Nuyorican Obituary

My fourth day in the world of advertising. I had imagined, perhaps as many of you have, that the world of advertising, the big corporate for-profit world of advertising, was much like it has been presented in the movies or on TV. Darrin Stephens working for McMann and Tate, struggling to come up with the one concept that will make or break an account. I do not want that job. That’s not why I took this job at D——. What job I do have I am not
entirely sure of. Seems to be a lot of writing. I am not exactly sure what tomorrow will bring. Which is why I took this job. Some details: 600 employees, in regular or plastic cubicles (sadly, the plastic ones look like leftovers from the set of Quintet or Logan’s Run) and glass-doored offices. The printers are out in the open and shared by everyone. Which sucks, if you know me. The company takes up half of the building, and there is a kitchenette and lounge on each floor, with free (but not-so-good) coffee and vending machines. Best perks: I work on a Mac, the bathrooms are clean, I do not have to wear a gray flannel suit. Or even underwear.

So this is my last week at the Office of Marketing and Communications at Pace University. Here I am pictured in one of the quirkier moments with T-Bone, the school mascot. Say what you want about T-Bone, about the cocaine abuse and all the illegitimate litters, but at least he was always down for a game of dominoes. I am moving to a gig at an advertising agency. It’s a good opportunity but frankly I’m a little scared of change. Old dog, new tricks, and all that. No offense, T-Bone. I’ve gotten very comfortable at Pace. But a dirty, used futon on a creaky frame in a dimly lit sublet by the highway may eventually become comfy even though it’s filled with bed bugs and makes you itch and sweat and argue with a woman you may have an ambiguous relationship with but who you really care about. Hmm, not sure where that metaphor went. Change, I understand, is good. Arf!

Thanks to the good work of Chief Engineer Ernesto, AsininePoetry.com is back up. Also, we recorded another an all-new podcast featuring Halloween poems, including the following–

TRICK
by Me

FOR an October Saturday I am up early in the kitchen
attempting Martha Stewart’s recipe for pumpkin pie
not especially difficult but still it is Martha Stewart
The cheese pumpkins roast in the oven at 350 degrees

I have a sweater on yet no pants
For all the costumes I’ve seen so far, the Spider-Man,
the warted witch, the pale-faced vampires,
I smell little fear in the air, for ghouls

Hallowe’en is told to be a liminal time of year
when the dead can contact the living
as the cheese pumpkins will tonight at dinner
with a dollop of freshly whipped cream

I mix the ground ginger and cinnamon, get out the cloves
Cloves scare people, almost as much as nutmeg
I grate them on the microplane and draw blood
Fucking microplane

If a boy dressed as George Bush not as satire
but as homage, that would be scary
If another dressed as a terrorist
I wouldn’t be surprised

Martha says to take the pies out before
they are done cooking otherwise
the surface will bloat and then crack
and your presentation is shot to hell

I set the hot pies by the open window for cooling
it is chilly and the hairs on my legs raise
I light the day’s fourth cigarette
and in the yard I spy a miniature hurricane of fallen leaves

I imagine it is an infant poltergeist
a sleepless soul inured to rocking
remembering in its dervish
the sweet tastes of autumn

That night however my nightmares are of Martha
in a business jacket and prison pants
and she is excoriating me with a pitchfork
because my crust was ready-made.

The pumpkin photo, by the way, is by my friend Christa.

Visitors to AsininePoetry.com may have noticed the usually stalwart site is not working. The editors are not on strike. And while many of them are illegals, they have not been deported. Non, there is a problem with the server. A glitch in the matrix perhaps. Or a tribble in the quadrotriticale. In any event, Engineer Chief Ernesto is on the case. Please bear with us. For now, perhaps this blog’s minor amusements or our MySpace may fulfill some of your asinine needs.

Picking the lock of an old apartment mailbox in a cramped vestibule is harder than you’d think. No matter how many bobby pins are around. Driving a beat-up, graffitied van while navigating an ambiguous relationship, though, is about as difficult as you’d imagine.

As a youth dressing as Caspar the Friendly Ghost three years in a row until the costume could no longer fit.

At about 8 or 9 not being able to trick or treat because my parents were scared we’d get kidnapped or poisoned.

Side note: Underoos came out the year after I was too big to fit in them. This caused a melancholy that lasted for years.

At 18 dressed up for a Halloween party with adults and feeling ridiculous in a costume. I remember  exactly what I wore and am still too embarrassed to admit it.

At 24 thinking I’d come up with a cool at-that-time obscure pop culture character to
dress as and then getting progressively more depressed as one, two, then three other Zorros, each one more accurately and expensively attired, the final one with an actual sword, walked into the party.

All through my 30s my costume was that of a hard-working professional. What I was underneath that, who knew?

At 40 attending a costume party as Satan in Pennsylvania and progressively losing my horns, my tail,  and my bowtie by the end of the night.

I am a Brooklyn boy, born and raised, and so I never needed wheels. Anywhere I had to go my sneakered feet or the subway  took me (although I did have Big Wheel as a kid I was rather fond of). So there was no need for me to learn to drive a car. But I made sure I did when I was 21–I took some lessons from a fly-by-night school in Hoboken; they had those cars with two sets of steering wheels and two sets of brakes. My instructor was this jeri-curled man who used to grab the wheel from me, even though he had his own. Till today someone grabbing my steering wheel makes me very upset. I suppose it’s a control thing. In any event, I learned a little enough that I felt confident to ask my not-easy-to-ask-anything-of father if he could teach me some more driving skills in his car, a Ford Bronco. Surprisingly, he said, “Sure” and put me in the driver’s seat right away. Well, it was that day that I learned about the concept of what the loverly folks in Detroit call Pick Up. The Bronco roared and we pretty much careened uncontrollably down the block for 10 seconds before I stopped the vehicle by parking it into the passenger side of a parked vehicle.

Last driving lesson with dad.

I paid for some more lessons with any agency and got my license, on the second try. Oh, I could parallel park all right on that first try, but apparently it’s best if the car is not a mile from the curb. So, I finally got my license but found no opportunities or need to drive. There was the one time my boss from my first publishing job asked me to run the proofs over the Union City and gave me his car keys; he drove a boat of a car, a Caddy; in one day, I scraped one parked car (they’re really just sitting ducks) and hooked fenders on an inclined street with another. Then there was the ripping off of some guy’s rearview mirror. Long story. So since then I’ve done road trips and driven in the madness of rush hour, but I have raced, oh I have raced as if the ghost of Dale Earnhardt himself had taken over my skilless hands, gripping the unwilling wheel hugging every sinuous curve asymptotically, and commanding my two left feet to subtly control the speed and sway of my brightly painted four-wheeled iron horse underneath me: Reader, I mean to say have raced go karts.

Now, you may scoff. Go ahead, I’ll give you a minute. Or two. But let me tell you something, I will admit that on the streets of New York City I may sometimes drive like an old lady, afraid of being crushed by some careless bastard in a Humvee (and don’t ask why anyone would buy a Humvee to try the narrow streets of the City) or of crushing some artsy fartsy daydreaming in his own entitled world. But on the track, oh on the sweet go-kart tracks in Coney Island—on the International Speedway it’s $6.00 for 10 laps, and here the sweet vehicles are decorated to represent different nations (Go France!)*—I am become a madman, un demonio de la velocidad!, a race car driver. If men must needs be mean, I am never meaner than on that track. My dear nieces and nephews could be out with me that day, enjoying the beach and the weather together, but for that duration of that ride, they see only the dust I leave behind. I pass everyone, I cut everyone off, I win every time. So, you want a race, you want a race? ANY DAY.

* Of course now that Coney Island is getting a makeover they’ve taken the speedway away.

Finally got my hairy hands on the latest issue of Murdaland Magazine with my story in it. During my weekly trip to my cavernously empty P.O. Box I decided to stop off at St. Mark’s Bookstore. It had been listed on Murdaland’s site as one of the place to seize the magazine (thanks to Elric of Pennsylvania for pointing out that link to me). I looked in the front window of St. Mark’s, expecting of course to see a placard that read “Read R. Narvaez’s newest tale in Murdaland!” Next to a stack of 1,000 copies. Umm, but no. Anyway, a clerk I asked knew exactly what I was talking about and led me to the litry area of said store (I had looked in the crime section to no avail), and there twas, several new issues. Some excellent stuff therein, stories I’m proud to shares pages with. My thanks to Murdaland editors Michael Langnas, Sean O’Kane, and Dennis Flynn for believing in my story.

The theory behind these things is that you learn a lot of little things about your friends and family. Apparently, it is important to know every trivial detail about the people in your life. What are we, Homeland Security? But let me not be cynical–I enjoy the sweet self-involvement these things allow me. So here once again is an e-mail quiz for posterity.

1. First name: Richie
2. Were you named after anyone? I like to think I was named after Richie Valens, or the salsa singer Richie Ray. Or Lionel Richie. But I could just have been named after my Uncle Jose.
3. Do you wish on stars? Yes. And birthday candles. And rainbows. And puppy dog tails. And asteroids hurtling toward the Earth. O Great Apophis!
4. When did you last cry? While watching Daylight with Sylvester Stallone. For reasons that almost had nothing to do with the movie
5. Do you like your handwriting? Yes. Especially when I cash a check.
6. What is your favorite lunch meat? Serrano ham
7. What is your birth date? June 20
8. What is your most embarrassing CD? Barry Manilow’s Greatest Hits. The bootleg.
9. If you were another person, would YOU be friends with yourself? Yeah, but I’d ask, “What’s up with the hair?”
10. Are you a daredevil? No, more like a spiderman.
11. Have you ever told a secret you swore not to tell? Hell yeah! You got one?
12. Do looks matter? Not to the blind.
13. How do you release anger? I take a while to boil, but when I do my voice shakes and I can be very cutting. At other times I am horribly passive aggressive. Most times, my medication keeps me in check.
14. Where is your second home? Alpha Centauri.
15. Do you trust others too easily? What makes you ask that? What are you after?
15. What was your favorite toy as a child? My cat Skidmark.
16. What class in high school do you think was totally useless? None. Every experience teaches us something. Except for some of the meetings I have to go to at work.
17. Do you have a journal? What do you think this is?
18. Do you use sarcasm a lot? Nooooooooo.
19. Favorite movie(s): Miss Congeniality.
20. Would you bungee jump? Only if there were 50 tons Jello beneath me (strawberry).
21. Do you untie your shoes when you take them off? Not always. But it does seem to take longer that way.
22. Do you think that you are strong? Strong-smelling, yes.
There’s 28 more but that’s enough, don’t you think?

Got news today from the editors at Murdaland Magazine that their new issue is out, with my story “Roachkiller” in their slick, literary crime fiction pages. I plan to inveigle all my friends to buy multiple copies. Or bribe them with beer. I went searching at Mystery Book Store on Warren Street but they didn’t have it yet. I’ll let you know when I hold an issue in my hairy little hands.