What Colors the Steel Sky Blue

Wherever we go, whatever we do, however we live our lives, we can always depend on one thing; our mothers. They are the rock in our lives, the source of every single cell in our body, and perhaps the starting point of every dramatic family meltdown. Our mothers manage to go to bed every night talking about something not done that day, and wake up the next morning with the previous day's list of to-dos not accomplished to a satisfactory level AND new tasks that must be accomplished before the end of the new day. Before there were post-its, we had our moms to serve as the bitter reminders of every mistake we made and every to-do we would like to avoid in our simple daily lives.

As for my mother, you just need to know her and if you are somebody in Istanbul, you probably do. She is a modern day Coco Chanel who not only is very educated and well mannered but also enjoys the joys and luxuries of life. I think my mother never really knew what poverty and hardship are. And you can not really blame a person for having a pretty privileged life. As I have always said, my family is not rich, we are just well off (depending on the every so turbulent Turkish Economy.) When I say we're not rich, what I am getting at is the fact that if we were to stop working we would not be able to sustain the same lifestyle we have today. My parents work hard and perhaps in some ways can never really be compensated for their hard work.

For the first eighteen years of my life, my parents lived their entire life within the context of the university they are so dedicated to. So no wonder I turned out to be so attention starved; even against my best efforts I can be attention seeking even when I am just standing there. It is amazing how our body language gives so many things away, and all the while we're thinking we're so sly.

My mother's discontent started with my move to the US. I guess she always imagined this to be a temporary move for education purposes only. She never intended me to stay here for more than ten years and then to top it off turn out to be gay in the end. To this day it is her firm belief that America made me gay, specifically the city of Austin.

At times painful, at times entertaining, and many times just darn right depressing I have to live with the fact that I decided to come out to my parents in September 2002. This was one of the hardest choices I made, and to this day, I still change my take on what happened. Don't get me wrong, this was a horrible, painful, horrible ordeal for the three of us. It really was the last bout of pain that played out with New York City in the fall for my backdrop.

My mother expected the world from me, and she still does. Good looking, smart, educated Turkish men are supposed to marry well and have beautiful healthy and smart kids that go to the best schools. It is this strange cycle of unreal expectations. Perhaps someone lives this happy and ideal life somewhere but I have yet to see a family in Turkey that had a less than perfect facade to it. I think all these lofty expectations result in mid-life crises, unhappy families, screwed up kids, and of course drama.

My family is not Greek, neither are we Italian nor Jewish. So you can understand my astonishment when I found out the disfunctionality common in my family exists in Italian and Jewish families as well. The same behavior of the mothers, the same crazy expectations, the full nine yards. So what is the connection between all these different cultures that aligns them so close to endless bouts of drama?

When you're unemployed you have a lot of time to go window shopping. It is ironic actually, just when you have all the time to find just right pair of jeans, you have no cash flow to buy it in peace. But does that really stop you? Of course not! They're hot!

Manhattan is the ultimate foraging ground; with thousands of shops each stocked up to the ceiling with anything and everything one can ever want or need. Despite all this variety and quantity, one has to search quite aggressively to find just the right shade of gray and the right cut for a pair of trousers. Forget trying to find anything in black. Black is the official color of Manhattan. Everyone that needs to feel powerful at work wears black.

By the time you haul your sorry ass to the department store only crazy yellows, strange oranges, and other selections from the Rainbrow Brite's closet are left behind. After a couple of cold winter months and tough luck at the department stores, I gave up on trying to beef up my business casual selection for work. Instead, I persuaded my employers that punk and grunge were the next power-suit.

My biggest supplier for skater boi look was of course the urban outfitters, a store I never could put anywhere within the gamut of clothing stores. It was not a thrift store but most of its items were as stressed as Wall Street brokers at the end of the year. It was definitely not where you went to don your Wall Street getups. It was not couture, but it was couture weird; it was trendy but it carried goods from 20 years ago. Some items looked old but they were not cheap; other items that looked cheap were comfortable and lasted for months on end.

Whenever I walked by an Urban Outfitters, it was "uncle" all over again. It was as if I was pulled into the store by some invisible tracking beam. The store I went to most frequently was in my neighborhood on 3^rd Avenue. It was a small store that usually had limited selection but they always left me alone there so I hung around for a while. Some customers sometimes even asked me questions; I guess I looked like I belonged there. Sad that is, considering that I was 28 years old, an ex-internet specialist with two degrees from expensive schools.

One day I met the manager of the store by accident. He seemed like a nice guy; obviously gay with the fakest dye job, and a lisp that could not hide behind the curtain of manager's voice. We talked for a while. I did not mind it at all, I was already planning to spend a good hour there anyway. He was very friendly, almost too friendly. Like most other Manhattan guys he was perpetually stuck in the hunting mode and did not know how to relate to someone of same sex in a non-sexual manner. He was all flirty and it was kind of cute, in a two puppies running into each other and falling on their back kind of way. So I watched on as he clowned. After my attention span had trailed off, I told him I had to be off and I left.

I chuckled to myself as I walked towards the gym. This guy's scene was ultra spiritual; he was planning on becoming a monk. I don't have any problems with that except that it seemed too good to be true. Many Manhattan guys have a marketing a pitch, something that is supposed to make them special: The multiple personality guy(s), the office worker that was in the Twin Towers, the guy who's on TV, the water board office clerk from Erin Brockovich, the guy with HIV, the guy with too many muscles, the stripper that's actually the next hot shot writer, the Harley Davidson guy with long hair that actually is the writer of children's books, the list goes on... And now here's one new addition to the list, the spiritual guy; kind of made me wonder whether I had a pitch for myself, and would it be? The Turkish misfit who can never really go home? Oh that's so sad, give me lots of attention already.

It was not as if I was looking for a soul mate. I had one of those; though he always ended up miles and miles away from me most of the time. At the time my significant other was still working in Long Island and commuting to Austin Texas on the weekends. He and I got to see each other every third week or so. I tried to tell myself this was normal, and that this was enough, but at a gut level it just was not enough.

So I was not planning to date, to trick with or do anything funny with this Urban Outfitter manager. Next time I ran into him, he asked if we could have dinner together. I was a little suspicious so I turned it into a lunch. Whenever you're in doubt about a guy's intentions, don't accept to have dinner with him --that only leads to trouble. Just have a lunch.

Of course he sniffed it right away and said, "ugh, lunch that's so non-committal." I was surprised that he caught on that fast but I saw it as a good thing. It meant less work for me.

So we met for lunch the next day. After we met at the store, we walked down to Lemon Leaf --a great Thai restaurant on 3^rd Avenue. He was ultra strange that day --stressed, snappy and somewhat catty. The lunch was a miserable experience. He kept nagging me about this and that, yanking my chain and calling me names. It was the kind of abuse I could only take from a very good friend I had known for a while. Naturally, all of this teasing coming from a complete stranger was completely out of place for me.

A pattern was starting to emerge for me. It was just not a good idea to have meals with people I did not know too well. It just meant that I had to spend the whole duration of the meal with the person and take the potential torture until the check has been paid.

He paid for the check and I did not even offer which is very unusual -- usually I pounce on the check because that's what you do in Turkey. It was a miserable lunch, and as far as I was concerned he could make it better by paying for it.

After lunch, he asked me if I wanted to come by his place. I had visited his apartment briefly the day before. It was kind of this extra crammed, run down place that I frankly did not care to visit one more time. So I said nah, thanks I have errands to run in the afternoon. By this time he was livid. I think he thought that by paying for lunch he bought himself some of my time at his place. Frankly I was offended. He followed this offer with offering to come to my apartment with me. This option I did not care about either because

• his behavior at lunch had proven him insane


• I did not want him to know where I lived


• I was afraid he might jump on me or something in my apartment.

Of course when I told him that I did not want him to come to my apartment he did not take that too well. By this time I was just ready to turn and leave no matter what. So although he was still fuming on the hot East Village sidewalk, I said bye and turned around and left.

On the way home I got a little paranoid that he might be following me, so I must have taken the most convoluted way home.

I got into the elevator, got off on fourth floor and entered apartment 4F as in Frank. I closed the door. I was home. I was safe. The episode was over. I exhaled.

Needless to say I never shopped at that Urban Outfitter again. That was a shame because it was such a fun part of my daily routine. Instead, I started roaming around inside the store by 6th Avenue and 14th. I did not make eye contact and I definitely did not talk to the staff anymore. I was becoming a Manhattanite faster than you can say "freak".

In the last few months, I got addicted to a new delight, Nutella (chocolate-nut spread) with crunch peanut butter on toasted white Italian loaf bread. My days are not complete without eating this poor man's delicacy at some time of the day.

Today is no different. I woke up hungry from my afternoon nap and stumbled to the kitchen. I can almost hear you asking, what are you doing napping in the afternoon. When your life is completely demolished like the two towers of World Trade Center, when you've lost all hope of employment, come to the verge of losing the best relationship of your life, when you're going to the gym every like it is your job, one needs a nap in the afternoon. Sometimes I even wish that I can sleep for longer periods of time, and perhaps sleep entire days out of my way. At this point life became this hurry up and wait process leading up to the good times that lay ahead. The existence of the good times ahead was starting to seem quite questionable like the unreal stories of the three holy books.

The cool kitchen tile felt good on my feet, as the fridge hummed a familiar tune. The spike of the florescent lights above as I turned the light on somewhat woke me up. I went through the pantry looking for something to eat. Then I remembered that I had not yet had a peanut butter and Nutella sandwich.

I put the two slices of bread in the toaster that slowly blushed and turned crimson. The sweet smell of the Italian bread started to waft out of the toaster as I unscrewed the top of the peanut butter. Soon the slices popped out of the toasters like college buddies on crack. The only thing that was missing was the toasts saying "oh mi god like how's it going??"

I took a table knife from the drawer and scooped a large glob of Nutella with it to spread on the bread. I was still dazed from my sleep so it seems what followed happened in slow motion, with the deep hoarse sound effects and everything. The Nutella started to drip from the knife onto the slice of bread on the plate. It was a hot day, when the room temperature is higher Nutella gets this viscous consistency like honey. So it drizzled on quite ordinarily but then it started to scribble. No I am not losing it, it scribbled an uppercase "T", followed by a "r", "o", "y" all lowercase.

My hand still over the toast, hovered frozen in time, frozen between sanity and acceptance of full on your regular every day insanity. There it was, even Nutella was spelling my name. The only thing it did not do was to keep writing on to tell me that I should give up this whole New York "I'll make it there, I'll make it anywhere" thing.

A few second later the analytical, skeptic, rational Troy kicked in. But he too was a little baffled. Even upon close inspection, the Nutella simply spelled my name on the toast.

I called my cousin immediately for a reality check. He told me that I was going insane being cooped up in my apartment and that I needed to get out and come over to his place so that we can go to dinner like normal people.

I obediently left the toast and Nutella on the counter and got dressed and left. The rest of the evening was pretty unremarkable. I had almost forgotten about the whole incident until I came back home to find the toast and my name on it staring back at me from the dark kitchen counter.

I decided to take the weirdness of this all head on, and took several pictures of the anomaly. Strangely enough although I used two different cameras all of the images came out blurry. Either my hands were shaking or I was truly experiencing an extraordinary event.

Either way, I was obviously entering the world of the weird with day-long naps, psychic dreams, strange daily coincidences and finally Nutella readings.

It is really that late in the night
and so early in the day that
though I close my eyes
the burden of unfinished tasks
and the anticipation of new ones
put a metallic twist in my chest
under heavy winter covers.

The radiators tick to their 4 am beat
as the pipes hum with their steam.
I turn to my left side, and the comforter
swings a slow one with a sweet tune
it whispers to dirty floors listening.

In that rarely quiet corner of Manhattan
I become the crease in time today holds onto,
that split in the garden hose where time leaks
and drowns the graying lawn into a green retreat.

As a firetruck screams on past my block
I become the bookend that the tomorrow leans on,
that final hold before next week falls off the shelf
where my mother's glass ornaments wait
for their untimely end.

Troy James Vega

My dissaproval of you is the only thing that
stands between you and I as we sit
across each other in a Village bar.

Your eyes shift to my left and then to my right
I pretend not to notice and speak on
hoping that my paranoia is weaker
than your six dollar long island ice tea.

The bottom of the glass arrives sooner
than that dreaded end of the night.
Once I laid that glass down
I just was not in the mood to fight.

You climbed down the steps to the F train entrance
I saw you and your train pull out and get lost
into the summer stench of China Town.

Waiting on an uptown platform,
I thought I should have waved
and pointed at the service change poster
but I'm not sure you were looking back.

Troy James Vega

This morning I woke up from this strange dream about the power plant behind my building. This still operational power plant is one of the two on Manhattan on the East River side.

To some this power plant is an eye sore, for some reason I always thought it was beautiful. Well, in my dream this particular power plant was on fire. With flames gushing out from one side while people were running around like crazy. The sound of the fire raging was incredible, I could barely hear the sirens, then there was another explosion, another cloud of smoke and fire blew out of the other side. At this point I woke up.

Like most days it took me a few moments to realize that I was no longer in the dream. The sound continued however, like a pipe organ on fire, kept blowing. The windows were vibrating, and then there was another explosion.

THIS WAS REALLY HAPPENING. I jumped out of bed, put on my clothes as fast as possible and stepped out into the hallway. There was no one in sight in the hallway. I ran down the stairs, the sound was coming from the power plant side so I went one level lower to the street side by the power plant. The stairs door flew open and there it was. There was this huge ball of fire at the side of the power plant.

There was no fire fighters or police in sight. My guess is right around the point I was woke up from my dream the first explosion happened. Just like in my dream the fire was growing. Pipes and pieces of the transformer that was on fire were being blown onto the street.

I ran upstairs to my apartment to pack my essentials for evacuating the building. This was stupid in retrospect but there was no way I was going to be stranded in New York City without money, some form of ID and my passport.

On my floor I ran into my neighbor Jim, he had the same idea. He had already packed a suitcase for himself and his wife and was on his way out the building. I rushed into my apartment and salvaged my backpack with my laptop and the papers I needed. I did not even think about clothing. Oh, I also took my portfolio of paintings. These are the times that make me appreciate the fact that I paint small 12x16 watercolor paintings --they pack nicely.

Jim and I ran out of the building with several other people. We kept going. By the time we left the building the fire fighters and police were flocking to the East Side of the 14th street where the fire plant was located. The streets were cordoned off and officers started going through the buildings closest to the plant trying to evacuate anyone and everyone.

Jim and I ran into Jim's wife on the way. She did not even see us, she thought that the fire had already reached our building. Jim had to call her name out several times before she realized he was her husband. After we exchanged our stories we calmed down a bit. It looked like a few avenues down, the power plant fire was under control.

The three of us calmly went to a bar nearby and had lunch. I guess this was a strange reaction to a major gas explosion in a power plant across our apartment building. But what is one to do really when they are faced with these situations. This was also a couple of months after 9/11, so we were always ready for something to explode in those days.

It turned out that one of the transformers in the power plant had experienced and overload and melted down. This meltdown had ignited the gas intake that exploded and became the big gas fire that drove us out of our building.

The power outage that followed hit the West Village and other parts of Lower West Side. Our power was not affected. Strangely, there was little or no coverage of this event. In these post 9/11 months where everyone loved linking everything including a dog pissing on a priceless Thomkins Park statue to terrorism, no one linked this huge explosion and power outage to anything.

Although I had moved away by the time of the second big power outage, I have always thought it strange that the authorities threw out the possibility of sabotage so swiftly and with so little to prove their theory.

A couple of hours later, we were back in our apartments. Our double pane windows were still in place. In fact except for a power outage that did not affect us, one could barely tell this ordeal even took place.

During my days and nights of unemployment not only did I get less and less motivated to anything and everything but I also developed some really strange skills that one certainly could not share with everyone.

I have always had a solid history of having very vivid and strange dreams. In fact I must have spent every night of my first 23 years with nightmares night after night. Endless combinations of exams failed, public humiliations staged, getting raped by the high school bullies, being exposed as a gay man, and finally a subgroup of dreams that absolutely had nothing to do with my fears or daily life.

All the other ones I could stomach, mostly because I knew where they were coming from and mostly where they were going to, nowhere. These were remains of the daily brew, that stain ring the last gulp of coffee leaves in a mug. one could either way the mug or throw it away if it was a paper cup from Starbucks.

The group that was not related to anything was a rare and strange breed. These dreams mostly felt like being in a film. Many times the credits rolled by after the dream was over. These were dreams about settings, places never seen, perhaps completely fictional people whose names I never remember after I woke up. These familiar strangers of my dreams could be my parents, could be my best friends, wife, boyfriend, perhaps even my child. What I have never quite understood is the process through which our mind creates a completely fictional face, assigns a fictional name to it and then fits it into a dream during our sleep.

Considering the hell we put our heads through daily life, you would think our brains would take any opportunity to unplug, to shut down, to take that blond moment we all are so in need of.

Late July, the weather is unbearable. Still, I am on the street, on the go because I can’t stand myself all cooped up in the apartment all alone. I frequently go to Tompkins Park in East Village these days, mostly because it is a rel strange mix of people. There's the base layer of homeless people speaking in the language of me, add to that the hippies of East Village having heated discussions about which color has more of the fire element in it, then in the shade sitting on a bench a celebrity with his girlfriend --pretending to shy away from the attention of others and of course others like me: the unemployment, multi-nationality marginalities of the lower-mid Manhattan.

In the green gray background of the Tompkins Park I suddenly noticed a spot of pure white, a color one does not come across often on Manhattan. As I followed the winding park path, the trees that were in the way first came closer into view to reveal that the white stains on the green were actually people, then the trees moved to the side as the path made a sharp left turn to reveal 5-6 people painted all white head to toe and wearing white clothes.

This was the kind of visual moment that stops you and forces you to re-evaluate your senses before you fully accept the anomaly. Although I double/triple checked my vision, the white people were not going away. They seemed to be some sort of a family on an afternoon's outing. They had a little baby and everything. There were other people interested and the white people did not mind at all posing for pictures. All this time none of them uttered a word to another.

I finally concluded that this was one of those wonderful moments in New York City when you experience something otherwise you would never experience anywhere. Here was a group of actors that were all dressed up for the part of a mime family but had thrown themselves onto the ever so gray, every gloomy and glaring scene of the East Village.

I followed them around while they made their rounds around the park for a while. Then I decided to leave before they dismantled and revealed their secret. I would rather leave them in mid-act and assume that they kept of living their ultra-white, ultra-calm, ultra-quiet life in a coop building colored none other than pure white.

Feeling is the beginning of hurting where what is felt solidifies at the tip of a tender leaf not letting go of the past and unwilling to accept the future and what it brings. It is at this crease in time in which I find myself balancing tens of apples on the sharp end of a large kitchen knife still wet from the diswasher. Then the sink screams, the microwave burps, the stereo in the living room sings an out of tune Turkish song, and it is time for my shower.

Clothes come off, one by one, perhaps even somewhat out of the ordinary order, the mirror stares on, the towels ready for my wet skin. I climb in and embrace the strings of water that seem to shoot through my conscience and clean all my regrets and pains. But the remedy is temporary because the memory of it all remains. "One slip and one ends up with a broken neck, how come no one ever thought of a shower insurance?" I ponder to myself.

Then that funny book comes to mind. I think its lines to myself, trying to remember every word. Somewhere in my mind a duo sings "you can not do it, you have failed again". But I tune them out like a radio station, like some old e mail print out I recycled, like a monitor I shut down even without shutting down the CPU cause I felt like living dangerously that day. Risking my equipment, risking my job, I unplugged the damn plastica electronica box out of that wall, because I had never done that before. To my despair, nothing went wrong, the monitor lived on.

I turn my head underneath the shower nozzle and my life is burdened by the experiences of others. I am constantly told to do this or that and to avoid all of the above that
involves thinking. My life is lived for me and then put into a package of four with one free at Wal-Mart.

I step out of the shower drops of water being licked by the A/C which is obviously turned down too low. I want to breathe and for that I take a pill. I knew it too, way before I had it coming. I got off the plane and they told me "you just wait, in four years, your allergies will drive you mad". It is almost like telling a child that he will support an unyielding erection in four years and not know what to do with the damn thing.

I climb into bed, one of the few good investments in my life; the pillow soaks my hair in, the comforter dances on my legs and I am in heaven, first row center. The A/C kicks in and crawls into my bed but he has a really restless sleep, I hear him leaving my bed several times during the night. All the better I think to myself his feet are too cold.

Mr Gardener come give me my fix
cause ma can no longer make cookies.

On that red day you began, I ended.
As yellow leaves fell on my forehead
I did not have a comb in hand.

The wild grass was long and soothing,
but soon green stains would be growing.

Everything rips, everything wrinkles
no wash can take away what I have seen.

What you and I hold here for less than a minute,
can only turn to grudges.

You said you knew the course of the sun,
I said I knew it's cooler in the shade.

You're always up for digging up the garden,
somehow I end up sleeping on my back all day.

The windows cave in, the ceiling weighs down
the fan beats that familiar beat.

Your callused hands stroke my winter shoulders,
as ice cubes shift in a glass of ice tea.

Mr Gardener, I can not say yes to all this.
Put that shovel down and let the wilting die free.

TJV
May 2002