 One Sunday, I think I shall buy The Times and attempt to summon the past. It is that glorious month of Pride, at least in the city, though New Yorkers seem, at present, far more animated by the Knicks being in the NBA Finals. I could not care less about the Knicks—or, for that matter, any sports team. The spectacle of ordinary people roaring with devotion for millionaires already enjoying themselves, and paid obscenely well to do so, has never made much sense to me.
Joaquin comes and goes, and at times my house feels almost more his than mine. That is all right. He does, after all, bring me pleasure when I need it. We never seem able to keep away from one another for very long. There is something between us—what exactly, I cannot say, and perhaps it is of no consequence. I have received an invitation to the Winter Garden to see the work of one of my favorite playwrights, Arthur Miller. They are staging Death of a Salesman. Miller was once married to Marilyn Monroe, and everyone knows how deeply I care for her. What a woman—what radiance. She would have turned one hundred on June 1st, had she lived so long. In some strange way, I am glad she did not. I would not wish to disturb the image I carry of her. I believe Miller was her third husband. As for Death of a Salesman, I remember finding it rather dull, though I am willing to give it another chance before seeing the revival on Broadway. Meanwhile, in Peekskill, you realize there are straight couples—most of them, really—you could quite happily do without, except for Danni and Rosa, your favorite straight couple of all time: the kind of couple you aspire to be, though in a different way. Today I liked how they could be in front of me without shame—the way Danni’s gentle fingers ran across Rosa’s back, the way she sat on his lap and held him there, and the way we all smiled. It felt oddly exciting
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 The Coffee House There’s a dark cloud hanging over Fort Hill, and the wind is tossing the flags outside City Hall. The night is over, and part of me is smiling because I let myself have some well-earned fun. It was Friday night, after all—the kind of night you don’t need to examine too closely the next morning.
Reading The New York Times online now always takes me back to the way I used to read the print edition in the 1990s with a lover. We’d have coffee, breakfast in bed, and slowly make our way through every article. Sometimes we’d walk down to a café just to be around people for a while. There was one place in Cole Valley, on Cole Street, that I especially loved. It had a gay, easygoing feel, and you saw all kinds there—not just pretty boys or men who always seemed to have sex on their minds. And now here I am in Peekskill, and in some ways life feels much the same. Men in the Coffee House still read print editions and still seem to be thinking about the same things they were back then.  Peekskill on the Hudson is aka Peekskill: A Friendly Town A small city can call itself “the friendliest place,” but that slogan rings hollow when fear, exaggeration, and quiet cruelty shape public decisions. On North Division, near Whiskey River, people who never sat on those benches are suddenly outraged that the city removed them, as if they had lost something they ever truly valued.
One excuse is that homeless people were sleeping there overnight, yet that claim falls apart under even casual observation. Another is the familiar complaint that the homeless and pantry crowd are too loud, too visible, too inconvenient—smoking, arguing, existing in ways that make others uncomfortable and supposedly chasing paying customers away. But what is really being driven away here: disorder, or humanity? The truth is that some people are less interested in solving problems than in pushing vulnerable people out of sight. And when anyone objects to that cruelty, the labels come quickly—liberal, leftist, whatever helps dismiss basic compassion as political weakness. But this is not about ideology. It is about remembering that people are not all good or all bad, and that poverty does not erase a person’s dignity. A homeless person is not a nuisance simply because they make others confront realities they would rather ignore—especially when that person may be someone you know, someone as human and connected as anyone else. If the mere presence of struggling people is enough to frighten someone, perhaps the problem is not the benches, or the block, or the homeless at all.  After the rain, after the heat, and now this sudden return of cold, the trees have darkened into a deeper green. Some mornings the writing opens up again. You sit down expecting the usual wrestling match, but instead the sentences loosen, the revisions feel like play, and you catch yourself liking what you’ve written — and rewritten. It’s a small mercy, but it changes the whole room. And when you finally look up from the page, the world has shifted too. After the rain, after the heat, and now this sudden return of cold, the trees have darkened into a deeper green. Not the bright, eager green of early spring, but something richer — a green that seems to hold the weather inside it. As if the leaves have absorbed the week’s moods and decided to wear them. It feels right that the work and the world would sync like that for a moment. A morning when the page cooperates, and the trees deepen their color, and you remember why you keep showing up to both. "To Kill a Mockingbird"
 The quiet heat, the balcony distance, the way a stranger’s small, unselfconscious ritual becomes a spark in your day... These dreams don’t wait for sleep. They come when I open my eyes, when I step away from the desk, when I stare out at the view without really seeing it — until something, someone, interrupts the drift. A boy. Shirtless. Dark‑skinned, Puerto Rican, lit by that sun‑bleached kind of day where everything looks washed in white. I’m on the balcony, not hiding, not spying — just standing there as he drops his bag on the steps and lowers himself into push‑ups, steady and unbothered. Then he stands. He pulls the shirt from his swimmer’s‑built frame, unaware that he’s shifted the weather inside my head, nudged the writing mood into a different current. The blog pulls me away from the project for a moment — but only a moment — because this unexpected heat has its own kind of invitation. I smile at what I’ve witnessed, at the simple fact of it. I pour another lemonade, the kind I make from scratch, and today — because the day calls for it — I add a splash or two of tequila. Not to forget the dream. But to stay awake inside it.   Tennessee Williams is a brilliant playwright. His *Cat on a Hot Tin Roof*, the 1958 Hollywood version starring Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor, is absolutely captivating and unforgettable. Peekskill woke me before I was ready — not with thunder, not with rain, not with anything dramatic enough to justify the interruption. Just a cloudless gray, that strange kind of sky that looks like it forgot to put its face on. A watercolor with no pigment. A mood without a name.
Some of us like to wake up to silence, to ease ourselves back into the world like slipping into a lukewarm bath. I’m one of those. I like the slow return from whatever dream‑state I was wandering through — that nowhere place where you’re alive but not accountable. I like the hush. The drift. The quiet reassembly of self. But then there are the others — the ones who wake up with you, whether planned or unplanned, whether welcome or not — and immediately reach for their phones like they’re clocking in for a shift. And suddenly the room is filled with YouTube shorts. And one of them — always one — features that person laughing like a Cheshire cat who swallowed a megaphone. That laugh. That awful, synthetic, caffeinated cackle that slices straight through my silence. I hate that one. And when two people wake up this way — one craving quiet, the other summoning digital chaos — you start to wonder about compatibility. Especially after a dozen polite requests to please, for the love of all that is holy, put your damn earbuds in. Because nothing ruins a morning faster than someone else’s noise invading your peace before you’ve even located your own pulse. But I’ll admit something: not every morning is a monastery for me. Some mornings I need noise too. I’ll put on music, or one of those self‑help videos that promise to fix the soul in under ten minutes. Other mornings I crave a classic film noir — something with cigarette smoke and moral ambiguity. Or Tennessee Williams, always with Elizabeth Taylor or Paul Newman sweating through their lines in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. And then there are the days when it’s Burton and Taylor in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, tearing each other apart with dialogue so sharp it could slice fruit. It’s the dialogue I’m after. The rhythm. The way a story can wake you up better than sunlight. Yes, two people from two different worlds, two different cultures, two different generations and morning philosophies — they can live together without stepping on each other’s throats. They can wake up differently and still meet in the kitchen later, still share coffee, still laugh about something stupid, still find a way to be gentle. It just takes a little courtesy. A little awareness. A little willingness to let the other person have their version of morning without trespass. Because even on a cloudless gray day, even when the sky forgets itself, two people can still find a way to start the day without ruining it for the other. And that, I suppose, is its own kind of noir miracle.  The bartender decided that Irish Spring Rolls and nothing else were all I needed this afternoon at quirky Whiskey River, which was about to get even quirkier as the clock ticked. There’s a particular kind of magic in walking into a bar and finding your drink already waiting — no words exchanged, no decisions required. Your bartender has simply decided what you’ll be drinking, and you accept his verdict as you head to the gents to wash your hands. You stand there waiting for the hand dryer to roar to life before remembering — of course — it’s the old‑fashioned kind. The metal box with the stiff brown paper you have to yank down like you’re ringing a church bell. Hungover Saturday is still clinging to you, even though by this Sunday afternoon you were convinced sobriety would’ve returned. Sometimes it just doesn’t. There are only a few people in the bar besides your bartender, who believes he knows you inside out — or so he thinks. For a fleeting moment you wonder how much he truly does know, but the thought dissolves the moment your cocktail hits your lips. Whatever he knows, or thinks he knows, is fine. You tell him about your bathroom mishap, and naturally he shares it with a couple at the end of the bar — a handsome pair out celebrating Mother’s Day and the upcoming wedding of the mother’s only son next Friday, or something close enough. It’s all in good fun, and you’re always game to meet new people, so two more acquaintances get added to the ever‑growing list. They tell me they’re originally from Queens and live in Peekskill now too — more City transplants who’ve fallen for the quiet charm and slower pulse of this place. As the bar thickens, every seat fills, and I lose track of how many classics I’ve sipped. There’s always a fresh glass in front of me. I swear my bartender is trying to get me drunker than he is, but he keeps a sharp eye on everyone — making sure no one tips past the point of no return. The conversation of the day — out of the dozens swirling around — lands on dialects. Boston accents, New York accents, even Rhode Island gets dragged in because one guy is from there and insists they call a water fountain “the bubbler.” The husband of the Queens pair — who works for Metro‑North Railways — disagrees, because he goes fishing in Rhode Island and claims he’s never heard such a thing. You get the gist of bar‑talk logic. Meanwhile, our bartender has the thickest accent of all — Irish, straight from Ireland — and half the things he says send us into hysterics. That was Sunday on Mother’s Day, before the room started spinning. But I was safe at Whiskey River, and forgetting everything — including how I got home — was perfectly acceptable. Thank goodness I live around the corner, not even a block away. As |
AuthorCHARLES PEARSON 
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