Friday the 7th
Friday was another excellent night, well spent with good friends. Due to my constant harassment and obsession with building backyard bonfires (or campfires) (or fireplace fires), we got together with S., R., M., Y., B. and K. and built another fire in the snowy backyard whilst drinking beer, peppermint schnapps cocoa, eating some sort of cilantro infused chicken and snacks dipped in onion dip. We played Mafia (still the best game ever), burned wood and basically just unwound after a long week. Always fun.
Saturday the 8th
Another good day. We got up mid-morning and grabbed a rental car so that we could drive to central new jersey for K's family's "Little Christmas", which is essentially a Christmas party thrown the week after the holidays end. It's actually a nice idea, because it prolongs the holidays a little longer and the letdown of the end of the holiday season isn't the cliff it usually would be. Anyhow, we rented a Nissan Sentra and drove down to NJ, where a snowstorm was picking up and had a lovely day at Aunt K's house, where a large extended family of brothers, sisters, cousins, babies, small children and third party interlocutors (like me) sat around drinking eggnog, eating quiche, deep fried ravioli, stuffed shells, banana cream pie, meatballs and sausages and watching football or generally talking, or engaging in Christmas games for the kids. Very nice. Especially the food. Which we brought home about 15 pounds of and promptly ate. The only downside of the day was having to go sit in the freezing car and jump on a conference call where I had to listen to 30 minutes of discussion over our team's comments on the compensation discussion and analysis section of the registration statement were applicable. Not fun. But, after stepping out of the car into the snow covered neighborhood and noticing the intense soundlessness blanketed in white snow, I was okay again. The ride home was also awesome because we got to listen to the Jets-Colts game on AM radio, which is surprisingly fantastic, in some ways even better than watching a game. And that game was fucking fantastic.
Sunday the 9th
Woke up fairly late, dicked around at home, watched the Ravens-Chiefs game on the couch in pajamas while eating more leftover food from little christmas. Decided to drag our asses off the couch and make it over to Nice Guy Eddie's bar for the Eagles-Packers game at 4:30 to meet with M. B. and D. Learned that Nice Guy Eddie's is pretty much the worst place on earth to watch sports. Shitty food, gross servers, tiny analog TVs with fuzzy and dim screens set up in a way that you can't see anything, and basically all around lameness. Note to self: Never go there again. We sent D. out as a scout, where he finally found a place called "The Edge", which in stark opposition to Nice Guy Eddie's, might be one of the best bars ever. No one there. Darts. Awesome TVs. No bullshit. Bring your own food (Sunny and Annies!). And at least 4 or 5 Tool songs came up in the playlist. Watched the Eagles loss with some disappointment, then we made our way over to Sing Sing on Avenue A where we ended up singing retarded Karaoke and drinking until 11:30, after which we came home and ate some MORE leftovers from Little Christmas.
Monday and Tuesday the 10th and 11th were relatively uneventful, but fairly busy on the work front. The real bitch of the week began on Wednesday, when I was supposed to fly out at 6 am to arrive in Los Angeles for a long session at the financial printers. The financial printers are something else…but I’ll come back to those.
Starting at 2 pm Tuesday, before a single snowflake had hit the ground, cancellations began rippling through the flights. As my 6 am flight was cancelled, suddenly all of Tuesday evening flights were beginning to fill up and all of the Wednesday afternoon flights were quickly getting packed. In a mad hurry, I booked a flight for the 3:30 Wednesday afternoon out of JFK. It was promptly cancelled, sending out more shockwaves of cancellations and overbookings. By 9 pm, all of the Wednesday and Thursday flights to LA were either booked or cancelled. Checking to see whether it would be reasonable to avoid late, delayed or otherwise unnecessary trip to LA, I emailed my partner to see whether I should try some scheduling gymnastics, such as, say, taking a morning train from New York to Baltimore and than catching a Baltimore flight to Los Angeles.
“I think it is important to try and get out there.”
So I booked it. In bed by 2 am, ready for another visit to the printers.
So, financial printers. No one understands what this is and frankly, I’m glad, or else everyone is a giant boring asshole. “Going to the printer” is simply going to an office full of word processors where they take your word document and convert it into a pdf document and then turn that file into an html document of some sort that can be filed electronically. Why we require entire businesses and tens of thousands of dollars to do this is beyond me. Whether this will continue to exist in the future seems unlikely. In any case, teams of lawyers and bankers and business people descend on a few lovely conference rooms, usually on the 12th or 20th floor of some random office building, and begin going through giant financial documents and prospectuses page by page. Thousands and thousands of pages are printed. Commas, periods, split infinitives, misspellings, defined terms, pagination, too much space between paragraphs, formatting, fonts, legally incorrect terminology, table spacing and every other nitty gritty mind number soul-crushing type of detail are hammered out, hashed out, re-read, and marked onto drafts by hand and sent into the “printer” for editing. Then, the drafts come back out with the changes made and we painstakingly proof every change and then continue marking new edits into the document. Hundreds of man hours are spent at every printer session polishing these turds until they gleam like gold and no sentence is left unprocessed into a banal platitude about corporate goals and no statement is left so specific as to invite any possibility that it could be incorrect or misleading. This continues for days.
So, back to my story, I went to bed around 2 am and woke up promptly at 6 am and began my travels. In my Indian-made grey suit (my back-up) and scuffed motorcycle boots, I dragged my travel suitcase and bookbag through the blizzarded sidewalks of slush and snow to Penn Station, where I watched for 3 hours as my train continued to get delayed. Getting tired of my book and of waiting, I eventually tried to get up and see whether I could get on another train to Baltimore – which, shockingly worked. Happy that leg one of my trip was well underway, I settled in for 3.5 hours of Modern Family and The League on my work-issued travel laptop, while frantically fielding blackberry emails relating to the deal. Arriving at BWI, I made it to my terminal where I promptly sat down and continued watching Modern Family (which I really do like, btw. Not as good as Community, but still quite charming). Made it on the plane, flew for 5.5 hours, landed in LA at 7:30 local, got into a rental car and promptly got stuck in gridlock for 45 minutes, trying to travel 5 miles. (I hate LA). Arrived at the financial printer, sweating my balls off, wearing the same suit for 18 hours, having not eaten, and proceeded to work until 3:30 am. In other words, my day had just lasted 24 hours. Luckily, I got to sleep 2 hours. And then proceeded to stress out. Editing documents, chasing down signatures, negotiating lock-up agreements with hostile partners at other law firms, inability to reach the clients during negotiations, client explosions and emergencies, all continuing from 8 am Thursday morning until Friday at 2:30 pm, another all-nighter under my belt. At 2:35, after watching the CFO of the company pop a bottle of champagne and taking a quick sip of the bubbly, I hurriedly said my goodbyes to all and got into my car, where I gridlocked my way to the airport, made my way through security and got onto my mostly empty flight, where I bought a sandwich, watched the League and slept 4 hours until touching down at JFK.
Saturday
I think Saturday was mostly just super satisfying because I knew it was a three day weekend, which fucking rules. Didn’t do shit most of the day except go to the Gym and be Fucking Productive and then went to B’s for beer and the Steelers/Ravens game (fuck Ben) after which I jetted over to R’s place where the firewood I ordered (half a face cord, 4 feet by 4 feet – yeah!) had finally been delivered by the Woodman LLC. And then we (R., S., Y., M., Me., Se.) proceeded to burn the giant pile of wood, piece by piece until we had finished all the beer and finished all the food. Love those nights.
Sunday
‘Twas a football day. We all gathered at The Edge, our new favorite football bar. Watching the Jets beat the Pats was AWESOME. Not because I’m a huge Jets fan, but that was certainly an awesome game to watch, especially with pitchers and pitchers of beer. Eventually we ended up going to Amsterdam Billiards where we played ping pong and pool (badly) while drinking more beer until we got bored (esp of D’s friends, one of whose name is Spike) and went home.
Monday – PRESIDENT’S DAY!! (January 17)
I think we tried and failed to run several errands this day, including a drop off of long held compost (retch) to the Farmer’s Market (closed) and an attempted run to the Apple Store (aborted) to pick up a new Mac. Instead, we stopped off at The Barrel (on Stuyvesant/9th and Fourth) where we had a couple of glasses of wine and beer and happy hour specials for food. After three small plates, we learned that we were actually even more hungry, so we decided to take a stroll down 10th Street between 1st and 2nd for some Japanese fare, whatever it might be. We ended up at Dieci.
Ok, so Dieci was awesome. A tremendous meal. We happened to arrive during happy hour, so all of the wine (which was excellent chosen and delicious) was half off. We were 2 of only 4 people in the restaurant. And then after seeing the menu, which appears to be tapas style Japanese and Italian blends, we rattled off 6 choices. Baby Red Potato Gratine with Sea Urchin, Shrimp and Mozzarella Spring Roll, Crispy Warm Fluke Sashimi, Spicy Tuna & Grilled Brie Sushi roll with Red Pepper Puree, Spicy Bologenese Ramen and Foie Gras Egg Custared “Chawan-Mushi” with Oyster Mushroom Dashi Sauce. Rashomon was also playing in the background on a little TV. Very good meal. Everything was cooked perfectly and executed well to the tiniest detail. The plates were timed deliberately and intelligently. The space was quiet and elegant. We followed the meal by watching Inception at home. I’m not sure why everyone was so confused by that movie. But it was pretty awesome. For some reason I thought the stakes would have been higher than a corporate heist, but I suppose that’s the point of Cobb’s entire emotional arc.
Tuesday
Back to work. Lame.
BUT, we got to cook an excellent meal. K. whipped up her variation on Momofuku’s ginger scallion sauce (which she does better than he does) which we tossed into cold spaghetti (such an amazing combo, even better than on ramen). I cooked down some swiss chard into white wine, butter, garlic and chicken broth, which we topped with crispy pan fried crimini mushrooms and shallots and then topped with a fried egg. And then we drank wine and watched Community.
Wednesday
Similar to Tuesday, except a much lamer day at the gym (WHY ARE THERE SO MANY PEOPLE IN THE GYM NOW? YES NEW YEARS I GET IT. PLEASE LEAVE) and we used buckwheat instead of ramen for the ginger scallion noodles, and replaced the swiss chard with kim chi and banchan mung bean sprouts, spinach and quick pickles (momofuku recipe). Excellent meal, great show.
Door left unlocked, wooden beams and roof, gas fireplace (only boo), quaint aesthetic and stone walls.
We populated it with Manhattanites, PBR, Budweiser (purchased by D.S. from a bar), Bourbon and Gas Station Snacks. And we drank beer, I fell asleep mid conversation in a recliner, and our night was over.
Two days missed! Not good.
So I did manage to finish "Freedom" during a long evening of reading where I was able to take off from work early. The night was a good one, and quite an anomaly, since it was about 5-6 hours of straight reading and a bottle of wine. I forgot what it's like to just have the evening to yourself without a job breathing down your neck or doing something more "exciting." In any case, although I was generally down on Franzen in the middle of the book, I think he does a marvelous job in last 200 pages or so. At least until the full heat of the action dies and the epilogue kicks back in…which doesn't quite feel right to me. After exploding the emotional core of the book into a thousand pieces with a powerful surge at the end of the book, the very last section of the book just felt off in tone. I suppose I was satisfied with how everything turned out, but I also simply didn't expect that to be the way things would turn out. (This is an excellent review.) In any case, I like the book more now than I did when I was in the middle of it. And I really do think that it is a book that tries and succeeds in embodying an era and a mix of ideas from this time. Maybe that's why people care about Franzen. I'm not sure that this book will feel like anything in 50 years, except as a cultural artifact of our times.
Other than that, work has been pretty easy. I closed my first deal as a senior…even though it was as plain vanilla a deal as they come and I still managed to get a little fried over it. I'm left with only a single deal to work on, which I have to admit is much better than the 3-6 that have absolutely killed me in the past. I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. And squish me. But whatever.
I recall only a few other details from the past two days, which is both good news and bad news because I'm supposed to be recording these details, but is also verification that I should probably continue: Cooked some sort of random purple cabbage and sausage dish. Cooked raw italian garlic and parm sausage in a skillet, let all of the fat get rendered, put the sausage to the size and added half a head of purple cabbage, which was thoroughly coated with the fat and olive oil, added a spoonful of garlic, added a spoonful of brown mustard mixed into a small bowl of the beer I was drinking and poured it over the top until the cabbage cooked down to a shiny deep purple, and then added the sausage back in. Turns out that was excellent. Other details: Watched The Office, which appears to be good again. Went to a semi-holiday party with K's co-workers. Watched TNF at a bar.
And now, packed a whole buncha shit into a suitcase and I'm off to Camel Back Mountain for skiing! I fucking missed skiing. I am going to ski the fuck outta that mountain. D and M managed to get us a cabin of sorts (with a gas fireplace, lame) and a bar, so K and I will be joined by D, M, and R and J for a weekend of drinking, eating and skiing like mad. Dear god I hope work does not fuck me.
Annappa was the first of the children to talk to me. He conscripted me actually. I was 22 years old, having been in India for 3 days, sitting with awkward terror on a slide and trying to figure out how to get kids to play with me. Or talk to me. Something. Some kids were chasing each other gleefully/angrily. Others were watching television inside. The older boys were playing cricket off in the distance. And one smallish boy was kneeled over a green coconut with a dry stale husk, determinedly bashing it with a fist-sized rock. I sat on the slide in the corner. He banged on the coconut. I sat on the slide in the corner, watching now. He dropped the rock and picked up the coconut and walked it over to a half-buried rock and began bashing the coconut against the rock. I continued sitting on the slide, wondering if I had an opening. He looked at me and shouted "Uncle! Uncle!", which sounded nothing like the word "uncle", so I was merely curious. After a moment, he stopped the "Uncles", picked up the coconut and walked over to the slide. Turns out I was "Uncle." Actually, turns out all foreigners are Uncle. (Or Auntie.) He gestured for me to help him crack open the coconut, though to my eye it did not look like it would be edible.
I obliged. I smashed rocks against the coconut, I smashed the coconut against the half-buried rock, I put the coconut on the buried rock and smashed the coconut with another rock, I smashed the coconut against the tree, I jammed my fingers into the rough husk and tried to rip it off with brute strength, I pretended to smash it against my head for comedic effect. Annappa cheered me on. I was heartened. Finally, I grabbed the coconut with my right hand, kneeled down and began slamming it repeatedly against the ground with a fury -- but then a motion caught my eye to my left and I saw an adult woman, standing right in front of me, looking perplexed. She was part of the staff. Very aware of how ridiculous I looked, I sheepishly introduced myself. Is it ok for a full grown man to be bashing coconuts against the ground in India? I didn't know the customs. But as I rose in embarassment, unsure of what to do or say…Annappa just took the coconut from my hand and continued beating it against the rock.
Annappa was 11 years old. He was a shade darker than most of the children, with coarse black hair. One of his eyes was very slightly lazy at times, but was otherwise a handsome boy, with clear compact features. He was born HIV-positive, contracted in the womb or at birth and was orphaned by AIDS when he was very young, possibly beyond memory. He was one of the very first children raised by FF. When they received him, he was chubby and had open sores all over his head. A caretaker shaved his head and washed his open wounds. Annappa eventually lost his baby weight, made friends in his new home, and grew into a healthy, relatively happy, boy.
Annappa craved and loved attention. He put his arms around others and often jumpted into my arms. His need for attention also meant he was rowdy - always in the middle of the scrum when the inevitable rowdiness of boys (plural) emerged. He hugged dogs. He leapt into other people's photos and had to be pushed out. He liked to be thrown into the air. Spun in circles. Go first (and second and third) in trust falls. He liked playing with his toys and asked for toy cars and toy trucks. He was always one of the first to crowd around sessions of Half Life 2 on the foreigner's laptop. And he wasn't all that physically coordinated. A little awkward. And he also had a temper that he didn't hold back. He sometimes hit other children when he was angry. He raised his voice more often than he needed. He cheated a little bit at small games. He had behavioral problems at school. But he was loving and wanted to be loved. Like anyone. Like everyone.
When I returned again to FF in 2006, Annappa hadn't changed a bit. I didn't get to spend much time with him, but there he is in all of the pictures, jumping in front, mugging for the camera. Sometime in 2008, he was sent away to another home, called Kalvery Chapel, where he would be given only a bowl and a mat on a concrete floor. His behavioral problems could not be controlled, so they sent him away. This has happened to over a third of the children I knew, which I thought was fucked up, but I held my tongue because I wasn't the one who had to raise these children. I was just the guy who played with them - not the one who was responsible for them. All said, even though I lived on the other side of the world, it felt unreal that might not see him again. And so when I finally returned to India in 2010, I hadn't expected a chance to see him. But Murugesh, the eldest boy at FF who has now become independent, had recently been admitted to Accept, a Bangalore-based Christian NGO for HIV/AIDS, and told me that he had seen Annappa in the wards - older, taller, thinner, but still much the same.
Kristen and I arrived in India on a Sunday for a jam-packed 10 day trip. All of our traveling was structured around making it back on Thursday for Murugesh's birthday, which was incredibly bad timing. After weeks of planning and discarding possibilities, we had settled on an early morning flight to Goa on Tuesday and an early morning return on Thursday. Having resolved that headache, we set about visiting the children and old friends. On Monday afternoon, I called up an old friend, an older English woman named Sheila who volunteered with the patients at Accept, to fit in a visit with her before she left for South Africa for a 2 month visit. While trying to work out our schedules, she suggested that I visit her that evening at Accept, where I could also visit Annappa, but I declined. I had just visited all of the FF kids again for the first time, met a handful of new ones and didn't feel up for trying to catch up with Sheila in the midst of a new care centre. Plus, we had already penciled in a visit to Annappa on Thursday, when we had a big block of time and could spend time with him.
When we finally made it to Sheila's that evening, we talked amiably and she eventually filled us in on his condition - something she had not done previously. Annappa had tuberculosis, had rapidly lost weight and become weak and bed-ridden. His condition had deteriorated to the point that the doctors had decided that even though it wasn't clear how long he had left, he was not going to recover and leave Accept. Annappa was beginning to experience "breathlessness", a symptom which can last days, weeks or months, but is a generally a sign that the patient was not going to survive. Annappa was also very aware of his condition and very afraid. He told Sheila and Murugesh that he knew he was dying and was very afraid. Sheila had bathed him and comforted him. She brought him juices and liquids he could consume. Before her last day, she told him that I had returned to Bangalore and that I was coming to visit very soon.
I didn't know what to do. We could cancel the trip and go to Accept 18 hours later, in the morning, or we could take our brief trip to Goa and see him two days later. In the past 5 years, only one child from FF has died, a six-year old from a drug complication. The rest remained healthy. We were just at FF - the children were jumping and running and playing. What could have happened in the intervening two years since he was sent to Kalvary to have so radically changed his health? In the end, we decided to stay with our plans to visit Goa. It was only 48 hours and he had only just begun to experience breathlessness. The chances of such catastrophe coming so fast were so small.
When we returned on Thursday morning, it was a brutally hot summer day in Bangalore. We arrived back at our hotel shortly after 11 and began scrambling to make our way to see Annappa, as thoughts of him had accompanied our entire trip to Goa. As Kristen got ready, I ran down the street to buy stacks of nature and car magazines and picture books, I darted into a movie store to pick up Spiderman 3 to watch with him on my laptop (he loved Spiderman) and we called Murugesh to meet us a couple of miles away from Accept so that we could meet to pick up a bag of fruit and three or four fresh juices for him to drink. Murugesh met us at the shopping center and we quickly split up, one to get juices, one to get fruits, and the other to get hot chips. After we got everything together, Kristen and I hopped back into the auto and Murugesh hopped on his scooter and his phone rang. He put on his earpiece and took the call. I was not thrilled. We were late and slow. It was hot and I was sweating and dusty. We had been waiting two days and were finally there to see him. I started to snipe at him to get off his phone. Annoyed, he held up his hands and waved me off. I continued sniping. He ignored me. He finally took off his earpiece and turned to us, "Annappa passed."
In shock, we all fell silent. After a few moments of speechlessness, we continued on towards, not sure of what else to do and to visit Varsha, another girl previously at FF. After getting lost several times, we finally made our way to the center and stepped inside. We discussed Annappa's passing with the staff, almost casually the way we've discussed passed patients, not knowing how else to communicate. They asked if we would like to see his body and then led us to another room. Murugesh and I walked in together, silently, with Kristen trailing behind, and the staff member continued to chat, possibly unaware of our history with him. Just another patient passing from AIDS - just another set of visitors coming after the ordeal was over.
The room was cell-like, with light green paint on the walls and fluorescent lighting. Annappa was lying on his back in a transparent glass case on the floor - a cooling box to prevent decomposition - about 2 feet wide, 1.5 feet tall and 6 or 7 feet long. He was wrapped in clean white gauze from head to toe, feet together, arms folded across his chest. The only opening revealed his unwrapped face, framed by the white gauze. His skin was the same deep brown, unblemished, almost wax-like. His eyes remained half opened, the whites incredibly clear and porcelain-like, and the pupils unfocused staring at nothing. I didn't recognize him. And he was so thin. The amount of space enclosed in the gauze was so incredibly small and frail, with the contours of his bones forming his outline, like a skeleton wrapped in cloth. I hadn't been there for him when he needed someone, and I had been there, in India.
I looked to Murugesh, unsure what he was thinking. He had grown up with Annappa. He was now 5 years older than Annappa and living with the same disease. Just a month ago, Murugesh had been diagnosed with tuberculosis and had suffered a stroke that left him bed-ridden. He had to be admitted to Accept for TB isolation. Exactly a month earlier, he had been blessed to test being Sputum-negative (non-contagious), but still required 9 months of constant treatment for TB. I don't know if it was a good idea for him to see his body or not, but I didn't stop him. He knew more than I what it meant to see Annappa, so I didn't interfere. A few minutes later as we walked out, he told me that seeing Annappa made him afraid - it terrified him. Soon after, he said he felt blessed to be healthy and alive. I just put my arm around him.
Annappa passed away on Wednesday, March 24, 2010 of AIDS-related wasting and tuberculosis. He was 16. He had no parents or siblings, and the closest people he had to siblings and friends had been separated from him. He died in the afternoon on a hot day in a tuberculosis ward, maybe surrounded by strangers, maybe alone. When most of his childhood friends and caretaker were living 2 miles down the street, in one of the rare moments that Sheila was not there and when we had returned to India to visit him, he spent his last minutes alone. And though he was loved, he didn't have it when it mattered. I'm sorry, Annappa.
