Hotspot on Dog + Collar Around Neck = Spiteful resting of collar on Owner's face.

Clam Cup: Found on the Subway, Sunday, 11:00am

Prospect Park, October

My Dog's Hammer

Bird of Fuckin' Prey, my flat white ass.

This was the hawk I had all hope on picking off Maryanne's pigeons.
One week later, the fucking hawk was gone and there was a new mound of pigeon shit under my air conditioner.

My Building

Just a sampling of the 100 pigeons who live in the courtyard of my building.
Maryanne, the crazy pigeon lady who "got the eye cancer" when a pigeon pecked at her face, is responsible for these pigeons, many of whom she's nursed to health in giant cages in her kitchen. When she's not caring for pigeons, she's taking care of the squirrels she also keeps in her apartment; feeding stray cats down by the train station; or smoking copious amounts of weed. The cats meow backwards.

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In a TV Control Room circa 2002...

This is a pic compilation Chris Stanton made of me and my co-workers. He'll never admit his straight guy crush on me, but this video speaks volumes.

Rikers Memories

"Excuse me? Is you a docta?"

Shit. She's talking to me.

"Excuse me..."

We're having a show down at the OK Corral. I hear the vultures. Sun beats down on the two of us. A tumble weed tumbles. I've got my clipboard, she a flattering brown jumper and a hidden shank. It's me and her in a freshly painted Pepto-pink hallway. Pink, the color for girls. This makes me laugh considering the location. I wonder if the men get blue. We're on an eternal wait to be acknowledged by a corrections officer who seems engrossed in everything but us. We rate low on the recognition scale, me, a civilian, her, an inmate. I'm holding my clipboard close because 1) it makes me look official and 2) it's a shield. Can a shank whittled from a table leg puncture a clipboard?

In jail, you think these things. I'm a rube. My first semester in social work school and I'm on Rikers Island. People's eyes widen at this. My gay friends with their OZ fetish's imagine Chris Meloni beating and sodomizing me. They are profoundly disappointed when I tell them The Rose M. Singer Center is the women's jail. Others stay wide-eyed. They only imagine what I've gotten myself into. I'm quite not sure. I took the internship because it paid, it was close to where I was moving with my boyfriend and because I thought it would be a way to dive right in. I'm not a diver. I can't even dive into a pool with out thinking i'm going to flatten my face and permanently paralyze myself. I usually tip-toe in. Not now.

I'm alternately overjoyed and wetting myself. Okay, I'm wetting myself more. It's everything and and nothing I'd imagined and it's only the first week. I stay shocked most of that the time. My exposure to social work jobs prior to school was as a volunteer at a safe sex hot line, where half the calls are lonely guys masturbating to your voice and the game is to see how fast you can realize this before they come. I became expert at vocal cadence and recognizing the causes for shortness of breath. "Sir you are being inappropriate!" Click.

She's still talking to me. I have contempt for her. She won't stop trying to get my attention. What the fuck do you want? Stop looking at me. Oh god I have to write these feelings down so my supervisor and I can analyze my paranoia. I pull it together. I'm not going to wite about this.

"IS. YOU . A. DOCTA?"

The clipboard is working.

"No I'm a social work...(What is she doing?)...intern...in the...(is she touching?).... "

"Cuz if you wuz, I'd find something wrong wiff me," she gyrates this and arrows her hands to her crotch.

Now I'm uncomfortable, I can't hang up, I can't get self righteous. No click. This is a client. The whole jail is a client. Client. Idiotic word. She's an inmate. A client to me, indicates something voluntary. We both enter into an agreement to do something together. What she wants to do together has little to do with social work. Well, maybe I'm wrong. It is social, work. Just not the kind I was anticipating.

Year of the Groin

I drew this illustration when I first came out and was excited to have sex with another person. I hooked up with three men that year and I thought I was a whore.

Not soon after I drew this, my Dad came over and saw it hanging on my bedroom wall. Below is the look I received: One word: Proud.

Samson Ann Lorio: My Pooch, frightened by a cardboard cat.

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Why Yonkers? Stories from Home.

Yonkers, NY is the fourth largest city in New York State and the 14th most depressed city in the country according to a recent men's magazine poll. This is based on anti-depressant sales and suicide rates. I'd base it on the fact that the city boasts The Son of Sam, child murderer Joel Steinburgh, Steven Tyler of Aerosmith and Linda Lovelace, star of Deep Throat, as claims to fame. Four names that don't exactly make the Who's Who in America.

Yonkers is a big city with a small town mentality. There's always a cousin or a sister whose geographic tunnel vision refuses them thoughts of ever leaving and as a result, you never really leave either. To them, "Yonkas is fuckin' great. It just fuckin' is." How can you argue with that? Cue eternal guilt. It's hard to argue with the greatness of the smoke screen. Yonkers' value, like most places we grow up, is best understood through the lens of nostalgia and dashed hopes than of realistic greatness.

"Do we have to go to that place where nothing happens and everything is sad? It reminds me of MA*S**H*." That's my boyfriend. Anything that was drab or contained the monocromism of army fatigues reminded him of M*A*S*H. He's speaking of my mom's house, more than Yonkers. There's lot's of muted greens and browns and there are causualties. But it's a fitting metaphor for the entire city. Yonkers is M*A*S*H sans the laugh track.

Here's a brief Yonkers history lesson -- Yonkers was a Dutch settlement called Johnkeer, before other immigrants bastardized the pronunciation to Yonkers. Blame the Italians. Or at least the one's from my family who, because none of them ever completed the 7th grade, bastardized everything - mostly children. Had their mother not died from a cantaloupe sized tumor in her stomach after mistaking it for her 13th pregnancy, those kids might have fared better. Instead, I give you YONKERS instead of Johnkeer and lots of grease under the fingernails, mortar, concrete and dropped "R's".

Ella Fitzgerald is also from Yonkers and there's a statue of her singing by the Metro North Train station. When I worked at the local TV station, a cameraman I knew videotaped the two of us fondling Ella's breasts one slow news night in 1999. Another point of interest in Yonkers is the Polish Community Center, where I once made out with the prettiest girl in the 9th grade. When the football team found out that I'd made out with her I received high fives in the auto shop breezeway. This was a coup of sorts. I was not cool and obviously gay, to those who paid enough attention to my hair and comportment -- I always walked a little more upright than the other boys, as if I was on alert, because I was. When I touched Claudia boobies, I was given a pass to momentary straightdom that I clung to until I graduated.

In addition to the Polish Community Center, Yonkers also boasts The Yonkers Raceway, where scores of family members gambled away social security earnings and pension checks; Central Avenue, a strip mall cemetery of forgotten department stores and Untermyer Park, the most frightening park in Yonkers as it is said to have been the place where burgeoning serial killer David Berkowitz (aka: The Son of Sam) and his minion of crazies would practice their Satanic worship. This was a popular spot for local Yonkers teens to drink, smoke pot and have sex. And for me to fantasize.
con't...

The Things I Left Behind..

I didn't think it would be this way. Me at 30, alone. Surrounded by tag sale items in a falling down Usher house with my mother who's so depressed she can't even kill her self correctly. Last week she filled her bathrobe pockets with stones, got in the tub and sat there waiting. She just shrugged when I asked her what she was doing. Lazy. Her depression doctors called it a gesture - suicidal ideation - but I think she just watched The Hours and was fucking with me. Bitch.

Everything used to be okay. Before 9/11. I love saying that. Everything was okay before 9/11. Fuck 9/11. Things have been falling apart for years. Everything was okay before I can't even remember when. Before 2000. I have my own cultural reference point that has nothing to do with shared tragedy. We've got our own little Apocalypse. Poor us. Waa.

Families divorce. Big fucking deal. We weren't even kids. I was 23. My brother was 27. Grown ass people. But when your father starts an Internet affair with a women who'll eventually become his wife and you watch it happen every night for months as he taps away one handed at the computer, you tend to wish for the naivete of youth. When shit unfolds and you've got your adult brain working overtime, you practically wish for a lobotomy and plan on performing one with a dental pick if you can get your hands on one. When it gets worse; the blowjob emails, the adopted kid that he insists she return to sender; when the makeup artists at your brothers job, who incidentally wants to fuck both your closeted brother and your retired firefighter father, tells everybody true gossip "She said she didn't love him anymore and that's why he left." Well that' when it became just a little too much.

This was our little Apocalypse. Each day I've been falling apart. Eight years later. But no one knows this. I get up, I go to work. I'm a good daughter. I visit my grandparents. I'm the strong one. I remember when I was eight and a neighbor called my brother a faggot and how I grabbed him by the lapels and told him to fuck off. Eight. My brother couldn't fight for himself. I fight. Everyday.

The Things in February

February 2000. I remember this month, this year. My first boyfriend calling me. I always call him my "first" boyfriend. I haven't had a second. "I'm coming up, tonight." He sounded concerned. He put our other friend on the phone. He was coming, too. And a third friend, his roommate, Lisa, our den-mother/lover of the gays. I said to my roommate, "Something's up." She said, "It's just silly boys having fun." I wanted to believe her. She was a resident, doing a rotation at St. Vincent's in the HIV/AIDS wing. My next door neighbor was a doctor too, she worked at an AIDS service organization in San Francisco. Me, I'm gay, and have been petrified of HIV since I was 12 years old.

I went back to work -- the late shift at the TV Station, creating graphics for a shitty local newscast - we routinely misreported deaths and boasted a news team of several of the ugliest people assembled in the history of television production. Our weatherman was often mistaken for a dwarf -- something about the distance between his eyes (too wide) and his arms (too short)that fooled people. He could get a finger up to the knuckle into his nose. He never knew I was looking.

All shift I wondered who was right, me or my roommate. The week prior, my boyfriend had won a magazine cover model contest at The Web, a gay bar/dance club that caters to Asian gay boys and the men who appreciate them. The magazine shoot was in a week. Exciting and silly. On the phone that same week he said, "Everything is so perfect right now. There's you, and I got a full-time job and I won the contest..but I don't know." I heard regret. "It sounds like you're expecting the bottom to drop out." I remember saying that. And it did. I've never thought it was just coincidence that he knew the bottom was crumbling. Sometimes I think it's why I was there -- to slap cement between the cracks that threatened to destroy any semblance of the "okay" he'd worked so hard to achieve.

My shift ended and I met my friends and boyfriend at the Metro North, a stones throw from my apartment in Hastings-on-Hudson. It's snowing. I make tea. My boyfriend asks to see me alone and we step into my bedroom. I painted it a luscious periwinkle. Even the ceiling. It's gorgeous. Everybody says so. It's like we're under water, always. Swimming, floating. Losing ourselves beneath the surface, trapped in beauty.

"I had a test."
He had a test. A test. The test.
"And the results were not good. "

It was his second test that week. The first was inconclusive. When you test positive they do another test to make sure it wasn't a false positive. That sometimes happens. He found out it was a positive positive earlier that night. He screamed at the woman who gave him the news.

We sat for a while. Silent. Motionless. What do you say? Sorry never works. We stood up. We played Fiona Apple, "...hunger hurts, and I want him so bad, oh it kills
Cuz I know Im a mess he don't wanna clean up, I got to fold cuz these hands are too shaky to hold, hunger hurts, but starving works, when it costs too much to love.."
And we swayed in each other's arms, cried. He thought it was a parting dance. It wasn't.

Silence.
Bu-bump.
Silence.
Bu-bump.
Hearts beating.
Me: "What are you going to do?"
Him: "I can jump off a bridge. Or I can fight."
I think about the HIV test I'll set up first thing in the morning. I'm fucking scared. He's looking out the window. I lived along the Hudson River at the midpoint between The George Washington Bridge and The Tappan Zee. The midpoint between oblivion and hope. Always, then. For him, always now.

We start to drown in the blue of the room. Blue. Real blue. Deep. It's snowing. Blue room. White snow. I drive them home to 15th Street. White blankets under smoldering metal. Tires crunching down leaving covered tracks as we fade into an oblivion. We'll fade in and out for some time. For some years. I hoped I'd find my way back.

February 2008. This month, 8 years later, stepping off the 7 train, I cried again, harder than the first night. I step into an alley. I'm close to home but I can't imagine trying to walk triumphantly into my building with tears staining my face. My stride might say, "I wasn't crying," but every thing else about me would belie that, make me a liar. I imagine the entire building staring at me until I scream, "It's about my ex-boyfriend, I don't want him to get AIDS. Fuck you. Do you even get wishing for that to never happen? Do you even know what he's been through?" Of course, there's nobody to say this to, but the imaginary peanut gallery in my head. I think about him and about what he has survived. What we survived when we made a go at it. There's bravery and hope in all of this. There was then, there is now. And even though I didn't know it then, in those early weeks of our relationship, there was love. Ugly, brutal. Unresolved. And it was love.

A Meditation on Love and Poo

I recently had a birthday and for the first time in a long time, I felt the age I turned. For a very long time I've felt like a kid masquerading in an adults body -- I could fake my grown up status but emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, and cosmically (don't groan) I wasn't there yet. Age gives perspective on the life patterns we develop and often need to desperately change so we're not mired in our own self perpetuating bullshit. This past year I got sick enough of my shit to try to change what I thought needed fixing -- shutting down when the emotional stuff gets tough, refraining from saying what I'm feeling when I'm feeling it and then building huge resentments later, and my favorite, having sex with people who only like me, rather than people I like and could ultimately love.

Love is becoming defined as the time I can spend with a person in total silence. I ask the question, how do I want someone in my space? When all the talk, sex, neurosis and anxiety about whether you'll love me tomorrow and planning a life together dies down, what's left? Can I imagine the person I might love taking a shit and not throwing up a little? Yes, it boils down to poo. I used poo as a criteria for getting a dog -- if the animal's poo was bigger than mine, I wasn't getting it. Thankfully, I mostly deal with tootsie rolls from my little guy --unless he's had a big Italian meal the night before. With men, it's not about the size of their poo, but If I can even imagine them taking one. Actually, it should be called giving a poo, since one deposits it. I really wouldn't want to take one.

I've had two men in my life with whom I did not care if they pooed in my toilet. One was my ex, the other was a man I dated in 2006 and 2007. My ex and I were so comfortable in our bathroom habits that we could poop while the other was in the shower. Then we'd rate it and say things like, "Well that was marinating just a little too long." The man I dated this summer and the summe before took a poo in my apartment on our very first date. He pooed for what seemed like an eternity. He's a singer by trade and he made work out of his bathroom time. He managed to sing, hum, whistle, make origami swans and a small foot rest when he was occupying my bathroom. I sat in the living room/bedroom/foyer of my new studio apartment and listened and laughed as he went through his canon of songs. Later, after he left, I noticed he was kind enough to open the window and air the place out. This is a thoughtful man. Our relationship has evolved into a "good old friends" status, despite only knowing each other a couple of years. I'm convinced we've been able to maintain a friendship despite ending our romance because of my early comfort with his bathroom habits. I was comfortable with the idea he could poo and could see myself loving him for it.

This is how I define love -- if I can imagine you pooping, we might be cooking with fire. Other times, I've imagined devil spawn coming out the asses of men I was dating. This is usually not a good sign. Of course, it's not my only definition of love, but it's the best one I'm working with currently.

When I was a teenager I had a friend named Sandra. I loved Sandra. We had many moments of hysterical laughter at our best-friend Joy's house. I also loved Joy. Sandra's moments of laughter often stemmed from three things; 1) Her complete and utter obsession with her boyfriend Andy, whom she accused of "ralavantering" instead of "galavanting" around town; 2) The fact that her Italian immigrant father shot the telephone with a handgun because he couldn't figure out how to use the answering machine and 3) that Sandra was capable of pooing lariat lenght poops that required Guinness book type documentation. Long poops from a small pretty girl always made us crack up. I loved every minute of the insanity and hillarity.

Poop is pretty creative when you think of it -- it's the one thing that as toddlers we become aware we can make ourselves. It's one of our first creative endeavours. For anyone who's ever taken a ceramics class or rolled play-dough in your hands or known the joy of playing in mud, you get it. When I was two I spread my poo on the wall of my bedroom. My parents took pictures of the wall and then me in the bath tub getting cleaned up. For years I was the family joke. And I resented it. I'm almost middle aged and I haven't lived it down. Although, I've always loved that, despite being the family joke, my parents had to not only clean me, but an entire wall of baby food poo. Early rebellion.

Lately, I've seen the photos as an act of love. My mother labeled it "Tommy's first artwork," foreshadowing a life-long love of drawing and painting. For all the scat pervs out there ( I say it with love) you might also understand your poo loving freaky-deek acts and longings differently, maybe you've got a photo like mine in a baby album, too. For me, I'm going to listen to the explicit and implicit in this message. Sure it's about poo. But its much more. It about loving a person even when they're sitting on an ass cauldron in my bathroom. I do know that the next guy I'm looking for is going to have to measure up to this poo ideal. I won't settle for less. I may hold our first date in my bathroom, just in case.