To learn about the first you have to read my book, but the second most has to be pinching Caroline Pinto's ass on the last day of ninth grade.

I had been going to Hopkins, a private high school in New Haven since the seventh grade and had not come even close to kissing a girl. I was one of the few black kids in school, nerdy and shapeless. My parents and I had decided that I should transfer to Andover in the tenth grade. I saw it as the perfect opportunity to re-invent my self as a adolescent cocoa-colored James Bond. My friend Ben and I were both transferring to Andover, his brother had done the same a few years before. We were both happy to be rid of Hopkins (though we both had a lot of friends there). Still, the very last day of school we bummed about seven dollars in ones and change from all the people in school that had pissed us off, promising to repay them next year even though we knew that we were leaving for good.

But Caroline Pinto's ass pinching came earlier that last day. I was fifteen and had been staring at it in her tight jeans for what seemed like a lifetime. Her hips would sway like a bell and take my heart with them. She always sat right behind me at morning assembly and I just ached knowing that someone so gorgeous and so lovely and kind and so sexy never would be my girl.

I don't know when the scheme bloomed in my head but I do remember that when it came I cackled out loud and the other kids stared at me. I was leaving. If I were very very Bond I could pinch her ass and escape detection. And even if I were detected and publicly humiliated I was leaving that school forever a few hours later.

So for a week before I practiced exactly where to sit (a row ahead of her and off to the left) so that the natural current of exiting teens would drift me right behind her. I imagined the sweep of the hand, then the brush past her shoulders.

The day of the final assembly I was a sweaty, heart-attack-ready wreck. I was convinced that she wouldn't even show. But she did and I positioned myself perfectly, merged with the stream of exiting kids and fell in behind her tight, swaying bell bottoms. I stepped up behind her and grabbed her ass, electrifying my sweaty palm. Then I hurried past her in the same stride, off her left while she whipped around to the right to see who the perv was.

The next bit was pure improvisation. I marched straight downstairs to the drama department bathroom, threw myself in to a stall and breathlessly scratched in ballpoint on the metal divider, "I PINCHED CAROLYN PINTO'S ASS!!!"

The next year at Andover I started lifting weights, lost the nerd rolls, and even got a kiss at the end of next school year. Her name was Joy Anderson. But that's another story.

Posted by Trey Ellis at 10:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I understand Alec Baldwin's outburst, sometimes. Alice Miller in the Drama of the Gifted Child spells it out clearly, how your kids bring out the kid in you, for better and often for worse. Today I finally dragged myself to yoga and then wrestled on the phone with ordering racing stripes for my 1973 Mustang Mach I. I always thought they were a bit too Neanderthal, a bit too Dukes of Hazard for my taste but the guy helping me sell the car convinced me that I need them.

Then I raced to pick the kids up at school. Ava was so delighted to see me and to learn that Valeria was coming for a picnic with us. At school her name is pronounced Val-eria because her teacher mispronounced it and it stuck. Valeria is from Peru. And Ava was so happy when I took us to Chirping Chicken to get more roasted potatoes. She is potato addicted but I'm trying to ween her off of fries. Then near home I wanted to surprise them with Italian ices from those street vendors, the kind where you push and crumple the paper cup to push the ice into your mouth. The guy wasn't there today so I told them we were taking a little walk.

You would have thought that I had suggested that she shave her head.

"Daddy, nooooooooooooo! I want to go hooooooooome." she planted her feet on the corner and pretzled her arms. I kept walking but found myself having to holler back at her to trot to catch up. I hate yelling on the street but wouldn't go back for her. The mornings, sometimes, are just as loud. Everyone always tells me what a great job I'm doing with the kids, how they are perfect angels. My kids just have the good sense to rarely show their asses, literally and figuratively, to strangers. In the mornings, at least a few times a week, we three end up yelling at each other like a family in a Scorsese film.

O.K., that's overstating it. We don't dig into each other like Jake and Vicki LaMotta but we're yelling across the apartment and then one of them is crying about not wanting to take a shower first or getting a supposedly measurably smaller piece of sandwich. It really doesn't matter what it's about my kids can find a way to make it life or death.

So when I dragged Ava to the new gelato/crepe store I thought she would immediately smile. Instead she dug in her heels and refused to order ice cream while Chet and I dug into our own. Later I broke down and ordered her a crepe and she was happy and now Chet was pissed and I was drained and depressed. When we got home I retreated to my office. Chet was in the shower, Ava ran into my room naked singing "Seasons of Love" from Rent over and over.

Each chorus was driving me further to insanity. I just needed quiet and wanted to will them to bed without dinner, without even drying off, if it meant that I would get to be alone and at peace.

But something in her smile stopped me from snapping at her, stopped me from yucking her yum. She was so happy again and that's all I ever want for her. So I clicked on to Rhapsody, a music service I subscribe to and played the song loud,

"five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes five hundred twenty five thousand moments so dear five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes how do you measure? measure a year"

I don't always take the high road. I've often yucked her yum. Just not tonight.

Posted by Trey Ellis at 07:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The three of us had an amazing Sunday. We met Ava's school friend at Riverside Park and I immediately noticed the kayers out in the Hudson and my heart lept. As a teenager who gazed out from in front of the 78th Street Boat Basin for years, pondering the mysteries of my miserable adolescence, I never once actually got out on the water. Ava and her friend Valeria were begging me to take them out. The only requirement for kids is that they can swim and Chet can't. He was learning well in California but for the last few weeks here at the Columbia pool he has shrieked uncontrollably. He even made himself sick enough to puke at school on the day of a lesson. He loves the water and is terrified of it. "I don't want to drown, daddy," he says. At least three times in his five years he's fallen into water deeper than him and freaked. Once in the Pacific at a birthday party. Phaedre nor the nanny was looking and he, at three, ran right in and gulped water. Another time at his godparents' covered pool he followed an old tennis ball that he thrown on the tarp covering the pool and slipped right in. I fished him out just as his head went underwater. At that same house he was in the hot tub (he loves water that he can stand in) and if he sat around the edge of the hot tub he was half out of the water. Well he jumped into the middle and I saw him completely underwater and yanked him out.

His sister is never more at home than when she's in the water. She's not the most athletic girl on land but in the water she's a mermaid. When she was two and change in St. Tropez she wandered off toward the rocks by the edge of the sea. I hung back enough to let her feel a bit independent, stepping behind her quietly. She toddled up on a rock and slipped in and I caught her hand before she even got her hair wet.

My dream is to for the three of us to surf Hawaii or Mexico together. I think of happiness I would die.

But today in the Hudson I took Ava's friend and then Ava out on the river, just for a quick spin but I was tempted to keep paddling to New Jersey. What a lovely adventure that would be.

Then at home I was shooting for their 8 o'clock bedtime but baths, dinner and Ava's hair kept us up almost till nine. Chet said, apropos of noting, "You know what my big wish is, daddy?"

"No, what?"

"That you and mommy would get un-divorced."

I asked him if even remembers us ever married. He was 8 months old when she left. He says he remembers the big orange house we lived in but I'm not sure if believe him. Earlier in the day he had said, "Raise your hand if you are differently divorced," and he raised my hand. I think Phaedre has told him that our divorce is different in that we're still friendly.

He's the most incredible and most handsome and charming five-year-old on the planet.

Posted by Trey Ellis at 11:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I loved washing out Chet's underpants today. I did. We'd just come from seeing Meet the Robinsons in 3D with two hot moms and three kids. At first the film was putting me to sleep, reminding me, unfavorably, of how many times I’ve been tortured to sit through crap like that remake of Flicka and Aquamarine. By the end of this new film, however, I was swallowing hard not to cry on myself while Ava snuggled into my bicep. When the lights came up Chet rushed over, his eyes huge, fighting not to cry himself.

"I wet myself."

"That's o.k." I said, and I felt his pants but they weren't wet in the front.

"I wet myself a lot. Poop."

Now Chet is five and three quarters and potty trained himself when he was just two, a full two years earlier than his big sister. This wasn't like him at all. I could smell him and instantly realized that my plan with the moms to go out for ice cream after the film was just horribly kaboshed. Waiting for the cab I asked him, gently, how this could have happened.

"I was just trying to fart. A really big humongous one and..."

"EEEEW!"

"Now Ava,” I told her. “It's no big deal.” Chet and I then reminded her of the time not so long ago that she didn't make it to the bathroom back in our apartment. As I fumbled with the key she peed on herself in the hallway howling and wailiung like blood-soaked Sissy Spacek in Carrie. Once inside I rinsed her off and calmed her down. This time at home I did the same with Chet, rinsing out his Superman underwear in the toilet and hosing him off in the shower. It wasn't all that messy and he didn't even cry.

I loved the moment not for itself but for what it reminded me of. The first thing I think of when I think of my own mother is not how she died young but the image of her hunched over a medieval stone public washroom, rinsing out my underwear in Florence, Italy, on one of the first days of our grand European vacation. I was maybe eight and had eaten something that had run right through me. Somehow I had gotten my pants off in public while she washed out my underwear in the ancient trough flanked by a half-dozen round Italian widows. She had studied Latin for years and as she and they washed she had tried, largely unsuccessfully, to communicate with them.

This Mother's Day the kids' mother is a thousand miles away, living with her own mother but promising to come up to New York soon. I'm forty-four and a half. This is my fifth Mother's Day without their mother, my thirty-sixth without my own. Every year since I've been single and with them it's been embarrassing for me. On Mother’s Day we eat out at any restaurant where we can find an open table and the other families look at the three of us like they want to write us a check instead of saving Sally Struthers’ children in Africa . I want to scream at them, "We're fine, damnit. Just finish your cheesecake and leave us alone."

To quote Rumsfeld, “You go out to dinner on Mother’s Day with the family you have…”

Posted by Trey Ellis at 12:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

I hadn't checked my blood pressure in weeks although I am supposed to often and have a battery-powered home machine just like an old man. I had assumed that my dizziness, not dizziness, actually but dimness, was due to the anemia that I've been wrestling. Lately I've been feeling as if the blood was only arriving 3/4 up my brain and that was leaving me foggy and unfocused. When i checked the blood pressure cuff (here at my computer, I pull a lever and my Aeron chair descends with a whoosh and I prop my arm on my desk so it will be on the same level as my heart). The machine said 80/50. Normal is 120/80. The good news was that my fragile kidneys love low blood pressure (that's why I gobble three different blood-pressure lowering medicines a day). The better news was that I could have something salty for once. it's been eight years since I've been on a salt-restricted diet. At brunch I was hoping for a salty chicken soup or chicken pot pie, two of my favorites, but they weren't on the menu. Then Nora, my lovely former nanny, who was in town with Sean, the love of her life, ordered a bloody Mary. That's it! Tomato juice is laden with salt. I ordered one myself and felt as wicked as a heroin addict. I hadn't tasted one in about a decade.

Later that night I checked my blood pressure again. 140/70. Terribly, dangerously high. I'd taken all the bp meds I as allowed for the day. I went to sleep vowing to meditate again. I consider myself a Zen Buddhist but since the kids have been born my meditation has been spotty at best. This morning I checked it again: 138/74. Awful. That meant that all night long my poor kidneys were being firehosed from within. But a new day means more meds and an hour later I was down to 112/71.

Tomorrow I get an EKG and a stress test. My last hurdle before qualifying for the transplant list.

Posted by Trey Ellis at 12:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)