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Music from The Record Store

The songs I love most are songs that were written long ago. They have history to me. They connect me to different periods of my life and give depth to the times which I keep in the archives of my memory.
I remember a winter day from my youth. It was cold and rainy. I decided to take a walk to the record store because there was nothing else to do. There was no one else around—and even if there were—no one was interested in walking in the rain.

I was young and my hair was somewhere between boyish and bowl-cut to becoming decidedly long. This was not an easy thing for my parents. They did not like long hair. Most of all, they did not like long hair on me. They did not like the way long hair looked. They said the did not like what it represented . . . but I did.
I was Continue reading →

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Billy’s Picture: You Would Never Know By Looking At Him

Out of respect for anonymity, names and situations have been slightly changed to protect the not-so-innocent . . .

Billy was a tall, soft-spoken man with a curly bowl of salt and peppered hair. He wore a mustache, which was grayer than the hair on his head. He wore a pair of wire-rimmed glasses and he always dressed casual. He was gentle and bear-like. I never saw him lose his temper and I never heard him speak aggressively about anyone. Billy was content to be exactly who he was—a kind, middle-aged photographer who lived on 28th Street in Manhattan’s Flower District.

No one would ever know by looking at him. No one would ever think he was once a drunk and no one would ever know about the twenty years he drank or why he chose to live that way.

Billy invited me over to his studio after Continue reading →

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Junkie Poetry

Small flame heats the spoon
which holds the key to an ongoing romance.

. . . . It seems as if yesterday has been gone for decades
only, you never noticed this
. . . . because you got lost in your own machine

Your eyes shut down to the half-mass nod
your body hovers, weightless,
drifting in the loft of a gentle seclusion
and it’s, “Us against them,”
because no one understands but us.
Am I right? Continue reading →

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the glass in hand

Like anything else, the night always starts off with the best of intentions.
It begins with a phone call to a group of friends and plans for a much needed night of madness and redemption. And it’s good to feel this way.
It helps us rebel against the boredom and stagnant lives that would otherwise plague a mundane existence.

So it begins . . .
The first drink of the night finishes with a satisfied, “AHHHH!”
This is the perfect exhale after a long day, or better, this is the perfect release after a long week, and in that exclamation point of an exhale, It marks the beginning of a celebration, which we pay for in full.
In that Continue reading →

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Boys Will Be Boys

It was an early morning in the town of Garden City. The sunrise had already begun and the empty winter branches of rounded-shaped trees were like black veins in the eye of a bloodshot sun. There were no clouds above my town to project the colors of dawn—there was only a soft pink hue extending across the horizon with fringes of purple at the edge of its reach. Morning was in full swing and the night before was at its end.

After a long night in the city, I drove home Continue reading →

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My public service announcement

I saw the perfect world our parents tried to give us disappear and vanish in the eyes of teenage boys on the verge of a terrible sickness.

And the parents wondered, “Why?”
They wondered, “Where did we go wrong?”

The drug culture is not a new thing. But parents seem to overlook this as if they have forgotten what they went through as teenagers. We come from a generation of excess. We come from more; we come from Continue reading →

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out to sea

I have not been out to sea in years. I have stood at its edge. I have waded in—waist deep, and felt the curl of its waves on a hot summer day. But I have not been out to sea and gone beyond where the horizon meets land. I miss it this place. Its beauty is more than I can describe.

I often dream of sitting in the wheelhouse or pilothouse of my own boat. The diesel engines hum along as the bow, or front of my ship cuts through an oncoming sea. The boat rises up and down as Continue reading →

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a good memory

It was long ago. The autumn had come and changed the appearance of my town. The leaves had yet to fall, but their green skin had changed into different variations of yellow and orange. The weather was no longer warm, but cool, as if it were in between the perfect climax before falling too far in the other direction.

My street was busy. Then again, it was always busy.  The traffic on Merrick Avenue was constant; however, it was more congested during the morning and evening rush hours. Cars ran from west to east down Glenn Curtis Boulevard to avoid the extra lights and delays on Hempstead Turnpike. Glenn Curtis was a mainroad shortcut between Continue reading →

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three stages of sickness

1.

I had no idea what to expect . . .
When I was told they were going to send me to A.A meetings, I pictured dimly lit rooms, and round wooden tables with old men sitting quietly on matching wooden chairs.
I imagined they sat without speaking—and I figured everyone smoked with a lit cigarette either dangling from their lip as the smoke curled upwards, or perhaps they leaned over with an elbow on the table and the cigarette fit between their pointer and forefinger.

I imagined a room filled with Continue reading →

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the salt and pepper

The world I live in was meant for me. All of it was meant for me—and by all I mean ever sliver and crack.
I lived, I tell you.
I may have lived differently from others, but the details of my past are the salt and pepper that seasoned my life and led me to where I am now.

I once lived in the basement of a white, ranch-styled house, with black shutters on the windows, a small driveway, one-car garage, and brick steps that led up to a covered patio, with green imitation grass, and a welcome matt that sat beneath the front door.
I lived on a quiet street between two Continue reading →