Chapter 5: “Yo-Yo” (from BRONX NIGHTS 🌃🍎)

Content Warning: This piece includes discussions of actual sexual history, private parts and all.

I have this little late-night gig at a senior residence facility just over the George Washington Bridge in New Jersey. I like the place. I like the people. It’s good, honest work. They gave me a chance to earn a buck when no one else would.

Tonight, while painting bathroom walls, this chapter fell out of me. Luckily, I caught it before it plopped into a urinal splashguard.

I’m writing this chapter second, even though it’s the fifth. (There’s probably a Dave Brubeck joke in there.) Hopefully my continuity isn’t tanked. Yeah, when you spend the night on your hands and knees in a common men’s room, you get to make all the little boy’s room puns you want.

Earlier in the day, my phone reminded me with one of those this-time-a-year-ago pics that I took Alex to see Yo-Yo Ma at Carnegie Hall last April 11. (Today is April 10.) The event was Ma’s final public performance with his longtime pianist partner, Kathryn Scott.

While writing this, I’m being inspired by my unauthorized recording from the concert of the encore performance of Bloch’s “Prayer” From Jewish Life. But you can listen to the maestro play this lugubrious movement (again, pardon) in his sitting room at this link:

Thank you, Yo-Yo!

Yo-Yo Ma is Alex’s favorite classical musician, or so she said. I bought her a large framed, signed sketch of Yo-Yo Ma during our trial two weeks of living together in hotels in February. (See Chapter 3, even though I haven’t written it yet.) She refused to hang Yo-Yo in the apartment. At least she’s consistent.

Mr. Ma is equally significant to me. Growing up, I wasn’t allowed to listen to secular music. Beethoven, backmasking and all that Evangelical jazz. So I embarked on a special ops mission to smuggle eight Columbia House cassette tapes (for a penny!) into the house, which I secreted under my mattress. I want to say one of them was Ma’s Simply Baroque, but that’s more a reflection of my present financial situation. (By 1999, when that album was released, I was of course free to listen to whatever I wanted. And I owed mail-order music clubs something bordering the national debt of Djibouti.)

What a gala night Alex and I had—one of the reasons why anyone would want to live in New York. All our personal drama was carefully folded and tucked away in the cat-free closet. We went on a shopping spree to Macy’s for a black evening gown. I sneaked into the dressing room with Alex, to the amusement of our flamboyant and superb sales assistant, who himself seemed eager to squeeze into the dress and perhaps even the changing room with us.

Then dinner at Hillstone on Park Avenue, Alex’s favorite restaurant, second only to Nobu. The first time we went to Hillstone, we couldn’t get a table, and she was visibly pettish as we wandered Manhattan looking for an alternative way to shuck several hundred dollars. Yet I was content to play online Scrabble with her at a window waiting area—spared, for a time, from forking over 24 bucks for chips & dip. At any rate, I think Alex had the ‘Osaka Style’ Pressed Sushi. On the way to the restroom, I stood and watched the sushi line prepare her dish. The chefs’ bowing toques seemed like a line of obsequious Beekers from The Muppets.

So, there were good days. I mean, siphoning off an ill, disabled person’s retirement fund should, if nothing else, be a hoot. I might add I was 50. I don’t know if that qualifies this as elder abuse, but I do have an AARP card.

Okay, enough Time Warp. Let’s Breakaway to May 13 via the last thing Alex said to me in the apartment. (This date I do not remember, but there’s probably a police report around here somewhere to nail that down.) The spot she stood while saying it is directly behind my desk. I think a spray of phantom venom just whizzed over my shoulder:

“Your biggest problem is that you’re too forgiving. You can’t just give forgive a person. They have to earn it.”

Alex next uttered something even more toxically ironic: “When are you going to learn to stick up for yourself?”

Then the roundhouse: “I would never initiate intimacy with you—ever. Jesus Christ, you have beetles on your balls, and your legs look like they’re crawling with worms.”

Correction. Alex did offer to give me a blowjob one time, on May 13, in fact. It was five minutes before my virtual court hearing to formally release custody of my daughter to my ex-wife. That was also the day Alex helped herself to my lemonade pitcher for a Bridgerton watch party she was hosting—in a private party room of the luxury apartment I was paying for.

I wasn’t invited to meet Alex’s friends that evening, let alone attend. We had been together since January, and her only friend I had met was Verse, a self-proclaimed witch who burned a hole in our new kitchen island while conducting an exorcising spell to rid our apartment, and me, of the darkness she sensed looming over my life.

It didn’t seem apt timing to accept Alex’s one and only oral invitation a mere 300 seconds before virtually appearing before a South Carolina family court judge. In fact, Alex’s sexual subpoena came off rather as a cruel cocktease.

And, there were bad days. That was a Mariana Trench moment. From there, I spiraled. The court hearing hit hard, and I equally hit the bottle—not to sleep, but to dissolve. I threw in the towel and everything else in the hamper. My only memory after that is of opening the party room door and calling Alex a cunt somewhere during Season 3, Episode 1, “Out of the Shadows.” So I guess I met her friends, after all.

Maybe it’s the Neuro in me, but my mind can’t let go of the beetles and worms low blow. Despite everything, our sex life had been a barrel of blue beads—numerous sessions of meaningful lovemaking, the kind of passionate intertwining that cannot be faked. I know what cardboard sex tastes and smells like.

I could prove our love life was earnest—the exact opposite of our absurd bedtime arrangement. I won’t.

Alex was right. She had never initiated sexual intimacy. In that moment, I questioned whether anything about her had been authentic. She had committed to a relationship, not an arrangement. But you can’t intend a relationship. One simply happens, or doesn’t.

Here I am, being all reflective, while your elementary school mind is probably stuck on my invertebrate-addled anatomy. How rude of me.

On Beetles & Worms, as Montaigne or Emerson would be wont.

I’ve been taking blood thinners since I was 28, when a blood clot befell my left calf and led to a pulmonary embolism—oddly enough, after traveling from Charlottesville, Virginia, to New York City one week following 9/11. Two decades of anticoagulants have resulted in a myriad of exploded capillaries in certain parts of my body—so much that my left leg appears to have Reverse Michael Jackson Disorder. My lower left leg has a definitive browning hue.

Honestly, though, my balls don’t look that bad—no worse than anyone else’s. I haven’t studied testicles at any accredited level, but my sack seems perfectly healthy, and is certainly aesthetically pleasing enough not to have deterred previous partners. What’s a bit of a polka-dotted scrotum given the general frank & beans landscape?

As to worms crawling on my legs, I do have thick varicose veins on my left inner thigh. They’re the result of poor circulation from that “Never Forget” blood clot. I don’t know, they seem to match the 12-inch scar on the upper thigh of my other leg, the result of a 2003 fasciotomy. Yeah, another blood clot. You try going through life with two congenital blood-clotting conditions. My friends who remain tenderly refer to my scar as The Lagina, given its Iris of Sauron shape and attitude.

Maybe this chapter should stand as a warning to all the dangers of body shaming. Alex’s words shredded my psyche—until I spent a few months thinking about it.

If you served anyone’s genitals or general bodily deformities on a plate at Hillstone or Nobu, they would make for one helluva cause célèbre Yelp review. To misquote Tolstoy: Everyone’s private parts are unhappy looking in their own way. Mine. Yours. Even Nina Simone’s.

Also, oral sex isn’t fine dining. It’s an all-you-can-eat salad bar for two. Or three, or four, or however many folks agree to sit together at a restaurant booth.

Lesson learned. Unless your partner has been orally abused (which I suspect Alex had been, and which is why I never pushed the subject those first six months), let the red flag fly.

Funny, though, I can’t think of a lover of mine who hasn’t been sexually abused in one way or another. Maybe membership in The Club is much broader than I realized. Or perhaps there’s some psychological tell-tale sign or hitherto unknown pheromone that draws us to one another.

No matter, if you’re in The Club, you are automatically afforded great compassion. And, I don’t know, forgiveness?

To all the Alex’s out there, see how easy that was?

To follow Arik Bjorn on all his pages, please visit his LINKTR.EE 🔗.

To listen to Arik Bjorn read the “Preface” from his forthcoming book, “BRONX NIGHTS,” plus other chapters, visit his YouTube Page.

All of the names have been changed, except for mine, and, you know, ones like Yo-Ya Ma, Nina Simone, etc.