Snow

Wow. There's snow, and then there's Snow. It's still coming down. Lots of it. I'm going to get bundled up like Charlie Brown and head to the park with my dog. Dogs love snow. I was planning on going into NYC today and checking in on my various vendors of leather and fetish apparel to see if everybody was on board with the upcoming GMSMA program, and to see if I can perhaps sway some of the fence sitters. That is looking increasingly unlikely. I'll have to make time for this during the week, although that can be problematic. There's virtually no privacy at work. Not that I mind chatting on the phone about "well if chaps would be prlblematic, maybe one of your straightjackets would work" in front of co-workers, but there seems to be a 'no personal phone call ethic' in operation. And, I think a visit is worth a thousand phone calls. So I guess I'll just take a long lunch and go galavanting around town.

It's cold in my apartment. Like, too cold. Not sure what the deal is there.

*sigh* I'm reminded of the Blizzard of '78.

I was fourteen years old. I was pretty miserable. My stepmother was a harridan. I had no friends at school. My salvation was my sister, Kathy. Kathy was thirteen years my senior. At that point, she was a knockout. Men were falling all over themselves for her. Yet, she would make a date with me every Friday night. We would go bowling or roller skating or to the movies. My sister's life centered around the town of New Hope, Pennsylvania. New Hope had been an artist's colony of sorts during the Fifties and Sixties, and then became a hippie haven during the Seventies. My sister did commercial art, worked as a bouncer in a biker bar called Fran's Pub (she was the only one who wouldn't be challenged by the Pagans and their hangers-on that frequented the place, cook in restaurants, and work in clothing stores that sold gauzy androgenous cotton clothing. She had a string of boyfriends. I remember Marsias, who was a sculptor. (Interesting story: Marsias was asked by the Pleasure Chest in Philadelphia to do some 'realistic' dildoes in vulcanized rubber. It was work, and he did it. Then, they asked him to do one in the shape of a forearm and a clenched fist. He would usually sculpt the penises he made, because making a mold from the real thing was problematic. But, for the forearm and fist, he decided to make a mold from life. His own fist and forearm were larger than they wanted. So he used my sister's. Every time I'm in a shop selling sex toys and I see that fist and forearm dildo, I wonder if it's my sister. I mean, Marsias sold them the mold, he wouldn't manufacture them. And it kind of looks like my sister's fist and forearm... There's gotta be a world record involved there, right?) Then there was Chaz, who was a Viet Nam vet with a fixation on George Thorogood and the Destroyers, who would play at Fran's Pub, where my sister was the bouncer. Chaz was still wrestling with his demons from 'Nam. He would wake up screaming. Once, Kathy and Chaz and I were walking up Main Street in New Hope when a car backfired. Chaz yelled "Hit the deck!" and pulled me and Kathy down to the sidewalk, covering us with his body. And there was Bob. Bob the Psychopath. (I think I picked up my sister's tastes in men by osmosis.) Bob was (allegedly) an Ex-Marine and (allegedly) was still sometimes called upon to do Special Forces work. He slept with a loaded gun under his pillow. He had a dog named Brownie. Bob was always trying to teach me wrestling moves. I didn't like Bob much, because I thought he was a psychopath. Kathy found out that he had, in fact, never been a marine, and with that everything else he told her about himself fell apart and she left him. Then there was Richie. I liked Richie a lot. He had hair down to his ass, was built like a brick shithouse, and is part of the reason that I smoke unfiltered Camels. (He did.) Richie had a dog named Meter (always running). Meter once got out and was picked up by the dog catcher and taken to the pound. Richie and his friends dressed up like cat burglars (black jeans, black turtleneck sweaters, black watch caps, crepe soled shoes) and broke into the pound to spring Meter.

Anyway, one Friday night in 1978, my sister took me bowling. When we came out of the bowling alley, it had started to snow. Hard. She headed towards my parents' house to take me home, but the roads were just too bad. So we went to her place. She was living in this house in Lambertville, New Jersey, right across the river from New Hope. It was a communal living situation, with a couple who were dancers, my sister, some artists, and a few other folks drifting through. We woke up the next morning, looked out the front window, and all the cars on the street were visible only by their antennas. There would be no taking me back to my parents' house that day, either. I spent the next three days living with my sister. We played a lot of Yahtzee. The whole house would gather for these Yahtzee marathons. My sister had taken me to an art class with her friend Susan who taught me a way of sketching with charcoal. You fill the page with an even gray of the charcoal, and then sketch by either darkening with a charcoal pencil or erasing to create various light and dark values. So when we weren't playing Yahtzee, we were sketching still lifes. And then we would head out into town. New Hope is something of a tourist trap, moreso nowadays, but then, too. But with the snow, there were no tourists. It was just locals. The streets were shut down. And everyone was out, building snowmen, having snowball fights, digging out cars, and stopping into restaurants where coffee and hot chocolate and the like were free since it was just us. We would wander around, build a snow fort, have hot chocolate, meet up with friends of my sister, walk down and look at the ice floes on the river.

That's what I think of when I think of the Seventies. Men and women in suede fringed coats having snowball fights and hot chocolate and playing Yahtzee and smoking pot. Everybody is your buddy. Making the rent is the big issue, but not much of one. These men and women were so much larger than life, in their cowl neck sweaters and hip huggers and moccasins and beads. To me it seemed that everybody was happy all the time. And the streets were always filled with snow, and we could always stop off at The Apple, a cafe on Bridge Street, and get some hot chocolate, and when Kathy told a funny story about how she had cut off the end of her finger and had it sewn back on, I would do a charcoal sketch of two steaming mugs of hot chocolate.

Life always offers it's little compensations.

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