Josh & Josh are Rich and Famous

Bookgasm

It started when I climbed the stairs out of the subway and stepped into a hot, humid, windless Manhattan summer day. A film of sweat and humidity encased my arms and my legs and slithered up my back, settling between my shoulders.

I got to my desk and several monstrous lopsided piles of work stood staring at me. (I've been doing the jobs of three people since everything went down at work.) I took a long breath, sat down, logged into my computer, and immediately felt the creeping grip of malaise take hold.

I picked up the phone.

"Skip, I think I'm having 'my time of the month,'" I said. My computer made whirring noises as it started up. I wanted to reach for a copy of Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. (Can you hear me, Judy Blume?) "I'm all moody and brooding and craving chocolate. Now if I was just bloaty and having cramps it'd be perfect."

Skip laughed. "I tell you what, kiddo: Let's meet over lunch and I'll give you the keys to my apartment. You can walk over, take a nap, and come back to work. You'll feel much better."

I muttered back something incoherent--probably thanking her for being so kind to me--and then my thoughts shifted to the important matter at hand: the need for chocolate and Diet Coke. I wasn't going to make it through the morning without them.

On my walk to the nearest Duane Reade I started to contemplate the day's sucky mood. What was going on? I hadn't had a quality crappy mood day in a long time.

There was the matter of not sleeping nearly enough. There's the work insanity and instability and trying to figure out what's next for me. I just finished a relationship, and started another. I'm in an intensive fiction writing class, and the work isn't flowing like I want it to. My best friend moved home, I miss him, and I don't know how long I can stay in the apartment where I live now. All of this descended like a proverbial X-ray vest on my chest. I closed my eyes and let out a long stream of breath.

Back at my desk my brain slowly started stewing and churning. Each item slipped into my brain's little thought washing machine, turned on heavy wash, and started squeezing and spinning.

Finally, a couple hours later, after my brain had rinse cycled and permanent pressed all of my whiny thoughts, a brilliant solution came to me in a moment of genius: retail therapy.

Some people love shoes. Others snap up expensive clothing.

Me? I have books.

During lunch I eschewed the nap option, grabbed a sandwich, and set off for Strand on 12th and Broadway, one of my favorite bookstores in Manhattan.

"Only one book, only one book," I muttered to myself while chewing bites of my sandwich, repeating my mantra over and over again as my other hand fingered the American Express card in my pocket.

Once I was in the bookstore, it was no use. My sandwich was gone, and so was my mantra.

The first book to enter my arms? Alice Walker's The Color Purple, one of my favorite books. I hadn't read it in years, and didn't have a copy in New York, and knew I had to have it.

Catcher in the Rye leaped into my hands next. The narrative voice is so deceptively simple, and it's such a classic. I hadn't read it in years, either, and decided it deserved another go 'round. Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass came next. An overwhelming desire to read Whitman's "Song of Myself" washed over me, and I knew I was a goner. It ended up in the pile in my arms.

I took a chance on the last book, a tome titled That Summer in Paris, written by Abha Dawesar. (No, it ain't chick lit. Calm yourself down.) I've had this nagging ache to go back to Paris lately, and I knew I had to have the book. I read the jacket cover and, without a second thought, it made the cut.

I walked up to the counter with a ridiculous smile on my face and plunked down my four books. ("Only four books, only four books" had been my mantra after all, right? So.) As I slapped down my Amex I felt a tingle start at my toes, shoot up my legs, through my abdomen, and into my brain. I grew a little flushed as the clerk's fingers danced over the cash register keys, and felt my breathing speed up as the receipt shot out of the cash register. I had to steady myself against the counter.

The clerk gave me a long, sideways glance and handed me my bag of books. I took a long breath and wiped my forehead with the back of my hand.

"Thanks," I said.

Retail therapy complete.

I returned to my desk, bag in hand, and again sat down at my computer.

Just like that, the crap mood was gone. Dunzo. Just like the sandwich, just like the book mantra.

Sure, the books helped. Sure. But there also comes a time when your brain can only obsess about things for so long, and then you just have to keep going, keep living, keep moving. Sometimes the only way through it all is through it. The crap stuff is there, I acknowledge it, whine about it, do whatever, and then move on. I go for a run, I buy some books, I go to yoga, I take a hot shower, I take a nap. I shut my eyes. I breathe. I let go.

It's just life.

It's just living.

But enough of my trite couch philosopher crap. I've got reading to do.

Celie and Nettie are waiting for me, running through a great wide field of purple flowers, and I intend to follow.

--Josh H.

Manhattan: Home of The Craptastic Haircut

I got out of the subway on the Upper East Side and discovered that since leaving the Village the clouds had ripped open, casting a torrential downpour on unsuspecting New Yorkers.  (I, however, was suspecting.  I always keep my little red umbrella stashed away in my messenger bag.  Be prepared, right?)

I hadn't been back on the Upper East Side in at least six weeks, where Josh and I lived for nine months, and I was surprised by how distanced I felt from it.  It no longer in any way felt like home.

I trudged up to a salon on Third Avenue, stepping out of the downpour that left my pants sopping, and dumped my umbrella in the bucket the salon put out front for just that purpose.  I collapsed into the shampoo chair and had to stop myself from making inappropriate "mmmm" noises as the tiny Asian woman washing my hair started kneading my neck and massaging my head in the style of a Swedish masseuse, all the while slathering my hair in scrumptious-smelling shampoo.

This, of course, leads to the point where I end up in the cuttin' chair with a Ukranian woman standing over me, asking "Vat I vant to do vis my hair."  I was still half in a coma from the shampoo lady working me over, and I showed the stylist with my fingers how much I wanted off, and where.  We had a brief chat about the overall idea of what we were aiming for, and then I promptly closed my eyes and proceeded to enter a half-sleeping, half-awake state of being.

I shouldn't have done that.

I couldn't help it, though.  I was really, really tired.  I haven't had eight hours of sleep in a night since Jesus was doing the bread and fishes trick.  I vaguely remember that I have an apartment in Washington Heights, but I haven't been there, except to sleep, in more than a week.  I had rushed to the salon straight from work, and was booked into dinner at at nearby Chinese place, and then set for a three-hour writing workshop a few blocks south.  I wouldn't be home until well after eleven.  This haircut was to be my disco nap, my rejuvination before facing the rest of my night.

When I opened my eyes, most of my hair was gone.  She just lopped 'er off.  My eyes widened.  I felt the first grips of panic ("OhGodohGodohGod"), but then an equal-and-opposite calming force took precedence.  I sighed.  After all, should I have been surprised?  Not really.

Since moving to New York City, I've had seven of the worst haircuts of my life from three or four different salons.  I don't know what it is with this city, but for $30 you're virtually guaranteed a sumptous botched abortion of a haircut at any Manhattan salon of your choosing.  (Thirty dollars in Minneapolis, by comparison, will get you a fun, sexy, reliable haircut.  How I miss thee sometimes, Rocco Altobelli.) 

I don't know how they manage to do it, but each Manhattan haircut has had its own particular brand of horridness.  You sigh, look in the mirror, poke at the mass atop your head, and think "Well, it'll grow back."  And then you think, "Maybe next time will be different."

Then, of course, you laugh out loud with such force that you startle the dog next door. 

You can't help it, but you feel just slightly better.

It's just hair.  It'll grow back.

--Josh H.

Guilty New Yorker

It happens every Monday. Another copy of The New Yorker appears in my mailbox, and I often freeze up when I see the shiny new magazine. I pick it up gingerly as if it might scold me, knowing my dirty little secret.

What's the dirty little secret, you ask? It's the little stack of New Yorkers I have piled up on my desk, just waiting to be read. There are four sitting here right now, staring me down as I write this.

See, I have this weird thing where I don't want to start a new one until I finish the last one, because then I'm afraid I won't come back to the first one, and what if there's something really good in the first one? I'm always afraid I'm going to miss out on something amazing. There is always at least one article in The New Yorker that holds me completely spellbound, and I'm afraid of missing that magic article if I just speed off and start a new one.

Thus, the mini stack.

Thus, the guilt.

Thus, the dilemma.

Getting a New Yorker every week is like getting a short novel in the mail. There's just so much to read, and how to fit it all in?

Can you imagine if I got The New York Times, too? I'd probably have a meltdown.

So much reading, so little time.

I'd write more, but I gotta go. The June 12th edition with the two soliders on the front is calling, and it totally has my number.

--Josh H.

Diet Coke With A Straw

Thank God for the food cart guy on the corner who sells cans of Diet Coke for a dollar.  Everybody else in the office loves to sneak off to Starbucks to cavort with four-dollar gourmet coffees, but all I ever want is to hand over my buck to the Indian guy and feel that ice cold can of Diet Coke in my hands.

I think they call this addiction.  I prefer to call it regularly occurring appreciation.  But I digress.

This food cart guy always gives out straws with his cans of soda.  Being from the Midwest, I have this ingrained habit of not saying to Indian Food Cart Guy, "Oh, sorry, I don't really need this."  Instead I quietly take the straw with my soda and then toss it in the garbage later.

This straw routine has been going on for a few weeks now, and this morning I finally gave the straw some philosophical contemplation.  ("Straw, why art thou with my delicious 12 ounces of Diet Coke?")  I hypothesized that straws are perhaps given with sodas because maybe they think you're afraid the tops of the cans are dirty and using a straw sidesteps that whole OCD issue.

But then, eureka!  Like a movie flashback, my dentist appears in my mind and says, "Josh, don't drink that soda.  It'll stain your teeth.  You want your teeth to stay white, don't you?"  He says this very sternly, of course.

But the straw!  See, you could bypass the whole soda-getting-on-your-teeth-and-staining-them thing if you use a straw.  The straw allows you to consume the evil Diet Coke without the brown liquid ever touching your teeth.

Grinning at my ingeniousness, I returned to my desk at work, popped the top on my D.C., and stuck in the straw.  Finally, a use for this thing!  If only Indian Food Cart Guy could see me now, and my dentist, too!

Then one of my co-workers walked by.  I was sipping my Diet Coke through my straw as she passed, and seconds later she slowly walked back to my desk.  I looked up at her, and realized I was being examined.  My eyes grew wide and I set down my soda with a guilty half-smile.

"Uhm, are you drinking that can of Diet Coke with a straw?"

I swallowed loudly.  "Yes."  Then the excuses began.  "You see, my dentist said that--"

"Josh, a straw with Diet Coke?  Really?  What, are you Alicia Silverstone in Clueless?"

"But my teeth, can't I just use it to--"

She solemnly shook her head no.  I sighed.  I took the straw out of the can and tossed it in the garbage.

"Good boy," she said, tapping my desk twice and smiling before walking away.

Being caught drinking a soda with a straw is sort of like being caught plucking your eyebrows in the men's locker room after a workout.  It's just--you know, how do you explain that?

Tomorrow I'm telling the Indian Food Cart Guy that the straws will no longer be necessary.  Thanks, but no thanks.

But I'll still take that Diet Coke.

Night Run, New York City

I lace up my battered New Balance shoes, music already pumping in my ears, and skip down the staircase in my apartment building. I push open the front door and the brisk February air hits my face. I breathe the air into my lungs, the cold invigorating and energizing, and head west.

I trace the sidewalks of some of the most famous avenues in the world, cruising past Park Avenue penthouses in towering brick buildings, swerve onto Madison where couture boutiques with single names whir past. Over the last few weeks, since getting back into the habit of running, my breathing has become slower, easier, more even when I run. The pace has quickened, the tiny aches and pains of first few weeks now forgotten memories. Running is mine again. I own this. I pass museums that have entire coffee table books written about them, the buildings shining like silvered jewels in the crisp Manhattan night, and pick up the pace as I trace the borders of Central Park.

I enter the park when I reach The Plaza, zipping past Wollman Rink where ice skaters cut deep grooves in the ice to the hottest new pop songs, the music echoing off the walls of the rink and pulsing out into the night. I run in the thicket of trees, shoes slapping against the pavement, passing scores of other runners lost in the hypnotic trance of their own run, faces blank, breathing heavily, billowing clouds of steamy breath coming from their mouths, looking invigorated and fiercely determined.

I join them. I become one of them. We are running together, separately, hundreds of feet hitting the ground in a vaguely musical syncopation. I lose myself in my own runner’s trance, my body working seamlessly, like a machine, feeling a slow, easy calm course through my body. This is the moment I’ve waited for: this calm, this quiet, this slow-burning peace.

I smile. I run. I run faster. My sneakers dig into the pavement and I fly through the icy air, leaving a trail of runners in my wake, pulsing forth into the night.

--Josh H.

Lonely, New York

It happened on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. I walked out of the New York Public Library, a newly borrowed copy of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours tucked under my arm, and stepped out onto the street. After so many days of gray the sky was blue—a bright, clear, watery blue. The sun started to set, drenching the buildings and streets in the kind of perfect light that cinematographers only dream of.

That was the very moment I realized it, the moment I really felt it and understood it and identified it: there is an inherent loneliness to living in New York City. It’s a strange moment to put that all together, but in a way, it makes sense. Really.

There’s something about a city where your subway stop gets bomb threats, where the train is so packed it looks like a cattle car, where people get in a fight on the ride home and end up bleeding from the neck after a knife fight (this really happened), in a city where everything is a luxury because it’s so expensive, where you see the body of man who has just jumped off a West 80th Street building, killing himself and lying in a pool of bright red blood (this happened, too).

There’s something strange about all that because at the same time this is the city where bright, bold, airy, dangerous, brave jazz music was born, where Starry Night hangs in a museum next to Picassos and Monets, where the best theater in the world unfolds, where celebrities walk down the street like ordinary citizens, where the epicenter of the arts makes it’s home, where families live in townhouses and children grow up playing in Central Park, and where some of the wildest dreams anybody ever dreamed really do come true.

There is a frightening amount of living going on in this little city (and I mean “little” in terms of square mileage flying in the face of astronomical population numbers). Everything is intensified here. It’s small and big at the same time, it’s loud, it’s expensive, and so much life happens in such condensed space. Maybe that’s why it feels like life moves faster, like everything is more urgent, like every day is that much more important, begging to be used completely until you return to your apartment exhausted, breathless, and entirely spent. This city demands your all, your everything.

And, among all that, there’s you. You who just graduated from school in the Midwest, let’s say, who has moved to this city with precious few dollars, no family in sight, and enough dreams to make any mover and shaker blush.

There are moments spent feeling like a drop in an ocean. But where loneliness somewhere else can feel terrifying or hopeless or stifling, it’s different here. Here loneliness has an entirely different taste. It’s less like the metallic taste of blood in your mouth and more like tasting something sour, with just the tiniest edge of sweet—enough to make you pucker your lips and really taste, really consider what flavors are lashing around in your mouth. The loneliness here is part and parcel of the game. It’s just that simple.

But this is why it’s different: just as I stepped out of that library, book under my arm, perfectly clear skies, golden sunshine, and not a care in the world, I found myself alone.

Here, I thought, alone. Big city, tons of people, and then me.

But then I look around, see the arching buildings, the people (oh, the people!), see that sunlight, that perfect sky.

Lonely in New York City is not a destination. It’s not somewhere you go and sit and dwell. Loneliness in New York City is a travel companion—sometimes getting on your nerves, sometimes awkward, yet somehow familiar and, well, sort of welcome all at the same time. It’s just part of the deal. There’s not a damn thing to be done about it, so you just go with it.

I walked down Fifth Avenue, grinning at the ground, watching my feet, feeling the sun warm the back of my head.

I let the taste of it all swim around my mouth.

It was delicious.

Morning Song

Today started gray, foggy, rainy, and bracingly windy. I was sure I wouldn’t be able to take a run through Central Park after work, one of my favorite ways of relaxing and calming down in the city.

But, just before I got done at work, the clouds broke, the rain dried up on the sidewalks, and suddenly Manhattan looked like it’d simply had a washing, preparing an afternoon and evening in which its denizens would feel compelled to play outside.

I took the express elevator down to street level, popped in my iPod headphones, and walked down the street toward the subway. The wind tugged at my collar and the sun made me squint, but I was glad to see the blue sky again.

Then the song switched (I love to put my iPod on random) and that song came on—that song that still makes me think of you from time to time. It always surprises me how a simple little song can jerk me from my reality—the unfolding of Battery Park before me, the anticipation of an early autumn evening spent in the park—to years ago, back when I loved you. Back when you loved me.

Let the phone ring, let's go back to sleep
Let the world spin outside our door,
You're the only one that I wanna see
Tell your boss you're sick, hurry, get back in I'm getting cold
Get over here and warm my hands up, boy,
It's you they love to hold

Oh my God. Suddenly I’m seventeen again.

Put the phone machine on hold
Leave the dishes in the sink
Do not answer the door
It's you that I adore

I remember your hands. I remember how much you loved me, how much I loved it when you held me and put your arms around me and rested them on my lower back, how my head fit perfectly in the crook of your neck. I remember what it’s like to touch your bare skin, the warmth of it, the softness, the comfort.

I'm gonna give you some more
We'll sit on the front porch, the sun can warm my feet
You can drink your coffee with sugar and cream
I'll drink my decaf herbal tea
Pretend we're perfect strangers and that we never met
My how you remind me of a man I used to sleep with
That's a face I'd never forget

I remember waking up next to you for the first time. I remember how you kissed me. I remember going to the bagel shop right after we woke up, wearing hoodies, our eyes bleary with sleep, you with your coffee, me with my orange juice and newspaper, us sitting together quietly by the window.

I remember how we ended, years and years later. We ended, and now all of those things I remembered when I heard that song are the kind of memories that I like to turn over and over like a new food in my mouth, feeling the texture, examining taste, feeling how it goes down.

Usually it goes down smoothly.

All of it goes down, except for the very end, years after the love ended and the friendship began. I remember all those things you said in that last phone call, those things you said with the specific purpose of trying to puncture my skin with your words.

We never spoke again.

What a shame—what a thing to waste.

Come on darlin', let's go back to bed
Put the phone machine on hold
Leave the dishes in the sink
Do not answer the door
It's you that I adore
I'm gonna give you some more

On the subway ride home I closed my eyes. I tried to remember your face in detail.

I couldn’t.

I opened my eyes, took a long breath, and changed the song.

Then I took that run through Central Park after all.

--Josh H.

Back to School? Not This Time, Kids

Back-to-school displays always get me. I get lovesick looking at the reams of cheap notebooks, the bonus packs of ridiculous gel roller pens, the displays of folders with Hillary Duff and Hello Kitty and monster trucks on the front (which I will all make fun of, not buy, and secretly covet later during boring math class lectures). I remember marching down back-to-school shopping aisles like an elementary school Napoleon, fingers in my jacket, pointing at all of the school stuff I wanted. My mother patiently looked at whatever I picked up, helpfully pried it out of my fingers, and promptly bought only what was on the school’s required supply list.

It’s back to school time, and it makes me long for those first nervous days of September when it’s time to put on never-worn sneakers and gather up Trapper Keepers and head back into freshly polished hallways and see the kids whom you haven’t seen all summer and will soon mostly wish you didn’t have to see again until after next summer.

The first day of homeroom you look around to see who got taller, who got fatter, who got boobs, who got biceps, who got the hot new clothes, who got their braces on or off, who looked like a good candidate for awkward make-out sessions at extremely lame parties that everyone would later proclaim “totally the bomb.”

All of that back to school stuff is here and, for the first time in my life that I can remember, I’m not taking part in it. I am not going back to school. I’ve graduated from sixteenth grade (a.k.a college is over, biotches) and now it’s on to the adult world. Punch in at 9 a.m., punch out at 5 p.m., go home, make dinner, watch an episode of something on DVD, call your friends, pay some bills, go to bed, lather, rinse, repeat five days a week.

When I went to Target this week I found my fingers itching for 500-page stacks of college ruled paper, fresh pencils, and assignment notebooks. I’m ready to feel useful again, to feel like I’m part of something, to learn. Except this time it just ain’t gonna happen.

It’s over. That part of my life is over. That’s a fascinatingly weird realization to have while guiltily handling Five Star notebooks on display at a discount superstore.

So on to adulthood and on to this—this “real world” thing.

I guess, in a way, that I will be returning to school this September, but a whole new kind of school. This one doesn’t require me to register for specific classes or get specific books. Instead I just show up at work and punch in. The books I read are my own choice. The assignments I get are all ones that I give to myself.

This September I will put on new shoes and new clothes and enter this vague sort of “school of life,” thousands of miles from home, in a brand new city, with all new “classmates.” I’ll try and stay out of the principal’s office, I’ll still skip the pep rallies, I’ll still prefer the smart-and-strange kids, and lunch food will improve. (Hopefully.)

Welcome to your new school, kid. No assignment list, no guidance counselors, no required supplies. Just you and that big world around you.

Josh H.?

Yes. Present.