Joe and Clemente at Suffolk Downs

     Something's been a bit wrong with me all winter. I've been working hard, but not going many places (except to take Joe to various appointments.) I'm a bit better this spring, but still I haven't gotten back to the track. I missed the Derby Day opening because it was Gloria Hellmann's celebration and then fussed all this week with various doctor/nurse practioner appointments. By the time Saturday came, and I had programmed myself for the Bagel Bards in the morning, I almost forgot that my Saturday afternoons are always spent at the track.

      I really didn't care if I went. I'm not sure why, because I'm always happy (a state I rarely attain) when I'm there. When I first moved up here, to teach at MIT in 1974, I desperately missed my scrappy life in the Lower East Side and found that going to Suffolk Downs and the Grayhound Bus Station were the only places that soothed me. The bus station provided that semi-exhausted, possibly drugged state of folks lounging in the waiting room and the racetrack had a lot of guys milling around, some of them drunk.

     In New York, our block, 5th Street, between A & B, always had junkies, not all that many, but some, leaning against cars, going into a nod, catching themselves. There was an atmosphere of slight danger that meant never walking home when it was very late (I, who had no money, took a taxi from Second Avenue), having a police lock on the door, and being very watchful. I still remember walking across the MIT bridge, soon after I'd moved up here, and whirling around when I heard footsteps coming up behind me. A runner. How odd.

     When a friend, a dog trainer, claimed a Thoroughbred, I got onto the backside and back into going to the races. That was almost five years ago. Maybe six. After she retired her horse, I stayed. The first person who talked to me, as I stood watching the exercise riders at six or seven in the morning, was Joe, a Cuban, whose father brought him to the states when he was fourteen. In order for him to work at the racetrack, his father had to add five years to his age, so over the last year, I've been able to go with Joe to various places while he's straightened out his real age. 

      I never imagined, when he first talked to me, that we'd end up friends and that there would be any way I could help him out. But, he's a talker, thank god, cause I'm not. And when Clemente rode by, they'd yell at each other and then Joe would tell me stories. One was about the time Joe was standing with his owner, and Clemente rode by on a white horse, a very white horse, the whitest, white horse, and the owner commented on how beautiful they looked, and Joe said, "Yeah, looks just like a fly in a glass of milk."

     They've known each other for years, since Clemente was a jockey on some racetrack, somewhere, some place, up or down the coast. After he had a really bad accident and was in the hospital for months, he stopped riding in races and became an exercise rider. This meet, he's walking hots because he decided it was just too dangerous to keep riding. He's already in a lot of pain and there is always the inevitable spill some day or other.

      Clemente used to sing when he rode in the mornings and after I got to know him through all the harassments they passed back and forth, he sang to me as he rode by, "You are my everything....."

     Anyway, I haven't see Clemente since he got back from Puerto Rico where he spent the winter with his family after his mama died. He used to talk to her every morning, five, ten minutes. After she died, he'd call me every now and then, just like he called the ladies who work in the Clubhouse, his white mama, Jean, and his white sister, her daughter, Brenda. Sometimes all of us go to breakfast at House of Pancakes....          

     Clemente likes to sneak up and scare the bejesus out of me, but I can never catch him out. I creep behind and grab his neck and he turns, "Oh, sweetie heart." Well, he gambles. Every penny he gets, he gambles away. He has a great time and says that this way no one's going to argue over his money after he dies. So, yesterday I see Clemente sitting downstairs, talking to some guy about some horse, and try to scare him, no luck, and he says we should to try to find Valdez. This involves seeing Mama, who sells Off Track Betting, finding out where Brenda's working, talking to various women taking bets and finally finding the Brazilian waitress. Of course, Clemente always introduces me as his private photographer and talks about all the money we're going to make since he's so handsome. Sometimes he tells them about the x-rated video I'm going to make, but sometimes it's just that my photos are going to get him to Hollywood So, we wander around, me following him like a pig in heaven. He's small, fast, talks with a high, loud vice, with a heavy accent and he's a scrapper.

     When I'm looking around the Legend's Room, where Joe usually sits, I hear him call me... He looks terrific. I haven't seen him look so good all winter. The picture I took of him does no justice, though it does show his beautiful eyes. The pass-o-port photograph he showed me, himself as a fourteen-year-old, allows a glimpse of this haunting kid with those huge, sincere eyes. I never saw Joe without a hat for the first three years, so i had no idea that he has thick black hair. He also has long eyelashes. He was, as he sometimes says, quite a fellow in his youth. He did have a good time.

     Joe tells the waitress not to bring Clemente any free coffee, and she says she would never do that and then brings him one with lots of cream after she puts Joe's dinner down....two pieces of chicken, mashed potatoes, corn and four rolls. Joe says he's not getting any when Clemente eyes his food, but the waitress brings a small plate and Joe ladles food onto it. 

     Clemente takes out his teeth when he eats because they are new, and ivory, from his relatives in Africa, made from elephant tusks, and they might break. He also has a twin, a bad twin who made whatever trouble there was, and an airplane that Mama, Brenda and I are going to Puetro Rico in, and a gold mine. 

     Usually I understand anyone speaking with a heavy accent, but I have to admit that I sometimes lose track of what he's saying -- like the time he was telling me a long story that involved cigarettes (he was bumming one just then), something, something, something, and his sweatshirt with the pouch in front. I did understand that I was supposed to wait until he'd finished galloping horses and drive him somewhere. I did. 

     When he got into the car, he was groaning and moaning in pain, but after I'd driven him the short distance to the Grandstand, he got out like a bolt of lighting. I was slow following him and only got there after he'd rushed through the building, out onto the back tarmac, climbed a fence, was walking along the track, climbing another fence, and was out in the dirt to -- picking up a pack of cigarettes he'd dropped when he was exercising a horse early that morning.

     Joe kept offering to buy me something to eat, but I just hate him using him money on stuff like this. But I was extremely hungry since I've been taking these endless antibiotics at timed intervals with no food before, after, a lot of waiting to eat. I almost ate one of the rolls that Clemente was waiting to eat later, after he'd gummed the chicken and eaten the corn and put his teeth back in.

     

The Cyst

     This week has been dominated by the cyst on my breast. It took a while for me to accept that I'd have to see the doctor. I've had two others, but they were on the breast bone, and I managed to squeak by with antibiotics, but I didn't think I could do that again. I don't like going to the doctor, but I understand that it's important. 

      So, there was the initial Monday call to his office, the discussion with the woman at the desk scheduling the appointment. I need this small problem taken care of and an annual physical, I say. He has time on Tuesday, she says. But is there enough time for the annual? No, but this is important. 

     He's quite a nice fellow though I look down my nose on his handwriting which has no distinction. But he's thorough, quiet, with some sense of humor. The problem with him is that he's not Dr. Isselbacher, a wonderful woman who was my doctor for many years. I trusted her implicitly. Her father had been an important figure at the Mass General and the man I lived with had trained at Boston City under Inglefinger and told me about these two greatly admired figures with their distinctive names. I gather that Inglefinger was someone who had to be buried face-down, but I've always admired the Isselbacher family of doctors.

    So, my new doctor, relatively new, found because Dr. Isselbacher took a long leave-of-absence and has finally come back to practice as a concierge doctor (I wish I could afford this type of practice), can't fill her shoes. Yet.

    But he looked my cyst over, measured it, counting out loud, 2, 3, 4, the widths of infection, and used words like erethema. And it was red, a huge ring of red around it. And instead of suggesting a dreaded surgeon, said that I should see a nurse practioner, Karen Flarehty, (that's not the right spelling) at the Brigham and Women's Breast Center. She, he assured me, is extremely nice (that's my requirement. The doctor I lived with said that it doesn't matter a damn whether a doctor is nice ... they have to be good (though he used a more precise word to describe just how good they have to be.)

    He phoned her machine, left his message, gave me a prescription for antibiotics and by the time I had filled it and got home, she'd left a message on my machine. 

    I saw her on Tuesday. My friend, Karl, came along. (He wasn't the most presentable person to sit reading a New Yorker in the waiting room, because he'd forgotten to put in his front teeth and change from his work sweater, but a very tall man is always impressive, no matter what the small details are.)

     She was willing to chat from the moment she met me until the procedure was done. I was relieved that she could do it there and that I didn't have to keep the appointment she'd made for a catscan and an asperation. I wanted this real, human, talkative woman to manage it. And she was efficient. And it was easy. Just a few pricks, then nothing until she bandaged it up. My only mistake was having taken a Valium for potential anxiety over needles, but now I know that that's only in the dentist office that causes my phobia and specifically concerns Novacaine.

    But she wouldn't let me take photographs.

    My dentist let me photograph both sessions for the crown and even took the camera to get a closer view.

    But I had to make do with photographing the cyst when she wasn't in the room and the aftermath.

    Of course, I have all the stages of the cyst -- in the office, the bandage, the unbandaged view with the drain starting to pull out, etc. This is all part of my never-ending fascination for what's happening. But my attempts are minimal compared to Karl Baden's who followed the whole process of his prostate cancer operation and long, difficult treatment with his camera. His drive to record the most difficult aspects of his life is admirable. I am fortunate not to have had any major catastrophe like that and my only close call, when Krissy was in grade school and had appendicitis, went unphotographed until she came back from the hospital and I took a portrait of her pale, exhausted self.

 

     My daughter says that it's "Lower East Side Clutter" meaning that everyone we knew who was living down there in those olden days had rooms filled with clutter. Nothing was particularly neat and much of it was extremely messy.  Of course, I had much less then, fewer papers, fewer books, fewer boxes of photographs and three-ring binders of negatives, no clay pieces stored in boxes. The little bit of extra money I had went for film, printing paper and sometimes for books about photography. (I wouldn't imagine buying photo books any more.)

     But what Krissy means is that nothing was in it's place. None of us would have known where the place was. There was a general air of confusion and poverty. I've maintained that, partly because being a middle-class person was a forbidden thought so that putting together a living space that in any way might have mirrored the one where I grew up, at least before my mother died, was impossible. Then, I didn't have any extra money, so I collected whatever furniture I could. Krissy's father found my kitchen table and four chairs on the streets back in the late sixties. I finally threw out the chairs and replaced them with inexpensive ones that aren't nearly as comfortable. But I still have that rickety table. Whatever extra money I have had has been spent on film, supplies and cameras, video and still, and put into savings.

    But I have amassed books over the years. There are the important books, those my mother had read, that were neatly arranged on the living room bookshelves, and that are now stored in boxes in the attic after I packed up  what I wanted from my father's house after he had died and Mari, my step-mother, went to a nursing home. I had to have those books, though I'm  not sure why. They were 'mine,' though Krissy thinks they are hers. 

     They are the legacy from my mother, books that I read when I was in high school -- Hesse, Forster, Wolfe (I may not even be spelling their names correctly.) They were books that told me nothing of the life that she'd left me with, one of chaos, a father who drank and a first step-mother who was  an aberration born of my father's drinking and the four long years he watched my mother struggle with cancer. Whatever happened to their marriage during that time has remained a secret, but the aftermath of their struggle was his instantly being enthralled with an ex-army nurse with a nasty mouth and all the seductive weapons of 'common' women that my mother would never have used. (My mother used Chanel No. 5 and a bit of powder.)

    But books, that's what I'm talking about. My books, ones that I've bought over the years, perhaps in college before I got really poor, and then in the last twenty or thirty years when I had a steady salary. I'm making yet another attempt at throwing out what I don't need and books are an easy place to start. A few years ago, when I moved from here to there and then back, another sad story, I got rid of endless books, but now I want to do it again. 

     But each book has it's history. For instance, a former student told me that I had to buy the autobiography of Black Elk. I did, while she was watching. And never read it. I am so saddened by books and films about slavery, the holocaust and anything to do with Native Americans that I avoid them. I couldn't open it, though I know how important it was to her --- this intense woman who had been one of nine or ten children born to a Jewish mother and a Catholic father. I photographed her with her mother who had developed breast cancer and died not that long afterwards for a series of mother-daughter images that I was working on in a rather feeble way. It never went anywhere. I think that my confusion over my own mother was so strong that I couldn't pull any cohesion into the series, though the photograph I took for the woman who wanted me to learn from the Black Elk book was, I think, important for her.

     I can't even pretend to myself that this new attempt to pare down books will do any good. My friend, Barbara McInnis, told me that she'd visited a number of women who had finally found housing after having been homeless for a number of years and around and on their beds were piles of clutter. The need to have everything there, in reach, a mess, was so deep that they slept in a nest of chaos. She and I laughed since we so shared their urges.

    Barb finally decided to move from her apartment in Forest Hills. She was a pack-rat of the highest caliber. It was almost impossible to walk down her hallway, much less to get into any of the rooms. She knew she had a problem, but had never been able to solve it. She decided, she told me, that it would take years of therapy to figure out why she needed all the things she'd never use, so she forced herself to hire some guy who came over for a couple of nights on Tuesday nights. She sat with three labeled cartons in front of her -- a keeper, a so bad it gets thrown away, and a give-away to charity. When she got to the point where she started looking back into the charity box and thinking about whether she really wanted to give away that precious whatever, she knew it was time to stop. So, he took away the two boxes, out of her sight.

    She finally got rid of enough, a heroic task, so that she moved to a smaller apartment in East Boston, one that you could actually walk into. Barb was a fabulous character, a woman that countless people tell stories about and thank for her unwavering care of folks in the homeless community.

Self-portraits, 1972, 73 and 2008, 09

     My daughter, Krissy, is allowing me to take a self-portrait with her everyday. That's her present for my seventieth birthday. And it's a good one. She was my first photo subject and that project lasted eighteen years until she stood on the stoop, her last day of high school, and said, "No more photographs." She'd been enormously patient until then.

     I never imagined reaching seventy. I've thought of death everyday for as long as I can remember. I imagine that is common for anyone whose mother died when she was a child. The possibility of death becomes too present. I think about death almost every time I get into the car. When I go away on a trip, I can't imagine returning from it. A trip to the doctor opens the potential for getting the news about what's in store for me.

     Krissy says I never smile. I'm sure that's hard on her. In fact, I'm much less dour than my father was, though I never even thought about his rarely smiling. He had a marvelous, quiet sense of humor and would make almost unnoticeable word plays. When he did laugh, his eyes would tear, his body would shake, is face would turn red. He liked Bob and Ray and the Sid Caesar Show, Thurber's writing. But smiling wasn't essential. By the time he got very old, he looked like a jack-o-lantern when he did smile, his front teeth blackened by his determination to never darken the door of a dentist.

     When Krissy was first brought into me after she was born, she was already alert. Even though I know that newborns don't actually see details, I could have sworn that she did, that she was saying, "Okay, I'm here, I want to get going." It was immediately obvious that she was an extrovert.

      I've always used a camera defensively, a way of hiding in social situations. Or perhaps entertaining myself since I'm bored so easily unless I've listening to a good story, someone telling it to me or eavesdropping on two people talking. It's very handy at social gatherings because I'm shy, a quality that never goes away no matter how much I enjoy myself once I get there.

     It's so  much easier now with a digital camera, to photograph my brains out as I did at the celebration for Gloria Hellmann, to have dozens and dozens and dozens of photographs that I can go through quickly, twice, discarding, and then send to T. J. I don't assume that they will care for very many of them and know I could pare down more, but I don't. How can I know how they will want to remember this day. I am sure that the photographs they took will be the most meaningful for them since they know who they want to remember and why, what that person means to them, the place he or she has in their lives. Of course, they didn't take many pictures. I'm sure no one took as many as I did, though just about everyone took pictures, everyone does.

    It was so much more difficult with film, but the pictures were so much more interesting, I think, more measured, black and white, but that had it drawbacks. Developing the film, making contacts, eventually printing. Printing was a curse, I thought, envying those who loved long hours in the darkroom. It's odd to see Karl Baden, one of the few people I know who uses film, now using a digital camera, grabbing photographs in his usual serious way. He has a great eye and a nice slant.

     I recently found some photographs I'd taken of a friend twenty or thirty years ago. I hadn't remembered taking them, much less printing them, nor had I ever given them to her. They are haunting, looking back at that serious, young woman. I actually liked them, though I'm sure I didn't at the time and only like them now because I've seen her recently, photographed her again, can appreciate the passage of time and the gratitude I have that we now know each other, again. But I've never particularly liked photographs. I would have done video if I'd had any money, when I started. Video was in its infancy and it would have taken far more resources than the sorry amount I had to do anything with it. But photographs, except for the quality of memory and my obsession to remember, are not particularly interesting. I'd rather hear the stories.

The Hellmans

Rachel and T. J. Hellman had an adoption party for their daughter, Gloria, at Madelaine and Muna's house here in Chelsea. It was a glorious day and a glorious party. I brought along a camera, always handy for me because it allows me a diversion, but hopefully it also allowed photographs that Gloria's family might like. But none of that is relevant. What was important is how touching this whole event was...seeing Rachel and T. J.'s parents, their huge collection of friends, most of whom speak Spanish as native speakers or not. I assumed that T. J. was a native speaker until I met his parents from Ohio and realized that he's learned and permanently adopted another language and the culture, as had Rachel, because of their social and political experiences. I find that admirable.

It's strange to look back on my life, what was, what won't ever be, to think about other choices I might have made if I'd been healthier emotionally, knowing that no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't be. I went into therapy seriously when Krissy was about three, my third therapist. I had the hope that I might be able to straighten out enough to provide a decent role model, to figure out how to earn a living effectively, to establish a nurturing family for her even if it wasn't with her biological father. Maybe if I'd stayed in New York, with that particular psychiatrist, Dr. Gordon, I might have managed, but the job offer at MIT intervened about three years into the process. At least I'd been able to free myself from some strange, sad dependence on Krissy's father who traveled back and forth to another woman on the West Coast. We were both trapped, unable to let go. And I did manage to figure out how to make a living so that I have a small, but unexpected, given my history, pension.

All this was brought more to mind when Muna asked where Krissy was and I called her and she came along to the party. She's in the middle of making big decisions about living in New York again, going back 'home' to the city that is so important to her. And she's weighing decisions, thinking about her life. So, what was really interesting is how much she learned about Rachel's family, her parents who live in Ohio, who have seven children and twelve grandchildren, and who seem so remarkably happy.  They are, as she immediately said, great role models. She's very clear about what it has meant to her not to have had a father, how much it's effected her life, how hard it is to find a good relationship because of this real emptiness in her childhood. When she mentions this, I feel guilty, of course, defensive. It's almost inevitable for parents who recognize how much their own troubled childhoods have effected their children. I know I did the best I could, but it's hard to look back on my own inabilities to form a supportive relationship with a loving man, for Krissy's sake, for my own sake. I'm glad that Muna asked about her, that I drove over to get her, that she had a chance to be at that party, to meet Rachel's parents, to add another role model to her list.

As she said on the way home, few of her friends from those ratty old, well remembered, difficult days in New York, have found good marriages. Many are still single. A friend of mine once suggested that I do a book of interviews of those children whose mothers had escaped from their troubled suburban childhoods, fled to the Lower East Side of New York, lived in considerable poverty, in tenements, a close knit band of women who helped each other. 

Gloria certainly has a solid group of people around her, friends and family. I'm glad that I met T. J., who designed my website and lives here in Chelsea and, by through that, got to be part of this celebration.

Normally I would have been at Suffolk Downs on Derby Day, the first day of live racing. And I definitely would have been watching the Derby, but I didn't. I took photographs, ate and talked instead.