CHICAGO, IL-

When you enter the country of Pain, they confiscate your passport. You leave behind the things and people that used to feel important and familiar, in which you used to believe. Everyone in the new country is a stranger, though it scarcely matters because pain is really a nation of islands, and everyone who lives there lives alone.

In 1995, while my husband and I were visiting my best friend Tom in Barcelona, I became an unintentional and surprise immigrant in the country of pain. It happened overnight, and at first I did not realize I had “moved.” I believed I had a bladder infection. I’d had them before—many, in fact, even having been hospitalized for one as a child. Sometimes when I got one, I could not close my legs for the burning; I could not stop pacing the room; I urinated blood. But the agony was always temporary. You take your antibiotics, you take your pills that make your pee turn orange, you feel a little crazy for a couple of days and then it is done.

Except this time, it was not.

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MANHATTAN-

The Cuban girl peeled off a cigar box wouldn’t open the door to her apartment building and over the intercom was listing all the valid, sensible reasons under the circumstances why we would never see each other again.

I stared ahead at the security camera and held a rose against the glass of the front entrance.

While it’s true sentimental people are cruel, they’re also quite gullible.

Eventually she came down and slipped out the glass entrance and gave me a kiss goodbye. While she was mumbling apologies about it not working out and staring at me with her cigar stain eyes, I gently reached my hand into her coat pocket and stole her phone.

I kissed her goodbye, grinding a slightly devious smile against her frown, and hailed a cab to get me back into the city until she gave me a call. After all, she had my new number.

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HOLLYWOOD, CA-

It started in childhood, of course. Everything does.

The year: 1987.

The film: THE PRINCESS BRIDE.

Starring: Cary Elwes…and his steamy British accent.

Oh that melodious accent. It was scintillating. It was fatal. It was official: I was obsessed. From that moment on, I’ve considered myself an accent connoisseur (pronounced with the proper French intonation which evokes thoughts of sweet nothings whispered in a darkened chateau whilst clutching Bordeaux in vintage stemware). I love accents both thick and light, both guttural and pleasant-sounding. European, Australian, even Southern. Accents are music to my ears.

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SAN DIEGO, CA -

I’ve been thinking about blood a lot lately.

Blood I’ve spilt, and blood I’ve seen spilt. The red fluid gushing out of a beheaded rattlesnake’s body, sizzling as it splattered onto the hot Mexican soil. The crimson seeping out of the crushed chest of a fourteen year-old boy, opened up like a book as the doctors tried to massage his heart back into life. We cut the snake into strips and fried the meat over an open fire. And as for the boy, there was simply too much of him smeared across the front grill of a wrecked car, and his poor heart had nothing left to pump. (more…)

HAVANA-

Somebody once said that at the end of the world there’s always a tourist and a whore fucking in a cheap hotel. If that’s here, that whore’s mother probably made the bed and had coffee ready for them after.

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BROOKLYN, NY

We get out at the Seventh Avenue station and walk up to the park.  I follow Nicholas down a small paved road that empties out a massive field, stretching black and green before us.  We slink our way across the plain until we get to an empty softball diamond with a metal fence that runs behind home base. Nick drops his bags and pulls his video camera out of the backpack. I ignore it and walk back out onto the playing field. A wall of forest behind Nick and the fence is bordered by a dimly lit path, so we can see if anyone starts to come near us. The mouth of openness on all other sides gives sufficient warning if anyone cuts across the field. I try to see into the woods, remembering this is a notorious pick-up place for gay guys. I imagine hundreds of eyes staring out at us from the tangled trunks and branches.

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HAVANA-

“In a sense, we are all crashing to our death from the top story of our birth to the flat stones of the churchyard and wondering with an immortal Alice in Wonderland at the patterns on the passing wall. This capacity to wonder at trifles—no matter the imminent peril—these asides of the spirit… are the highest forms of consciousness.”

-Vladimir Nabokov

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BOULDER, CO-

So, I was doing a little “online shopping” the other day when I came upon a Christian Sex Toy site. [Uncertain intention of pun.] Now, I’m as adventurous as the next Sally, so I have to admit I was curious. What could the boudoir of the believer offer to spice up my marriage? What Would Jesus Do?

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CHICAGO, IL-

One day in spring, accompanied by a 50-something-year-old inorgasmic couples counselor* snapping photos for her out-of-state-lover on her cell phone, I went to a sex store that I always call Great Sexpectations, though it is actually called something else.

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HAVANA-

I saw a little girl get bit by a dog this afternoon in Central Park. I watched her from a stone bench beside the Esquina Caliente (Hot Corner) crowd of men arguing baseball just down the street from the Capitolio. She tried to pet one of these Goya-nightmare stray dogs and it snapped at her hand. She went off like a car alarm but it was the way she screamed that made the old men give up baseball and rush over to console her. In 30 years it is the solitary bonafide miracle I have witnessed. You’ll have to take my word for it, but if the Hot Corner heard Slim Pickens himself was falling from the sky straddling an atomic bomb, slapping his cowboy hat against his hip and yee-hawing his way down onto their heads—there wouldn’t be a flinch— “We’re talking béisbol here coño.”

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VANCOUVER-

My hunch is that if Havana’s your mother you’re going to have a tricky time making another city your wife.

My hometown has breezes it treats like hurricanes, Havana has hurricanes it treats like breezes.

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SMALLTOWN, TEXAS-

While an Asian pro with a rhinestone ass wiggles next to a pot-bellied shooter sporting a runaway moustache at the Bellagio craps table, I wonder what the percentage of self-deluded people there are in the world.

Probably pretty fucking high, I think as I scan the room. At the video poker bar, a bachelorette pops a caplet of X into her mouth as her friends cheer her on. “Scooby Dooby Doo,” she howls at a passing geriatric, then preps a line of coke on her wrist to rev her high.

She catches me watching and smiles. “You wanna line, sugar?”

Mississippi. Maybe Alabama. “No thanks.”

“Delusion is the cornerstone of happiness,” she offers with a snort. “You sure you don’t need a little help? You look too grounded.”

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WASHINGTON, NJ -

Every time I open a new book of fiction, there’s a part of me that hopes for the improbable: to encounter something new, something utterly original.  So as you can imagine, I’m let down a lot.  But sometimes I get lucky.

It’s been two weeks since I finished reading J. Robert Lennon’s Pieces for the Left Hand, but here’s this little gem of a book, still sitting on my desk.  I don’t know when I’ll return this paperback to its designated shelf, but it won’t be anytime soon, for I keep going back to it, reading one of the 100 anecdotes in this collection at random, smiling and chuckling along the way.

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LAS VEGAS, NV -

I’m a night person. I pull all-nighters. No, I don’t do speed (although I might as well). I simply hit an hour of no return and there I am watching the clock roll into the future. Bringing in the next day. Telling me I made one more.

2am.

4:30am.

Usually, if I get to bed before 10:30 then I’m good. But if I pass that time then who knows what’s going to happen.

1:30am.

3:20am.

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VANCOUVER-

She texted me that she’d landed and was going through customs.

Waiting around in the arrivals I was nervous. Anna Paquin walked by all conspicuously-inconspicuous and I glared at her and she smiled.

My heart is as complicated as minigolf. Even Anna Paquin knew it on her way to film X-Men 3.

I’d give a lot to be one of those people who are misunderstood. Everybody gets me.

I felt nauseous and confused and looked around until I saw an abandoned wheelchair and jumped in. I felt better. Then I had some inspiration.

I texted the girl: “Bad timing. Had skiing accident and severed spinal cord. Paraplegic. Hope you can see man behind the chair. Sorry to be so last second.”

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COLDEN, NY-

I put on my forty-year old stainless steel Rolex Oyster Perpetual when I need to impress someone. I take it out of the drawer and shake it a few times to get it running, snap the metal clasp in place, trying not to catch any arm hairs in it, and I’m cool. Guys nudge each other – check out the old dude with the Rolex. Wonder what he deals.
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LOS ANGELES—

When I was ten, my parents sent me to summer camp for two weeks. They made the arrangements secretly, knowing a fit was inevitable the minute they broke the news. I was an explosive kid, coming as I did from a histrionic family, and my parents wanted me gone for a while so they could rage at each other without me around to upstage them.
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VANCOUVER-

Starbucks Girl asks me in the parking lot, “You’ve been long distance with her for like a year, right? Are you ever scared that one day she’ll regret flying to be with you? I mean, leaving her home behind. If it doesn’t work out…”

Everything—or at least most stuff—is a version of something else. I guess that’s unsettling for a lot of people. Maybe it’s why so many people qualify the word “unique” when they try to describe stuff, as if it’s a matter of degree. There’s one of something or there’s not. It is or it isn’t. Unicycles have one wheel or they don’t.

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NEW PALTZ, N.Y.-

There are certain hobbies that, while possessed of an inherent appeal, I would never take up because the subculture attached to them so repels me.

Take golf. I enjoy whacking the little white ball—I’m pretty good on the driving range, truth be told—but I would never go so far as to play the game for the simple reason that I don’t want to spend a whole afternoon with golfers.

Marijuana is another example. Pleasant though the high may be, no amount of stonedness could hip me to hackeysack and Grateful Dead bootlegs.

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DOUBLE-PARKED IN MADRID-

“I’m a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes against hope they won’t.”

-F. Scott Fitzgerald

She’d told me she enjoyed the walks to the boys houses more than the boys.

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