through the crowd and was headed for the counter as a couple guys and a woman came running from the back of the restaurant toward the front door. On the way, one of them picked up a chair, one of those sturdy but light aluminum chairs, and lifted it over his head. As he ran past me, it banged the side of my head hard enough to hurt but I was drunk enough to be more amused and intrigued than scared or angry. I sat down at a table and watched the chaotic running around and shouting, someone saying over and over, “Chill! There are cops outside!” until finally they did chill, and I got up and ordered my slice and walked to the train at 34th Street. Miraculously, the A train came within minutes -- sometimes late at night you have to wait forfuckingever -- and I was home in bed by 5.

I have a slight headache today and a bit of a knot on the side of my head and I can’t stop smiling.

Almost Two Weeks.

I've been here less than two weeks and already I have 4 jobs! I haven't started any of them yet. I interviewed last week for a job at a prop furniture rental shop in Greenpoint. They called yesterday and said they'd like me to do some work for them on an "as-needed basis, and we have a need now." I think they just want to check me out before they say anything too committal. In the interview, she (I think you'd call her a manager, though it was a small operation and it seemed like everyone did everything) said it would probably be 2 or 3 days a week.

I'm also going to babysit a friend's son (he's 9) about once a week in the East Village. And I'm going to help a friend of a friend organize her files, and then some time later in the fall I'm going to do some house painting for a friend.

***

It's been chilly at night and in the mornings, but I find myself superstitiously avoiding putting on a sweater or even a long-sleeve shirt. I don't trust the cool weather, I've been so traumatized by the Texas heat. It's been gorgeous out, the kind of bright, cool fall that New Yorkers live for. It's still hot in the subway. I've forgotten how long it takes for that hot air to be displaced in the fall.

***

I cleaned and rearranged T's kitchen yesterday, spent most of the day on it. T and I have been friends for 20 years. I love him with all my soul. He has many talents but keeping the house clean is not among them. The kitchen was a mess, dirty and cluttered with no place to work and no place to sit. I moved stuff around and created some counter space for cooking and a little eating nook by the window. It's very tenement civilized. Huge difference. And it made T happy to come home from work and see the kitchen transformed. That in itself made the effort worthwhile.

When people ask me for advice about cohabitation, whether it's as friends or lovers (and oddly enough, people ask me), I always tell them my one rule is, "If you think something needs to be clean, clean it." Seriously, stop trying to figure out how to get the other person to do it and just do it yourself. Then it'll be clean and you'll be happy. It doesn't matter who left the dishes in the sink. If you wash them, they'll be gone. Problem solved. What's so horrible about doing something nice for someone like washing their dishes?

People have different styles of housekeeping, different priorities, different levels of dirtiness that they notice or tolerate, and it's probably impossible to change them much. All the trying and the resentment it creates on both sides just corrodes the relationship. My threshold of cleanliness is somewhere halfway between clean freak and slob -- I've been on both sides of the dispute in my various households over the years.

***

It's hard to believe I've been here for almost two weeks now. I'm happy.