Dream

As I was jerking my way down the 5 this morning, I decided to listen to what is arguably the most influential piece of theatre I have ever experienced. Hedwig and the Angry Inch.  The superlative aside, when I was younger and first watching John Cameron Mitchell shake shimmy, and scream his way across my brother's television screen I was struck with an incessant need to create something.   Watching the riveting pathos immolate itself in this incredible journey of self expression and discovery made in me a thirst for something more, and something that I desperately needed to understand.  I remember when the TV turned off, my eyes blurry with the tears of the last few minutes of Midnight Radio, I immediately got up and went outside his complex staring up at the sky and wondering if something would be different.   If a star went nova, or the sun stayed up just an extra desert minute and let the pale blues and purples highlight the discovery that was occurring in midtown Tucson.  I swore for that one moment, I felt like I could rip a hole in the universe and leave an indelible mark that said "I was here, I am here, and you will never forget that I lived."

Alas, none of that happened.  And the cicadas chirped ever louder as I stared past the low wattage amber lighting that is dictated by the City of Tucson so that one can see more easily into the night sky.  I remember it so clearly because though nothing I could have done (or undulated or ululated) could have created such a dense moment of permanence, my decision was set. I would do what I just saw, and I would become more than myself.  Even if I had to scream and wear a wig to do it.

Matrika, Mike, Becca, Kristina, Randy and John

 I woke up the morning of our trip with both expectation and dread in my mind knowing that in about thirty minutes my best friend was going to walk through my front door, and this change was going to become real.  I rolled off of my air mattress, my real one already being packed, and stood up. Creaking and cracking my way into the shower, hoping that the rinsing off would brace me to the next hour or so.  Everyone arrived shortly after, John, Randy, Mayela, Mike, Becca, and Kristina bearing with her the little bundle of bitchiness that was my Guinea Pig, Shelby Nona Rose. (I'm nothing if not incessantly dramatic when it comes to naming my pets.)  As we close the latch to the truck I turn to look at them, arranged in a semi circle around us waiting for the first person to break the ice and start it, Becca walks up and plants a huge hug on Amanda, tears in her eyes.  All arms clutched and clung for the next ten minutes, as we were well wished and loved on our way out the dirt paved road and to our next quick stop, my parents.

It still hadn't hit me yet.  Even driving the giant behemoth of a truck down a wide residential street didn't strike me as anything different or momentous. It was simply, a moment in time.  Sad, yes, but still a moment that passed.  It wasn't until after saying goodbye to my wonderful parents, and about 107 miles outside of Tucson that the second act of Rent came on and I had my first moment of realizing, "I just left my home.  The only home I have ever known." And I cried.  And just as quickly laughed because in the end, leaving something should be hard.  One should never say goodbye with indifference, lest the experience be remembered with indifference.  That is, at least, to the happy memories. 

The next few days passed as travel normally does, with the scenery shifting and changing and us praying like so many aboriginal cavemen that our truck please make it over the next hill.  I learned that New Mexico is hilly, Northern Texas oddly beautiful, Oklahoma very flat, Missouri is also the Gateway to Green, and West Virginia and Pennsylvania are some of the most beautiful pieces of scenery an American could ever witness.

As we woke up on our final day of travel, I stepped into the driver's seat one last time.  Putting on some music and moving forward down the highway at the briskest pace our behemoth could take us.  Passing over a green mist covered hill, the skyline of our new home came into view and I exhaled out so much of my stress of the past week.  There in the distance was the Empire State Building, the Chrysler, the Memorial, and any other number of giant skyscrapers that make up the landscape of the booming Manhattan Metropolis.  We made it.  We pulled into the George Washington Bridge, down through the New Jersey turnpike and made our way into Upper Manhattan.

And this is where the real drama started to begin.  As I pull into my soon to be neighborhood, the people milling around and crossing streets as haphazardly as if they were made of the same steel that my yellow gargantuan was threatening to crush them with,  The first thing I did was nearly run a red light.  The second thing is get caught in a traffic jam on a street that is about the half the width of most roads in Tucson, and the third thing is kill no less than 4 pedestrians, one being a very pleasant lady in a ha bib who probably just wanted to get home and make chicken.  The others being those same people who thought that a giant moving truck was simply a malfunctioning crosswalk sign.

As we reached our destination, our nerves frayed but ready to get going, we stepped outside into our first real New York day, and were immediately met with some of the muggiest, humid, tropical heat that I have ever experienced.  Not quite as wet as the delta in the summer, but damn close.  We ignore it to the best of our ability, choosing instead to thank the Church we live across from on 117th for having a giant open space for us  to unload in.   Steadily enough, we start to unpack, trading in and out every few trips so that no one gets too exhausted.  Four hours later, we are finished, and we drive the truck to a drop off point (Which in itself was an adventure) and are able to take the Subway back home.

The Subway in New York is a very private experience, 99% of the time.  Granted you are packed to the gills with about 200 other strangers in a small, shrieking shaking metal car.  Riding the Subway basically means about 25-40 minutes of some of the most interesting introspection a person can experience.  Everything is so loud, and everyone so close that the very notion of privacy becomes a spectre of it.  Yet private it is, as people go about their business nonchalantly oblivious of the goings on of the others around them.  Nobody here knows or probably even cares that the three people sitting next to them just made the biggest leap of their lives.  No, instead they are engrossed in the book they uploaded to their phone, or the Beyonce video they downloaded just before the tons of concrete cleaved their service away from them.  Or, as was the case with most, they were simply staring straight ahead neither listening or not listening, but just existing in that eternal present "now" that self help books strive to get you to emulate.  It is not a matter of philosophy, or psychology that creates that moment of placidity, but is instead perhaps the mind's way of recognizing that the day is done.  The walking is over, and even if it's only for half an hour, you are wholly inside your own thoughts, cascading from street to street, avenue to avenue like so many pieces of driftwood just waiting to come ashore.   And surely enough, as I stared down Lexington past the neon signs of .99 cent pizza and $10 ATM's and the spattering of locally owned convenient stores; I definitely felt like I was about to step out of the water, and onto a solid beach, waiting and willing to lay down and rest my head and heart in my new place on 117th that I now called home.  Knowing that tomorrow I was going to wake up, start unpacking, and step back into that raging river that is Manhattan, happily ready to navigate myself from beach to beach finding the peaceful  moments that seem to come second nature to the natives of this city.

And I couldn't be happier.

"And if you've got no other choice you know you can follow my voice, through the dark turns and noise of this Wicked Little Town."

The beginnings of a brand new adventure.

So I haven't post a status on Facebook in about two weeks.

On the one hand this is singularly liberating not being beholden to posting every detail about my life.  Before I moved, I hardly posted and since I moved I have kept up that tradition.  However, the most important point of Facebook is staying in touch with those to whom you may not be physically or viscerally connected, and I have neglected it for it's base purpose.

So to assuage my guilt towards those whom are probably wondering if I have ended up laying in a pool of my own fermented juices, or potentially landed the role of a lifetime moving Patrick Stewart's reading glasses from one dressing room to another.  Here is a blog of my ramblings, and my musings.  My thoughts, my feelings and the general upkeep that is the life of this new Manhattan-nite, Brian Edward Levario.

For those of you who are new to chiming in,  I have recently moved to New York City.  After spending 27 years of living in a small desert town named Tucson that turned out to be quite more historical, and quite less small then living there seemed to suggest.  Tucson is a brown, dry place who's idea of a lawn consists of sanded down multi colored rocks that get to temperatures of about 120 degrees in the summer, and about 20 degrees in the winter....And by winter I mean the two weeks in December in which the blazing ball of oppression decides to give you a reprieve from it's flaming UV clutches.   As a child you learn that these rocks are the symbol of new homes, or new renovation.  Blocking out the dry infertile clay bed that only seems to want to sprout dandelions or little thorns.   If you were me, these rocks also meant warfare. Gathering your group of poor neighborhood kids, a development would come in or some new homeowner would decide it was time for a project, and here the truck would come dumping this giant pile of small pebbles sized grenades.   You would break into your groups, grab a handful, and then jet into the nearest alleyway, finding the grimiest piece of discarded wood you could and begin the trench warfare that was your childhood.  

Now, this kind of behavior could only happen when the temperature was mild, which in Tucson meant October.  After and before that you would have to regale yourself of the finer aspects of outside playing, which generally devolved into who could find the shadiest tree to sit under and complain about the heat.  I swear, you learned how to smell the sun growing up in Southern Arizona.  Most summers I would spend badly diving, and adequately swimming in one of our local sports clubs and looking forward to when October would roll around again and I would get to throw the stones.

Other than the heat, which I promise you is like the friend who is far too loud and doesn't understand the notion of personal space, Tucson was a lovely place to grow up, and I feel like I was on the cusp of so many new beginnings with it.   The U of A is there, and so during the school year if you traveled west of Alvernon you were inundated with the young people who were far too tan and far too blonde for their own good, trying to make a beach town of what is most assuredly the capitol of all Cactus.   From my parents good graces, and their reluctance to send another one of their kids to the local high school, I got to go to one of the more prestigious high schools in the area.   Tucson High is right next to downtown, and at the time our downtown consisted of a cute little street that positively burst with charm... and the only local gay bookstore (something I will get into in a later blog post) You followed the street down, through an underpass that took FOREVER to complete (Prince Rd exit anyone?) and came out to the 5 or 6 "tall" buildings that composed our bustling metropolis.   We had a famous haunted hotel, and a pretty famous theatre that bands and singers performed at regularly.    The point that I am trying to make is this, Tucson is a very flat place in comparison to almost anywhere else that I have seen.  Except for Texas.  One should never have to drive through texas.

Never.

Anyway,  going to high school where I did enabled me to have a lot more freedoms than I feel most high schoolers in Tucson had.  I got to have New York Style Pizza most Wednesdays. (And I can safely say now, guys, Brooklyn Pizza does it justice so go there, and frequently) and I got to explore the basic and effervescent aromatic pleasure that is old human and urine.  Basically, high school and that adorable, fragrant, unforgettable avenue(4th Avenute) was my foreshadowing of living in Manhattan.  

As I was leaving Tucson I was struck with simply how much change has come to the place.  Downtown is getting pretty big now, and has a rail system that is nigh on functional that can transport students from their dorms straight down 4th Avenue and deposit them downtown.  Where they will inevitably visit one of the many chains, and privately owned bars, for overpriced specialty drinks and cheap cheap Corona beer.  The El Con mall has finally become something profitable, and the arts are spreading like wildfire straight up into Oro Valley.  All in all, Tucson is getting bigger, and is a far cry from the one storied adobes that one may imagine in Southern Arizona.

I don't mean to bore you with the details of what most of you probably already know, but I wanted to stress the importance of these visceral memories of mine as I made this giant change.  See, I haven't been writing not because I didn't want to, but because I truly did not know how to put into words what I have been realizing more and more.

I am proud of where I come from.  Truly.  So many people flee Tucson because they hate it, or because they say there is nothing to do.  And for the longest time, I simply agreed with them.  Because yeah, in comparison to a place that has an entire area devoted to pure advertisement in which the lights are so bright they block out the sun, Tucson is small.  Tucson likes things closing at 11:00 PM, and likes to open them up at 10.  It likes things to be a lot slower, especially in regards to construction.(Looking at you, Houghton) There is not the same sense of urgency that I have discovered in my one week of being here.  But what there is is a spirit, and what there is is an ability to make the city into whatever you want it to be.  So yes, it can be awful, and conservative, and stifling, and brown.  And yes, it can be slow and hot, and tepid and creatively flat.  But I made a choice while living there to live a life, and through that choice was blessed with so much engaging and bursting vitality.   Tucson, like the rest of the world, is what you make of it.  And what I made of my Tucson was a place that I cannot wait to go back and see.

I didn't leave because I was running, I left because I wanted to live more.  See more.  Be more.  And from what I have seen so far.  I have undeniably made the right choice.

Perhaps in my next post, I will actually talk about what it is like to live in New York.  :-)

We'll see.