Of two sisters one is always the watcher, one the dancer.—Louise Glück

A SHORT STORY

LAUGHING GAS

“LIFE is unfair.”

Diane turned cautiously from her mother’s sharp rebuke, avoiding what might have come next. She pressed her chin into her breastbone, biting her tongue. She’d already tempted fate by questioning the unfairness of it all, but that hand of fate could pack a wallop if she didn’t just zip it immediately. There is nothing she can do about it now. She fingers the soup can-sized rollers in her hair. It had taken her all morning to carefully section her fine straight hair, demanding patience she had very little of. If only she looked like Sandra Dee she’d get a boyfriend like Bobby Darin who was a lot better looking than Frankie Russo.

Not that she has a boyfriend. Not that she’s even allowed to have a boyfriend. That’s what the argument was about last night. The Shrimp had tracked Diane and Frankie to the playground. Her little sister Suzie was called The Shrimp—among other things—because she was so tiny. Anyone who didn’t know guessed she was much younger than her ten years. Diane should have raced from the grasping, juiced up boy as soon as she heard her mother yelling from their first floor window into a courtyard already emptied of kids who had come when they were called. And when her little sister peered into the cement barrel tunnel on the playground and urged: “Better get home for dinner. Mommy’s gonna kill you,” she should have been nicer to Suzie, not screamed at her as she sped away from them. She should not have yelled, “You suck!”

Her mother’s expression twisted from annoyance into rage as her youngest delivered the reason for Diane’s lateness. If her father had not been there, resigned under the desultory plume from his cigarette, staring at an empty dinner plate, then Diane surely would have felt her mother’s hand across her cheek. Instead, he tossed the cigarette into the sink on his way to the refrigerator. “She’s boy crazy that one!” Her mother stabbed a finger at Diane. “She’ll wind up like that…that Sharon.” A familiar hiss escaped as he popped the tab on a can of Rheingold and halted her rant. He looked at Diane. “You are too young for a boyfriend.”

Now Diane’s Saturday is ruined. “You want to be a grown up?” her mother challenged. “Then take your sister to the dentist.” At least this time she had been spared her father’s mantra: “Yours is not to reason why. Yours is but to do or die.” Well, she was dying, that’s for sure. Whatever she might have been doing was far better than what she had to do now.

“You aren’t going out like that, young lady.”

Diane had painstakingly ironed the ruffled bands on her prized “angel” shirt, which stopped just at her midriff, leaving a bare patch above her favorite pair of pedal pushers, cinched at the waist with cute little buckles. Her mother’s sting still on her skin, she tossed the offending blouse to the floor and replaced it with a plain pink button front, sleeves rolled to the elbow. Out of sight, she will flip the collar up and pull the shirttails into a knot, freeing her tummy. Her Keds shine whitely with a fresh coat of polish. She’s pulled her useless hair into a tight ponytail until it hurts. Even teased within an inch of its life it has no body. Suzie stares dolefully from the foot of her bed, one of two identical single beds in the claustrophobic room they have always shared. “It…your hair…looks better like that.” She had no privacy, no privacy at all! Diane shot back: “You suck.”

“Hold her hand crossing the street. Especially on Northern Boulevard.” Diane prodded her sister through the front door and into the courtyard mumbling, “If she’s so worried about you why doesn’t she take you?” Susie’s lower lip puckered. “We could walk.” “Well, of course we could walk, stupid. We are walking.” Diane held out the coins her mother had given her. “Save on carfare,” she mimicked, “you have nothing better to do with yourself so walk there.” “I mean,” Susie piped, “we could walk back, too.”

They exchanged a conspiratorial look. This had happened before. They could be arguing, screaming like banshees one minute, punching, and pinching each other. Then something would happen to bring it all to a stop, some way of getting back at her.

Ahead, slouched onto a bench as if he was joined to it, sat Frankie. Older than Diane by a few years, he pretended not to see her. He plucked the cigarette pack from his sleeve and tapped it onto the back of his hand. “Hey there, little one.” He winked and ran the palm of his hand over slick black hair. Susie giggled and lowered her eyes. “Come on,” Diane urged, pressing her sister’s delicate shoulders, sneaking a glance at Frankie who was still not looking at her.

They picked up the pace from there to the schoolyard at the top of the walk. A few of the neighbor boys were chucking a basketball, but the handball courts were empty. Diane pulled The Shrimp from the low-slung chains looping brown-patched lawns. Because their apartment’s first floor windows eyed the stoop entrance and overlooked benches where tenants congregated, the family quarrels were public theater, their mother’s harangues legendary. Airless summer nights drew the colored kids to the schoolyard with their parents and older brothers and sisters. Diane’s heartbeat fell in with the conga drums and she’d lie in bed imagining the women dancing, the street lights on their skin like flickering candles in the dark, humid night. Until her mother, not content with screaming at them, decided enough was enough and stormed up to the schoolyard. The drums would go quiet. Diane counted off the steps it took before her mother was far enough away from the dancers to be meaningless again and the drumbeats resumed, along with Diane’s sleepy smile.

• • •

Susie meandered in lopsided dreaminess ahead of her older sister’s watchful eye as they traipsed along 48th street heading for Sunnyside. It always struck Diane that not far from the impersonal complex of public housing, there were neat yellow brick homes in comforting rows along a street shaded with trees at the far end, kids’ bicycles tilted into wrought iron banisters. Her mother’s parting reprimand ringing in her head, Diane took her sister’s hand at the crossing on Northern Boulevard. It was a no man’s land of auto dealerships and ill-defined structures split by the broad boulevard. Determined drivers whizzed past them. Safely on the other side, Susie wrenched her hand from Diane’s grip and sprinted on spindly legs in crisp cotton shorts, putting some distance between them. The sight of the Empire State building on her right in the far distance reassured Diane. Next year she would go to a public high school in Manhattan. She’d passed the test. It was a dream come true. No more of this babysitting. She’d have friends and dates and drawing classes and way too much schoolwork.

Susie slowed, squatted and pretended interest in some scrap on the sidewalk but Diane knew that the train trestle ahead spooked her. It was a foul and scarred strip of grimy wall, weeping with blistered paint under a skeleton of iron pilings and train tracks encrusted with pigeon shit. The stench of urine on a hot summer day hurried even those hardened pedestrians. “’Fraidy cat,” Diane jeered and then laughed to soften the blow. Susie turned. Her shoulders were drawn under her ears. Her brow was deeply furrowed, her eyes looked darker and older in her small face. “I’m not!” she cried. Diane laughed again. “You are so.” But she hurried to her sister and in an unconscious move they clasped hands and when Diane shouted, “Run!” they tore under the train trestle, hollering for all they were worth as a cloud of pigeons burst from their path.

The other side brought them to a canopy of trees, alongside a chain link fence woven thickly with ivy. Wooden cottages, cheerily painted, nestled alongside two-story brick homes, front doors shaded with green-and-white striped awnings. Embellished iron gates led from the sidewalk to shady places behind the houses. White wooden porches graced red brick homes and flowerpots hung from hooks. Hydrangea bushes ballooned in front gardens, blossoming violet and blue, lavender and pink, depending on what bit of iron or copper was buried at their roots. Sunlight dropped through the trees onto the pavement, splashes of light from a natural palette. The complex of low-storied houses called Sunnyside Gardens was a paradise to Diane. A few steps up from the street and you were in a landscaped garden so private you could hardly believe it. Lace curtains billowed out from open doors. White morning glories, like wedding bells, shivered when you touched them.

At Queens Boulevard Diane grabbed Susie’s hand again. It was always tricky getting to the other side of the broad, congested road and Diane took no chances as they hurtled across one way, stopping under the viaduct looming above them, before they took their chances again on the other side.

The dentist’s office was up a flight of stairs in a narrow two-story building on a quieter avenue behind the boulevard. The waiting room was a small, nondescript area just outside the office. Dr. Tucher stood in the doorway between the reception area and the examining room, expecting them. His smile was hard to describe. Like it came with his face and never changed. He smelled clean and his hands were always cold. The few straight-backed chairs were old, and so were the magazines piled onto a rickety table in the corner. In the winter, the radiator gurgled and steam coated the window. Today a fan perched on the radiator in front of the open window whirring softly. Diane had never recalled seeing any other patients and she slumped into a chair, prepared to wait.

He spoke softly, not exactly gently. “Come along.” Susie passed under his arm and when he put a hand on her shoulder she flinched. Dr. Tucher urged her, “It won’t hurt, and you’ll be right as rain.” Diane called after her, “Hey, peanut.” Susie turned, her look disengaged. “It’s not that bad,” Diane crooned. They disappeared behind the closed door.

Diane was glad not to have to be in that chair today. Everything about the experience was off putting. The office equipment, all of it a nauseatingly pale translucent green like she imagined the color of sea slugs. She hated the feel of his cold hands prodding the inside of her gaping mouth. They smelled abnormally clean. Her mother was usually with them but after awhile Diane was relieved when she’d disappear on errands for the duration. Her mother was a bit too flirty with the doctor who let his hand linger on her arm sometimes. She and her sister would joke later and call him ‘Dr. Touch Her.’ And that gas mask. Ugh. The first time he placed it over her face she reacted so strongly that he looked distraught and worried allowed that he had somehow hurt her. He carefully explained that the gas would make it painless, even make her feel good. She was not persuaded and instead endured the long needle he’d had to shoot into her gums to anesthetize a compromised tooth. Susie would be distracted with the silvery balls of filling he let them play with.

Diane dropped a thin pile of magazines onto her lap. Life magazine. All old issues. She put an issue of National Geographic back on the table. Her annoyance returned. Not even a current copy of Seventeen. Jack Paar squinted from a cover of Life. Her dad called him the Pinko, or rather, that Pinko. She slid it back onto the table. Here was Debbie Reynolds on the cover of Life, in Spain. She’d like to go to Spain someday. She was surprised to see Marilyn Monroe next. It was an old issue of the magazine but one Diane had never seen. Flipping through it she saw an article about a young woman in Japan who was called a ‘commoner’ and how she was marrying a Prince. So, it could happen. Diane held her breath as she slowly tore Marilyn’s sexy image from the magazine. She folded it carefully and slid the page into her pants pocket.

There was no clock in the waiting area. Diane fidgeted irritably. Her little sister was so little and even more maddening than ever. She hated sharing a room. They were so different. Everything about her life, her dreams, had to be secreted in her diary and then even that was not safe. Diane bristled, recalling with anger the day she arrived home to see Susie, surrounded by her friends on the stoop, reading aloud from that diary, its lock cleanly cut from the covers. Exasperated, Diane pictured their reward after this. A treat at the ice cream parlor on the corner, thank you mother. They would have to walk home but it would be worth it. She might have suggested the White Castle—mystery meat her dad called it—but Susie was the one getting drilled and she would want ice cream.

The door clicked open. Susie, head lowered, slipped quickly past the doctor. “Okay there?” she asked. He assured Diane she was fine, that she was still feeling the affects of the gas. “You’re taking the bus?”

Outside Diane started for the ice cream parlor. Susie stood still, looking around her like she was lost. “What’s up?” “I don’t….” “You don’t what, want ice cream?” Diane crouched down to look at her sister more closely, see if her jaw might be swollen. But apart from that vacant look, she seemed fine. “Peanut?” she urged, “Are you sure?” Then resorting to her father’s precocious nickname she whispered, “No ice cream for the zinzemeier kartuffel glazer?” Diane reached for Susie at her waist, aiming to hoist herself back up. Her sister’s body went rigid, as if a thunderbolt had shot through her. “Get off!” she shrieked, her face reddened and clenched. Diane, stunned, straightened up. “Okay, okay. Sheesh, you’re touchy.”

After a few silent moments Susie murmured, “Bus” and she clasped Diane’s hand.

They rode home in silence. Diane stared out the window. Next year she would go to a public high school in Manhattan. She’d passed the test. It was a dream come true. No more of this babysitting. She’d have friends and dates and drawing classes and way too much schoolwork.

LAUGHING GAS is an original short story by Linda Danz.

STORIES ON THE AMERICAN FRIEND Writers Guild of America, East #R28299

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, business organizations, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. The use of names of actual persons, places, and events is incidental to the plot, and is not intended to change the entirely fictional character of the work. ©August 2009.

SHORT STORY

“Because no matter where you run, 
you just end up running into yourself.”
Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Truman Capote.

HAS IT STARTED YET?

Standing on a corner of Lexington Avenue at 60th street she closes her umbrella and sighs beneath the weather. It’s a deep and gradual sigh, heavier than the drear enveloping her. It is surrender—her sighing—masked as relief. The rain has stopped at least. Her battle, the first round that shrouds her, arrests her breathing, provokes her, is finally finished for the day. The repository of affluence called Bloomingdale’s sits to her right. The Subway Inn, battered neon-lit haven of the beery rank and file, tempts her on the left.

Her marriage, a flimsy scaffold unable to bear the weight of cognition, has collapsed. She is barely twenty-seven.

She has just been to see a divorce lawyer. His office is a few blocks south on Lexington, above a storefront psychic reader and advisor, where a marriage that should never have been is now being dismantled. He is an eagerly pleasant young man just starting out. Tall and angular, he is still unused to his position behind a desk. The padded shoulders of his suit slide from side to side as his handsome head bobs to the beat of his pitch. As soon as she’d revealed she is an artist he’d spent a greater part of the session talking about his dreams. He’d lamented a domineering mother who had thwarted his artistic aspirations, because an artist wasn’t a professional. She has told her story. He will save her.

Her own soon to be ex-mother-in-law is a haughty pretender. Her son does not escape her dreams for his future as a professional. She buys his clothes and he looks like some old man, an absent-minded professor in baggy suits from Brooks Brothers. As a young man he had once played at anarchy. He wrote poetry and wooed her with the exotic entitlement of the well off to playing at madness and educated eccentricity.

She was divorcing herself from the professional dreamers. She knew about dreaming. She was a project girl who aspired to be a painter.

Peter Kuperstein, her attorney, wore a fashionably mod shirt, but the kind of suit that indicates he’ll choose success over dreams in the long run. His hair is dark and pulled into a ponytail. She thinks that will change sooner than later. He talks about painters and vision as if they had an understanding. His broad silk tie is patterned with the frenzied swirling nightscape of her favorite painter. As a girl she worshipped Van Gogh. She’d copied his famed Starry Night from a reproduction in a book onto a huge piece of Masonite her father had obligingly lugged home. When she finally got to the Museum of Modern Art, on a high school class trip, she’d seen how much smaller the original was. She’d cried. Not from disappointment but from the heart thumping force of it, all that power in such modest space.

But what will she do now? What to do at this very moment? Traffic snarls, agitated in the congested street. Traffic lights change and cars barge noisily around delivery vans idling at the loading dock of the department store. She considers shopping, staving off a return to an empty apartment. But Bloomingdale’s is too fine for her now.

It always was. When she was an art student at the high school on Second Avenue a few blocks downtown she’d traversed the department store simply to get to her subway line back to Astoria. Never mind. Alexander’s is just down the block, a store more suited to her newly re-discovered penury.

The truth is she has a closet full of clothes, expensive outfits from stores like Bergdorf’s and Saks, hanging with unpleasant recall. For six years she was deemed, like her husband, incapable of buying her own clothes; the little unmatched girl who needed a moneyed mother-in-law’s guidance to fit in with the Park Avenue dames. She’d suffered the ministrations of unfamiliar uncles who had done well in the garment industry. They’d draped her in silk coats trimmed in silver raccoon and fitted her with the sample outfits the models wore. She’d balked at underwear but brokered no peaceful resolutions. It was properly expensive underwear that no one would see except her husban and, perhaps the driver who might accidentally run her down.

A few beers at the Subway Inn tempt her. Why not? How many afternoons had she dug her father out of the darkened cave of lost men? How many times had she entered a nondescript doorway and passed under the inviting guileless smile in the framed black and white photograph of Marilyn Monroe. This was the same approachable beauty she had seen laughing easily with the counter girls in the cosmetics department of Bloomingdales as she cut through the main floor of the store after school. But that was over ten years ago. Marilyn was dead. Her marriage was dead.

It is far too early for a beer, even for her. She tucks a wet, mouse brown tendril behind her ear. Farah Fawcett’s whipped silver main was replicated on the heads of young women everywhere, a style her straight brown hair would never be wrestled into. And she cannot go into a bar dressed as she is. Her linen dress boxes her in. She is a poor man’s Audrey Hepburn.  And the dress is yellow, too yellow. Her mother-in-law insisted on color, when she was happiest in somber hues. She thought the fashionable dress would buck her up, help her to appear surer of herself when she met her attorney for the first time. But it is all wrong, and she’d had to spend some time, too much of his time, explaining herself, trying to make him understand she was not the kind of woman who wore yellow linen. “My mother-in-law bought it for me,” she’d mumbled at what she guessed was his dismissive appraisal.

A wardrobe coup is in order but she doesn’t actually have a lot of her own money to underwrite a drastic transformation. Her attorney will take much of it. Until he left for Cambridge, her husband had lived with her in a sunny upper eastside apartment a few blocks from the medical institution where he’d gotten his doctorate. It was a comfortable life for the Harvard bound. It was too comfortable among friends who were graduate students with lesser means. Her father-in-law had devised a way to support them and he gave her more money than her contrived clerical job for his psychiatric practice was worth. But it was meant to pay the rent and leave his son free of mundane financial concerns while he was in graduate school. It was a way around taxes. She sometimes kept some of it back for herself, especially as the marriage deteriorated. When her father-in-law had prescribed a strong antidepressant to keep her quiet about her unhappy marriage to his son she never filled the prescriptions and pretended she had and just stopped complaining. Her father-in-law, believing himself omnipotent, celebrated his victory over her, giving her more money.

Heading toward Third Avenue she passes the original building, the bit of movie preserved as a reminder of where the two Bloomingdale brothers began their enduring venture. At least they had something to show for it.

She’d met her husband in a helter skelter era of anti war protests. She was an eager apprentice to her husband’s political activism. College campuses were battlefields where a well-meant flower placed in the barrel of an army gun got you shot. Violence had murky fingerprints. Their shaky venture carried them through Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy, assassinated within months of each other. Then came the walk on the moon. While they watched Neil Armstrong take his small step, she and her husband were getting stoned with his Uncle Maury on a king-sized bed suffocated by designer pillows in an apartment on the Upper East Side ostentatiously decorated to its nouveau riche teeth.

Woodstock followed. In the spacious Central Park West apartment of a childhood friend of her husband’s whose father was a well-known labor lawyer they had sat around smoking pot, listening to traffic reports on the radio and planning their trip to Yasgur’s Farm. They were still sitting around when Arlo Guthrie announced from the stage: “The New York State Freeway is closed man. Far out!”

They had gotten stoned, and they had missed it.

She scans the busy avenue ahead. Where is the best place to hide? In a darkened movie theater, of course, where a yellow linen dress has no effect. Whatever is playing, at the Baronet or the Coronet Theater next door, will do. Deliberate strides take her across the broad avenue.

Both theaters are fixed with the same title in black letters on their marquees: Eraserhead. It is a film by a controversial new filmmaker, one who is getting mixed, but heated, reviews and she hesitates because she has read something about this movie, something off putting. She reconsiders. There is the Queensboro Bridge if she was feeling groovier. She’d walked across that bridge to high school and whenever she got to the Manhattan side she’d felt like she could do anything. Although the rain had stopped, the summer afternoon air is dingy and cloying. The film will start in half an hour. She buys a ticket and enters an empty theater.

Relishing the cool air in a semi-darkened interior, she slides down into a velvet-upholstered seat at the back. A questioning voice distracts her from rummaging in her bag for her book. “Has it started yet?” Standing at her side in the aisle, hardly bigger than the large container of popcorn he cradles against his chest, the tiny man asks again: “Has the film started yet?” His voice, a breathy lisp, is like that of a child. But he is an older man. A black cap tips over his brow. He is wearing one of those pea soup green British military sweaters with patched elbows.

Gazing up at the writer she smiles, suppressing a startled recognition of the infamous celebrity, and then turns toward the front of the theater, indicating to the empty screen. He looks away, as if in a trance, and prances lightly down the aisle to take a front row seat. The theater lights go down. The film begins. They are the only two in the audience.

When the house lights go on she is alone in the theater. “Who can blame him?” she thinks, feeling slightly unsettled herself. But she’d stuck it out, intrigued by the surreal horror story unfolding in black and white on the screen.

The afternoon has lightened and there are hollows of blue in the feeble clouds. She wants to forget about the disconcerting film for the moment and instead think about the writer with the popcorn. She’d devoured everything the very famous author had written—from a Manhattan fairy tale with its dark corners to the profoundly darker and murderous stretches of Kansas. As she heads uptown she ticks off characters in her head.

The struggle for attention starts with the unimaginative naming of the child. She wishes she had been named Holly. It has a nice ring to it. A name is everything. Her parents, no literary lions, went for the obvious. The most popular girl’s name in 1947 was a hit song. Her sister, born a year later, suffered an even more ignominious fate and was named after Gene Tierney’s character in a film shown years earlier. Truth is she’s not the waif that Audrey Hepburn was. She wasn’t an eager young woman in New York for the first time, having come here to live out her dreams. She was a native, a project girl. She was born too early to be a Holly, but why not a Celeste, or a Bette? Why not an angry, dangerously self-aware smoker who knew just what she wanted? No, her parents handily plucked her name from the radio airwaves. “When I go to sleep, I never count sheep, I count all my dreams about….”

She will soon shed the alien surname she has been lumbered with for the duration of her short marriage. She will keep the apartment. Real estate was changing and a rent-controlled apartment was something to hold onto. Her attorney will see her through. He’ll get her a monthly stipend for a year. Of course he was right. Burgeoning feminist principles aside, she needs to live. Find her footing again.

At 74th Street and Third Avenue she pauses under the ivy green awning at J.G. Melon where society knocks knees under café tables. She catches a glimpse of a young woman in a yellow linen dress reflected in the darkened window. Dresses like hers are spotted as interlopers in a place like this. She has a job interview in a week, an entry-level graphic position at a community newspaper. The yellow dress will be long gone by then. She steps closer to the window and whispers to the watery image: “Has my life started yet?”

HAS IT STARTED YET? is an original short story by Linda Danz

STORIES ON THE AMERICAN FRIEND Writers Guild of America, East #R28299

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, business organizations, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. The use of names of actual persons, places, and events is incidental to the plot, and is not intended to change the entirely fictional character of the work. ©July 2009.

FERAL WOMAN

in her younger days
she found the way
that love with desperation
took her breath away
and left her in
a bloody situation
don’t you pet her
don’t you even try
treat her badly
it’ll make you cry and
since those far off days
she found that life
could never be timeless
why?
don’t even remind her

feral woman
you gotta confess
shakes her head and
leaves it a mess
she’s just getting started and
she’s on a tear
never cruel hearted but
she really don’t care
really don’t care
she really really really really really don’t care

on her better days
she knew that love
was gonna be a tough one
and she’ll take you there
although she knows
it’s gonna be a rough one
don’t you pet her
don’t you even try
treat her badly
it’ll make you cry
since those far off days
she found that life
could never be timeless
why?
Don’t even remind her

feral woman
you gotta confess
shakes her head and
leaves it a mess
she’s just getting started and
she’s on a tear
never cruel hearted but
she really don’t care
really don’t care
she really really really really really don’t care

these are better days
she’s on her way
and even when the reasons
take her breath away
you’re sure to know
she’ll take you through the seasons

she’s gonna come through it
she knew it
outgrew it on her own
she’s not gonna fake it
she’ll make it on her own

feral woman
you gotta confess
shakes her head and
leaves it a mess
she’s just getting started and
she’s on a tear
never cruel hearted but
she really don’t care
really don’t care
she really really really really really don’t care

Listen to this song on myspace.

©fairalldanzmusic 2009

“Your sperm’s in the gutter, your love’s in the sink.” Jethro Tull. Thick As a Brick.


SPERM WAIL!

The headline in the Independent online screamed: SCIENTISTS CREATE TEST-TUBE SPERM!!!!! Okay, there were no exclamation marks and truth is, this headline was screaming in my head. And to be fair, it was also challenged by experts who claimed the sperm-like cells produced in the experiment were not genuine sperm.

To breed-free folk like The Mister and me there seems to be a lot of attention paid to sperm and the resultant legions of children that have been steadily growing in this post war era.

Since the fall of 2001 couples who were undecided about raising a family quickly discarded the “sure-but in-the future” notion and embraced the “now” of children. Marriages that were tumbling messily to the brink of divorce were suddenly no longer in need of psychological counseling and instead were brought back from the brink by fertility treatments. Singles rushed to be coupled with anyone. A lot of times that anyone turned out to be a dog. Usually it was pure-bred canines, expensive and sadly not significantly large numbers of rescues from the pound.

The Upper West Side of Manhattan, my earlier stomping ground, was once the hallowed territory of artists, musicians, writers and all around left wingers, who—if they had children—were civilized enough to keep them under control. Brunch was adult entertainment. These days upper Broadway is gridlocked with those ubiquitous Maclaren “techno” strollers, double- and triple-wide. A hasty glance at all the twins and triplets, the fussing tow heads with blue eyes, might give the already callous observer the idea that one fertility doctor had been very, very busy.

My building on the Upper East Side was once a haven of struggling actors, writers, painters, and all kinds of artists along with a few black sheep with trust funds and a sprinkling of eccentrics. Children were suspected to reside in the building and evidence of that was seen in the hallways where an errant toy had been dumped or a tricycle had been parked. It was actually a comforting sight, the evidence of children, and their sweetness, without the actual, you know, evidence of them. Periodic sightings of those children were enough to gauge their growth, their ability to ride the elevator without pressing every button until finally they were adults and flew the coop. Well, some of them.

Not so in the post co-op era where even the welcome mat at our front door has been deemed unsightly by a board of disciplinarians. Hallways are condemned to be free of strollers, house slippers, toys, and well, life. The children? They are everywhere as are the dogs for those with and without children. The Mister moved in some twenty years ago and so can attest to this dual population explosion. It used to be that one could peruse household objects in the basement storage room and discover an elaborately carved concert harp looming grandly over the more proletariat guitar cases and the occasional amp stored there. Today it is impossible to navigate the dense field of high chairs, car seats and pet carriers.

But, I digress. Where was I? Oh, right. Sperm.

The recent article on the white stuff (No, not snow…pay attention.) suggests we have come a long way from 2004 when another article appeared online warning of the dangerously low sperm count in western countries. The full study can be found in a journal called Human Reproduction. I wonder what the “personals” were like in that one: Looking for handsome, athletic, intelligent, successful sperm. If you were worried about your sperm count and if you were male (if?) then “you should think twice before placing a laptop on your lap.” If one had to raise the temperature a bit, then resorting to the old-fashioned human kind topping your lap would be the way to go.

Independent writer, Jeremy Laurance, Health Editor and author of the online article about test tube sperm wrote: “The extraordinary development, which until a few years ago belonged in the realms of science fiction….” The imagination tips precariously into dark scenarios until the reader comes upon a quote by a Professor Nayernia: “In theory it would be possible [to dispense with men], but only if you want to produce a population all the same size and shape [because they have the same male genetic origin]. Personally I cannot see human reproduction as purely a biological process. It has human, emotional, psychological, social and ethical aspects, too. We are doing this research to help infertile men, not to replace a reproductive procedure.”

Whew!

From the same article. “Sperm: The facts:”
• It takes 10 weeks to make a sperm in the testes.
• Once produced, they are stored for about a fortnight.
• If they are not ejaculated they are broken down and reabsorbed.
• A healthy male can produce 70 to 150 million sperm a day.
• A teaspoon can hold 200 to 500 million sperm.

As a woman who loves to cook and to cull new recipes this last bit makes me just a wee bit gaggy. I am gleefully reminded, though, of visiting a friend in San Francisco many years ago. It was the Age Before AIDS, before Harvey Milk was murdered. Karen and I were strolling through the Castro District. My friend is a very straight, married mother of two teenagers now but apart from the teenagers she was the same then. Conscious of my wilder adventuresome self she was a splendid tour guide and we ambled up Market Street into the Tenderloin, along Polk Street and through the Castro. There must have been 50 or 60 gay bars on Polk Street alone. Not to mention the peep show parlors that reminded me of Times Square and home. A lot of the bar names were also reminiscent of Christopher Street environs like The Anvil and The Spike. But one bar’s sign caught my friend’s eye. “See,” she declared, pointing to a sign prettily illustrated with two white birds entwined. “That one is lovely, those white doves, so sweet.” I pointed out that the white doves were really…er…white swallows. “Notice their tails,” I directed. The look on my friend’s face as she processed the information? Priceless.

Some people want kids. Karen had them. Dear friends of mine had them and are still having them. They have grown, and will grow into lovely adults. Who am I to say, “If you can’t have ‘em, live with it?” But if you don’t have them, then be good to kids who aren’t your kids. You know if it takes a village then be one of those village people. Kids always gravitate to the odd one anyway and they love costumes.

What is very much a modern day occurrence are blogs that plead the pain of childlessness on the Internet with blog names like “wannababybad” or “infertileinseattle.” They worry over low testosterone (hypogonadism) and very low FSH. Which at first glance I thought I read, “very low fish” and was for a moment very, very confused.

Sperm is good for a lot of things, even for art it seems, though no guarantee of life for the artist. Dash Snow, photographer, graffiti writer, downtown celebrity and sperm artist, recently died of an overdose. Though, presumably, not an overdose of sperm. Sperm is good for facebook. All those new customers who can join the legions who believe friendship to be the increasing numbers on their website, who never have to actually, you know, talk to or visit those friends. Who will also discover more quickly than their older counterparts who have to be dragged kicking and screaming to facebook that the girlfriend of one distant friend is far from the mole-chinned witch one is led to believe before they actually, you know, see a photo of her smiling face posted on his facebook page. And who else but the next generation—may they be in the many millions—will hold up the giant ponzi scheme called social security?

The hidden dangers of sperm? Octomom.

A couple of years ago a study came out which I like to think may have cured a few carnivorous mothers: “Mom's beef puts son's sperm count at stake.” Mothers who ate a lot of beef during pregnancy give birth to sons who will, as adults, wind up with a sperm count about 25% below normal and three times the normal risk of fertility problems. This news reported as “The tip of the iceberg.” So I wonder how the tip of the iceberg news then has affected the tip of the you know, penis, now. Is meat eating down? Are sperm counts up? I just ask the questions.

Now that I see sperm stories everywhere I begin to let the imagination run wild. Always a potentially dangerous endeavor, says The Mister.

A recent article in the online Daily Mail described the desperate attempts of one English family to find their beloved missing pet. The frantic family squirted trails of their own urine around town, sprayed on lampposts and trees to lure home their Black Lab who was presumably just on a doggy mission to spread his own sperm. The dog might come home but the neighbors will be hoisting pitchforks. Small price.

Anyway, I got to thinking about errant wives. Suppose a man, frantic because his wife has left him, could lure her back by squirting his semen over the barstools in the pub or the front car seat of the man suspected to have rendered the husband a cuckold. Because, “…the house is so quiet without her. She’s a bit of a special wife you now. I kind of rescued her and it took me ages to rehabilitate her, so I want her back.”

I’m perusing the Washington Post online, which I read for the “them” content. There’s an op-ed piece by Sarah Palin, soon-to-be-ex- governor of Alaska and soon-to-be-plaguing us free thinkers once again, sooner than we think. The phrase “Cap-and-Trade” is in the headline. Being who she is, you know, a hockey mom, I assume she’s now embracing an amendment to her procreative policy of teens having babies. Maybe it’s a call to cap the little guy with a condom and instead of having them naturally, well then just trading a few million dollars for a three-year-old Malawian girl, like Madonna.

All this news about sperm is making an impact on The Mister. He wants a cuddle and I am warbling on about increased sperm volume. “Knock it off,” he whispers, “I am trying to be romantic here.”

Before capitulating to his undoubted charms, I manage one more rant. What about teeth? Why aren’t the scientists working on a way for people with a family history of poor teeth to be born with really good teeth? To pop from the womb ready to ride with those pearly whites to success? Because those scientists, at least the American ones, invent for what counts in life. And that, my friends, is sperm.

BREATHABLE GLASS

everything beautiful she did
everything beautiful she was
every beauty has its past
flowing through me like
breathable glass
every promise of love
every promise comes undone
everything bright fades too fast
flowing through me like
breathable glass
flowing through me like
breathable glass

she’s a shy girl
catch your eye girl
how can you lie girl
and say you love me
she’s a shy girl
i don’t know why girl
you don’t trust your heart
and say you love me do
say you love me do

everything memory has to lose
everything memory just won’t give
every feeling meant to last
flowing through me like
breathable glass
every secret she shared
every secret disappears
everything slips from my grasp
flowing though me like
breathable glass
flowing through me like
breathable glass

she’s a shy girl
catch your eye girl
how can you lie girl
and say you love me
she’s a shy girl
i don’t know why girl
you don’t trust your heart
and say you love me

she’s lost in ecstasy
breathing all too easily
and there she goes again
sliding out of view

she’s a shy girl
catch your eye girl
how can you lie girl
and say you love me
she’s a shy girl
i don’t know why girl
you don’t trust your heat
and say you love me

Hear the © song at www.myspace.com/paulfairallmusic

THE RESERVOIR TONIGHT

"When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive to these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such Principles and and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness… "

—Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence of the United States of America