Esmine Green’s ghost is haunting me. I cannot get the image of her death out of my head. A psychotic woman does not deserve to die in agony on the floor of a modern hospital. She has rights too. The timing of her death and psychosis is what triggers my grief. I was in a psychiatric ward on July 4th, 2002, just like Esmine.

I remember it was Independence Day only because most of the staff were off that day. It was a relaxing holiday with the shrinks gone. I’m thankful that I didn’t end up in Kings County Hospital’s loony bin, like Esmine. I live in Brooklyn. I could easily have ended up there and died too.

The tragic online video podcast of a crazy woman flopping like a fish on the floor while a security guard just watched gives me the willies.

My crazy mind led me out of New York City. I was in Jersey and ended up at a place called Trinitas. Watching the video of Esmine squirm on the floor makes me realize that the ward in Elizabeth was much better than the huge hospital facility here in New York City. There were only forty or so patients in my wing. There must have been at least ten staff on call at all times. Yes, treatment was better at Trinitas.

Art classes. At Trinitas Hospital we had art class. I remember vividly now that I’m over all the bitterness I had towards Trinitas psychiatric care. They kept me against my own will.

Interns. There were intern art therapists at Trinitas– two young girls, probably in their early twenties, fresh out of college, willing to do their best to help others, like me.

Clay. Molding clay. The interns passed around globs of white clay and promised to bake our creations once done. The girls granted special attention to me, perhaps because I had schizophrenia, unlike many of the other patients there who suffered from mental illnesses ranging from major depression to Alzheimers. The pretty white girls must have been warned about me; the psychotic dude in Unit D.

“What is that, Charles?”

“A crown of thorns.”

“It’s very small. It may be difficult for us to place it in the oven. Why not make a toothpick holder, something you take home with you?”

“I don’t want to take this home. I don’t want you to bake my crown. Just leave it alone.”

“It’s beautful. Such detail!” They assured me in a paranoid state.

They were so patient with me. Sketching was so much easier for me. My rendering of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s face on the body of the Statue of Liberty made everyone laugh. A bi-polar guy told me it was funny. I told him to shut the fuck up.

Older, seasoned staff are my only complaint regarding the medical treatment I received at Trinitas. They were jaded, seen it all and only had comments like– “Oh, you are going to go through a very painful period following your psychotic breakdown, Mr. Taylor.”

They were right, but a little encouragement would have been nice.

I was out of cigarettes and nobody was coming to visit me. I didn’t want to call a friend for a favor. I was in Jersey anyway. Why inconvenience my friends and old lovers to make a trip all the way out to Elizabeth? I turned to the impressionable artistic interns.

“Will you buy me a pack of cigarettes if I give you the money? Nobody loves me and nobody is coming to see me. I have cash in the bag that the nurses had taken from me when I checked in here. Will you go into my bag, get $20 and buy me four packs of Newports?”

“We can’t go into your belongings, Charles, but you can sign for your bag at noon today. Sure,” the skinner of the two interns offered.

I couldn’t believe it. There was hope in the world. I gained hope, and days later was released from the arms of the intern artists.

After watching Esmine kick her legs as if a house had landed on her in Oz, I’ve concluded that Kings County Psychiatric Hospital does not offer art classes for its patients. They should. It would be a great start to providing better services to the mentally ill and there must be untainted interns willing to work in such places who unlike seasoned staff can offer real flavor to successful hospital care.

Taken in and fed are the hungry

They shall be filled

Those who cry now will laugh

Blessed are those who minds cringe in fear

For their fears will be rescued

The silent listeners who are forgotten

Will be remembered, forever

Wealthy riding horses of steel

Will have already received life’s rewards

They who laugh with graces

Shall cry in unfathomable fear

Stars will fall from the face of Hollywood

Those who know to love absolutely everyone

And serve as doormats to the dusty feet of others

Will walk barefoot upon streets of gold

The abused– servants of anger who walked narrow paths

Gave all that they had in pursuit of love

Will be showered forever in grace.

It is impossible for me to pass the lost boys and girls that clutter the sidewalks of New York City. Homeless men and women are sometimes easy to walk by and ignore, but dirty boys and girls, mere children in their early twenties, have no place on the streets. It seems that with a little direction, they could lead lives sleeping in real beds. The children seem drugged and lost. They probably are. With little heads tilted to the side and their legs sticking out from under cardboard boxes, I have no choice but to toss in my loose change and not care if they use the money to buy more drugs. God bless them!

Paper cups with shaking coins in such little hands remind me of the warning call of the rattle snake. If we keep ignoring society’s reptiles, eventually we will all be bitten. It has become standard protocol in town to trust charities like the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies, Catholic Charities, Steinway Child and Family Services, Bailey House, the Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services and a host of thousands of others to remove the snakes from our urban garden of Eden. These charities do a lot, but not enough, and none of them offer any real hope to the lives of those who need it most.

The New York Time’s Neediest Cases Fund campaign is nothing more than the comic page inside the New York Post. I get a kick out of reading how the newspaper and its readership give away thousands of dollars each year to New York’s ‘neediest cases’. Such journalistic fraud! If readers and donors of this paper’s foundation had a real clue as to what really happens to their charitable dollars, they would do like I do, and give directly to the drug abusers on the street. Why give to agencies who believe that institutions, anti-depressant pills and anti-psychotic drugs manufactured by drug companies and newspaper publishers are the solution?

New York’s charities are run by a den of thieves and ex-nuns turned lesbians. Our city government places social service leaders like Kathleen McGlade, Susan Bear, Mary D. Redd, Pernessa Seele and Gina Quatrocchi in charge of public service. They are power hungry bitches who believe in nothing but hairy pussy. Care lost its soft touch when real men left the social service arena when the dykes took over the care system.

There is little we can do to help with lesbians controlling everything. We trust that the angels who have fallen from normal lives will find the care they need from the charitable organizations and their power-hungry bitches. There are so many institutions around that can help, we assure ourselves as we walk by and count our blessings.

There must be a way our government can assist the individual homeless person more effectively. Why are there so many homeless people who do not bother reaching out to these institutions that have been around for hundreds of years? Certainly homeless families with children must take priority when welfare funds are handed out, but just because a person has no kids and is homeless is no reason why social service charities should ignore them.

The shelter system in New York is hopeless. Never will we keep all our children from becoming vagrants, but there is one thing that can be done…

Homeless people lockers. Yes, a place where they can keep their collected aluminum cans, dirty blankets, pots and pans, books, and everything else that homeless people pick from the trash and keep in bags and carts in hopes of one day starting a new home somewhere.

Yes, give them storage bins. Put these lockers all over the city, Disguise them as sculptures. Without all their junk, homeless people look like they have homes. Imagine the burden that will be lifted from their dirty shoulders without having to tote around all their junk. And we will not have to step over it as we leave Starbucks with our $4 coffees.

On the way home from work on Thursday, I managed to find a seat on the G train. I sat down next to a man in a blue Doe Fund shirt. Moments later, a handsome, black homeless man who obviously was cleaned up a little by the worker from the Doe Fund approached with his laundry cart, stacked full with his personal belongings. I slid over so that all three of us could sit down.

The young man with the cart seemed so nervous. He chose to stand.

I overheard their conversation– “You will work and earn $300 every two weeks. In six months you will have completed the program and if you saved $3,000 you can leave.”

I looked at the black man with a large crucifix tattoo on his right arm and wondered where he was going with his cart on the G train. He caught my eye.

“Listen, don’t worry about what these people think of you,” the social worker in the blue Doe Fund shirt snapped at his charitable case while pointing his finger at me.

I wanted to explain that I have worked in charitable organizations like the Doe Fund for twenty years now, but there was no use. I wanted to suggest to the handsome homeless man that he simply get rid of the Doe Fund and his cart full of junk and run for his life, but it was none of my business.

I ignored them both like a schizophrenic.

There was a skull of a cow in Jennifer’s kitchen. The ghost-like remnants of the animal sat on a cupboard next to her salt and pepper shakers.

“I’ll be back in October. Remember to send me my mail once a month and make a check payable to this man and mail it to this address. You are going to love this place. Feel free to help yourself to my books.”

Jennifer reminded me of a witch. The West Village hippie chick rented me her rent controlled studio apartment on King Street for just $775 a month. Although the place seemed a little haunted and dark, it was mine for four months. I had been nearly homeless for several months and moving from the shelter of several close friends, not wanting to be in their way, just waiting for my own affordable apartment. Frank West had a restraining order placed on me and I lost my home. A judge told me not to go within feet of him. Jennifer’s studio was perfect. I stayed with my first lover Anthony for several weeks following my arrest and night in prison. I had no choice. Tension was high in his apartment above a liquor store on Myrtle Avenue in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. He thought it was hysterical that my relationship with an exotic dancer who was professionally trained at the Dance Theater of Harlem had ended in a split.

“Are you ready to come back to me, now?” He asked.

Frank was old– going through a middle age crisis. I shouldn’t have been so angry when he cheated on me. Now that I’m 40 I see what tormented my lover so! The cheating was a way he dealt with not having legs not so flexible. I had no choice but to leave him. He had me arrested anyway. It wasn’t my fault. As much as I loved him, I could not return to his arms. I was on my own now, and almost homeless.

Anthony didn’t want me sleeping on his sofa. He said I was ruining the cushions and if I wanted to stay there much longer, I would have to share a bed with him.

“What if I just blow you one good time and agree to sleep on the floor? No thank you, I’m over you.”

“Come suck your man’s big black dick again. When’s the last time you seen one this big? I know Frank ain’t got no coon dick like ‘dis one.”

I laughed in hysterics. Was he serious? Yes he was. I had to give him head just to keep a roof over my head. Thank heavens I was introduced to Jennifer by my friend Geoffrey Holder. Jennifer was an artist too. A photographer. She left the city for Canada every summer and rented out her charming, oddly decorated, barn like apartment in the heart of New York City. She drove to the heartland of our Northern neighbor, into farm country, where she took rustic photographs of Canada’s abandoned farms. Her work adorned the home. It felt good to have a place to pull myself together and not to be a sofa whore to old lovers whose love has lost its sting. Jennifer said if the skull bothered me, I could put it in the hallway closet.

I thought of the nights I spent with Rodney in Washington heights when Jennifer handed me her keys. He was a guy I met in an AOL chatroom. We had sex once, and it sucked, but remained close friends because he was once in the marines and I was in the army. The sex should have been good but it wasn’t. I was grateful for my friendship with Rodney after Anthony got on my last nerve. His screen name was NYC Marine, or something like that.

“No. It’s cool. I like the place like it is. Don’t worry. I’ll take very good care of it,”I promised Jerry.

Four months was all the time I needed. The sublet was perfect. There would no longer be a need to be an inconvenince to friends.

A former co-worker, Patrick McGovern just bought a brownstone in Harlem. Patrick offered me a two bedroom apartment on the first floor. The place would come with a washer, dryer, dishwasher and a backyard. He offered it to me for a stunning $1,200 a month. All I needed was to wait for Patrick’s place to be finished. To move into a newly renovated place without a lover attached to it would be a dream come true, but already, in Jennifer’s place, I was at home.

I smiled at the cow skull on the kitchen wall…

Re-invention is the fountain of youth.

The white hairs on the sides of my head were itching at my youthful consciousness. Revlon Colorsilk #50 (light ash brown) was what I used to take twenty years off my appearance this evening.

In just twenty-five minutes, my crown of grey glory was gone. That look of wisdom was erased in just one application. I’m dumb and sexy again!

Under the influence of what is merely an optical illusion created with permanent dye, I sparkle again.

My youthful good looks have returned, thanks a home hair coloring kit. I see envy in the eyes of older men. Jealousy beams from their shinny heads or thinning birds nests when I gallop by with dark roots glowing in the golden summer sun. I run my hands through my mane as if it is sometimes a burden to have so much hair.

Even if the patches on the sides have turned white from the seasonings of life, there are alternatives for guys like me. A well-done coloring is far more dramatic than hair plugs or comb overs.

Spike me!

Prior to the box of Revlon, hair on the top of my head was light brown with kisses of blonde sprinkled in. These green eyes still shine like clover in Irish fields but the eyebrows looked a little worn out too, so despite the warnings on the box, I made them match.

The ladies at worked begged me to keep my ‘distinguished’ sides, but I couldn’t stand it. I should have known to be cautious of a Revlon product on sale for $4.99. Now the hair on the top of my head is dark brown, the color of coffee without cream. On the sides, it glows in orange-red tints.

I’m hot as hell, but the greys turned red. I cannot wait for my wisdom to return.

The porn industry is not what it once was. DVD’s have taken the thrill out of naked bodies. The internet provides more free previews of sex than it does literature worth reading. The porn industry is suffering now, like everything else affected by the recent spanking of Wall Street’s bubble butt. I’m convinced that the problem with our economy and the porn industry is computers and the internet. Everything on-line is so free and cheap.

Although I spent countless years regretting my appearance on the cover of Honcho Magazine, I have learned to embrace the beauty of my youth, years later when I read my own reviews inside a mainstream publication.

“Meet Joe from Iowa. The nine inch power bottom.”

“Joe likes older men. Bears!”

I made $800 for doing that cover and inside spread. My friend, Jose got me the gig. He worked as a office assistant/ fluffer for the publisher of Honcho Magazine and a host of other once popular gay porn tabloids. I begged Jose to get me in the magazine. He said I was such a whore, yet loved me all the more and somehow managed to arrange a photo shoot. Two months later, I was on the cover of magazines in the gay neighborhoods of Chelsea and the West Village, here in New York City. I never stopped to realize that the magazine was on the west coast too, in places like LA and San Francisco.

The magazine never made me famous. Very few ever “star spotted” me. The $800 was nice at the time. I really didn’t care. I was beautiful and loved showing off, especially in front of a camera lense.

What a summer that was. It was a time before the internet age when free nudity is everywhere. There I was, a sexy gay man, ‘published’, in a real magazine.

I promised myself when buying ten copies of that magazine that one day, I would appear as a writer in one…

When the weather gets hot like it was today, I dust off my crockpot. Slow cooking was designed for straight days like this.

Why heat up the house with a gas stove on a day like today? The tiny air conditioner in the bedroom hardly cools this dusty old place. What to make? I am hungry for ribs. The supermarket on the corner had fresh, deep red beef ribs (short ribs) for $4.00 a pound.

Three packages will fill both me and my lover. He always makes love to me after eating this dish– one of my secret gay man recipes. This is how I trap my men. Keep them coming back, no matter how good the sex may or may not be elsewhere. I invented this dish after my first gay divorce when I was still fat and nobody wanted me. It’s good soul food for those with lonely hearts.

The ribs are seared in a cast iron skillet in a small handful of Crisco shortening. Three minutes at high heat on two sides is enough to brown them.

After all the ribs have been browned and placed carefully in the crockpot, add a can of beef broth to the empty skillet. Use the same can for measuring in an equal portion of red wine, from Australia, if available in local markets.

A green pepper sliced in thick strips makes this this a Mexican favorite. Place the pepper over the ribs in the slow cooker.

Stir the wine broth in the skillet, removing any brown bits stuck to the pan. Add a packet of Ortega Taco Seasoning powder to the broth. Stir to boiling, then dump over the meat and peppers.

Cook at low heat for six hours. Make a pot of rice, a dish of mashed potatoes, and pan of green peas soaked in margarine.

Bon Appetite and Happy Gay Pride Day, B. Style.

With moments to live, he chose to spend what time there was left in his life with me. Never wanting much, just additional time alone with me. Another night together in a warm bed was all he asked for. To be snuggled in comfort, his worries put at ease in my arms, as darkness set in. He should have said something or told me that he was going to die very soon. I went on with life as if it were eternal, not always granting him the time with me that he longed for just moments before death wrapped its cold, black fingers around his purple heart.

Unlike other lovers I have known, he loved the sea too. Summer was when we fell in love. Who knew he adored riding waves in the cold Atlantic waters off the coast of Long Island? I had done that alone for many summers while those I loved stayed at home because they could not stand the sand. Off to white beaches with chips of violet shells scattered among the white sand we ran when the weather permitted. Aboard a train with a blue plastic cooler, towels, lotion and a hefty staff of weed, I rode with Jesus to the water.

Away from the crowds of bathers who tossed themselves as seals before a resting Neptune midday sun, we found our spot along the beach. Carefree with just a few other loners around, we stripped our heavy clothing from our bodies and quickly entered the bubbling white-capped waves. Over and over again we entered the seas, only to be tossed as children upon the land from which we crept.

With soggy fingers we returned to the spot in the sand with the blue cooler hidden behind stacks of shoes. He lit his brown blunt, offering me the first hit, carefully wiping my lips from salty water that fell from my hair and brow as tears of joy.

All day without food, in the water we fasted until the sun pulled its red rose fingers from above and evening sank quickly upon the red wine sea.

He begged to sleep with me. I was too tired. I wanted to go home alone and wash the sand from my hair. Enough of him– an entire day in the sea. I needed time alone.

There is little doubt in my mind that the trigger of my horrific case of schizophrenia was ecstacy and marijuana. The illness was dormant for 35 years, secretly locked within tiny DNA until I started rolling on E and smoking like the devil.

Environmental and psychological conditions were perfect for the psychotic breakout. A rash of personal problems caused my mind to retreat into darkness and isolation. The loss of a job, home and lover within a month’s time is enough to crack anyone’s dark psychological wholeness.

Still high on ecstacy even though I hadn’t popped a pill in months, I went through the fire of a constant high, one that was impossible to come down from. Every time I took a drink of water, my head sang in glory– so many ideas came rushing all at once. Mania was fierce! If only I had a pen in hand at the time of contact with God.

Eventually, the Eden I was exploring turned into a desert of grief. My mind began racing through the realms of unstoppable, imaginary horrors. It was the great fall and loss of self that so many saints have written about. Bitterness towards life was all I felt. There was no end to the pain, ever, I was told by imaginary voices. I understood why many take their own lives during such possessions.

To this day, I remain convinced, by thorough observation, that the illness is not just in me. It is everywhere around us. Only a few are chosen to suffer from the biological disease. And the spirits I saw? The ‘imaginary’ demons that once haunted me– do I think they were real? Of course I still believe they are all around us. They are as concrete as consciousness is to me. Shawn came back from the grave to haunt me. Anyone would have lost their mind if in the same circumstance as me. When people are gone, they are supposed to be gone, but not Shawn. He was right there with me, a witness to it all.

Going three weeks without any marijuana– my body was paranoia free. His death made me want to be clean. I should have never smoked again, though. After my first experimentation with E pills, it seemed that marijuana had a different affect on my mood than it once had when I simply would smoke, sit back and listen to music or get done.

That was the real trigger– the pot I smoked after cleansing my soul during a two week period of mourning.

The bud went right to my head. Tyre should have known better. Me too. What were we thinking? Why did I go out looking for sex two weeks after Shawn died anyway? He was always overly protective of me when he was alive. As an invisible soul, he was like a scorned hooker working a cheap motel who had drained three loads from me in one night and I ran out the door in early morning without paying, while the hooker stayed asleep, exhausted from all that I had given her. His ghost was furious with me. I was so sorry for what I had done.

If ever another man tried to take me from him, Shawn, while still alive, grew furious. He was trying to rest in peace when suddenly my mind made contact with him. His soul, like the illness in my genes was dormant for two weeks when suddenly, I decided I needed to go out to get laid in order to stop missing him so much.

“Shawn Lazarus Smith, walk,” the voice of Jesus must have commanded from over there. He was back for good it seemed and ready to make me pay for being such a heartless whore.

I was with his old friend from LA– Tyre, the bartender from the hidden, “down low” club in Bed-Stuy– Langstons. Shawn and me played with Tyre several times before Shawn passed. It was a threesome heaven with those two; a holy trinity of sorts. God, I think I was in love with both of them at the same time and neither seemed jealous.

Those times were gone and besides, Shawn wasn’t there in person. Tyre handed me the blunt. I thought I wanted him, but suddenly changed my mind.

“Listen,” he said. “Hear that?”

“What’s that,” I cried.

“My upstairs neighbor. He got a dick bigger than mine.”

The man upstairs wasn’t gay, or at least it wasn’t another man he was screwing. It was a woman, with cries of ecstacy that verged towards moans of possible rape.

It didn’t seem real. What was Tyre talking about? No, I wasn’t down for any of that. I ran out of his apartment on Quincy Street and headed towards home. I was nearly hit by a car that quickly turned from Nostrand Avenue. The car behind rear ended him. I kept walking. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. For a moment I forgot where I was. Something was after me now. It was Shawn. That I am sure of. It wasn’t a mental illness, it was Shawn fucking with my head, like I had his, during those wave filled nights in Brooklyn, when guys like Tyre were with us.

The phrase ‘crick’, used by indigenous mountain people of Pennsylvania, never went mainstream. The word crosses tongues there more frequently than powdered funnel cakes. The only instance that residents of Huntingdon County use ‘creek’ is whey they say “You’re up shit’s creek,” otherwise, the proper word for casual conversation there is ‘crick’. That’s what flows out of mouths .

People who say ‘crick’ are often thought of as hillbillies. The truth is, most people who use such terminology know the proper word, but speak in methods handed down to them from previous generations, and spew forth such literary tragedies simply because they don’t know no better.

One must have swam in a crick at least once in their lifetime to understand why the word is used so freely there. The waters are dirty brown and tainted with cow urine. In the 1970’s, there were no chlorinated swimming pools in South Central Pennsylvania. We swam in the crick and how refreshing it was.

During the great flood of 1972, when the remnants of Hurricane Agnus dumped over two feet of rain upon the Appalachians, the crick near my grandmother’s house flooded all the way up to the second floor of their house. The family simply shoveled out crick mud and moved back in. At five years old, I helped Pap Pap clean out the mud.

“That god dammed crick,” was all that Pap Pap had to say, even though he spent lots of time fishing in it.

As soon as the river was back in its banks, we went swimming in the crick. Blown up inner-tubes from car tires were tossed on the dirty water and secured under out skinny white asses. We floated next to the cow piss and thought nothing of it.

On the other side of the crick, there was a mud bank with grapevines from which we swung thirty feet above the crick’s surface and did cannon balls into the brown water. When snakes swam by, it was best to move out of the way. Uncle Steve took a crap in the crick one day. We all laughed watching his turd float harmlessly by our tubes.

Crick leeches were an inconvenience, but never a bother. Pap Pap burned them off with his square, metal cigarette lighter.

Corn from nearby fields belonging to an old farmer that we didn’t like was gathered by the handfuls and we cooked the cobs in crick water over a fire to warm ourselves after all day swims.

Yes, the proper word for a muddy creek should be crick. There is nothing like cricked, corn on the cob.