Instead of going there, wherever “there” is or wherever it might take me, let me tell you about this morning instead.
I woke up as I always do, which is begrudgingly. Not getting up is what I want to do, and would do, if I could get away with it. I would lie in bed all day, happy as a clam, reading books and eating oatmeal cookies. But I can’t do that because….well, I just can’t. I tell myself that I don’t have to get up, be productive, go to my AA meeting to treat my alcoholism (eight years sober and counting, thanks), and then sit at my computer to worry about a nation I left thirty years ago and can’t stop loving…
I can absolutely stay in bed.
Where I know, from bitter experience, I will be utterly miserable by 10 AM.
Then Anselmo the cat yowls in the living room, and the balance changes. I’m not getting up, I’m feeding the cat.
So now I’m on my feet but in a couple of minutes I’ll be on my knees. I’ll pray for the usual things (strength, wisdom, and possibly even prudence) and the usual people (that guy who shouted “Fuck YOU,” at me after a meeting), and end with the usual petition, “God, please help the United States of America.”
Unsurprisingly, the usual bus driver drove the usual (of course) bus and I sat down, in a different spot. Today, I was sitting next to a Trump supporter and next to him, an exuberant character whose normal demeanor had shifted.
“The world has completely fucked up,” she said. She’s a medical interpreter for Spanish-speaking patients in emergency rooms in California and New Mexico. She always had plenty of work, and loved her job. She got paid for helping people who needed help and were grateful—all that and the money was great!
The money isn’t great now. In fact, she’s thinking about applying for a job at Burger King.
She didn’t go further, and really, she shouldn’t have gone there at all, according to one point of view. The Trump supporter sitting next to me is just as sick as I, and needs the meeting just as much. Any mention of politics is utterly forbidden, and rightly so.
Yeah?
But what if the world’s on fire?
The first AA meeting in Germany took place in 1953, but the question still remains: what would an AA meeting in Nazi Germany have been like? Would all the Nazi drunks have been sitting with the anti-Nazi drunks talking about humility and the dangers of pride (today’s topic) while the trains rolled by the meeting hall on their way to the concentration camps? Would people have averted their eyes as the Jewish drunks strolled into the hall, wearing their yellow Star of David armbands? Would I, a non-Nazi (or a gay man, which I am, in which case it would have been the pink triangle), feel the need to be especially nice to the Nazi?
After all, we’re both drunks.
Because I did feel a little sorry for the guy sitting next to me, in today’s meeting in 2025 San Juan. I don’t like him, personally (well, surprise, surprise!) But I pride myself on feeling compassion for his struggle against the demon rum. I know that one, and if the eight years are easy now, they weren’t in the beginning.
So I said nothing, and berated myself for complicity half of the way home, and patted myself on the back for my restraint of pen and tongue on the other half of the journey. In short, I was confused, which is my normal state.
Then I bought kitty litter because…well, Anselmo does his business, the world on fire or not. He does his business, and my business is to be sure that he can do his business. Or that he doesn’t do his business where he shouldn’t.
You know how it is.
So the world is on fire and the Trump supporter got off scot-free from a richly merited tongue lashing and I have bought the litter for Anselmo and called the Uber. Then Jeanne, my sister (in-law, technically), called. She was probably at home, in Manhattan, overlooking the Hudson River.
So she knew that…
…ICE had raided Riverside Park, where the immigrants go to hang out in the pre-dawn hours before they pick up the food deliveries from Zabars and Westside Market. They pick up all the lox and all the bagels, the freshly squeezed orange juice and the delicious Kalamata olives and the Brie and Zaragoza cheeses. They pick up all this stuff and then they ride to my brother and sister’s house, in addition to a couple hundred thousand more. They go all over the place, and they did it during COVID by the way. So John and Jeanne, I suspect, were just like many others: they saw (often) the same face at the same time doing something they very much needed and wanted. A stranger comes to your door with the gift of food. You may not know his name or where he comes from, just as you don’t know the clerk at Rite Aid or your Uber driver. But this is different. This is a person coming to your door with a smile and bringing you food. Yeah—you bought it, and the guy is getting paid. But you’ll sit down to the lox and bagels, and that guy (who walked a couple thousand miles to get his job) will be on his bike, delivering…oh, let’s say crab salad and baguettes to your neighbor.
“I’m hating this country,” said Jeanne, and I noted the continuous form of the verb. She doesn’t hate this country and neither do I. But she is at times hating her country, and so am I.
So ICE raided Riverside Park, and the point wasn’t that John and Jeanne and all the other Upper West Siders didn’t get their baguettes and exotic cheeses. The point is that nobody is safe, even on the upper West Side. Carlos or Jesus or whatever-his name is—they’re just the first ones to go. Upper West Side today, Alligator Alcatraz tomorrow.
So I commiserate with Jeanne and tell her about my meeting, and the medical interpreter sitting next to the Trump supporter next to me (the retired leftist) at the meeting this morning. Neither one of us is the least bit surprised that medical emergencies no longer afflict the migrant communities.
“Nobody’s going to the emergency room,” said Jeanne.
We’re both completely annoyed, and that’s when I tell her about the rabbit hole that I am trying really, really hard not to get into, or down, or trapped in. Because now I have to tell Jeanne that I too am obsessed with Jeffrey Epstein.
Mea culpa, mea máxima culpa—but the glop of money, power, influence, and sex isn’t just sticky. It’s like a tar pit, and all of us animals—Republican or Democrat—have stumbled onto it, on our way to the watering hole. So of course I have read the book Filthy Rich and seen the Netflix documentary. I’ve also read a book by Barry Levine called The Spider, in which he states that by a curious (read bizarre if not Byzantine) string of events, all of the worst material from the hundreds of hours of illegal videotaping that Epstein made of rich very-old guys screwing poor very-young girls…
…all of that material, as I was saying…
All those hours of fucking, seen from the hidden camera above….
Well, all of that stuff…
That very stuff…
It ended up—guess where?
(Dramatic pause)
(Drum roll)
…in RUSSIA!!!
Then the Uber pulled up.
