Sure, I called it other things along the way.
In high school, I said I was searching for freedom, acting out against the hypocrites of my hometown. Man, whatta uptight Republican, conservative Jersey town. To be gay in that town, well just forgetaboutit.
I had the word rebel planted on my forehead. All the other kids filled their closets with cashmere sweaters and alligator shirts, but even then, I hated colorful clothes. I contented myself with a yearlong array of black rock & roll T-shirts, tucked into two pairs of patched up, worn out Levi's. For a splash of color, I tucked a red bandana in my hip pocket.
Hey, the bandana had a use,too. It helped cover up the pint of Hiram Walker Blackberry Brandy.
Nobody told me that I couldn't turn my piece of the late '70s into the '60s.
But then, peace love and punk rock aside, what I was really doing was looking for love.
I guess I figured that if I made enough fuss, smashed up enough authority, that I'd find a nice safe, place that I could be myself in and then all those people dying to love me for exactly who I was would just line up, poetry and casseroles in hand.
New York City is the best place in the world to come to, if you're the hometown freak looking for love.
My weirdness didn't even register a blip on the wacky scale once I moved to NYC.
Everyone in New York in 1981 was a freak.
New York had just pulled out of bankruptcy, race riots, a decade of burning buildings and homicides and everyone was walking around in the rubble, shell-shocked. People were downright cool.
Washington Square park was like a baby Woodstock unplugged. Guitar players banged away next to poets, homeless drunks, NYU kids smoking joints, drug dealers looking to sell to the NYU kids and tourists, dogs drinking in the fountain, lovers pretending to be cool, street comedians making fun of your race, religion or attire and then getting you to laugh so hard you'd pay them 50 cents just for making a fool out of you.
The first time I walked into Washington Square Park, I thought I'd entered Planet Wild. I was 17 and firmly convinced that I was the baddest girl around. Five minutes after I walked into the park, I felt like Mother Theresa. I don't think I ever felt like a bad girl again.
I'm sure I fell in love with somebody that year. There was always somebody to fall in love with then. I fell in love a lot in the '80s. That was the thing to do then, fall in love and survive and hate yuppies and wonder when I would get my piece of easy times.
Now it's 2002, and I'm feeling a little blue. Well, just this week.
I don't know why.
My career (whatever that is) seems to be doing fine.
My real career (whatever this is) is coming along.
The most wonderful lady, who has been in my life on and off for three years now, has been unusually attentive of late. Together we seem to have emerged from some sort of long-term haze to find each other. It's been thrilling.
But still, from my center, I feel this melancholy.
Well, sure there's still the post 9/11 blues that has lots of us treading sand, especially we of the downtown Manhattanites. I imagine it will be years, if ever, before I move past those images, but things are looking up in NYC. People are surviving and growing, changing for the better, caring about each other more.
There really are reasons to rejoice. The human spirit has been working over-time and it's an awesome thing to check out in action. I've seen it now up close. I've still got dots in my eyes from the flash.
Last night my cubana and I celebrated a late Valentine's Day/anniversary combo. She took me to see Love Janis, the Janis Joplin musical about her life, based on the letters she sent home to her family.
I sat their in the rowdy crowd with all the lights out, listening to the music of Janis Joplin that always was about one thing; looking for love, and I reached out and touched my girlfriend's hand and thought to myself, no matter how much love I've got, I'll never stop looking for love.
There just isn't ever going to be enough of it; love of friends, love of admirers, love of goodness, love of charity, love of strangers.
Maybe the day I stop looking for love will be the day I decide that the world is fine just the way it is, that things don't need improving, that I no longer need anyone's appreciation.
After the show, my cubana took me to Nirvana, (well, in this instance I'm talking about the restaurant, not the state of being), and we devoured our tandoori chicken and sipped our mango champagne cocktails and looked out over the great impossibility of Central Park.
I've always loved that here in the height of ultraexpensive real estate, in the very heart of big-money Manhattan, sits more than 50 blocks of park land, unspoiled, untarnished and unprofitable. It just sits there, for all of us to enjoy to free.
Central Park is like childhood. It reaches out innocent and green and lush and ripe against all the skyscrapers and symbolisms of big business and overpriced doorman buildings. It sits there and giggles.
Central Park is for lovers.
Are you looking, too? Looking for love.
You can find it. I know you can. The secret is just to stand still and let it all happen around you. That's when the biggest chunks of love fall on your toes: when you're standing still and when you're barefoot in the grass.
Love always falls on bare feet.
