new jersey and manhattan.

I write to you now from a mauve house surrounded by deciduous trees, deer and bugs in suburban northern New Jersey. I lay on a teal couch like a fat cat sipping on a gin and lemon juice. Katie and her parents are terribly accomodating; tonight I am overfilled first with gin, then meat, then ice cream. And like clockwork I seem to sleep and receive my meals and gin at the same timeslots. I pee at 2 AM sharp. Katie's mother and I are watching three-fourths of Phat Girls together, interspersed with Larry Birkhead on Larry King during the commercial break. Two weeks on the road [I'll tell you about the rest of the roadtrip later when I have time] and I've stayed here a week now.

And twice, for foil, I've taken the train into Manhattan, the regimen suddenly collapsing to the impulses of a feral animal, and I feigned exploration with some alternative tours. The first was by Gary, an early 40s lifelong Manhattan resident―responded to a Craigslist ad I posted―I met him because we share an interest in goats. He told me he was hit by a taxi once and got a concussion on the curb. Now he has no sense of smell or taste, and he added: he used to be able to sniff a fox out of the woods, and now he can barely enjoy Jell-o ®. He showed me around Hell's Kitchen, an area that's being demolished and rebuilt like craaazzzy, including a new extension of Hudson Street for walking only, and sites of future skyscrapers to extend the skyline crowd. There were also aspects of the far past―the building where honkytonk pianos were first sold, for instance―and recent times―buildings through which the Lincoln Tunnel still exhausts, and Manhattan's largest camera store, run by a large family of Hasidic Jews.

My second tour was by a younger lad, Paul, to whom I had been leaving answering messages throughout the road trip to here imitating accents I heard at each place as I went through it. For instance, I heard a lady in Dollywood say, "Why should we have to stand in the shade? We Black." And then I would do a very poor job at imitating the accent of any one of these lines, and it will be interesting to hear them all in a row. He told me he was bringing me to two works of art. We went by the chaotic sockets of the World Trade Center buildings to a park made of large tastefully arranged chunks of brownish slate rock. Paul was simply ecstatic; I was photographing a hippopotamus statue in a playground emitting two sprays of water at an elephant with only one nozzle. Then we arrived at another park, which he kept referring to as one of his favorite works of conceptual art. And I told him I didn't see that, but thought it was nicely landscaped.

Luis, my only friend who lives in the city permanently, gave a third tour, consisting mainly of going to a gay bar where he last worked at over a year and a half ago, Xes, and watching the Tonys, which for me was like being exiled to a foreign country. I did enjoy being around gay strangers whilst watching bad television. Does LA have places for that? Then we stopped at Chelsea Papaya, where I keep buying a smoothie that tastes just like medicine I once received in Prince George, British Columbia, when I was seven and sick.