La Perla De Sur

Chapter 1: Egomaniac (with an inferiority complex)

It was 3 am on a Monday morning and she had anticipated this walk since those jogs brought her further and further out to...here..to the foot of this street corner nexus. The corner looked liike any other just the same, but not so in her last night's vision. That night, the corner seemed so overwhelming..so monumental she had to open the door OF HER APARTMENT BUILDING to regain her breath...as if to say her brain cells ceased functionality for a solid set of minutes. Yet she was so engrossed, so intrigued.

Her friend Marta Santos could not determine whether or not it was her mother saying "hello from hell" or perhaps just some normal anxiety attack. Yes Marta....ready to label her friend a lemming at a moment's notice. But Keely knew better..."Am I really Keely?" she thought to herself.."Or just an unwelcome stranger setting foot on the not-so-welcome-mat of this seemingly sinister galaxy?"

She stared at the walk-up window. The sign read something about an existing store for lease and a number to be called for details. The yellow awning below read "exquisite ballrooms" with some sort of cyrillic under it. She looked up to the sky, to the stars..for a catalyst, perhaps a thunder crackle and a lightning bolt. But nothing came out of it. She pulled out one of her cool Kings, lit the cigarette, and just stood there, baffled. Was she truly a visionary like the gawky college-kid tarot reader told her?

Three puffs later, she felt like a complete sack of shit....no better than the bums that pissed, shit, and slept on the curb of the street. She woudln't be surprised if by now one wanted to drag her down an alleyway and fuck the shit out of her. Yes, contemplating a vision was thoroughly driving a wedge between her and the sleep she much needed to function at 9 am the next morning...though she could pick and choose if she wanted to come in.

Walking back to E 41 st she thought about it more intimately..how could something that could come forward with such frightfull clarity; providing such a stir in her conscious that she would do anything short of crawling in a snake's lair to find out answers be attributable to "anxiety attack" fallout syndrome?

She was ready to call her friend Marta on her cell phone and cuss her out. But luckily she held back because she remembered how her mother's next to last words shed some light on the perils of fucking over those, who, whether you were ready to accept it or not, might help supply the threads that keep you clinging to this life no matter how close you were to falling off that edge. Marta took the bullet for her more than enough times, she just agreed to disagree, albeit with more than just a slight amount of fucking prejudice.

Self-defeating pride with little or no humility mixed in for fun...a Keely Overton hallmark.

As she reached the apartment building door and took out her keys she was met with the stench of male cat piss.....then she remembered Raul, the vagrant she let have the remainder of her merenguitos and this was the thanks she got from him, Brooklyn's version of a personalized engraving...el tour de piss!!

She opened the door to Apt #1J..she noticed her uncle Alex sleeping quite soundly with just a sheet of linen and a decorative pillow pitched at the foot of the grey couch. She adored her uncle, and now even more so since her mother died..but why the hell did he not possess the stregnth to walk into the other room..not more than a foot down...grab a regular pillow, and sleep like a king as opposed to a miser. Laziness has its pitfalls; YES OF COURSE. But an idiotic disposition to go along with it?

Take a risk, make a sacrifice, grab a pillow with a real live pillowcase, not a SHAM

She really wanted to wake him up and smother him at this point, but she left it alone.

And so she sank onto the air mattress by the window. All of a sudden she was hit with an impulse to grab the last slice of pizza with basil and tomato out of the freezer and wash it down with a homemade egg cream..but the nightmares she'd been having were so wierd and unmanageable she was at this point too afraid to even take some water and fear having to hold it in in her sleep. She even had this mantra for warding off nightmares in general. Nine times out of ten..it did the trick, and since her period was no where near she was feeling lucky.

Chapter 2: Sink or Swim

Slumped over a coffee pot..head looking up to the ceiling. "Tell Me" by the Stones was playing on her mother's turntable. The record had not yet been removed since Cora died.

She was really getting into it....she loved that movie "Mean Streets"...she wished she was the black stripper in that scene with Harvey Keitel.

The scene that made her choke

Keely imagined herself jumping aside and standing next to her...poking at her.."Like what the fuck, dude...why are you torturing the fuck out of me?" ..kind of like that commercial "Hey..Keely's phone here..saying HELLO FROM HELL BITCH!!"

Keely just scratched her head and looked up at the ceiling..

Only so much brake pressure to be applied..to avoid a pile-up..to avoid a smack with a cinderblock wall...

Blue poker chip...

That's when the arrow kind of hit her heart...she knew if she did it..if she actually took the drink...if she actually reunited with her old pal Russian Bob..the fallout would be so much so she wouldn't know what to do..

And don't think in a million years, spoiled little shit, that you'd get away with this SCOTT FREE...without hell to pay.

Gold poker chip...big blue book

She folded her arms..marched slowly over to the bottom cabinet adjacent to her foot...and pulled out a 16 oz mini-Skol Vodka

"Skol vodka..skol vodka..skol vodka..because my liver is the masochist at heart"

The youtube viral commercial flashed in her mind's eye. She held the bottle in front of her....shouted bud´te zdorovy!, and poured a shot's worth into her morning's coffee. Her uncle was still asleep, snoring. If he was up, he would have joined her anyways; no cameras shoved up her ass.

It felt good..the sensation was more than realistic...in fact it was hyper-sensational...like some sort of lucid dream where she was bowing down, thanking Jesus..shaking a million hands. It was as if all the men she ever loved dearly, whether on a romantic basis or not, sat down in portrait fashion scatterred amongst the folding chairs and sofas in 1920's top hats and shirts and ties ready to embrace, run their fingers through her hair, kiss passionately. Recreating the judgement of Paris....but with no turmoil or tension. Kin to an 11-year old's first peek at the concept of hedonism, erect penises and the like..without all the mindfuckery and rotten trapped sewer-stench wind it entaile.

Motherfucking shit.....she poured another shot into her royal cup coffee, to her the exotic blend.

The floodgates had been released..from out of her eyes.

She wiped her eyes.. Friends insulted her, how "backwater hollow" Royal Cup was...but it was her mother's coffee of choice. All she could do now was sit back casually and roll her little eyes back. Now the rays of sun were poking through the window at full blast. It reminded her of summer days where it seemed those rays would never go away, not even a hint of a droplet on her window pane. It pissed her the fuck off. Ten o' clock in the morning when people were fucking getting ready to run errands..and she was about a hairline close to "fallen down drunk" again.

This beared no relation to the hits of Manischevitz she'd take on Friday evenings two years ago..the emotinal intensity was much stronger, yet the apprehension factor was kept at arm's legnth.

Oh yes Shabbos dinner, couldn't be happier. Eloy the football guy was sitting across from her, winking and smiling...big brown eyes...confident swagger..and she of course winked and smiled back..imagining the pounds of naked flesh and muscle mass beneath the gabardine. To her it was unfathomable, how a remarkably fucking insane clown costume get-up kept some hot guy looking like a pussy-ass from seminary. A masculinity secured and under wraps. Lock-in-key. Her father's pat discussions on kosher-this/kosher-that were confined to background lispings...and the moments that kept her and Eloy from cuddling together half-naked, confessing secrets in Hebrew became pleasurable as opposed to unbearable. Keely couldn't help but laugh. She became addicted to this "tease and denial"....seminary boy? Or middle Eastern stud. This ritual became akin to "finding out what was behind the green door" in that song...the exotic perfumes of Madagascar swarming her head inside and out.

Green door! She swore that she owed her alcoholism to Jim Lowe...she could always find her scapegoat someway, somehow. And how the fuck in a million years would her mother, straight off the boat from Romania with barely a penny to her name who found work scrubbing toilets in a looney bin in 1957 at age 17..not a word in English not even a crack in her accent, become so engrossed with a northern soul group that fizzled away as fast as it appeared, and a hick from Mississippi who sang of chicken shacks.

This was way too much to sift through. Her uncle "came to" with a snore. True he wouldn't care eight shits if she was drunk or burnt toast, but it was merely 10 in the morning. People were still forking away at their eggs over easy while Regis was faking a smile though dead from the waist down. Morning drunkenness a.k.a. an invitation to a spar. So unlike the Keely that he warmed himself up to since Cora passed. Responsible, agreeable Keely.

"Morning love" she shouted. Then she covered her mouth with an "ooops" expression. What the fuck, was she 16 again.

"Hey"..was all that seemed to make it over the couch.

"What was that?" She said, mocking her uncle's barely audible voice.

Okay, Keely, bubelah, darling...what have you. Now is the time you don't want your uncle Alex to call your bluff and blurt out those three magic words..ya know...so why don't you just grab ahold of a newspaper, pretend like you care about the economy and the op-ed section..and try to finish your coffee instead of looking like you just crawled out of a vat of paint thinner

Hmm..k...good girl...maintain composure...pull out dark frame glasses from left drawer....ya know above the same cabinet you fucking forgot to put that skol vodka back inside of.

Put on glasses, lose the bottle. At-a-girl.

"You are becoming difficult" Alex said sounding like the German soldier from "Laugh-In"

Keely laughed

"How are you, my Perla"

So far, so good (Keely Overton was really Perla Kassin....that was her Jewish name but Kassin of course sounded way too Jewish so she kept her divorced father's last name and her favorite actress was Keely Dawes from "Ashes to Ashes") To her, Perla sounded like a wallflower at a Spanish ball.

"You want me to just come over there and smother you with that pillow, don't you?"

"La Perla del sur" he started singing some bullshit song in Ladino/Spanish where the lyrics didn't even fit right...and Keely just imitated him to make the tone-deafness in his "song artistry" seen even more apparent.

"Stupid ass" She says quickly.

"You used to love that song" She was amazed he didn't up end the chairs

"You know what?" She pulls out this gag gift...a "bitch citation notepad" . "Oh this is a funny one". She looks at the check-in-the-box for "Bossy bitch". "You're a bossy little male bitch" She rips out a page from the book.."I should just cite you on general principle".

"Oh yeah, go ahead make my day"

"Or better yet, a snaggle-toothed little bitch" She giggles like a hyena while he comes running ready to play-tackle her..the complete opposite of the laziness manifested the evening before.

Colombia

This is a little bit of my photography from a 2007-08 (spent New Years there) trip to Colombia. Enjoy!

Eli & Indira

I decided to go to Spanish Harlem..my mother thought it was Far Rockaway
"Make sure you're back by sundown" she shouted
The yenta coalition met downstairs daily in their sun chairs
"Far Rockaway? You'll schvitz like there was no tomorrow"
But I didn't stick around for that

Took the train uptown...El Barrio...got my bodega fix.
Ramon the owner gave me two quarter waters gratis.
The old men in pea caps outside looked at me like some tourist pendejo.
Not knowing I'd rather dish in their bullshit over the yentas at my building anyday

Watched as the clothed children smiled and screamed
Taunting the fire hydrant's muscle per cubic inch
Growing stronger each minute
A seeming ritual since time immemorial

The stoop where I drank my wine on was the makeshift wall in my old room
I could have closed my eyes all day and thought of her
Mi tesoro Indira... her hair of raven and mestizo eyes
As the boleros continued at fever- pitch
The ones where the singer cries at the end

I heard the door-open
record scratch
Dulce Restrepo came out in curlers
Yelling at her children in Spanish
To clear away from the hydrant and come in for lunch
Before it's gone
Bistec en cazuela

You want to take a picture
Of the hydrant and the kids
the girls hanging out by the snowcone truck
or the dominoe tournament by the park

Because by 6pm they become
the somber faces of your relatives
as you sit down and prepare for the enthralling
weekly ritual known as
shabbos dinner

I should of had Tony chop your head off one year ago!!

Walking down Flatbush, on a Sunday morning..to the corner bodega..to get your cheap ass casa del toro...sitting on the stoop outside..thumps of Rad-Z..though in your mind you really want to hear timba or something. Here comes a Chassid with some sort of oversized package which to him weighs heavily....no one briefed you on the gabardine convention. This ruins the mood. You thought to hell you'd never miss Miami..and then you get engaged in this mindfuck.....you need to find a timba song yet there's no internet at home.....the music store sells reggae in your segregated jamaican neighborhood. You want to do like Robert Deniro and aim your 12-gage at the TV when Fox news and the asshole suits come on..just for spite...punk-asses.

You catch the Kings Hwy bus back home....fuckin' guido panguini won't shut up about the Mets....and macanudos. You hope they switch the garlic for arsenic when he seasons his pizza

You stagger inside..yenta-bitch is asleep....then you realize she finished off your scholl's and hope she dry heaves for the balance of her hangover....just for spite, ahh..swore you'd never be a professional jew and yet "just for spite" bounces off your tongue like ..the beat of salsa... SHIT NIGGA...now you need "calle luna calle sol" or some shit like desperately...your bitch stole your IPOD after the fight..the radio is kool-aid on ice these days....all that's left is the record player...and a handful of albums....you thumb through them..MEL TORME? KEELY SMITH? oh shit......why don't you just sprinkle the whole room with fairy-dust..makes me want to break one of those vinyls over a barista's head....and as for you it makes a shit's bit of difference whether it was the early 60's or now.....you're still an overpowering despot who tries to play the victim/schizophrenic angle when someone takes it upon themselves to hand your ass back to you..that's why your fucking husband left you and your geriatric neighbors don't include you in the canasta tournament....

Well, all these ideas and more weigh oh so heavily on you..the critical mass to bring a skyscraper down. And no inherent let-up beckons unto you from around any corner within near reach. A death knell pierces through the alleys. Piercingly louder, shriller; you entertain the notion of wriggling...ahhh..but instead you see "Our day will come" by Ruby and the Romantics...KAPP records...pressed in 1963...a year that only exists in your mind. You never heard the birds chirp, the cars whizz by, or the delivery trucks with the freshly baked bread for that matter. You can imagine the smell of the yeast, perhaps even the stagnant heatwave casting its albacore around your neck...but it's not a piece of your life you can cross-reference in the face of an otherwordly experience. There is a static crackling..but you stand shackled to the others in the throes..of a cosmic let-down...not able to be suckered in by "nostalgia".

Nostalgia is nothing but a cleverly concocted cover story for the quiet desperation and painful yearning in us all.