Richard Hertz, MD

Once upon a time, there were two people who lived together in a very, very, very small apartment. They both liked movies, but one of them liked movies more than the other. One of them would sit through any movie at all no matter how bad it was. The other would walk out of a movie if it failed in any way to live up to expectations. Oddly enough, the one who really loved movies was the walker, and his name was Fred. The other one, who only sort of liked movies but was willing to sit through nearly any swill rather than embarrass herself by walking out was called, let's say, me. Anyway, I knew of Fred's proclivities and he was aware of my inertia and the spooky brew of our tendencies was about to come to a boil.
Richard Gere had been in another movie that was playing not too far from where we were living on the Upper East. I had never actually seen a Richard Gere movie (although I'd seen clips from "American Gigolo" and hadn't really liked what I'd seen) and it was a rip-off of a French film (and I had to look it up on imdb.com to recall the name, otherwise I'd be making a total arse of myself with possible titles such as: Blowing, This Blows, Barking, etc.) and renamed "Breathless."
Not long into this spleen-jerker, I started wondering how Fred felt about the film and if he was about to walk out. I had never walked out of a film, but I was now ready for a new experience. I didn't say anything and we sat through the whole, long, ghastly turd. Afterwards I mentioned to Fred that I would have walked out of that one if he wanted to and he said that he was staying put because he knew I didn't like to walk out. Then we both started laughing and went in search of a watering hole in which to sluice away the bad taste in our mouths.
We had passed a watering hole called Uncle Charlie's North. This was patently a gay bar, as its brother in the Village was. But we also patronized a gay bar up in our neighborhood called Brandy's, and didn't think anything of it.
The clincher on this deal was that Uncle Charlie was having a happy hour for the next 40 minutes or so, making it a wise financial choice. The counter bar was crowded, so we ambled off to a quiet corner to sip our beers and trash the waste of celluloid we'd just suffered through. The first round went fairly quickly, having also demolished a container of over-salted, over-priced popcorn at said "flick." After the second round, though, Fred claimed he was tired of braving the group at the bar and being ogled (which I never knew he ever had a problem with), and he told me to make the next trip.
Because we'd been sitting by ourselves and absorbed in our mutual grievances, I hadn't really looked around the bar, but standing in a short line at the counter for the last happy hour call, I realized that I was next to the only other woman in the place and all the monitors were showing male strippers (a waste of time, as far as I'm concerned). This may have shown on my face, for a denizen of the barstools leaned back and said, "Don't worry, Honey, we don't bite!" To which I retorted rather quickly, "Oooooo, I wish you would!"
This seemed to entertain my new friend, which he intended to be. He invited me to bring my escort to the bar (where, happy hour closing out, there was now room). Fred reluctantly joined us.
Perhaps I should describe Fred a bit, explain what he was doing in New York and our relationship. When we met in South Carolina, Fred was a hairdresser and we dated. Fred has a lot of gay friends. Fred moved to New York to work on Broadway, and he did; as a hair and make-up man he worked on "Cats" (very tiny perm rods), "Amadeus," and "Doonesbury: the Musical," to name a few. In New York, however, our relationship was different. Wisely, we were just roommates. Fred, however, should have been having no problem in this bar. It took several drinks to loosen him up.
Our new friend and benefactor (he was now buying) was absolutely delighted with the two of us. He pardoned himself at one point to go to the men's room. I had to check with Fred who was going from "I'm not all that happy here" to "Well, okay, if you're having a good time" when the bartender, using the same microphone he'd used to announce the last happy hour call, called out, "Phone call for Doctor Hertz! Paging Doctor Dick Hertz!" and our benefactor, just coming around the corner bleated, "That's meeee!"
To this day I only know this man as Dr. Dick Hertz. If he mentioned his name, I did not retain it.
Dr. Hertz convinced us to go to another bar in the Village and we all (as he had some other friends) piled into a taxi. The next thing I remember, I was on a dance floor dancing with someone I did not know. There were all men around me, mostly bald, bearded, pierced, black leather-clad. Notably, one of them was wearing some sort of studded black leather halter and black leather shorts, and probably a black leather, studded dog collar. This was a new experience for me, and I was grateful for it. However, it was a "school night." Our intention had been to see a movie and perhaps consume a beverage or two.
After the song, I located the bar and found Fred sitting there looking shell-shocked. "Where are we?" I yelled over the music. "We're in the Village," he told me, "at a bar called The Monster." "How did we get here?" "I don't know," he admitted, "but I remember something about a taxi ride and someone named Dr. Dick Hertz."
Right on cue, the good doctor came up to us shouting, "That's meee!" We thanked him and made our way out. Nothing looked familiar. We spent the next couple of hours wandering around the Village, trying to find a subway and our way home. At that hour, the subways were coming right seldom and we had to take three to get back home. After the subways we had to negotiate the eight blocks from Lexington and 86th Street (where Fred claimed to see prostitutes all the time and I never knew what he was talking about) back to our apartment.
I look back and shudder at the escapades I had in New York and am amazed that nothing ever happened to me. I am thankful, though, that I don't have stories to tell about bondage clubs or being mugged or other more lurid fare. I'll leave those tales to others. A couple of decades down the line when I'm appalling my great-niece and -nephews with stories, the contrast between my grey head and wrinkles and the mild excitement of these stories will be enough to make them goggle. Well, at least they will goggle the first few hundred times.

Best Wishes in the New Year

Been thinkin' about anger today. I've been blowing up over little things, but it's the big things that you have no control over that are the most painful - and they just fester away until someone does something stupid and Kaboom! So what am I so angry about?

Well, I suppose I'm still mad at my sister for dying. Of course, that means that I need to feel guilty about being mad at her for something she had no control over. She gave those cancer treatments her best shot. So I will instead have to be mad at her for all the little things she did to me over the years, although I doubted she could have helped herself there either. She could have completely ignored me all her life. She was nine years older and by default an only child.

Instead, she played with me. She played "camping" with me ... by setting a fire under my crib. She played "Ed Sullivan Show" by using me as one of those large balls acrobats spun and tossed with their feet. She played poker with me ... before I was able to read, so I had to run into the kitchen to ask my mother what my hand was. Yes, all the games seemed to have me on the losing side, but she was actually playing with me. Rare were the times that she tried to keep me out of her hair by, say, tying me to a rocking chair with my own summer camp lanyard braiding. I was very, very lucky.

My sister had a lot of power over me that I was unable to combat. If I refused to play along with one of her schemes and ran and locked myself in my room, she would stand outside and alternate between threatening me and acting pitiful ("Mom and Dad like you better ...") until I gave in.

Decades into our relationship, we met at our parents' house and I made some remark to the effect, "You're not as tall as I remember." She was always sensitive about her height, which she claimed to be no more than five foot twelve inches. "That's funny," she retorted immediately, "You're every bit as short as I remember."

I worried about our relationship when our mother (I almost wrote "my mother," and usually caught hell for that when I said it in front of her, but we were figuratively raised by different mothers) was gone. We had both gone down to help our parents make their final move and were clearing out the attic, finding boxes that hadn't been opened since the previous move. My sister found something she wanted for herself. I was living in an shared apartment, so I wasn't even thinking of keeping anything I ran across. Mother was always after us to to find things we wanted and tag them for the future. She put my name in an antique clock that I expressed an interest in. It would stay with her and our Father as long as they lived, but we could claim it afterwards if it had our name in or on it. So my sister asked me if she could have this item. I have absolutely no recollection of what it was, but she claimed it would mean a lot to her. I had no interest in it. "You can have the next thing," she said, seemingly sweetening the pot. I have no interest in it. She could have it. Minutes later she found an extremely ugly hand-painted (by some unknown relative, no doubt) plate. "You can have this!" she said. "I don't think so," I retorted. "I get to choose what it is and it's not that ugly thing!"

After that, I really worried about what would happen when it came to divvying up the junk my, I mean, our mother collected over the years. As usual, and as Mother always said, I was worrying about the wrong thing. Now all I have to worry about is whether my nieces will want any of that junk! But at the time I worried that it would be just one incident like that after another. There would be bartering going on of byzantine convolutions. We'd probably have to get someone to come in and value every last teacup.

Later, in the year before she was diagnosed with cancer, we were playing cards at her house during the Christmas holiday. I hardly ever play cards anymore, mostly because no one I know plays. She was losing. I had won about three games in a row and I could see the consternation growing on her face. I was quite giddy. I never win games when I play them with her. In fact, I thought for years that I was rubbish at games because she always beat me. I reluctantly joined into a Monopoly game when I was in college because I was so bad at playing, but I walked all over those people. They started glaring at me (I'd gotten the utility monopoly) as they paid out, grumbling, "You sure you don't play well?"

So there I was, winning! This was my time to get up and do the end-zone dance. I didn't though. First of all, I had to check her face to make sure she wasn't letting me win, just to pounce later. Instead, she looked so unhappy that I kept playing so that I could intentionally lose (without being detected, which was a big worry) and she would cheer up. Not being quite as competitive as she was, winning wasn't such a big deal. (When you lose all the time you don't develop a competitive spirit. In fact, you can become quite opposed to competition and stressed out by it.) I didn't need to display my hubris by crowing over her losses. I held them tightly and secretly to my chest and hugged them, feeling I was an adult at last (at what, age forty?) having finally beaten a life-long adversary.

Within a year she was having radiation treatments for cervical cancer and then I wondered about my winning streak. She had been hemorrhaging so badly that she was passing out when she finally called the doctor. She may have been ill for ages and not known it. I may not have been so clever after all.

Her legacy in me is that streak of anti-competitiveness, which doesn't necessarily translate into teamwork, but I will try to undermine competition with the suggestion of all-working-together. In graduate school I was horrified when someone I very much liked in the first week, suddenly went all competitive on me when the opportunity arose. We didn't get along again until the end, and now he's one of the few friends I have left from that phase of my life. He was called Pete, and I referred to him as "ComPete" in disgust. After we noticed that people were hoarding books from the library on quarter-loan, I suggested we pick ones we would all need, check them out for the quarter, and keep them in our graduate-assistants' office (a pokey hole on the modern language floor). I even added one of my personal books to the collection.

During the written exams, they put all the foreign languages in one room and left us otherwise unproctored. They figured the presence of other departments would keep us honest. Fortunately, the competition broke down enough so that we were able to help each other when we were at a loss for a word. The only one who complained was the one German Masters Candidate, but we said we'd do our best to help her if she needed it. If someone got lost, everyone stopped what they were doing until a solution was found.

I never got my master's degree, but I did get farther in my education than my sister. It came to my attention when I was in graduate school that as soon as she moved out of the house, my grades in school got better. I'm not sure what was affecting them, the continual assertion that I was stupid (or uncoordinated, or knock-kneed), or taking up my time playing with me. But she did play with me. I have always looked for friends who were like her, not in the superior way she had, but in having lots of ideas of things to get into. I don't have many such ideas, moi.

My sister made several attempts at college, but never managed to pass Freshman English, which only became more difficult each time. Mother said she got her Mrs. degree, which is what counted. I think after that Mom decided her job was over and she could relax. My sister's marriage lasted until her premature death, which is more than many can say, and she raised two children who have their own families. I can give her no better accolade than she would have used herself: Not Half Bad!

Oh, here's another

I hope this one can be read. This is the transcription of an actual event. I was appearing the "The Mousetrap" with a group of experienced repertory people. My character was stuck in a scene where I had nothing to do or say for what seemed like twenty minutes. At that point I had a one-word line to justify my presence on stage. I spent most of that time going over that one word to make sure I didn't screw it up, which I have been known to do, only to hear that one word delivered by someone else (who was supposed to say something along the line of "But that's crazy!"). What to do?! What to do?!
Years later one of the other performers was doing a crossword puzzle and came across a clue for a six-letter word for "nonsense" that had a "p" and an "f" in it. Up until then, she thought I'd made the word up.
Hey, I'm not that good!

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