THE LITTLE FOXES

I spend the weekend with CAR in the swanky section of Maryland, Bozman Neavitt, also known as the Boz?

CAR picks me up at my towering apartment building on west 42nd Street around 8 pm.

I've managed to make my bed and straighten the living room, but as soon as she gets here, I ask her to sweep the kitchen floor, pick up the mess in the bathroom and empty a week and half's worth of garbage trash. I have to follow along for the this particular chore because the smelly fetid trash is bursting at the seams. In the trash room, I fish around for recyclables (encrusted with coffee grains, old wet cereal, and carrot scrapings, before we dump the loot down the chute.

Car is visibly disgusted which surprises me because she always has seemed to have a low bar for all things gross.
(My bar is lowered every day).

We pack up the car, including my bike, my laptop and some of my vitamins. Her car-van is perfect for my bike and CAR single handily lifts it and it goes in standing up.

"Piece of cake" says CAR.

(I am impressed -now- with everyone's strength, with everyone's mobility, with everyone's motor-neurons).

We stop at the dollar pizza place on ninth and fortieth*. CAR gets two slices and a diet coke. I am off wheat so (no pizza for me) and "diet coke is poison" I admonish her. Car seems to have some risky handle on health, she's created her own philosophy, which she firmly believes... and she's convincing. I have to grip my seat not to be swayed. Basically her concept is that nothing can hurt you as long as you don't believe it can hurt you (or) ... something like that. It's actually very Mary Baker Eddy of her. It goes the same way with medicine too (I tell her) you have to research vitamins and herbs and medications and understand what you are taking so that the mind cooperates with the potions.

My throat is bothering me. I am fighting a cold. I can't clear my throat easily.

When CAR gets pizza, leaving me in her blinking van under the Port Authority Bridge, I have a moment where I can't get air down my throat. I DO panic. But I wait it out. I did one search about this very issue on the web and it basically said. very, very few, ever die of choking. So. I let it go. And CAR doesn't seem concerned so why should I? It's a relief to have someone around who doesn't buy into the drama of this thing.

The drive is fun. I eat CAR's lettuce, nuts and water.

CAR and I have a way of talking endlessly. I ask inane questions and she allows for this. I ask things like...

"Do you ever wish you didn't own a car?"

(or)

"Is it hard to keep you bathroom clean? and who does the cleaning? And moreover, what kind of cleaning products do you use?"

I am endlessly fascinated by the smallest, tiniest subjects. I have an endless facility for imaging things in my mind's eye so these absurd (out of left field) topics are really entertaining to me.

I imagine that my interviewees must feel a little defended. That I'll have some insightful thing to add at the end of my endless questions. But I never do. I sit there, my mouth slightly open (like the village idiot) pondering, imaging, how (CAR gets baking soda and white wine vinegar to work around the bathroom tile and toilet bowl. Does here daughter stare at her as she scrubs? Is the cat in the way? When can she possibly have time to do it?) And so on...

Perhaps, I too am on "the spectrum". The spectrum (a word that CAR uses often) being the wide possibilities from ADD to Autism (I surmise).

We take 95 to 301 and cross the Delaware Memorial Bridge (really something to look at!).

We get lost and CAR makes urgent calls to her husband as she stares in frustration at her GPS devise on her Blackberry. I sit in my docile and inchoate state as CAR whips herself into small bouts of angst and apology for our meandering. Since I don't care to look at the future (these days), since I don't want to face planning, the present moment is always perfectly fine with me.

I am (indeed) - (zen-like) out of necessity.

We get to CAR's parents house around 2 am. There is a long driveway lined with Sycamores. It feels grand (with a touch of humility) and historic. It's so late at night, I am reminded of Scarlet returning to Terra in Gone With the Wind after the civil war is over.

Like a play, the drive in, is an overture to the front of the house which is... (I guess) ... the first act?

The house is great looking. The groomed property seems endless. The Maryland water hugs the property. There are multiple outbuildings which is a sure sign of prosperity (in my book).

The place is called "Gratitude". There is a sign hanging by the entryway. CAR says "we tried to change the name of the place but it involved too much paperwork or something."
I suggest they rename the place, "Complacency" or "Deserved It!" Car and I find this amusing but she tells me she's gotten guff for the name before so I imagine and I'm bringing up old jokes and she is giving me the courtesy laugh.


CAR and I get right to it and have a glass of wine at two in the morning.
CAR initiates a conversation about me.

"Charlie" she says "I just can't believe this, this is just UNbelievable."

I don't really want to talk about it, but I do offer, "well from where I'm sitting it doesn't seem so far off the path. I've always had these mess-ups along the way."

I go through a list of health scrapes I've had.
I was in and out of the hospital a lot when I was a little kid.
I just can't get a handle on it except to say that it feels familiar.

I scale the stairs (I grip the banister and pull!) and choose a bedroom, coughing along the way.
It feels dramatic and ominous like I'm Horace Giddens in "The Little Foxes".

Maybe CAR will kill me in the night for my life insurance.

CAR graciously sets me up with some water and my medicine.

As I fall asleep, I worry I'll choke to death in my sleep.

_________________________

* that patch of the city, the only section left that resembles the New York I remember as a kid, as an eleven year old commuting to 1970s Manhattan during the garbage strike, where there were Chock Full of Nuts diners on every corner and I met the likes of a pre-adolescent Ally Sheedy at TV auditions