Published in the New York Press, 11/14/2007. Read the original (w/comments) here.

I spent all week anxiously watching the news. On Sunday it was nothing—a blip on my scan of the morning papers. By Monday, the coverage had blown up like the fires themselves, moving fast and seemingly everywhere. I’m not well-versed in California geography, so the name Witch Creek meant little to me. My boyfriend Angelo was the one who pointed it out.

“Witch Creek,” he said. “That’s near La Jolla. Have you spoken to Brian and David?” While Angelo sometimes needed help to get from Brooklyn to the West Village, his grasp of geography outdid mine when it came to anywhere not accessible by subway.

Brian and David owned the apartment we took care of. For the last year and a half, I’d been a semi-professional house-sitter.

I moved every few months, from vacation home to pied-à-terre and back. Usually, I arrived somewhere as everyone else departed and packed my bags just as the weather started to get nice. When offered the chance to watch a duplex in Park Slope, I jumped at it. New York, I thought to myself, has no off-season.

Not so California. Reading the news coverage, I was reminded of that old joke about the four seasons of Los Angeles: flood, earthquake, riot and fire. With the worst drought on record and unusually strong Santa Ana winds, October 2007 was shaping up to be fire season in a major way.

A quick email assured us that Brian and David were safe. But they had bad news: Depending on what happened, they might have to shorten their stay in California. Angelo and I had been prepared to move by December; now, we had to be ready to find new housing by Saturday.

We began to study the maps. Witch Creek was a bare 60 miles from La Jolla. Stunned newscasters were reporting that the fire was traveling west at speeds of up to three and a half miles per hour. At that rate, it would reach Brian and David’s house in less than a day. From a continent away, I watched the fire threaten my home.

I’d always considered house-sitting to be the perfect solution to my simultaneous desires to own nothing and have everything.
When it came right down to it, none of the stuff was mine. I now saw the flip side of the arrangement: Though I was living in Brooklyn, the California wildfires were about to make my apartment go up in smoke.

On Tuesday, the University of San Diego—where David worked as a professor—cancelled classes. Deaths were being reported. The ecological destruction was massive. The smoke from the fires was visible from space. But all I could think about was my apartment.

I never meant to become a full-time house-sitter. My lease was up and my friend Jon needed someone to look after his place in Vieques, Puerto Rico. All I had to do, he said, was prevent the wild horses from eating his banana trees. When that ended, a second-cousin asked me to keep an eye on her house during the winter, to make sure the pipes didn’t freeze. Word got around, and more offers came my way. Some worked out; others didn’t. I always found somewhere to go.

By Thursday, it seemed clear Brian and David were coming back. UCSD had closed for the entire week. Brian mentioned their imminent return to a mutual friend. I watched the footage of people sobbing over the burnt wreckage of their former homes, and in my melodramatic, self-pitying heart I thought, “Yes! I know what you’re going through.”

I could have found another place to house sit. Even a casual mention of my possible eviction had offers appearing on the horizon. In the time I’d been in Brooklyn, though, I’d put down roots. Like Angelo. Things I was not willing to drop when the fires appeared on the horizon. Now it was all going to fall apart, and though I wasn’t about to lose everything I owned, I still felt panicked.

By Friday, the situation in California was coming under control. La Jolla seemed safe, but I realized it didn’t matter if Brian and David came back. It was too risky, living where my home could be taken from me at any moment. I wanted a place of my own, even if that meant a tiny studio in a bad neighborhood, or not being able to leave the country whenever I wanted. The beautiful thing about house-sitting was the complete freedom—or so I thought. All it offered was the freedom to leave. Not the freedom to stay.

While waiting to hear from Brian and David, Angelo and I studied maps again, but this time, they were of Brooklyn. “Which train goes out to Sunset Park?” he asked. My days as a house-sitter were over.

Published in the New York Press, 7/2/2008. Read the original (w/comments) here.

I was somewhere in the middle of Tennessee when the burning started again. It wasn’t quite a burning, really. More of an itching. Like a caterpillar was crawling inside the shaft of my penis. It would stop for a little while, perhaps to explore an interesting twist in the vas deferens, then it continued to bumble its happy way up and down the length of my cock. It was particularly active whenever I took a piss—a bad sign.

“Joey, do you guys have any medical supplies here?” Joey was my ex-boyfriend. I was visiting him as part of a 10-day road trip, from New York City to Tucson. He lived on a queer commune hidden deep in a mountain valley—the sort of place you’d never expect to find on the borders of Appalachia. It was equal parts glitter and gutter, manure and magnificent. I was surprised they hadn’t been run off 15 years ago. But there I was, standing between the goat pen and the wood-stove-heated sauna, trying not to claw at my dick like a deranged lunatic on the subway. I found that a subtle squeezing of the penis seemed to relieve some of the itching; but from someone else’s perspective, this was indistinguishable from masturbation.

“What are you looking for?” he said. “There’s a first-aid kit—Bactine, suntan lotion, that kind of stuff—up at the main house.”

I didn’t particularly want to tell him that my new boyfriend (let’s call him DW) had given me gonorrhea. For the second time. However, if I had any chance of scoring some prescription antibiotics in the next 5,000 miles, it was here on the fag farm. The only other option was to find a free clinic in the area, and I knew what that meant— another sadist in a lab coat ramming a Q-tip down my willy until I cried. It had been bad enough in Brooklyn. Out here, I bet they used wooden splinters with steel wool on one end. Plus, it was Saturday. Nothing would be open.

I couldn’t even blame DW. He was asymptomatic, and until I started itching and dripping, he had no idea he was a modern Typhoid Mary. It was possible he hadn’t even given it to me the first time—perhaps I had a particularly long-incubating case from the last person I’d slept with. After the itch started, DW and I both got treated—but on separate days. We thought we’d waited until his course of antibiotics was done, but unless I’d slipped into a patch of poison ivy somewhere in North Carolina, we’d miscalculated.

“I, uh…I think I have gonorrhea.” Scratch, scratch.

Joey rolled his eyes. He thought of me as a total slut, mostly because I used to be one, but partly because he still considered me emotionally stunted and incapable of having long, deep and meaningful relationships. I hastened to explain that I’d gotten this particular STD from someone I was actually dating. That in fact, every STD I’d ever had —crabs twice and now gonorrhea twice as well—had come from someone I really liked, whose last name I knew and could even spell. I could walk out of a sex club in Germany with nothing worse than some abrasions from a sling accident, but put me in a relationship and something was bound to start itching.

“Oh, God,” he muttered, then stalked off toward the house. “Let’s go look.” I followed sheepishly behind him, with my head down and my hand in my crotch. Thirty minutes later, we’d turned up all sorts of over-the-counter pain medications, some anti-depressants, a few unlabeled prescriptions bottles, and more herbs, tinctures and medicinal teas than I could shake a stick at. But there wasn’t a single bottle of plain old-fashioned penicillin.
“You want to call Morty?” Joey finally asked me, resignation making his voice weary.

Did I want to call Morty? No. That was the last thing I wanted to do. Sadly, I didn’t have any other choice. Morty was Joey’s dad and was a licensed physician. He’d helped out friends of ours before with everything from morning-after pills to consultations on the effects of taking testosterone; but what was I going to say to him?
“Hi, I broke your son’s heart a year ago and now I’m hoping you can fix this pesky venereal disease I seem to have developed?” Yeah, that would go over well.

How much humiliation does it take to outweigh a penile swab? I know some people are into that kind of thing, but I’m not one of them. I’m more afraid of physical pain than embarrassment. I write nonfiction; public humiliation is an occupational hazard. I called Morty.

After a perfunctory “Hi Dad, the goats are fine,” exchange, Joey explained the situation. He put me on the phone and left the room. My voice cracked like a teenager as I assured Morty that I knew it was gonorrhea, told him how I’d gotten it and promised to inform DW and my primary physician as soon as possible. He was polite and professional the entire time, and he never said anything about my being an emotionally stunted slut, for which I was thankful.

For all his eye-rolling, Joey helped me find a place to get the prescription filled, gave me directions and made me some lunch. We talked about mutual friends, lovers and acquaintances; and we discussed his garden and my graduate school program. I told him about DW, and he introduced me to his new girlfriend, a fellow commune-ist. We all held hands and sat on a broken-down couch whose springs had seen better days.

Joey might have been right. I wasn’t the best at relationships. At least not the dating kind. But the friendships that lay at the heart of those relationships—the passionate, compassionate, warm, hot, strong, long-lasting friendships that came before, during and after—those mattered to me. My journey cross-country was a map studded with friends and former lovers who I could not wait to see again. And they were all letting me stay with them, so the feeling was at least somewhat mutual.

By the time I rolled into Tucson, two days and another ex-boyfriend later, the itching was gone, replaced by a warm feeling somewhere deeper and more primal than the shaft of my penis. My heart.

Published in the New York Press, 9/29/2007. Read the original (w/comments) here.

The problem with going to Puppy’s house was that I left smelling like a burned-out hippie who just stumbled off the last plane from Goa. It was a peculiar combination of pot, dirt, sweat, patchouli and God-knows-what else. It was a miasma that inhabited his apartment like a roommate, and it followed me all the way home to Sunset Park.

Puppy’s apartment was the entire top floor of a dilapidated brownstone. Puppy converted the living room into his bedroom, and the bedroom into his farm. The ceiling was wreathed in grow lamps and the walls covered in reflective Mylar sheeting. The plants grew from a series of interlocking troughs built a foot off the ground.

“You know hydroponics?” Puppy said. “Well this is aeroponics. They get everything they need from short bursts of nutriginated-water. They grow huge on nothing. See?” He lifted the lid on one of the troughs, revealing the tiny root structure of a mature plant.

“I hate pot,” Puppy always said. “I fuckin’ hate it. It smells like crap, and it makes me stupid and tired.”

Being a pot farmer in the middle of Brooklyn was strange enough; being a pot farmer who didn’t like pot was downright weird. It was for the nausea, Puppy explained. For years, he’d experienced intense stomach cramps. Once he’d vomited for 12 hours straight. He was a model and extreme biker before he got sick, but over the years, the muscle and fat were stripped from his bones. By the time we met, he was a beautiful face with a wasted body.

Medically, there was no explanation. Puppy called it “Cobain Syndrome,” since Kurt Cobain complained of similar symptoms before he killed himself. Puppy’s  doctors called it idiopathic gastroparesis—medical terminology for “we don’t know what the fuck is happening.” The doctor gave him morphine for the pain; the pot he grew on his own. The sicker he got, the more of a shut-in he became, and one day he turned his personal remedy into a home business.

Every time I went to Puppy’s apartment we looked for something to help with his nausea. We meditated, used magnets and electroshock bracelets, made strange teas from herbs ordered off the Internet, exchanged massages, did yoga; anything and everything we could think of. He taught me to play a didgeridoo, hoping that the harmonics would resonate with the frequency of…something.

I played along because I loved him. He was funny, sweet and brilliant—at least, he was when he wasn’t high. I hoped each time wouldn’t end like so many before, with Puppy shaking in agony and me tying off his vein and injecting morphine into him. But often it did.

Growing pot indoors made for a shorter, and less seasonally-dependent growing regimen. This meant Puppy could get two or more crops a year, at times when there was little fresh pot to be found locally in New York. One spring, right after harvesting his plants, Puppy made a surprise announcement. He was visiting his parents.

Puppy’s parents were a mystery to me. Once he’d compared them to snake-handlers, and told me they were backwoods Louisiana religious types. I knew he’d run away from home and changed his name as a teen. They kept in touch in fits and starts, always looking for that rarest piece of real estate: common ground. This was a strange development for someone who rarely even went a subway ride away from home.

The day he was to leave, I went to Puppy’s apartment to help pack. In between stuffing random clothes into a bag, he gave me things. His didgeridoo, a book I was slowly reading during my visits, a jacket of his that I loved. Packing, he said, made him realize how much crap he needed to get rid of. He’d be back in a week, and he expected me to be ready to play the didge for him when he returned.

Part of me wasn’t surprised when a week later I got a call from his business partner, saying he found Puppy dead of a morphine overdose. No note.

For months, I refused to wear his jacket. I kept it shut up in a drawer by itself, where the smell of Puppy’s apartment could linger. I opened it periodically, and Puppy came rushing back to me in a whiff.

Eventually the smell wore off and someone bought Puppy’s apartment and renovated it. But every time I pass someone smoking up on the street, I am taken back to the only farm I ever knew in Brooklyn.