Joel Hunter Borrelli

Essayist. Humorist. Storyteller.

I’m a writer of abstract snippets, short stories, poems, lyrics and other works of word engineering as well as a raconteur of my Forrest Gump-like life. I’m also a voice actor who has participated in hundreds of cold script reads for films and episodic series working with a roster of talented and gifted actors, writers, directors, producers, filmmakers and storytellers. - JHB

The Stones

Not far into his journey, as he tried to navigate the bumpy, muddy path, getting scratched by thorns and thistles, he was given a stone to carry. 

There were times he climbed inclines and thought he caught glimpses of a smoother road ahead. 

While he was yet far from where he started but with far left to go he was given another stone to carry on top of the one he already held. 

Soon he began to feel the weight of both stones but he was spirited enough to see it  as exercise. Carrying both stones would result in strength built by carrying them until he met the road. 

It wasn’t long however before another stone was added to his load. 

With this next stone he began to strain. He began to feel the burden of carrying stones. 

He put one foot in front of the other no longer able to even see if there was an end to the path as his view was blocked by rocks. 

He hoped he might find some relief by placing his stones upon a pile where others may have left theirs that would mark the entrance to the smoother road. 

When he thought he couldn’t bear the burden of the stones anymore he felt the added heft of one more. 

Then he felt the ground begin a steep decline and not knowing if this was the final descent he knew he had to continue carrying the stones because if he didn’t, if his knees buckled, he’d be crushed beneath their weight. 

A Joel Hunter Borrelli Snippet  01.28.23

The Strangers

I know the strangers. 

I’ve met them all before. Versions of each and everyone anyway. 

I know them by the way they carry themselves. By the manner of their speech. Their vocabulary. The cadence of their delivery. 

I know them by the way they cast their eyes upon you, above you, or down and away from you. 

Experience has given me the ability to see them in the way they see themselves.

I’ve met them all at some point. Those that were performative and those that were inhibited. 

I’ve known those with pronounced affectations, those who were good at imitation and those whom I’ve admired for their ability to be unassuming and natural. 

I’ve known those whose entire self worth revolved around how others saw them and I’ve known those who were perfectly indifferent to the impression they made on others. 

From the moguls, mobsters, movie stars, murderers and con men I’ve come across to the altruistic, the stoic and the pure, the underprivileged, and the ones that chance, luck and opportunity evaded as well as the ones who’ve known nothing but luck and good fortune, I’ve known them all.

I’ve known those that made their own wealth and those that inherited it. I’ve known those that have known poverty and those that have inherited it. I’ve known those who knew nothing but middle class living who didn’t know it was disappearing. 

I’ve known those who have sought fame, others who have sought infamy, those that wanted to leave a legacy and those who have sought simplicity and solitary. I’ve know them all you see. 

I’ve known those who thought they’d live forever with no sense of their mortality. I’ve known those that didn’t think about it and others whose obsession with it was their reality. They thought of little else at the expense of really living. 

I know the strangers. 

I’ve met them all at some point. Versions of each and everyone anyway. 

The Strangers

A Joel Hunter Borrelli Snippet 

02.28.23

When We Were Birds

I loved being a bird with you.

I loved it when we flew

I loved how you took to the sky with grace

I loved how you danced a ballet in space

I loved the songs we’d sing in spring

I loved the home we built at a mountains peak

I loved fishing with you in the creek

I loved when we drifted on the wind

Over the Hudson River doing spins

I loved the days early out of the nest

Making the most of light hours, stopping only for minutes to rest

I loved the care free days soaring off the Kaaterskill Cliffs

Our younger days wanting for nothing to miss

I loved racing to the city as if we were jets

Chirping with other birds we had not met

I loved perching on the ledges of all the landmarks

Sitting on branches overlooking Central Park

Everything in life from a birds eye view

I loved being a bird with you.

Joel Hunter Borrelli

09.15.20

A Ranch Hand

I’ve been thinking about hiring myself out as a ranch hand.
Maybe working some big spread. Living in rough quarters in the back off the barn by the horses.
Where the roof leaks when it rains.
Drinking whiskey and beer around bonfires.
And when the mood hits, or the weather changes or I get “the calling” again, I’ll saddle up Rosinante and hit the trail ...again, searching for adventure.
I’ll ride through nights when the moon is full and sets a glow upon the darkness.
I’ll ride in morning mist as fog like smoke drifts towards the sky leaving the tall grass wet with dew.
Someday when I’m out for a ride maybe I’ll go listless upon her and she’ll know to drop me in a meadow.
And I’ll become the earth and the stars again.

A Joel Hunter Borrelli Snippet 08-13-20

Hello Old Friend

A Joel Hunter Borrelli Snippet 8.17.23

I’m sorry it’s been such a long time. I’ve just been wrapped up in this self centered world of mine. It’s not that I don’t give thought to you, I often do. And every time it brings a smile to my face and a remembrance, and I think it’s been way too long since we laughed ourselves to tears, it’s been what, how many years?

Yet every memory that comes to mind seems like it happened yesterday. And I want to reach out to you because I have so much to say, and so much I want to hear about how you are and reminisce about everything and all we shared.

Then I remind myself I’m no longer who you remember me to be. You won’t know this version of me. And the moment we’d see other you’d see, life didn’t turn out the way it was supposed to be.

You knew the younger me. I no longer know who he was, and maybe what I need more than anything else is for somebody like you, who knew me then, to reintroduce me to myself. Oh Old Friend it would be great to talk with you again.

A Joel Hunter Borrelli Snippet 8.17.23

Middle-Aged Men and Muses

She was dressed fashionably like most wealthy woman in the West Village were. It was the first thing I noticed about her when I walked into The Black Derby, a small restaurant I’d been introduced to on West 4th near Bank St.

One long leg was tucked under the other. She was wearing jeans, high heeled brown boots and a cream colored turtleneck sweater. A loose tan belt with an oversized bronze buckle ornamentally wrapped her at the waist.

I think I looked at her from the boots up first. I was a fan of the outfit. It was a combination I’d have appreciated no matter who was wearing it.

The New York Times was spread out in front of her along with some binded document she was flipping through and marking up. She sat at the first table to the left as you moved into the dining room from the bar.

Her hair was blond, long enough that it fell about six inches past her shoulders and natural enough that you could see the few grays, one of the only hints at her age. 

She had high cheekbones. Her eyes were almost turquoise. The small lines around them were the only other sign of maturity. The sunglasses she had with her were on the newspaper and I couldn’t help but think what a sin it was when she used them.

Several tables were open still. It was off hours on a Monday afternoon. I don’t know what gave me the impetus to be brave and bold enough to be so obvious taking the table beside her, but I did.

It was probably a subconscious effort to dilute Catarina from my life. The problem with middle-aged men is we fall in love with our muses. Nonetheless I had been looking for a replacement.

As soon as I’d slid into my seat, she looked up and gave me a smile that immediately made me want to tell 17 year old Joel miracles do happen. I’d been making up a list of encouragements for the younger me.

I ordered a Fortaleza with one ice cube. I noticed she smiled at me again. She smelled so goddamn good I was almost delirious. It wasn’t even like perfume. It was cleaner. Like she took a bath in a tropical rain forest.

When she had her head down crossing out something, I stole another glance. It was an expression that I caught, It caused an ignition to cognition.

Two things happened almost at once. I realized who she was and that the document in front of her was a script. 

Wasn’t this what I was trying to get away from?

She looked up before I could look away. Now I smiled at her. She smiled back and our eyes locked. She must have sensed that I recognized her.

The waitress walked back in with my drink and turned towards her. Then I heard the familiar voice I’d only heard on film. “I’ll have what he had” is what she said.

“And I’ll buy it” was out of my mouth before my brain thought it. She smiled again. “I accept”.

Whoever I was at that moment was not the guy who walked in a few minutes ago. “Is it good?” I asked. She arched an eyebrow. “The script, it’s a script you’re marking up, right?” I continued.

“I think it’s good. I wrote it. I’m making revisions” she didn’t say it defensively, not in any other way than pragmatically. That didn’t take away from my feeling I’d blown it. It dissipated when she went on, “I think, today, if a woman my age wants a role that resonates, she’s got to write it”

Before I could respond she asked the question I’d come to dread most. “What do you do?” Men are defined by what they do as much as women have been defined by the way they look. Ask Chris Rock, he’s made it part of his act.

“I’m a pitchman” I answered. She smiled again. “I’ve never heard that before”. “Yea it’s not a common job title on LinkedIn.” I replied. “What do you pitch? She asked “Lately just a lot of myself” I answered quickly. This time she not only smiled again but she laughed. “You’re funny”.

Sometimes you’ve got to dive into the deep end. “I’m trying to write more myself actually”. I didn’t have time to regret it. “What do you write?” She asked.
“A lot of what I call Snippets, like shorts, musings, ramblings, lyrics and I’m sure a lot of misfirings. That may be my best genre ...misfirings” She laughed again. “And the pitchman part?”

“I made the mistake of tying my fortunes to life” was my stock answer to myself so I offered it to her. One more time she laughed. My confidence was building.

“Read me something” she gently demanded. So I recited my piece Entering the Ether. As I read it she leaned in towards me. It was almost an effort towards intimacy.

“Are you Buddhist?” She asked.
“That’s funny my friend Anka said it was sprinkled with Buddhist dust after reading it.” I answered. “It is. It is.” She replied.

I’m not sure how it happened. We’d both had another drink or two. I asked her if she smoked. She looked at me in a disappointed way. “No, no not cigarettes” I said “Pot. Pot. Good pot.” She looked relieved. “Yes”. “I’d love too” she said.

We smoked outside. We were in a cab or an Uber. We had dinner in a dimly lit place. We sat in a booth. She sat right beside me. She kept placing her hand on my leg when she laughed. 

It was when we were in her loft on Laight Street in TriBeCa, on this colorful, close to the floor, Jean Paul Gaultier coach that I’d only seen in showrooms, I began to remember who she was married to.

That was the last thought I had before her lips were on mine. It was primal. I liked control. I wanted to taste her. I always received pleasure providing it to my partner. She seemed to feel the same way. 

She was in my arms and her head was on my chest as she slept. 

I remembered telling a movie producer friend of mine recently how a woman had emotionally cut me so deep it exposed bone. He grabbed me by the shoulders, hugged me and asked “Do you know why we don’t date actresses Joel?” I was so hurt I’d only shook my head, no. “Because they’re actresses” he said. 

Albert Einstein said the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result.

I was insane.

A Joel Hunter Borrelli Snippet 10/30/18

The Enemy In My Mind

Joel Hunter Borrelli 9.4.23

There’s an enemy in my mind. It takes possession of me at times. It takes my will away. When I beg my will to stay, the enemy tempts me, leading me to stray.

When the enemy takes over, the whole world for me gets colder. I fall under his influence even when I’m damn cold sober.

The enemy takes away my fight, he flips the switch in me that’s light. He leaves me in a darkness whether it be day or night, when the enemy takes over.

The Enemy has an incredible, insatiable appetite. He devours all the peace and chews on all the hope in sight

The enemy wants to kill me, I know and so does he. If I could, I’d kill him first, but the enemy is me.

The Enemy In My Mind

A Joel Hunter Borrelli Snippet 9.4.23

Consider this a prologue. A chronicle of how it all began.

The Hunter Borrelli’s 

A Joel Hunter Borrelli Chronicle 

Drafted 9.4.22

Becky was heated. She and Bob had been fighting. She decided she’d show him. She borrowed her younger brother Dickie’s new 1964 Cadillac Coupe DeVille. With all three of her children in the car, Bobby, Rebecca and Roger, Becky decided she’d head to the country to see the house her friend, Vivian,  from ceramics class in Harrison, had been inviting her to.

It was a boat of a car and she had a lead foot. I’m sure it didn’t take her long to travel the distance of the thruway before taking the exit.

Soon after, as she began the ascent up the mountain road, Becky became more cautious. The road was narrow, twisted, and only had a wooden guard rail in spots with the ravine getting deeper as she climbed. 

She was taken with the beauty but she couldn’t really appreciate it. What had she gotten into? Not realizing she had almost hit the crest of the mountain, she caught sight of the houses seemingly built dangling over the side of a cliff on the other side of the ravine. Becky chose to turn the car around and head back towards the highway.   

Somehow, she ended up in a motel in Springfield, MA. I’ve seen the pictures of all of them swimming in the pool. 

Becky returned home. She and Bob made up, as they commonly did, repeating this cycle often in their marriage. 

Shortly thereafter Bob took her and the kids for a ride to her friends house in the mountains of the Catskills. 

Vivian & Ezra’s

The driveway was long and narrow. It didn’t have enough gravel to cover the dirt. There was a strip of grass in the middle between the tire tracks. 

My mother and Vivian always drove fast and there’d be a cloud of dust behind the big cars they drove as they barreled back and forth, If you came across another car coming the other way, if you didn’t crash, one of you had to back up.

When the house finally came into view you had choices. You could park in front of the stone walls that wrapped the house, along with the inner grounds, the stoned pathways and the multi level terraces. The terraces were graded to match the graduating platforms of the main room that converted the house to a natural concert hall — the purpose for which it was originally built. 

If you took the hard right you’d come around a circle with a garage merging again with the driveway as it carried along the right side of the house, allowing access through the side door into the study and the stairs to “the addition”

If you entered through the gated stone wall in front, there was a reflecting pool and fountain on the right. I spent a lot of time listening to and spotting the frogs there as a kid. There were rose bushes and blackberry bushes, plantings that looked so perfectly thought out but also perfectly natural and wild in the landscape. 

The shingled house was built in the Arts and Crafts style with exposed beams and posts. Stone steps and stone terraces graced the immediate exterior walls of the house.

A stone terrace with an overhang roof greeted you before you entered the house.

As you stepped into the rectangular entrance space there was a piano on the right. On the left was a fireplace. I still can remember the fireplace tool set and playing with the bellows. Walking behind the fireplace led you to a secret bar and doors that opened to the outside. The other side of the room led you through doors outside as well. The entrance hall was made to be the recital spot for a concert pianist. 

There were paned glass doors that opened to the multi-level great room. The room was also rectangular but on an axis to the entrance room, much longer but not as wide. There were 4,5 or 6 stairs between levels. Each level had large window seats built in. Big enough to use as beds, which my siblings did.

At the top level of the great room was another fireplace that dominated the space. If I remember correctly, from the front door of the house to the fireplace was 90ft. 

On either side of the fireplace there was a room. To the right a dining room leading to the study, and on the left was Ricky and Rodney’s, “the boys”, bedroom with doors that also opened outside. 

At the head of the house, accessed through a hallway above the dining room, climbing a few steps, was the main bedroom with an en suite bathroom, not that we called it that then. If it wasn’t for the small kitchen to the left and west of the bedroom, and before the addition,  the house would have almost appeared to be a cross placed on a rectangle base. 

When my mother brought my grandmother, my fathers mother, to see the house, my grandmother said in Italian “Mi sembra una chiesa”  It seems like a church to me.

The house retained the smokey scent of many well enjoyed fires in its multiple chimneys over the years. 

I loved the scent.

This house, and Vivian and her husband Ezra’s hospitality, led to Bob and Becky Borrelli buying themselves a “weekend house”, the former Harty Farm, that needed “some” work in Hunter.

Asphalt and Dynamite

The smell of asphalt and the explosion of dynamite spark my earliest memories.

I grew up across from a young and expanding ski resort in the Northern Catskill Mountains of New York State. They were paving the local roads and carving new trails in the mountain all the time. That's how I remember it.

It was a magical time.

I was born after my family relocated full time to the weekend place they had purchased several years before.

I’m the only one in my family who could call himself a “local”. My brothers, Bobby and Roger,  and Rebecca, my sister, my parents, Becky and Bob  all had moved from Southern Westchester.  Bobby had moved for his senior year in high school. 

My mother and father came from two large italian-american families families who lived within blocks of each other in adjoining towns. My fathers from Harrison and my mothers from Mamaroneck. They created the family outpost in The Catskills. 

Cousins on both sides would follow. Some full time, the Reale’s of course, and the Federico’s, others; the Tomassetti’s, and the Chutes, purchased weekend homes. When everybody was up and more relatives and friends  came to stay, it felt like half of Harrison and Mamaroneck were “up the country ” 

It was great. 

The environments were totally different. Harrison and Mamaroneck are affluent towns, then referred to as the “bedroom” suburban communities for Manhattan. 

Hunter Mountain was being developed by two brothers with vision and a savvy for the public relations of the time. They quickly turned it into one of the most popular ski resorts in the Northeast which benefited tremendously from its close proximity to New York City and the metropolitan area. 

Shortly after my family moved “up the country” Hunter became a little boom town, a party town, in a rural, economically depressed region.

I’d spend 50 years straddling both areas.

Harrison and Mamaroneck have continued to stay affluent, becoming more diversified with the proximity to the city and the Long Island Sound. 

For many, the thought of Hunter brings back mentions of memorable nights and nights people can't remember. It might have had the highest concentration of cocaine dealers, liquor licenses and bar stools per capita of any place I’ve ever experienced. A lot of money was spent there. Little of it has stuck. 

My mother was a perpetual student, a writer, an artist and a freethinker. Her workplace was at the head of the kitchen table. When you came through the door, you would see her reflection in the mirror of the buffet behind her as she wrote, read, or sketched.

I don’t know what age I was, maybe 10 or 11, aware of the age difference between  my siblings and myself, it was clear to me I was unexpected and I expressed that while she had her head in a book. 

“Ma, I know I was a mistake”...without missing a beat, or refocusing her attention on me, with her head still tilted towards the book, she reached out with her left hand placed it on top of mine and said “We love you anyway”. My mother was very smart and very funny. It is one of my most cherished memories. In retrospect I didn’t know her for that many years after and now it’s forty years since.  

Joel Hunter Borrelli 

3.4.23

My Mistress Manhattan 

My mistress, Manhattan, is the longest relationship I’ve ever had. We’ve been seeing each other since I was in my teens. I’ve put many miles on my feet courting her.

I admire that her curves are in all the right places. I enjoy her many moods. I appreciate her quiet hidden streets and alleys as well as her outspoken broad boulevards. 

She is as comfortable dressed to the nines on the Upper East Side as she is dressed down in the Bowery.

I like that no matter what hour it is, if I want to go out, she’s  ready and always has something new to show me. 

She seduces me with her feminine fragility. She’s won my trust with her displays of maternal strength. 

I’m drawn to the contrast of her maturity and the youthfulness she demonstrates constantly reinventing herself. Always evolving and growing while remaining true to her respected role. 

Her bridges and tunnels are like fingers open on a hand, welcoming her relatives, neighbors and transient travelers. 

She’s a democrat and at times a socialist. She’s blind to bias and bigotry. She accepts everybody. It’s her contagious warmth that welcomes those from around the world. Her reputation reverberates around the globe. 

People have risked their lives to meet her. 

I take pride in the intimacy of our special bond. She allows me to be a voyeur and an eavesdropper as I play audience to her street theatre. After all these years she’s finally instilled in me enough confidence to be an exhibitionist.  

It is  to this courage that I know I’ll owe her most.

Joel Hunter Borrelli

A Joel Hunter Borrelli Snippet 

11.23.19

The Escort

(Part 1)

A Joel Hunter Borrelli Snippet 

02.07.23

A friend of mine is an escort. She exchanges intimacy and sex for money. She’s now in her late twenties and has been doing it most of her young adult life. The fact is, she does it because, in her words, “I like what I do”. 

I’m not a consumer of her services. I have no reference to gauge her enjoyment other than what she tells me.

The night we met I had just finished a late showing of Uncut Gems on 19th Street in the Flatiron District.

It was maybe 1 AM when it finished. I was too riled up from the film to go home. Too energized. So I did what I love to do. I began to walk the city. 

I didn’t know where I was headed. I did know where I’d end up. 

The bar at The Ear Inn is open until 4 AM. The kitchen too. 

I always enjoy my time there. It’s a dive bar in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the country. You’re guaranteed to meet interesting people. 

I wouldn’t go back if it didn’t happen time and time again. 

When I walked in there was one empty stool and I couldn’t help but notice the young woman on the right. 

She was in her twenties and she was wearing cateye glasses. They might have been new but the style was pure 1960’s. Kinda turned up at the ends with baguettes. 

It was hard to reconcile the classic frames with her youth. Little did I know that would be the least issue in reconciling who she was juxtaposed against how she appeared.

So I might loosen up, you know to overcome my shyness, I  started to sample the tequilas ..again.

Before long I asked her if she’d seen Adam Sandler reinvent himself in Uncut Gems. She had.

I ask a lot of questions. I’m always drawing characters. I never know for what, but I’m preprogrammed to do it. 

In this instance it was like being in a casino, playing the one armed bandit and having all the cherries align. 

When I found out she moved to New York from Tulsa, Oklahoma at 18, the onion began to peel. 

She was refreshingly candid. She didn’t pause, she didn’t hesitate

I’m a middle-aged man. I’ve had enough life experience, met many people. made enough mistakes, drawn enough wrong conclusions, that I know enough to explore.

She was worth the effort and more. 

New York is an expensive city to settle in. If she arrived at eighteen on a Greyhound with $500 and she was now 26, I wanted to know how she conquered the challenges.

I asked her. How? 

“I’m an escort” she told me as easily as if she were telling me she was a barista. 

She asked me what I do. I haven’t known how to answer that question for years, I gave her my card though and told her that I like to write.

Then she asked “Will you write about me?”

I assured her I would. 

Months later, in the late spring, I received a text …”Are you ready to write about me?”

The Escort

Part 1

Joel Hunter Borrelli

A Hail Mary Pass

A Joel Hunter Borrelli Snippet 8.13.23

“I have been to the funeral of all my dreams and buried them one by one” - Author Not Known

A Hail Mary Pass, based on the Catholic prayer, is a sports metaphor. It is often used referring to a last ditch effort to win the game or put up points with little chance of success.

I’ve entered the Hail Mary Pass stage of my life. I’ve been in my native mountains for a few months and have had a reckoning with myself.

I didn’t arrive at this piece of path by conscious choice, more than anything it’s been by combined unforeseen circumstances unfolding over time.

I’ve spent more than a few years boxing with the world and wrestling with the reality of not being able to change the past. The losses and challenges I’ve had to face have been body blows. Yet I’ve remained upright against the ropes. I could have easily tapped out. Everyday I’m surprised I didn’t.

Life is so much different than it was.

When I was a younger man I had the ability to wish things into my life. What I wanted I wished for and it came to me. What I focused energy on came to be. Whatever needed to be done I would do so that what I dreamt could come true.

Now the clock is ticking and I’m running out of time. With gale force winds in my face it seems it’s all an uphill climb.

Among the lessons I’ve had to learn is, when I’m out of breath, when it seems like I’m running out of oxygen and energy, when my will wains, I’m solely responsible for resuscitating myself. There is no one else.

So, I’ve been reaching deep inside my reservoir of remembrances to chronicle stories to inspire myself based on what I’ve done that may have mattered.

Tomorrow I’ll take the weight of my failures and shift them to one side of the fulcrum of life to lift myself from the other.

I’ll wake with gratitude. I’ll put myself in position and search for the opening to make a Hail Mary Pass and perhaps, just perhaps, it’ll go through the goal posts at last.

A Joel Hunter Borrelli Snippet 8.13.23

Cody

Cody was tough as nails and as fragile as glass.

He had hair the color of wheat worn to the shoulder and cobalt blue eyes. He was lean. His tan skin wrapping only muscle and tendon around bone. Part genetic, part athletic, and in part because there wasn’t a lot of currency for excess in his diet.

He was as much a force of nature as the mountains and the streams.

He was heroic, generous, loyal and sometimes potentially lethal.

He was among the kindest and gentlest souls that walked upon the common soil of my youth.

He was also among the most unrelenting savages I’ve ever known when he was triggered.

It wasn’t rocket science why. He had hundreds of hell raising tales about being raised in hell.

He kept so much pressure bottled up inside that when it was ignited he combusted.

If Cody had a fault it was that he didn’t seem to recognize danger and, if he did, he didn’t care.

Once, as dawn broke, and we were sitting on the edge of a cliff over a swimming hole in the Kaaterskill Clove, drinking beer for breakfast, trying to come down from getting high, and he looked like a broken doll from a fight the night before, he must have caught the way I looked at him. A mixture maybe of sadness, and love and fear for him.

“Don’t you understand?” Cody asked, with the trace of tears falling down his cheeks, “I need to fight. I need somebody to hit me hard. I need to physically feel my emotional wounds. I need to see the blood. I need to bleed the pain out through the cuts. I want to see the black and blue, the purple and the yellow bruises of my hurt.

When I’m forced to focus on feeling the pain on the outside I don’t have to focus on the pain I’m feeling on the inside for awhile.”

It was heartbreakingly, tragically, understandable.

A Joel Hunter Borrelli Snippet 04.08.22

Parting With The Perch

12.31.21

I’ve been blessed to have had such a vantage point of the city I love for the past 8 1/2 years, using The Perch as my base in Manhattan. The views. The sunrises. The sunsets. The moon. The Empire State Building with its light shows every night. The Macy’s 4th of July Fireworks. The ability to deliver traffic reports to friends whether it be traffic in the air, on the Avenues, or the East River.

The Perch and I came together by coincidence. It was fortuitous. It was serendipitous.

Positioned between the United Nations and NYU Hospital, the building was full of Doctors, Diplomats and me.

They were so out of place.

For all her amenities, she also had the most utilitarian location for my business and, as a brittle type 1 diabetic, the business of my Dr’s.

This part of Murray Hill has so many medical offices and hospitals it’s called “Bed Pan Alley”.

I’ve been hospitalized more than a dozen times while I’ve been here. 10 in ICU.

While here, as a phone was placed to my sister Rebecca’s ear in an emergency room elsewhere, I said the last words of goodbye on this earth to her before she transitioned. Weeks later, here, I received the call that my brother Rogers mortal life had ceased. I’m an outspoken agnostic but I must tell you, each time, white birds flew by my window. A pair the 2nd time.

I’ve mourned while here. I’ve rejoiced while here. I’ve celebrated successes and licked my wounds here.

I’ve walked thousands of miles through Manhattan during the years, observing, experiencing, indulging at times and coming back here to reflect, to write, to rest and, on Saturdays, recover.

Out of all those who worked at the buildings reception concierge, the ones who saw the lighter side of me, were those who were there between 2AM and 5AM. If they ever spoke with the guys on the other shifts about me, they wouldn’t think the others were speaking about the same person.

I locked down here for the first months of Covid. Venturing out into the dystopian landscape to capture images of the emptiness .

I’ve had wild and raucous times here too. Many I’m not yet willing to document lest anyone think any less of me then they already may.

As a country boy, I never intended to own her. From the beginning for the price to own her 532sq feet, I could have bought an estate elsewhere. As it is for the amount she cost to lease over the years I could have purchased a small village in Sicily.

Now a new owner will soon take over. She’ll get the makeover she’s wanted to have for so long. I’m sure she wishes I would have been a cook, perhaps, if I had lobbied for it, she could have had a new kitchen sooner. Rather than one designed and built during the Reagan Administration. Maybe even an open kitchen like many of the others have, you know, like the ones the Doctors and Diplomats have.

I’ve been taught the lesson of impermanence, time and time again. Impermanence of material things is of no concern to me. I’m accustomed to it. I accept it. It allows for rebirth and new experiences. Impermanence is the catalyst that allows us to live different lives within this one.

I begin 2022 now looking for that perfect place in the West Village. Perhaps above a coffee shop where I can gather with my friends.

Joel Hunter Borrelli 12.31.21

Chronicling Caterina

It may not be easy writing someone out of your life, but I was determined to literally give it a try...I needed a salve for my sadness.

“What makes a man want what he cannot have, crave what only hurts him?”

It seemed like Catarina ended up everyplace I was. The places I went to where she wasn’t, I’d been to with her before. It was my own fault, the result of my giving her the Joel tour. Memories now that cut to the core.

When she moved to the city I walked her through different neighborhoods on different days and especially during the nights. We’d walk and talk, window shop and wander. We’d take pictures and film bits.

We’d find places to sit and smoke pot. She always liked to roll. We’d sit by the water, on the steps of Brownstones in the West Village and on the shipping platforms of warehouses that’d been converted to lofts in TriBeCa. She’d tell me about her past life and loves. I listened to what she volunteered. I rarely asked questions.

It’s funny how one can defy their own philosophy. A Joelism I often repeated was - I must have missed the class that teaches people how to breathe while their head is buried in the sand-. But when it came to Catarina, I was conscious of what I didn’t want to know. Practically making a choice to be blind.

She’d entered my life in a storm, in a fit, in a collision. She left the same way.

For the 4th time.

But the last late time it was me that felt like he crashed.

It turned on a dime.

Maybe it was because it had been so good it turned so bad.

I’d have to admit I took a deep breath when she said she was joining me to get out of the city.

There had been no warm in the temperature of our relationship it ran either hot or cold. When it was hot it would melt your heart and when it was cold it would freeze it.

It was this range in our dynamic I was worried about. As it turns out not without good cause.

Anytime we were together I was never sure if we’d see each other again. It had been that way since the first honeymoon phase of our relationship halted.

I’d fallen in love with so much about her. Her accent. Her speech patterns. She delivered her sometimes disassociated train of thoughts in rapid fire fashion. One time in the beginning I turned to her and said “You never ask me much about myself.” She replied “Well, you don’t say much so I keep talking”. She smiled. I was smitten

I loved the fact that after delivering a monologue on a myriad of things in a one sided conversation, she’d turn to me and go “What else?” As if I’d been the one talking. Or after making a statement or assessment or just upon completing her thought she’d say “it is what it is”

It wasn’t until version 3.0 of our relationship that I heard her use my name for the first time. She asked me to join her as she filmed a commercial. Somehow I became part of the crew. Maybe because it was in the presence of others I heard her say “Joel” asking me to help with something. I didn’t realize up until that point she’d never called me anything but “Darling”

The last night we spent time together, she was at the stove cooking a piece of steak with a sliced onion, and I turned to her and asked “Say my name, call me by name” “Joel” she said the way no one else could.

I’d come to love her comfort level with coming over. She’d text me “w r u? What r u doing” if I replied I was home she’d say “Maybe I could come to you”.
She’d text me at all hours. We were both insomniacs. If I replied, which I almost always did, then acknowledging I was awake, it was likely followed by the phone ringing. She’d want to talk no matter the time.

There were 8.5 million other people in this city and it was all hollow if I wasn’t sharing it with her and I didn’t want her to share it with anyone else

She was everything I wanted minus everything I needed. For me the equation still had a value even if logic said it shouldn’t.

When I wasn’t with her I found myself alone even in the company of friends, lovers and strangers.

In version 3.0 of our relationship she came to my apartment and she fell into telling me about someone she dated.

I told her I wasn’t capable of the relationship she wanted. Again, she looked at me hurt and wounded. She was quiet.

As we went downstairs in the elevator together she laced her fingers in mine, pulled in close on my arm and whispered in my ear, “I’m not going to lose you.”

She didn’t understand I had to let her go.

Versions of this same exchange would repeat on and off.

Catarina knew I cared for her. She didn’t like I didn’t chase her and told me so. I wasn’t like the others she danced with toyed with teased and tempted.

I knew Catarina needed to be chased. I was sure it was because she felt a void. An emptiness. A feeling from her youth that there was a lack of love and security. She’d been responsible for herself for years now.

She was proof that life was full of irony.

What she wanted most was to be loved, to be someone’s world, but she couldn’t trust the love of just one person to sustain her. She needed options. To be adored. To be wanted, to escape the loneliness. She was trying to protect herself from abandonment. The fact that she was beautiful practically made her more insecure never sure of others intentions yet also what she leveraged to attract them.

On the other hand I couldn’t chase anyone. Maturity had brought me the wisdom of the wounded.

Version 4.0 of our relationship was instigated by an invitation I received one Saturday to join her at an actors expo.

Later that night, after dinner, we parted in the rain. She kissed my cheek and crossed the street still saying goodbye. It was a busy corner of Madison Avenue in midtown on a Saturday night. I yelled over the noise of people and traffic, “You heard me right? Even when I don’t like you, I love you!” She smiled back and gave me the thumbs up.

Catarina was calculating. It was that which caused the problem this last time.

We went from ecstasy to anger quickly. When she told me about plans she’d made, her story started to unravel. She cut me so deep emotionally she’d exposed bone. I wasn’t capable of shifting mental gears so quickly.

She was a beautiful brilliant talented opportunist and I attacked her with prosecutorial statements.

We were in her car. She was driving. She kept clamping her right hand over my mouth to mute my hurtful words from scarring her. I couldn’t stop. She tried with such vigor to stop me, her fingernails cut into my cheek enough to draw blood as she tried to cover my mouth. She was using such effort to stifle the destruction. I couldn’t stop the verbal damage.

Then our argument became a knife fight to see who could cut the other deeper. Even if I won I’d lost. I’d made the deep cut a gaping wound.

Now weeks later I still couldn’t stitch it back together in order to heal without her.

I tried to dilute her from my life by dating like it was a competitive sport. The day I returned to the city I double booked myself for brunch in two different neighborhoods a few hours apart. I dived into dating. I had my share of admirers but they didn’t have a hold on my heart.

I couldn’t stomach hurting her even though I knew she’d intentionally hurt me too. Others in her social circle might have been exposed to her emotional highs but I’d been exposed to her emotional lows. I’d been cursed by an empathetic and protective trait I couldn’t shake.

She was a survivor. She was independent. She was fragile, vulnerable and scared.

I knew I wasn’t the only one she called Darling. I knew that I’d lived in a fantasy of what could be that didn’t correspond to reality. I knew I wasn’t the only one she sought for support but I needed her to know -
I texted her:
“You're always welcome in my world even when I don't want you there. Even when I don't like you, I love you. I offer you refuge in my arms even when my heart breaks to hold you”
Her reply was a quote from The Crucible that crushed me:
“I may think of you softly from time to time but I’ll cut off my hand before I ever reach for you again.”

I wept.

A Joel Hunter Borrelli Snippet
11/4/18

Postures of Prayer

A Joel Hunter Borrelli Musing 7/27/19

He threw his hands up in the air, fingers stretched out in a posture of prayer.

His arms arched cradling the sun. He began to dance and chant, and laugh and hum.

His arms open in faith that there must be more, fingers trying to touch those he loved who’d passed before.

He’d danced and prayed in the fields, he’d danced and prayed in the woods, he’d danced and prayed on the Kaaterskill escarpment every time he could.

He was a bizarre vision to come across,

this madman in nature, speaking to those he’d lost.

Against the river valley as a backdrop, standing at the peaks of the mountaintops, from his mind he’d let life’s reel of scenes unwind, his whole journey screened flowing from his memory and patched with his dreams.

He’d dance and pray and sing knowing he could not change one damn thing.

He’d laugh, he’d pray and dance, he’d holler and cheer because he had breath and death was knocking, it was always near.

A Joel Hunter Borrelli Musing.

7/27/19

Broken Like Me

Prologue:

Another night passed, again with no rest. He could feel himself getting lighter. Less mass. Less of him.

He said:

“Hold me. Hold me tightly. Very tightly. Wrap your arms around me and tell me you love me. I need to hear you say it. I need to feel it in the depths of me. I need to be tethered by some sense of need and want. Hold me tightly. Very tightly. Don’t let me drift off on the cold current of the wind.”

She said:

“I’m going to wrap myself around you. I’m not going to let you go. I’m going to hold you tight. I love you. I’m going to hold your feet to the ground. I’m going to be your anchor. I won’t let you drift off on the cold current of the wind.”

Broken Like Me.

She was broken like me. That might have been the initial attraction. The wounded are often drawn to each other.

Sometimes I’ve found the only way I could begin to heal my own wounds was to inject myself with other peoples pain. In this case we’d come to a mutual understanding that we’d serve as bandages for the others emotional bleeding.

Neither one of us could feel the sunshine without the other. Alone we were in the darkness, when we were together we saw glimmers of light.

A Joel Hunter Borrelli Snippet 6.5.22

A Beekman Memory

We were sitting at a table in The Beekman Hotel. We both had finished our second Casamigos. It was just enough liquor to loosen the lips.

We began to share the intimacies of who we are, as people do when they’re getting to know each other. At some point I told her that I’ve never been that great at picking up on signals from women when they were interested in me, and sometimes I only got the hint when they kissed me.

She was wearing black Prada framed glasses and wore what appeared to be a white mens tailor fitted shirt. As we were baring our souls, she reached for my hand and held it in hers against the tightest, softest, black pants I’ve ever touched.

After awhile, she went to excuse herself for a minute. Before she stood up, she leaned over, kissed me softly, and let her lips linger on mine. Then she smiled, almost shyly.

She let me know later she didn’t want me to have a doubt in my mind.

A Joel Hunter Borrelli Snippet

07.02.21

My First Kiss

Her name was Corrine. She was fast for her age which was a few years older than me. The kiss, the first real kiss that I can remember, occurred outside the Villagio Italia, a resort in Haines Falls, NY, after a swim night in their indoor pool. I was maybe 13 years old. 

The memory of it popped into my head this afternoon while I was on the subway. Though I hadn’t thought about it in years, there’s so much about it I still remember. Where we were standing. How we were standing. The way we were holding hands. How her lips felt on mine. I can remember that as if it just happened. I can remember how happy I was.

An older woman.

A Space Selfie

Joel Hunter Borrelli 2.5.22

I was piloting a rocketship into outer space. I had the window open and the galactic breeze blowing through the cabin lifted my York Peppermint Patty wrapper and swept it out into the abyss.

With my right hand I pulled my phone out of the satchel I kept on the passenger seat.

I took a selfie of my reflection in the side view mirror wearing my vintage leather flyers cap with the ear flaps and my blue tinted aviator goggles. There was a big, fat, lit joint dangling between my lips and the blue marble of earth was getting smaller in the background.

The picture was bad ass.

I immediately posted it to my Interstellar account as I blasted off towards the Milky Way.

Joel Hunter Borrelli

2.5.22

#imagery

A Clandestine Trip

A Joel Hunter Borrelli Snippet 07.12.21

It was one of those nights where I was just sitting in The Perch listening intently to the silence of the city when I decided to grab a flight to LA.

I arrived the next evening. I rented a car and immediately headed for the curves of Mulholland Drive.

It was the way I first liked to experience LA, whenever I came into town. I liked to be up in the Hollywood Hills catching the lights of the city below. I didn’t tell anyone in New York I had left and I didn’t tell anyone in LA I was there.

I rented a convertible so I could take in the air. It felt so different than New York and smelled better too. It always gave me a high.

I could see why people lived here. I wouldn’t, but I could see why others would. I’m used to a city where I can walk from one corner to the other. Los Angeles is the polar opposite of that.

Still, I liked the vegetation, the palm trees, the warmth, the ocean and the mountains all so close to one another. I liked to drop down Laurel Canyon to Sunset and then take a spin through Beverly Hills.

No matter how tired I was when I arrived I couldn’t sleep once I got there. This time was the same.

It seemed like everyone was already in bed as I was giving myself the now familiar tour and it seemed as if everyone was still sleeping as I headed to the Santa Monica Pier.

I’m reckless. I had taken a 1/4 ounce of mushrooms with me when I left and stuffed them in a pair of socks in my carry-on.

I ate about an 1/8 after I parked the car and washed the taste away with a Diet Mountain Dew I purchased at the airport when I landed.

I didn’t always enjoy the company I was with when I was by myself but I made my best attempt to be comfortable with me.

I walked out onto the beach and proceeded into the water still in my jeans. I wanted to feel the fact I was on the West Coast.

I’m probably lucky I didn’t drown as I baptized myself in the Pacific.

When I returned to the beach I laid down on the sand, plugged in my headphones and listened to Dawes and Beth Hart as I watched the sand breathe and the waves crash.

Several hours later I woke up sweating so much my clothes stuck to me. It took me awhile to shake the cobwebs from my mind and remember where I was even if I didn’t yet remember really why.

I think I subconsciously was making a choice of whether I wanted to live or I wanted to die.

I had lost who I was and I was tired of redefining myself. I guess I was scared I had exhausted all of the options and that I was no one else...

A Joel Hunter Borrelli Snippet

07.12.21

A Casualty of Dreams

I had become an assemblance of bruises, nicks, cuts, and gashes; the wounds and damage that come while trying to lasso stars from the earth. 

Dragged along the ground when the rope of ambition and the energy of inspiration catch the corner of a constellation and the world is spinning too fast. 

Joel Hunter Borrelli

2/7/18

The Mustache Massacre

People who truly know me know I’m a flawed fuck. I give into temptation way too easy. I don’t learn my lessons well. I repeat my mistakes.

Recently, I started cheating in a relationship I’ve had for more than 10 years. At first I thought it was going to be a one time thing only. Like a lot of people when what we’ve become accustomed to isn’t available we start to wander.

The first time it was almost out of necessity. My regular wasn’t there and when I found someone else, the experience was great, I received more attention than I had been. The experience was longer than normal and I left feeling great.

Then my regular was back. But week after week I snuck around. The new one was only up a block.

I felt so fucking guilty I confessed my situation to different friends. Nobody stopped me. Everybody thought the new situation fit me well. They saw how happy I was.

Like a lot of relationships everything is perfect in the honeymoon phase. She listened to everything I had to say. It seemed like she really heard me. But just last week things began to fall apart. She stopped listening. She took advantage of me at my most relaxed.

I’d come to feel I didn’t need to give her direction when we started. I felt she knew exactly what I liked, what I wanted.

Every week I had complimented her telling her what a great job she’d done and how great I felt afterwards.

I actually didn’t even realize at first. I had my head back and my eyes closed while she did her thing. I felt her being more attentive in areas than she had been but I dismissed it. By this time I began to trust her.

Karma finally came to visit me.

When I woke up the next morning and looked in the mirror my mustache had been trimmed. My beard was left long and my mustache was trimmed.

If she’d done anymore I’d look somewhere between a member of Hamas and an Amish farmer.

I don’t know why she chose to do her own thing. My instructions in the weeks prior were always that I’m growing out my facial hair and not to touch the length but make it look clean.

I feel like Samson after the philistine cut his hair. I feel like I’ve lost my strength.

Honestly, friends were surprised when I started to let a woman cut my hair.

I’m going back to Eddie my barber. I know he’s going to know I’ve seen somebody else.

I’m just going to have to confess it and ask for forgiveness.

I’ve learned my lesson this time and paid the price.

Joel Hunter Borrelli
5.7.21

We Were...

It was a drug-based, sex-based codependent relationship.

It was great.

Some people never get the chance to truly meet their match in life but I met mine.

From the first night we met, we drank too much, partied too much and had sex like we were in trials for the Olympics.

We flirted with death and death flirted back. Our haze was our reality. We both lived in the same foggy dream.

Getting by didn’t seem so bad and ambition appeared to be a sickness shared by some poor souls who lacked direction and lived without a philosophy.

That’s the way we saw it anyway.

We ate enough to absorb alcohol but not enough to temper its effects.

It was all about balance.

We knew what to do with what and what never to mix together.

We were scientists.

We always enjoyed the way the sun came up in the morning signaling we should get some sleep.

When we were on our game we woke up on time for happy hour. We knew who offered what specials on what different nights.

We were researchers.

Most of our friends all manufactured or procured something for sale which we resold.

We were merchants.

In order to cover ourselves we had to calculate how much we needed to make to pay for our rent, our drinks, drugs, and incidentals like rolling papers and deodorant.

We were planners.

We shared a skill set.

We were survivors while we were killing ourselves.

A Joel Hunter Borrelli Snippet
06.17.21

The Celestial Horse

A Joel Hunter Borrelli Snippet. 10.28.21

I woke up inside a dream.

I was caught in the ruts of the road, the wheels were coming off the carriage, the wagon was heading off the cliff. 

It’s with abandon I was laughing, I was roaring at my fate, that it would end like this. 

That I’d be headed off the mountain, dropping into the abyss.

Pay no attention to known measurements of time, because in those few seconds, I saw every memory of mine.

I felt the air expand in my lungs as I took that gasp of autumns breath. 

The last injection of oxygen before turning to the dust of death. 

We should all leave our bones as I dreamt that I’d leave mine. To approach the end, and speed ahead, and leave it all behind. 

Without the chance to brake, or slow, as you approach the inevitable cross, to only cheer for the ride you’ll have when you wake again upon the celestial horse. 

A Joel Hunter Borrelli Snippet 10.28.21

On The Lam (1)

A Joel Hunter Borrelli Snippet 05.06.21

She wouldn’t recognize me. No one would. I barely recognized myself these days. I knew what would give me away was my voice. We hadn’t seen each other in years. We were kids in our twenties when we were last together. Now we were in our fifties.

When I saw her walk out of her house I took a deep breath. It was a physical reaction to an emotional trigger. She hadn’t changed at all. In effect, she was more attractive now. She wore maturity well. She always carried herself with great grace and her laughter was infectious. Her voice was as distinctive as mine. I couldn’t wait to hear it again.

She wasn’t expecting me would be a gross understatement. I didn’t know I was coming until necessity put me in her neighborhood. And what I mean by necessity was I needed a place to hide out, to go on the lam for awhile.

I couldn’t be seen. I couldn’t be found. I had to clear a few matters up. God knows no one would consider l’d be reaching out to her to provide me sanctuary. I didn’t think so anyway. I hoped not. I didn’t want to complicate things for myself and certainly not for her.

As I often say, sometimes you’ve got to just dive into the deep end. I crossed the street as she was putting things in the back of her car. “Sarah” I called out as I approached her. I startled her a little.

When she turned towards me there was a quizzical look on her face. She knew something was familiar but at first I don’t think she could pin what it was. “Sarah, it’s me Joel”. I don’t think she believed it looking at me. Not with the beard. Not with the longer hair. Not with the few extra pounds I’d put on. I certainly wasn’t the skinny young guy she once knew. Many told me I looked better now than then. I hoped she’d think so too.

She stood absolutely still at first. So did I. “Sarah it’s me. I’m sorry to surprise you”. I went one step further. “Sarah you look better than the night I took you to dinner at Crispo’s. Better than the time we were dancing at Neptune in the Hamptons”

She fell into my arms. She started to kiss my face. She began to cry. So did I. She buried her head in my neck and kept kissing me. No two people have ever held each other tighter than we did then.

She kept pulling back and cupping my face in her hands and looking in my eyes. Those she recognized. We’d spent a lot of time looking in each other’s eyes. Tears kept streaming down her face. And mine.

She still had not uttered a word. Not one.

All of a sudden it happened. She began to laugh. It was like an eruption. Just like I remembered. Her laugh felt like home.

Finally words. “I thought you were dead” she said. “So did I” I replied. “But I may never have felt as alive as I do right now”

She put her arms around my neck. She pulled back as if to take me in again.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

I tried to answer. She saw me hesitate. The Joel I’m sure she remembered was rarely at a loss for words. I didn’t want to change this moment. I just wanted to pause the world for a few minutes.

I wanted to savor the safety of being in her arms. Sometimes even outlaws need to feel secure.

“What is it?” She asked with her head pressed against my chest. I cupped the back of her head with my right hand while my left arm wrapped her at the waist. I didn’t want her to move.

“Sarah, honey, I need you to listen. I need your help.” I said it as softly as I could. Almost whispering it in her ear. She just nodded her head gently and tried to pull back to look me in the eye. I held her more firmly.

What I was doing was so selfish. So wrong. To get her involved in the chaos of my life after all these years. I had to remind myself I had no choice.

“I know what I’m going to ask is selfish and unfair to you. I wouldn’t ask if there was anything else I could do”

She didn’t respond. Funny enough she didn’t even seem surprised. She didn’t move from my arms. Not one inch.

“What can I do?”

“I need a place to stay for a little while. Where no one can find me. It’s complicated”

I felt Sarah chuckle against my chest. She knew an understatement when she heard it.

“Somehow honey, the bad guys are looking for me and what you’d call the good guys are too”

She pulled back, pushing against me a little to look at me. She just shook her head gently. She might have even smirked a little while she did it. As if she’d almost expect that after all these years I’d show up on her doorstep unexpectedly, neck deep in a predicament.

She smiled up at me, took me by the hand to lead me and said “Let’s go inside to catch up”

As we walked up the stone path to her house she put her left arm around my waist, pulled herself tight against me and placed her head against my shoulder.

“I’ve missed you”

“I’ve missed you too”

She pulled herself even tighter towards me.

“I feel like I’m dreaming” she said.

“I hope I don’t turn it into a nightmare” was all I could think to say.

Then we walked inside to catch up.

A Joel Hunter Borrelli Snippet 05.06.21

*Lilith “Lily” Corbett

A Joel Hunter Borrelli Snippet

5.16.22

Lilith “Lily” Corbett became a singer in a punk band in the late 80’s. She had a reputation for having a reputation as one of the wild women of the time. An extremist. A risk taker. An exhibitionist. A provocateur. A great vocalist. She wanted to push the limits on everything. And she did.

I can’t even tell you how I met her. I circulated a lot in those days. Meaning, I got high with a lot of people. What I remember is we became fast friends. Her and I, and an assortment of characters, that either had too much money or not enough, I, of course, was among the latter, who bonded quickly and created our own little commune on Lily’s new compound in the Hudson Valley. It lasted a few months many years ago.

It was a party, a bender and a rave. It was temporary. It was beautiful. It was a moment in time.

Lily was the classic story of good girl gone bad. If you were looking at her at age 22, tattooed, when it wasn’t as popular to be, in tattered clothes baring almost everything with sometimes only duct tape covering her nipples and genitalia, you wouldn’t automatically guess she was a blue blood raised in the “back country” of Greenwich, CT., not far from the Polo Club.

Her grandfather invented some widget that other widgets are based on. I don’t know, the point is they had beaucoup bucks.

Her parents seemed more focused on spending money than adding to the family fortune. They were founding members of the entitlement contingent.

Lily’s parents had their strong points. They knew what grapes grew where. The best time to be in St. Barts and what were the hotter weeks to avoid in Madrid. They could have written their own column on what hearty, sturdy, ridiculously high-end luggage to buy. Luggage and what to pack for where they were going next involved a disproportionate amount of conversation while Lily was growing up. Parenting wasn’t among their strengths.

They sent her to The Hotchkiss School, a boarding school, in Litchfield County that was over a hundred years old then.

It wasn’t that she didn’t like Hotchkiss, she liked it more than Greenwich, and it’s the main reason she bought the house she did. It was close to the fields and countryside she’d grown to like during her time at the school and far enough from her family without being too far.

She left before completing her senior year, to sing in her boyfriend Paul’s punk band. She developed a certain look by then. Ridiculously high platform black leather boots that reached well up her thighs, and the darkest shades of black makeup mixed with the brightest shades of red. It was one others went on to mimic through the East Village where her and Paul found a building to squat in. It was an act of defiance to their privileged upbringing or some shit.

On a rainy, fog filled night, a few months ago, I was headed to the tristate corner when I came across a diner in the mist. The neon of the diner’s sign against the fog, with the few cars and trucks in the parking lot, made a great picture and I regretted I had to focus on driving and couldn’t stop to take the shot. But it triggered a memory from long ago.

I recently went back the same way in the daylight. I came across the diner and the white church built into the hill following it on the right, and the cemetery for the churches parishioners across the street on the left. And then Lilith’s oversized ramshackle ranch style home built into a hill on the same side as the cemetery. It was a perfect location for Lily.

I knew it was hers because there was a vintage tour bus in the driveway with sunshades covering the windshield so as not to fade the seats. Though it was easy to see the bus hadn’t moved in years.

It seemed that nothing changed at Lily’s since I was there last. The house looked somewhat worn and everything was overgrown.

Things didn’t look necessarily inviting, and I risked Lily wouldn’t remember me anyway, but I drove up the driveway past the bus and pulled to a stop.

The last time I saw her, at The World on East 2nd Street, was one of her best shows, epic and ingrained in everyone’s memory who was there, and, to my knowledge, it was one of her last. It was also one of the last shows at the famously infamous club before it closed.

As I walked to the side doors of her house I remembered the interior.

The walnut cabinets, the pumpkin orange colored Formica countertops. The brown linoleum kitchen floor and and the thick chocolate and tan carpeting that carried through the rest of the house right into the bathrooms. So stylish then

I heard her voice before I could knock.

She was singing.

A different type of tune.

She was playing piano and singing a cover of Neil Young’s After the Goldrush.

Her back was to me. Her long dark locks were now a wonderful shade of pewter.

Though her stage persona, the performance persona she used to project was large, she was, in fact, petite.

It appeared she held the same build. There may have been even a little less of her physically now than there’s was then. But the voice was just as I recalled, if anything, even better.

I just stood there.

I didn’t want to startle her and I didn’t want to stop her.

I was being a gift by the universe to be right there at that very minute. To feel everything come back and immediately curious, wanting to know everything in between then and now.

To be within feet of someone I was so fond of, loved once, and lost touch with and to by happenstance have found my way back. Wow.

Towards the end I couldn’t help myself, I don’t know what made me, I didn’t think about it. I didn’t even hesitate. I added my voice to hers

“Well I dreamed I saw the silver spaceships lying in the yellow haze of the sun”

She stopped playing. She didn’t even turn her head. She didn’t ask who is it? She just stopped for a few seconds and then began to play again

“There were children crying and colors flying.

All around the chosen ones

All in a dream, all in a dream

The loading had begun.

Flyin mother natures silver seed

To a new home in the sun.

Flyin mother natures silver seed

To a new home”

Then, I knocked on the door frame.

“Lilith, Lily, it’s Joel Borrelli. Lily do you remember me?”

A Joel Hunter Borrelli Snippet

5.16.22

Returning A Favor

A Joel Hunter Borrelli Snippet 

9.24.20

I knew I’d have to shoot him. It wasn’t what I wanted to do. It was what I had to do.

There’s a calmness that comes when you’ve made a decision with these type of consequences. The anxiety is in the indecision. I was beyond that now.

I’m someone who doesn’t like to holster a handgun. If I need it I normally keep it in the pocket of the jacket I’m wearing.

Today it fit perfectly, almost lost, in the front pocket of the tan LL Bean Field Jacket I had on.

Almost every jacket I’ve bought in the last 8 years I’ve bought because I could comfortably hold the Smith & Wesson J Frame revolver in the pocket. I’m a sucker for classic and vintage reliability. From restaurants and bars, to clothes and weapons. Thats what I can depend on with the J Frame, consistency.

At 15 ounces it feels like a water pistol, sometimes almost fake. Until you pull the trigger, that’s when you feel the power.

The thing with Butchie, the guy I had to shoot, is he wasn’t someone who was going to be intimidated. He truly wasn’t all there. He didn’t have enough smarts to be scared even when he should be.

The years he spent at the Clinton Correctional facility in Dannamora dissipated any fear that was left in him.

Butchie’s cellmate was “ Bobbie Deli” one of the Cropsey Crew. Bobbie used to fill Butchie’s head with stories about the money Li’l Joey’s daughter ended up with when the old man died and what she parlayed that into.

Now that Butchie was on the street he was eager to get a piece. He felt it was owed to him. Most of the crew that would have protected Iris, Li’l Joey’s daughter, were either dead or doing time.

That’s where I came in.

Despite appearances I didn’t seem to be dead and I dodged doing time like the rest of them did.

I also owed a favor. A BIG one. I’d been eager to settle up for some time. I just had hoped it wouldn’t be like this.

I was driving a rented 2020 Cadillac XT5 and headed south over the new Mario Cuomo Bridge on my way back to Manhattan when I had gotten the call. I was already expecting it. That’s why I left The Catskills a day before I planned.

I checked the clock when I was going over the Brooklyn Bridge. I hate to pay a toll. It was 5:12. I figured I’d be where I needed to be in another 20 minutes or so.

This wasn’t going to be a negotiation. It wasn’t going to be a warning. It was going to be a hit and I was going to do it.

Butchie was supposed to be staying with his sister, Angel, at least that’s where his parole officer was told he’d be. He wasn’t.

Yeah he’d make his way back there now and then when he knew he had to be, otherwise he was staying with the former Mary Todaro, his old girlfriend. Mary’s husband, Teddie “Teddie Ferrari” DiPaulo, was doing at least another 10 years at Otisville before he even had a shot at getting out.

I knew where Butchie was. Mary had a two bedroom in one of those 6 story apartment buildings on Avenue U that was built in the 60’s. In fact he was in 6-F. I’d rather he was on the first floor but I didn’t have that option.

You see, Butchie had become a pain in the ass. He was threatening Iris. He’d show up everyday outside her companies office so she knew he was around. It had been three weeks.

Butchie felt that like an insurance company after an accident, Iris would find it best to settle with him to make him go away.

He didn’t know Iris. She would have shot him herself if she didn’t have me.

I stepped out of the car, I pulled my collar up. It just had turned into Fall and the temperature had dropped 20 degrees in the past two hours. A cool breeze was blowing. If it had been any other night the perfect Autumn weather would have had me enjoying a nice long walk in Manhattan.

I walked up to the building. I couldn’t just ring the bell. “Hello, who is it?” “It’s Joel and I’m here to cap Butchie” didn’t seem like the best approach.

I went with a simpler plan. I would wait until somebody came out. It wasn’t long before a teenage girl walked out of the elevator headed to the front door.

I was standing on the stoop pretending I was on the phone, like I didn’t want to enter until I finished the call. As soon as she threw the door open I grabbed it, acted as if I was finishing the call, “Okay, great Frank, I’ll talk to you later”, I smiled at her, she didn’t smile back.

I entered the building. Instead of taking the elevator I took the steps two at a time like I was ten.

As soon as I got to the 5th floor I slowed down the sprint. I needed to listen. I needed all my senses to work. I couldn’t wait to get this over with. Not just because I wanted to get it done but I’d forgotten to piss. The older you get the more you seem to need to piss.

I could hear the television in 6-F. it was on fucking Fox News. I bristled. If I could cap him quick I’d like to send a bullet into the tv. No one needs to listen to that bullshit.

Half of Brooklyn is eating pasta on any given day and today was no different. It seemed like Mary knew what she was doing by the smell of the sauce. My stomach rumbled.

Now I was starving.

I was on the 6th floor landing when the door opened. I had my right hand on the gun, crouched and pulled it out. Butchie had a bag of garbage in his left hand and headed towards the garbage shaft by the service elevator.

He had his back turned to me. It almost didn’t seem fair. But I had to piss.

Joel Hunter (“il Rotundo”) Borrelli 

Returning A Favor

09/24/20

A Joel Hunter Borrelli Snippet

BIg Willy - (1) & (2)

A Joel Hunter Borrelli Snippet

7.27.22

Big Willy had the “Big” added to his name as soon as he came out of the womb. There is no wonder as to why. People were sure his mother was expecting twins.

Big Willy had height in his genes but it didn’t take him long into adolescence to understand he was surrounded by little men in his family. Thus he wanted as little to do with them as the little they wanted to do with him.

The women in his life weren’t as much strong as they were hardened. The difference being that strong women can still be prone to emotion, sometimes filled to their depths, where hardened women stop feeling.

Whatever education Big Willy got it was on his own. Schooling wasn’t as much a priority as surviving. The streets provided what the schools didn’t, what they couldn’t.

On the street Big Willy’s size wasn’t so much an asset as it was a target. A target people wanted to knock down, just to say they did. Especially the smaller ones with the typical Napoleon Complex, The same guys who got guns in middle school.

His life growing up was a constant dance, a constant struggle, a constant battle. But Big Willy made friends. He knew one thing for certain, he wasn’t going to be a nobody. He was going to be a somebody.

To that end he hustled. He knew enough to surround himself with loyalists. They were all misfits in some way. That’s probably what made them loyalists, survivalists. Probably where the bonds were born. Creating their own family. When they needed to be bad ass they were ruthless but they also modeled their approach to their community after Robin Hood.

Big Willy had a vantage point growing up. He saw how the boys did it and he saw how the legends did it. He wanted to be a legend.

When somebody in the community was hurting, had a loss, or needed a favor. They sent an emissary to see an ambassador who spoke to an apostle who got the message to Big Willy. He communicated back the same way.

Big Willy limited his exposure. He didn’t move around much. He worked out of a warehouse on East 140th St., the southern most point of the Bronx. Where the Bronx meets the East River. Amenities included expansive views of Rikers Island where a lot of Big Willy’s friends, enemies and neighbors went on vacation. Some for a long time.

The warehouse covered the entire block and was the former headquarters for a carting company, a “Commercial Waste Management” and recycling company, before Giuliani went after everyone in that industry whose name ended in a vowel. They all viewed him as a self-hating Italian anyway. Another brother with a Napoleon Complex.

Anyway, the goombas still owned the building doing whatever goomba shit they did and they gave Big Willy space. They used him for protection and he used them for protection.

They were all in the logistics business. Freight, shipping, warehousing and distribution in some manner.

The building was better protected than the United Nations. There were people located on all 4 sides, 24 hours a day, every day, plus a network of surveillance cameras. Every vehicle that came down Walnut Avenue or Locust Avenue was noted. If a vehicle looked suspicious or out of place, they’ed be blocked in by one of the trucks sitting idling nearby. This was a neighborhood where guys opened their jackets, so you saw that they were carrying.

Big Willy didn’t do fancy cars, he didn’t do nightclubs or bottle service. One of the most popular strip clubs in the city was just blocks away and he’d never set foot inside the place.

In a corner of the warehouse Big Willy, his crew, and the goombas built a screening room sparing no expense. They screened more films than most film studios.

Not one of them wanted to go home. They built a gym and installed showers. They worked out and they drank and they ate. The goombas eating loaves of Italian bread, with hard cheese and antipaste, washing it all down with bottles of Ruffino Riserva Ducale. Big Willy and the crew soaked up Courvoisier and Veuve Clicquot champagne. The building was so cavernous they barbecued all types of meat-inside. It’s the only block in the Bronx you could smell the scent of hickory smoke and fruit tree logs burning.

When the factions wanted to have communion together they did shots of Casimogas, smoked blunts and watched more movies.

Big Willy was close to his cousin Tamera who was kind of the Head of Administration for their organization. Tamera made sure the books were kept, the debts were collected and she was in on decisions for the discipline for those who were late making their payments. “Business is business” was a common quote to those who owed who offered a “But you know me man, I’m good for it” appeal.

Tamera had a friend, Kendra, who Big Willy was fond of. For good reason. She was smart, beautiful and talented and she began to come by more and more, often enough that she was expected and her absence, when it happened, was noticed.

It wasn’t long before one of the crew’s emissaries in the neighborhood told one of the ambassadors he better get ahold of one of Big Willy’s apostles and give him the message. The message: Kendra was being held by the Betances Boys, a gang from the Betances Houses, one of the notorious projects in Mott Haven. This is where the story begins to take a vicious turn.

Big Willy - Part 1

A Joel Hunter Borrelli Snippet

7.27.22

Big Willy - Part 2

A Joel Hunter Borrelli Snippet

7.30.22

The Betances Boys were brutal. That was their strength, brutality. Strategy however was not their strong suit. It wasn’t like they read Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Big Willy had. It was given to him by Richie Mercadante, he was the Capo of the goombas who ran this section of the Bronx. You can’t trust stereotypes, some of these guys were brilliant and some were just muscle and a few were both.

The Betances Boys were exactly that; boys. They were led by an alternating leadership as almost all who didn’t end up dead by 20 went to prison. When they took Kendra, it was under the order of KaShawn Simpson.

Though there are a lot of beautiful women in New York City, many throughout the Bronx, it seemed all of the South Bronx from Hunt’s Point to Mott Haven knew who Kendra was. She was beautiful and turned heads by the time she was in middle school. Her voice also had made her stand out in her high school chorus and everyone knew she had aspirations to be a singer.

KaShawn wanted her taken. He wanted her to get to Big Willy. He’d heard the rumors that Big Willy was keen on Kendra and he wanted to make his bones. In his haze he thought by grabbing and holding her he’d up his status and people would recognize that he had balls and was brave.

The Betances Boys weren’t strategists but they weren’t stupid. There were hundreds of

apartments in the Betances Housing Project. They knew no one was going to come blasting in searching apartment by apartment to find her.

Just in case, anyway, they kept moving her. Not in the hallways or on the elevators only using the stairwells. Not during the day but at night and not without clearing the stairwells first.

KaShawn knew that Big Willy’s crew could provide him and the boys with a steady revenue stream by providing steady product. He knew that any hope of negotiating meant they couldn’t touch Kendra. They couldn’t hurt her. If they did Kashawn knew he’d lose all bargaining power and he’d have his own death sentence on the streets and if he got sent to prison somehow it would be worse, not just for him, for all of them.

Big Willy had his entire crew, his emissaries, ambassadors, and apostles ready for war as well as all the associates who wanted to be part of the crew and those who just wanted to do a favor for Big Willy. He also had Richie Mercadante who had all the goombas fired up. They’d gotten to know Kendra from her stopping by the warehouse and once you got to know Kendra there was nothing not to like about her.

KaShawn didn’t calculate the goombas. He didn’t realize that he just made the Bronx a very small town. In addition to the other gangs in the Mott Haven projects they always had to battle, he’d just alienated him and the boys from everyone.

Between Big Willy, his crew, Richie Mercadante and the goombas, word was carried from Conner Street in the Bronx to Bath Avenue in Brooklyn and from Howard Beach in Queens to Todt Hill in Staten Island. Anybody who provided assistance to the Betances Boys would find themselves with a target on their own back.

They couldn’t find refuge anywhere now. They were on their own. They didn’t have favors to call in.

KaShawn’s Lieutenant in the Betances Boys was his 18 year old cousin, Tyrone “T-Mac” Macintosh. His older brother Damien “Decks” Macintosh, the former head of the Betances Boys, was incarcerated at the Clinton Correctional Facility up in Dannemora, NY.

Since there were others from the Mott Haven projects incarcerated at Clinton, news traveled fast. It wasn’t long before “T-Mac” got the news that “Decks” had been fatally beaten and stabbed in an attack by other inmates.

The news also carried the message as to why. The hit inside the prison was ordered.

“T-Mac” came to be Lieutenant, because he was “Decks” brother and KaShawn’s cousin not because he had the brains or temperament for leadership.

He went ballistic.

KaShawn knew they were in no position for retribution. They couldn’t start the usual eye for an eye gang shit.

Now by taking and holding Kendra, with word on the street that there was a bounty on the head of each member of The Betances Boys and a bonus for killing KaShawn, they’d practically put themselves in their own prison.

The Betances Housing projects consist of a few dozen low rise and high rise buildings straddling several blocks. Most built on the northern side of St. Mary’s Park. The largest public park in the Bronx. They ran one block and only had absolute control over one building, a hi-rise located at the northwest corner of the park on St. Anns Avenue.

Kendra was snatched on a Thursday afternoon. By Saturday night, after not showing up at the warehouse Thursday night or Friday, Big Willy got the message she was being held by The Betances Boys. By Monday morning, Big Willy, his crew, Richie Mercadante and the goombas had broadcast their own message.

On Tuesday afternoon “Decks” was beaten and stabbed to death at the Clinton Correctional Facility.

It was Wednesday morning when KaShawn went to the 6th floor apartment of his grandmothers, to check on Kendra. They had moved her there the night before. His grandmother was ailing and at Cavalry Hospital and each of the boys had been taking turns keeping watch over Kendra.

Kendra was beyond scared but she did her best not to let it show. She had overheard them talk about getting to Big Willy and she knew he’d try to find her and that’s why they were moving her around so much.

When the Betances Boys first snatched her they were full of vigor, and energized by their score but now they were much quieter. Though she had no appetite, they brought in fast food and pizza. They had given her some clothes one of them must have taken from one of their sisters who wasn’t as small in size as Kendra. Though they all leered at her, no one had touched her. She was thankful for that and afraid that could change.

When KaShawn gave the knock on the door letting them know inside it was him, the door went unopened. He gave the knock again. No answer. He used the key to turn the lock as he pulled the Glock 17 from his waistband with his finger on the trigger. He opened the door slowly while calling out for “Puff Raz” whose turn it was to watch her.

The apartment was empty. No Kendra. No “Puff Raz”. This was a problem and a big problem and it took a minute for KaShawn to even process. No one was to do anything with Kendra without a direct order from him.

He immediately called “Puff Raz”. When “Puff Raz” answered it took him a minute to process why he was being screamed at by KaShawn. When the screaming stopped for a second, he told KaShawn that during the night a heated “T-Mac” came in and told him he’d take over watching Kendra.

Now they both were missing.

The shit had hit the fan.

Big Willy - Part Two

A Joel Hunter Borrelli Snippet 7.30.22

Hiring a Hitman

I’ve played a lot of roles in life, but I’ve never hired a hitman. I have no experience on that side of the fence. 

I’m wired to be selective, no matter the issue or cause. I try to balance being sociable with an ingrained sense of skepticism. Internally questioning everything and everyone. Listening to hear what’s not said as much as to what is. I smile and make others think I’m digesting their bullshit as the gospel.

I know the rules of the game enough to know there are no rules. 

I knew, in this, my latest endeavor, there was no room for error though. 

I made a decision and I was going to follow through on the task until it was done.

I was able to supply all the details needed on the target. His whereabouts. His movements. His routine. 

Though there are no rules I have certain stipulations. The first one being that the target never knows when to expect his termination beyond his own expectations and intuition. 

The second, that the shooter be a crack shot of sniper quality. 

When you make a decision like this, you’ve got to be prepared to conduct a vigorous and thorough interview process. 

Jerry came to me through a friend in the business, Mel. Mel knew what I was looking to do and why. He had a sense of compassion. 

Of course, because of my own motivation, I didn’t want the killer to be caught. He was only doing a job. It was a contract matter. A business thing. 

He had to be unidentifiable and know how to disappear. 

Jerry and I met at a diner in Bayonne. I was already eating the pancakes I ordered when he sat down. He was late. To me that disqualified him immediately. He was also built like a linebacker who’d stopped weight training long ago. His bulk, his scraggly beard, and his lack of punctuality eliminated him from the position I was hiring for. He couldn’t disappear in a solar eclipse.  

We made a small talk about the weather and how cell phones and security cameras affected the business before I bid him goodbye with a promise to get back to him soon. 

Two weeks later Mel asked me to meet Karen. 

Karen was Korean. I met her at a BBQ restaurant on West 35th Street in Manhattan. A perfect place for both of us. Underscoring her ability to be unnoticeable and unremarkable though she was young and fashionable. 

She seemed to really want the job. 

She had been shooting at a range in Chicago she said and bested all the men that were members. She wanted to earn her bones in order to propel her career and she said my gig offered her the chance to do that.

I’ve always been a fan of unfettered ambition and I’ve never been misogynistic about who I work with. 

In part because I felt she was the right candidate, in part because I’m sympathetic to helping people in their careers, and in part because I had a time frame that was shrinking, I gave her the job. 

When I shared with her the targets routine, where and when she would have access, she expressed confidence in her ability to carry out the contract.

It was only when I shared the pictures of the intended target did I see any emotion. 

Her mouth opened for a minute and her eyes grew wide. Then she only shook her head acknowledging she understood. I then handed her the envelope of cash.

When it comes to planning your own execution, you’re obligated to get it right. 

Then I just went about my business and waited.

Hiring a Hit Woman.

A Joel Hunter Borrelli Snippet

4.24.22

Thomas’s Big Break

Thomas’s big break came later in life than he would have liked it to. Nonetheless, it was exciting that people finally were beginning to appreciate what he had recognized long ago.

Thomas was truly ahead of his time when he began. He had to develop a thick skin as many of his contemporaries mocked him for his pursuits. He remained laser focused though on his vision.

For him, each of them were passion projects. He saw what others didn’t. Once he started, he used to say, “It’s like the work isn’t even mine. I don’t know where the inspiration comes from, I’m just the vessel that gives it life. I’m not a religious man, I’m spiritual and there is some spiritual force that guides me”

Thomas Littlejohn was always considered gifted and his family and friends had thought he’d take a more traditional path. He had married twice and both wives divorced him because they felt they couldn’t compete for his love with his obsession.

No one, not even Thomas can pinpoint exactly how and when it started. Even when people began to take notice of the time he was investing cultivating his craft, they still felt it was innocent enough even if they didn’t think it was wise.

That’s why everyone was surprised when the gallery’s started calling to exhibit his pieces and wealthy collectors began bidding up his work.

Larry Gagosian was quoted in ARTNews saying “Thomas Littlejohn may become the most important visual artist of his time. His career is just beginning. There may be no one more significant on the art scene then Tom, he’s created something unique.” Since the article was published demand has skyrocketed and Thomas reportedly can’t create pieces fast enough.

I sat down with him recently and he mentioned to me that he’s going to move beyond just toilet art at the end of the summer incorporating both bidets and urinals.

It’s seems that Thomas is finally reaping the benefits and gaining the acclaim and notoriety he justly deserves.

Congratulations Thomas!

A Joel Hunter Borrelli Snippet
5.26.21

Down Off Pike St. – A Prelude

I didn't want to be dangerous but I was.

I was down where I shouldn't be doing things I shouldn't have been.

It wasn't going to make a difference anyway. I wasn't going to be back this way again. How I made my exit wouldn't matter.

Still I'd be foolish not to pay attention to the shadows that appeared behind me and reflected in the windows as I walked.

Even though my pace was brisk, I felt better having my right hand in the pocket of the sport jacket I was wearing. I rarely carried a gun but tonight was different. I knew that it was going to come down to one decision maybe two.

Life becomes different when circumstances lead you to a narrow path. I was out of options 2 days ago and I've been biding my time ever since.

I laughed to myself when I thought about her. That’s how I got into this you know, all in a matter of weeks. I wasn’t even looking at her that night. I only knew that she had dark hair. I couldn’t tell how old she was. I looked towards the door. The air changed. I felt her presence beside me and then I heard it. Her laughter erupted from rumble to roar. How could anyone be that fucking happy I thought.

By morning I realized she was a paradox. She had an accent you could breathe, a scent you wanted to drink and a voice you could almost taste.

Joel Hunter Borrelli 02/01/17 

The Most Dangerous Man on Earth.

I was tired and had too much tequila. I probably shouldn’t have even taken the subway. In hindsight I might have been better off in an Uber.

I noticed his arrogant expression as soon as I sat across from him.
Whether or not I keyed in correctly on his attitude didn’t even matter. 

I was intoxicated and angry. I hadn’t had time yet to face my sorrow. I was full of misplaced rage. I saw him look at the three young females that had gotten on at the same stop I did with a predatory look. I wasn’t in the mood to even give him the benefit of the doubt. I needed a release for my anger. 

I saw what appeared to be a lecherous smile cross his lips when I decided he’d be a victim of his own intentions. 

I laced my fingers together and before he knew it...in two steps across the subway car... I  cupped my hands behind his skull and drove my knee into his nose.

The blood was everywhere. 

I pulled my knee back and drove it with full force into his jaw..twice ..until I heard the bones break in his face. Some of his teeth along with copious amounts of his blood were on my pants and on the floor of the subway car like some type of 7-Eleven freeze drink spilled. 

People screamed but none would approach me. I was normally a man of peace but tonight I was a man of retribution and not even my own philosophy could pull me back from the brink of physical destruction.

The others did nothing but stare at me as we pulled into Grand Central. I exited and made my way back to the apartment. 

I was a germaphobe and hated to have other people’s fluids and DNA on me. 

I couldn’t wait to clean up when I got home and get some rest. 

I’d feel better tomorrow I thought.

A Joel Hunter Borrelli Snippet 12/18/18

Cleaning Up After Candace

Candace had asked me to meet her at the GW Bar inside the Freehand Hotel. I knew a lot about New York, I’d walked many, many miles and spent many years exploring her nooks and crannies, avenues and alleys but there were still things that fell beneath my radar. One of them was the Freehand. 

It was on my side of the city, I’d walked by it too many times to count inroute to all the somewhere else’s I enjoy nearby. The Gramercy and Flatiron neighborhoods practically drew me for some purpose everyday. On some level I probably planned it that way.

So it took my by surprise when Candace made the request because I’d passed it without being familiar with it. The week before I’d taken a picture of the restaurant on the first floor, Simon and The Whale,  and posted it because it appealed to me. A mixture of lighting and location. That’s how my life was, I never knew what was going to take me back to where.

Now that I was approaching it with a different lens I saw it differently. Once I walked through the door I immediately regretted not being here before, and by the time I hit the second floor I knew I’d be here more. 

As I got older, I found myself repeating a lot of the same shit to myself and everybody else. In this case it was the affirmation and confirmation that boutique hotels were the new niteclubs.  

The place was a scene without being pretentious. It was what The Bowery Hotel had been before it became “The Bowery Hotel” which now seemed to be the New York City edition of the Chateau Marmont without the vegetation.  

I was used to places that procured their staffs, it seemed, out of Central Casting but the Freehand seemed to curate their customers from there as well.  

I immediately noticed I wasn’t part of the majority, I was male. I didn’t mind. 

I couldn’t find her amongst the sea of temptation. I texted her that I was there. She replied she was seated by the window. I spotted her. Long black pleated skirt, black laced boots, a white blouse and a black bolero jacket. Red hair cascading everywhere. She looked even better than I remembered. 

“Whatcha up too?” She asked.  I always appreciated the abbreviated verbiage she fell into that brought us back to high school.  

“The same. Searching for my soulmate in the eyes of strangers” I said as I kissed her cheek.  

“I saw” she said.

I looked at her questioning.

“I spotted you when you reached the top of the steps, if your head was turned anymore it would have fallen off” she went on “it’s good to see certain things don’t change”

We both laughed. 

“How often do you come here?” I asked. 

“Not often. Last time I was in town a girlfriend recommended it and we stayed here”. 

I felt the same pangs of jealousy and envy I’d always felt when she mentioned a girlfriend. She knew I immediately understood. Candace had friends that were female and then she had girlfriends.

I’d had girlfriends. I’d had a wife. Candace might have been the only person I’d ever considered a lover. Now it turns out we both had the same taste.  

As I looked around again I laughed. I’d bet the odds were tilted in her favor of charming one of the lovelies to enjoy her lair versus mine of doing the same tonight. 

Candace was the first female to introduce me to lust. When she made love she did it with the all of her. It wasn’t so much a sexual act as an experience in ecstasy. Physical, spiritual, psychological demanding, draining and rewarding without measure. She was like an athlete when it came to affection and to be her partner you’d  better be prepared to compete. 

Years ago I was stung when we’d agreed to meet up at an event after she flew in between assignments and she disappeared with my date.  

Candace was a music journalist and spent her time interviewing famous musicians at venues, in hotels and at clubs around the world. Like they say, it’s not bad work if you can get it. 

She’d started her career off on a whim. She seduced a famous singer, who let Candace interview her and who then wrote a hit song about her. I don’t want to out the singer but if I named the song you’d know it. 

She had a talent for encouraging people to emotionally expose themselves in interviews and the results invited invitations from other entertainers seeking the same type of favorable exposure. 

Since she was a classically trained musician and singer herself it probably helped her connect to her subjects.  

A tequila turned up in front of me without my asking. She saw my curiosity. “I ordered it from the waitress when I saw you walk in” she said. “You still enjoy tequila don’t you?” 

I smiled. “Of course, where’s yours? Don’t you still enjoy it too?” I asked. “I do” she said “but this afternoon I’m trading it for tea.”

“Cheers” I said as I tipped my glass towards her. “Cheers” She replied as she lifted her cup. 

I tried not to be obvious looking around again. Then I noticed the waitress smile at Candace and Candace smile back. If a smile can be sensuous hers was . I was trying to be a gentleman in my prospecting. She was shameless in hers. 

She’d asked me to join her for a reason. I could tell by the first text and confirmed by the second. It wasn’t that she insinuated any urgency, more that she was confirming my commitment to meet. 

I decided to drill to the core. “What’s up anyway?” “Everything alright? “No” she said.” I was taken off guard with the rapid reply and the tone of its delivery. Candace normally had more courage than a corrections officer at Rikers. 

“You ok? What do you need? What can I do?” I asked, beyond concerned now. She looked down for a moment. She looked up. She looked out the window for a few. Then  she turned back towards me with discernible tears forming at the corners of those eyes that I’d let lead me into dreams.  

I reached for her automatically. She practically fell into my arms sobbing. I don’t want to say I was panicked but I was. Candace was not someone you’d associate with fragility or vulnerability. She was a survivor. If she was hurt in life she’d bury it so deep she couldn’t find it.

A few people around us noticed but probably attributed it to an excess of alcohol. 

I moved beside her in the window seat. I had one arm around her and held her hand with the other. She didn’t say anything else for awhile. She blotted her tears with a tissue and regained her composure. 

Then, she turned towards me and said “I know the gravity of what I’m going to ask of you. It’s not something I’d do if I didn’t have too. It’s not something I’d ask if I didn’t need you. And what I need to ask is something only you can do”

I searched her eyes as she looked at me. I was trying to make sure I understood. I thought I did. It was in her phrasing. 

“Candace, I’ve loved you since we were thirteen. No ones had a hold on my heart for so long. I may not be connected to anyone the way I am to you. I no longer do what I think you’re asking me to” she knew what I said was true.  

She shook her head that she understood. But we both knew, for her, I’d do what I had to.  

“Who is it?” I asked. “What did he do?”

“It’s not a he. It’s a she” Candace replied  

This was going to get complicated. In all the years I spent contracting, enforcing and inflicting the harsher aspects of karma, I’d limited my assignments to he’s. Nobody ever even asked me before to handle a she.  

“Where? Here or LA?” I asked.

“She’s here now, but splits her time between London and LA” Candace stated.  

“How long is she here?” I was trying to get an idea of time frame and location. I wasn’t keen on coming out of retirement and applying my skill set in another country.  

“Til Sunday” Candace answered. It was Thursday.  

“And when you say here Candace, you mean here in the states or here in New York, in the city? I questioned.

“Here.” She answered. Sometimes everything is in the emphasis. “Here as in here? At the Freehand?” I asked a little more taken back. She nodded. 

I immediately started to scan for security cameras. I was sure they were everywhere. At the very least I passed some on the way in. People don’t realize the ability of facial recognition software. It’s one of the reasons I retired. I recently read that in London a person can be expected to be caught on a surveillance camera 300 times in a day. I’m sure New York City is the same way, maybe worse. It was another reason for me not to go to London too. 

It’s when I noticed that Candace had placed a hotel room room key on the table in front of me, I knew I was already committed.

Before I could even calculate my next move Candace said “Make it look like an accident.” The tears started again at the corners and  then dripped down her cheeks. I blotted them away this time. 

I leaned in towards her, hugged her and whispered into her ear “She’s in the room?” The reply was a soft confirmation, “Yes” Candace added “She’s not going anywhere. She can’t”

I saw the waitress and motioned for another drink. I held up 2 fingers. I wanted a double but didn’t care if she brought me two.  

It was an acquired skill set. Perfected by practice. Execution and disposal. The latter being far more difficult than the former. 

Candace and I spent years, most of the eighties and a good part of the nineties  as passionate lovers consuming massive quantities of cocaine. There was a time when we’d wake up having breakfast on the ocean of one coast and dinner in a restaurant in New York on the other.

It felt like we knew everybody. What we knew more than anything else, we didn’t want to be poor. Candace came from money. I didn’t. When her father died leaving her mother in the cold and his mistress all his money, she’d only known the privileged life and wasn’t keen on living differently.  

We were both similar in that we were gamblers. Not the casino kind. We were willing to take risks. She was beautiful and had talent. I, well I only had ambition. 

I’d had the luck and misfortune of saving Tommy Ruggerio’s youngest son, David, from getting his ass kicked outside a bar in Bay Ridge Brooklyn one night from a bunch of goombas who had no idea who he was and neither did I. 

The goombas were drunk and dumb and didn’t like that David was a handsome kid with a drop dead looking girlfriend and a nice car. They wanted to pick a fight. I only stepped in because four against one didn’t seem fair and it didn’t appear the kid did shit. In fact he didn’t do anything. The funny part was they were a bunch of wannabe’s and they didn’t realize who they wanted to be was who he was. 

I must admit I’ve always had a short fuse even when it was a bit longer. My temper was far larger than my size warranted and the bass of my voice was a few hundred pounds heavier than I was. It was a potentially lethal combination and I mean potentially lethal to me.  

I was brave but not stupid. I was a gambler also in that I was good at calculating odds and they weren’t in my favor jumping in to protect the kid that night. David and I were both about the same size which was about half the size of each of them. 

I’d adopted the philosophy early on that being proactive was a far better strategy than being reactive. I shot the biggest one right in the stomach. He was stunned. Then he fell over sideways and crumbled into a ball. His fat fuck friends all of a sudden became world class sprinters.

As it turned out there was a witness. A DJ I knew who worked one of the clubs in the Catskills. He was from the neighborhood. He knew who David was and that he was Tommy Ruggerio’s son. 

A few days later the DJ , Rockin’ Rick, is in Rocco’s, a deli with a reputation on Bath Avenue in Bensonhurst. Tommy’s at the counter talking with the Old Man and Rick can’t help himself. He says “Tommy your boy David’s lucky my friend was outside The Dog on 3rd Avenue the other night some dicks were getting dumb with David”

This was in the day before everybody had a cell phone and people weren’t GPS’d to within feet of their actual location because they had one in their pocket. 

In order to find somebody it took leg work. 

I’d always leaned towards privacy and though I kept an apartment on West 69th Street, off Columbus, in the city, only a handful of people knew. Most people assumed I was in residence at the family house in Harrison or the one in Hunter. 

So I’d have to admit to being surprised when I got out of the elevator and stepped into the lobby of my building the following Wednesday, saw the doorman nod towards someone sitting on the couch and met Tommy Ruggerio for the first time. 

I did a lot of work for Tommy in the following years. He always respected that even after establishing the Wall St. operations, I still wasn’t afraid to get my hands dirty. 

It was based on this skill set and experience I’d have to rely tonight. I didn’t want to ask Candace much more. The less I knew the easier a polygraph. Wiseguy humor. 

“Candace when’s the last time you used your credit card here at the hotel or the bar? Do they have it? Did you run a tab or bill it to your room?” I peppered her. 

“I haven’t taken it out of my wallet” she said. 

“Are you sure?” I came back

“Yes, Yes” she knew where I was going. 

“Is the room registered to you, only you? I asked 

“Yes”

“Does anyone know she was with you?” I was trying to cover bases quickly 

“No, her husband thinks she’s at The Canyon Ranch in Tuscan on a yoga retreat “ I’m not sure if I actually rolled my eyes and she saw it or she assumed it because she then blurted out “she’s been my “yoga teacher” (finger quotes and all) for six years in LA”.

I still was sitting beside her one arm around her holding her tightly. I leaned towards her once again. “Candace, get your stuff together. Go to the rest room, get your self together and get out of here. Come back later. After eight”

A few minutes after I watched her descend the steps and saw her exit onto the sidewalk from the window and then hail a cab, I came out of retirement for a friend.  

A Joel Hunter Borrelli Snippet  11/1/18  

The Complexity of D. 

A Joel Hunter Borrelli Snippet 4.21.19

It was late in the afternoon on Passover when we glided onto the FDR in her Tesla headed to one of the orthodox communities in the suburbs to share dinner with her relatives.

As an Agnostic I had anxiety attending a religious tradition of a faith that I didn’t share with a family that I wasn’t a part of.

Over the years I’d heard about her tremendously successful cousin, but I’d only met him recently and it quickly turned into a business relationship. Now I was about to be his guest by extension of her invitation. 

I was copied on a few emails regarding the guest list and time to arrive by an assistant with the title Estate Manager.  I figured that was an indication as to what lie in store. 

We weren’t on the road long when she began to tell me that she was worried because her friend, Tommy Carnavalle, had gone missing. 

The early reports didn’t seem promising. Danny, his sometimes driver,  dropped by to check on him after he was unable to reach him by phone. His keys, his wallet and his Life Alert were on the counter but no one knew were he was.

For most people it might not have been as alarming to disappear for a few hours. Tommy wasn’t most people. 

For starters he had just spent the past three decades in prison. Almost half his life. He had a reputation on the outside before he went in and one on the inside before he returned.

One of the first things Tommy had done after he was released was to reach out to her. He wanted to pay his condolences on the loss of her father years earlier. 

Her father had a reputation too. His was bigger. He was considered the last of the real men of the mob, part of the old guard. And, well, Tommy was part of the guard of the old guard prior to the time he had done.

She remembered the handsome young man he was in their youth. She remembered how loyal he was to her father. Loyalty remained part of her DNA in the best and most beautiful ways.

It was always difficult to reconcile who she was with where she came from. She transcended any type of label. You couldn’t pigeonhole her.

She had become a successful woman in her own right. At the height of the publicity, when her father was on trial, the papers did stories about her and her successful business, trying to tie the two together. She was quoted saying she’d built her business not due to her father, but despite who her father was.

Honestly, that only encouraged people to want to meet with her. Her success and her fathers reputation intrigued people.

The funny thing was, once you met her, you were hooked. She spoke off her cuff, honestly and bravely,  without a filter. She was smart, attractive and endearing. She won EVERYONE over. 

Though you wouldn’t want to make the mistake of misjudging her kindness for timidness. If you challenged her without merit, or, God forbid stupid enough to threaten her, you’d find yourself on the receiving end of an intimidating dispatch. A unique mixture of Bensonhurst vulgarity and Wharton intelligence.

Or, these days, possibly the recipient of a phone call or a visit from me. I was smart enough to know she didn’t need my help and close enough to her to know she appreciated that she could count on me if she needed too. 

I offered my intervention much more often than she ever accepted it.

Her life was a classic, only in New York City, only in Brooklyn, story. Her mother and her father had come from different worlds and different religions. Her mother from a Jewish family and her fathers, Roman Catholic, from Italy.

Despite the differences in families, It grew to become both more familiar, more comfortable and more complicated for them as her fathers reputation grew and he climbed the ladder of his chosen career path.

Her ability to transcend labels probably started there. 

She began to tell the Tesla to start calling people to get updates on where Tommy was and what people heard.

As the passenger I just kept silent and indicated my understanding and feelings with minimal hand gestures while she talked.

When she had Danny on the phone, saying she hoped it wasn’t a “Street” thing, I couldn’t help but laugh at his response.

In the gravely voice of a Staten Island tough guy, Danny said  “Do you know how hard it would be to get Tommy into a car? It would be easier to have dropped him right there”

It seems that though Tommy retained the handsome features of his youth, his weight had ballooned while doing time. He had trouble breathing thus the Life Alert that was now left on the counter and causing concern

Danny wasn’t kidding. He was making a serious assessment and she agreed.

She reached out to a known attorney from the neighborhood to see what he had heard. She talked to friends of Tommy’s to see who knew what.

It wasn’t going to be easy getting facts between the rumors and the reputations.

After awhile we pulled into the gated entrance and through the porte-cochere that connected the main house and the guesthouse of our destination.

The initial anxiety dissipated quickly with the hospitality and in the warm company that made up her family. 

I didn’t get a chance to tell the story of how I didn’t know I wasn’t Jewish until I was seven or how I ended up with a globally sourced yarmulke collection as someone born Italian and Roman Catholic. 

Perhaps there’d be another occasion I could regale them with my tale of confusion. 

I always appreciated the spirituality of tradition no matter what religion. However, participating in the significance of an observance that went back more than three thousand years resonated. 

Towards the end of the evening when the subject turned to how she came to know and befriend a prominent psychotic suspected serial killer, I had to tell the story of how, when I was deciding to move to Manhattan, she suggested maybe I should consider living with “Fred” because he was probably lonely.

I’ll never forget where we were at the time. I was driving and I turned to her and asked “Didn’t he decapitate and dismember his neighbor?”

She shrugged in a “we all have skeletons in our closet” manner.

In as much as I was eager to move out of the suburbs and into the city I couldn’t muster the enthusiasm to consider her recommendation.

Following our good-byes we began our return to the city and she continued calling around to determine what side of the surface Tommy was on. 

It was a routine day with D. 

A Joel Hunter Borrelli Snippet

04/21/19

Balls|Stupidity

A Joel Hunter Borrelli Snippet

6.23.22

The Man often paired Jerry and I to attend to outstanding matters The Man wanted taken care of.

I never really did mind when Jerry and I went out as a team to take care of a task. The only thing imposing about me was my 375 pound voice when I chose to leverage it. Other than that, by sight, unless someone had dealt with me before, at 5’7” and shrinking, I wasn’t intimidating until I opened up my tool kit.

Jerry was the opposite. He was imposing and intimidating from a block away. I’ve watched people move to the other side of a subway car to get out of his way. I’ve watched others move closer, feeling that just being in proximity to him offered them a sense of protection from the chaos of the surrounding city.

Despite the fact that there may not be anyone else I’d rather be in a foxhole with, Jerry could also be a source of concern. There was something in his DNA that attracted him to danger. He got some sick thrill from pushing the envelope, testing the limits to get away with something. Though when he did, it didn’t matter. It was just some high he got from it.

For instance, even though his mere appearance drew attention, the last time Jerry and I went out in the field, he had an unlicensed Smith and Wesson 500, one of the longest barrel pistols made, concealed, tucked into the waistband of his cargo pants.

For that particular mission Jerry was also carrying a guitar case on his back. The size of him made the guitar case look like a violin case and Jerry doesn’t look like any musician busking you’ve ever seen. Of course, the case was also lacking a guitar. It did however, have not one but two sawed off double barrel shotguns.

It’s with this hardware Jerry decided to start a conversation with two fine members of the NYPD. They were standing on the corner of 6th Avenue and West 4th St. as we were on the way to pay a visit to a couple of the Canal Street Crew that were holed up above a gym in a building on the border of Hudson Square.

It gave him some kind of crazy adrenaline rush to know the lawmen didn’t know what he was carrying as he talked to them about how “It looks like rain”.

In truth, they probably were relieved when we parted and he turned to tell them “Have a good day and stay safe”.

It’s not like we were carrying assault rifles with high capacity magazines. We didn’t need weapons for war, just for protection, and, at times, just displaying them, as needed, helped us sway those we had to talk with to a better understanding of our viewpoint.

Still, I kept having to nag Jerry about the unnecessary risks he took just to give himself the jollies. I had to tell him as diplomatically as I could that there is a fine line between balls and stupidity.

I may be one of the few people who could broach the subject with him.

A Joel Hunter Borrelli Snippet

6.23.22

Stitching Snapshots

The rat a tat tat kept repeating in my head as I was trying to make sense of it in my dream. It kept repeating and repeating until I reached a sober enough level of consciousness to recognize the knocking wasn’t occurring in my dream. It was at the door.

Nobody I know would need me with such urgency. Nobody I know even knew I was here, right? Wasn’t that the point of going on the lam?

The rat-a-tat-tat continued, even louder. I was trying to stitch together the snapshots of last night that populated in my impaired brain. The memories began to form a movie-like trailer. I started to fear what the feature performance might have looked like.

My instinct was to try to muffle the noise of the ever louder knock by using the pillows as a baffle. It wasn’t working. I started to think someone wanted my attention and their persistence might be more enduring than my patience. Plus my head was fucking pounding.

I forced my eyes open from under the covers and the pillows. The light was so bright it was almost painful. What fucking time was it and where were my fucking clothes?

Rat-a-tat-tat. The sadistic fuck kept at it. “One fucking minute!!!” I bellowed and regretted it as soon as the words escaped. I’d provided confirmation I was there. Now where were my fucking pants?

Joel Hunter Borrelli 09/14/18

Redemption

He was more of a never-been than a has-been.

Larry accumulated his scars injecting chemical cocktails and fighting in bars.

He said he didn’t think right when his mind was straight. He only knew himself in an altered state.

Upper middle class family, all the right schools, an athlete, a pedigree, connections, all a successful life’s tools.

But Larry was a boy with privilege who didn’t like rules.

As he got older he was more of a loner, an angry drunk and a steady stoner.

Resentments built and relations got strained, and Larry focused on numbing the pain.

For years and years Larry slept on the streets. Only cardboard boxes between him and concrete.

All the store owners knew his lined face, Saying they wanted him gone, “What a disgrace”

Searching corner trash cans to redeem the 5 cents. Only miles away from the youth he misspent.

Worn and ragged and in search of not more but another 1/5 of cheap whisky and another dope score.

One day on the sidewalk, some boys had a beef, one pulled a gun, and out rang a shot. In the line of fire a young mother pushing a carriage, walking her tot.

Larry didn’t hesitate, he didn’t even flinch, jumping in between, the bullet missing his heart by less than an inch.

Security footage was shown on the news, Larry was a hero, a sum of his choices, and what did he choose? Not a life of convention, but a life worth redemption.

A Joel Hunter Borrelli Snippet
07.11.21

Eyes of a Witness

I recognized him immediately. He still had that hardscrabble look that one gets from being brought up on the wrong side of the tracks in an already poor town. The kind of town where the lack of employment leads people to have a lot of time on their hands which they don’t seem to spend wisely.

I know these types of towns. My family roots might be from one of the wealthiest counties in the state and the country but the johnny-come-lately I was to the family unit had me being brought up in one of the poorest.

I knew almost all the towns in the counties between the mountains where I grew up and the city. Until you hit the suburbs they seemed to follow a pattern. The closer the river; the poorer, the more desperate. There weren’t many sailing regattas or country club cotillions in these towns. Just a lot of Stewart’s and Cumberland Farms. Places where people did most of their shopping in convenience stores.

He was about 6ft, he was thin like an addict, and tanned from outdoors, leathered even. His face, around the right cheekbone, had an impression and a scar that seemed to come from an impact that hadn’t rebounded or been rebuilt.

His hair was worn long, but not as long as when he was younger. His most notable feature had become part of his name, how he was known. The “Grey” in Danny Grey wasn’t his last name, it was for the color of his eyes. Deep grey in the most unusual way. Now they matched strands of his hair too.

He hadn’t lived this long without having his own set of survival skills. His upbringing didn’t make him stupid. He’d learned there was ignorance among the educated. Many times it was how he made his money. Doing what they didn’t know how.

He knew just about everyone you’d think. He’d been around for years and when anyone needed a set of hands they seemed to find him. He’d done enough of enough that he knew more than most.

He managed to navigate a life between the villages in the valley and the main streets in the mountain resorts when they were in season.

As the local bars opened and closed or moved you’d find him fixing, painting or carrying ice for whoever owned what at what time. You never knew if he was being paid or doing it for free and sometimes neither did he. Or you’d come across him at the lumberyard or hardware store in the company of one of the contractors or tradesman he was helping.

In his own way he was a facilitator and a bit of a historian. He could tell you who died of what and when. He was like Rainman when it came to death.

This particular night I was seeking him out about one I knew he’d want to forget. He had been a witness to an excess of alcohol, anger and ego that resulted in a murder. It happened one night at Tommy V’s long ago.

Eyes of a Witness A Snippet by Joel Hunter Borrelli 8/6/18
 

Saving Sally - (Part 1)

I had to prepare to call Scott back. The last conversation we had on Sunday had me worried. 

I closed the door of my office so Rachael,  my new assistant, didn’t hear. She was my friend Bruce’s niece, neither of us had yet told her how I made a living. 

Earlier I  offered a guy outside Dunkin Donuts $2 for a cigarette. It’s not that I couldn’t buy a pack, it’s that if I did, I’d smoke it, the whole pack. I didn’t want to be a smoker again, but I knew for this moment I’d need the nicotine. 

I moved from the desk to the couch I’d spent too many nights sleeping on lately. 

MSNBC was on in the background. 

I looked at the time. it was 9:15am. I might as well take a moment to see what Stephanie Ruhle was wearing today before I made the call. 

I spent a few more minutes watching her than I should. It reminded me of an event the other night among the deep blue of Democrats. Most of the people there were from New York’s theatre world. I made mention of my attraction to Stephanie and half the women in the place confessed to having a crush. 

Between her, Nicole Wallace, Rachel Maddow, Katy Tur, Kasie Hunt and Hallie Jackson, you knew someone at that network  knew what they were doing. No wonder their ratings exploded. Men and women in a political fever and a sexual fervor.

I’m not sure if that many Fox viewers got as worked up over Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson. 

I hit contacts, found Scott and called him. One ring. Two. Three. Four. I was getting antsy. Then, “yeah” he answered low. I immediately pictured him in bed wrapped in a blanket. The shades pulled. 

“What’s Up?” I asked as cheerfully as I could muster. We were friends long enough and knew each other well enough I knew he’d find the sarcasm in the optimistic sunshine of my delivery. 

“Nothin” he answered flatly. I could almost feel the dampness of his house. The air conditioning there  came with a mist strong enough you’d wonder how the place wasn’t  covered in mold and mildew. I could feel the darkness of his depression. 

“I tried you last night, you didn’t answer” I said “Where were you, what were you doing?” I asked 

He coughed. For awhile. After a minute he replied “I was making a list of easy ways to die”

“Should I be concerned?” I inquired in an effort at understatement.

My issues in life were money and love. His was only love. That might have made it worse. While I had to invest time in fighting for survival, his time was only invested in what he’d lost. 

“I think I’m going to go away” he said. “Maybe LA, or Rome or Costa Rica” 
“Just get away by myself”

I couldn’t help but answer the same way my brother Roger once answered me in a similar situation. 

“Why do you want to go away with the person you hate the most?” It really wasn’t a question more of a statement. 

I couldn’t find my lighter. It wasn’t in my pocket. Now I couldn’t find my pot either. I was trying not to panic. I wanted to smoke this Parliament I procured. 

The pot, the one hitter and the lighter were on the corner of the desk where I’d emptied my pockets earlier looking for the same thing. 

I lit the cigarette and placed the lid of my coffee on the table in front of me to use as an ashtray.

I started my pitch.  “Scott, I’ve got a job I could use some help on. It’s not something where you’ll need to get your hands dirty”, “I may be in over my head on this one, really I need a body man with MacGyver skills. Someone I can trust” I explained. “That leaves only you and Tommy and Tommy can’t do it”

I was already anticipating his resistance. I wanted to take care in framing the proposition as I really needed him ..which I did..but not have him feel I was recruiting him to get him out of his broken hearted funk.

 I was surprised when, after a moment, he replied “Where do you need me? When? For how long?”, he quickly added, “ I have to make plans for Norman,” Norman was Scott’s Bull Mastiff. 

They say that a lot of people look like their dogs. Scott and Norman had the same build, the same pedigree if you will.  I always liked to see people’s faces when Norman pulled Scott for a walk around their neighborhood. 

Many crossed to the other side of the street. Between Norman’s over excited gait and generous drool and Scott’s stream of expletives, they were their own tornado. You didn’t want to get caught up in their spin. 

“I heard about Tommy” He said. “I wish there was something I could do”

“I know. We all do” I replied.

“The fact is I need you yesterday. With everything going on with you  I was hesitating before I asked”

He didn’t say anything. I immediately regretted the reference to Sally. 

“As quick as you can make it to the city and I’d expect we can prep and take care of this in 2-3 days if all goes smoothly and longer if it doesn’t” I told him. 

Scott knew better than to ask me the details of the job over the phone.

“Ok” he said. “My sister should be back from Florida today. Her and Lucas can take care of Norman. He’s got a girlfriend next to Jenny’s now.

“Who, Lucas?” I was confused. I thought his nephew was still seeing Theresa . I was just with them at his graduation. 

“No, Norman” Scott said.

“Well at least one of us dogs is in a good place relationship-wise” I    replied.

“Ain’t that the truth” Scott laughed. 

I hadn’t heard him laugh in weeks.

“I’ll be down there tomorrow as early as I can”. He almost sounded relieved. 

“Thanks Scott” “I’ll see you then”.

As soon as I got off the phone I wished I had another cigarette. I’d wait til he got to the city before I told him it was Sally that we needed to save. 
Part 1

A Joel Hunter Borrelli Snippet
01/13/19

Saving Sally - Part 2

After Scott hung up I went back to watching Stephanie Ruhle and got worked up over the days politics and the cut of her dress. She was wearing another off-the-shoulders blouse. 

Some days the only way I knew what time it might be was by the host on MSNBC.

I called Racheal into the office. I don’t know what Bruce was thinking having me hire his niece as my administrative assistant/receptionist/sober buddy/sometimes driver-providing medical oversight on the diabetes that threatened to kill me. I’m not one to be threatened.

He knew better than almost anyone how irresponsible I was. He knew I was a well intentioned character with a deep flaw.

Why did she have to be smart AND pretty AND 27? I’d recently raised my dating band range on Tinder & Bumble to 29 from 27, admittedly I was raising it on the higher end of the band too, and, as it happens, getting more satisfaction.

I’m agnostic but at that moment I almost became orthodox. They say God has a sense of humor and at that moment it was either God sending me a message and having a laugh or Karma catching up.

I saw my reflection in the mirror.

It was at that moment, I saw the grizzled 51 year old man looking back and realized Racheal probably wasn’t stressing herself about being attracted to me, having sexual fantasies and worried about falling in love.

I was more confident at that moment she hadn’t been investing many, any, moments picturing me naked.

It was going to be hard to have her be under the umbrella of all those responsibilities and not have her really know what I did.

I’d try to protect her. I’d protect her. She fell under my umbrella of responsibilities. She was also female and I know, #metoo and all, but I couldn’t be convinced that being chivalrous was wrong.

After all, like the one who’s name shall not be mentioned used to say, “Darling you are noble and gallant”.

She’d been out of my life for a long time now. I let the words stay. Those anyway.

I saw Racheal appear in the mirror behind me. That’s a hell of position to be caught in. Just staring at yourself in the mirror. Not grooming, not doing anything but looking at yourself. You might not realize it until it happens to you. Like it did me, just then.

“Yes, Joel” she said with a smile

I just turned around and started. “Racheal, I’ve got no big plan here. No exact strategy how this is going to work” “if it’s going work” ..I felt I had to reframe it.. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I want it to work out”. I stopped for a second to gauge her face before I rambled on, ya know, without a strategy or anything.

She still was holding the same pleasant smile. Almost, for God’s sake, with the look of a mother letting her son talk about some awkward topic and providing encouragement for the comfort.

Or. Jesus Christ was that an empathetic smile?

I went about it from another angle with a different approach.

“Racheal, for the most part I live my life in the open and I’m pretty transparent. I’m a what-you-see-is-what-you-get kinda guy”

I continued. She kept smiling.

“At parties or events I like to share a little information about myself, or if I’m meeting a woman I haven’t met yet, I like to frame my financial situation at the outset. I find it helps me.”

I continued. She kept smiling. 

“Racheal, I like to tell them that if I were to find a home I liked, that I wanted to buy, and it was going for 5 million, I like to tell them that I’m no accountant, I’m not a CPA, but if I do a quick run of the math in my head, my available assets, my overall assets minus my debts and my exposure, I’d find myself short 7 million”

I delivered the story straight as I always did. With no hint of humor. I’d delivered it the same for sadly almost as many years as it was accurate. A long time.

In the most sophisticated circles with the most comfortable crowds, there was often a beat before the humor translated along with the reality. Amongst prospective dates and sexual mates it often prompted a nervous laugh. Amongst others it often lead to an uproar.

Racheal, well Racheal was amongst others and it seemed her laugh began deep inside her even before I finished.

It appeared Racheal and I might get along.

A Joel Hunter Borrelli Snippet 1/22?19

Losing Melissa

She had a throaty, deep and smokey voice. Her laughter erupted the same way, from the depths inside of her. It was wrapped up in an electric personality and topped off by a smile that never seemed to leave her face.

We were living the fastest life at the youngest age, working in bars before we could even legally drink. In our mountain haven there were times Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager would have been envious. 

Our paths crossed again over the next few years. We’d all migrated towards the city, suburbs and the Hamptons. Then she ended up at a bar in Scarsdale next to me. 

I can’t tell you how many nights I spent mixing groups of friends from all areas of my life there as she tended bar. I knew I vied for her affections among those with more money and thereby it seemed more muscle. 

I can’t tell you how many nights I shouldn’t have left there to drive home. A different day and a different time but the same danger. When you’re young you’re ignorant and think you’re invincible. It turns out I was nothing more than lucky. 

I’ll never forget the night I knew I’d lost her. We’d closed up the restaurant and bar she worked at on Garth Rd. and headed to The 808 on Scarsdale Avenue. 

She rode with me in the Mustang. I recall telling her, in an inebriated way, how much I cared about her. 

If you don’t know Scarsdale, it’s one of the wealthiest towns in the country, and The 808 was a dive bar that could have been used as a film location if they needed the look of a rural roadhouse. 

It might be where my devotion and dedication to dive bars in fancy locations began because I still prefer the paradox today. 

When I think back on it, I do so through the eyes of someone who’d already drank too much before, in a near perfect recollection to the manner in which I’d walked through that door.

Tommy and his crew walked in behind us. I knew there was chemistry between them but for the likes of me I didn’t know why.

But Tommy it turned out was playing chess while I was playing checkers. 

It didn’t take much but it meant a lot. While I was trying to gain my bearings after too many Grand Marniers, Tommy played the juke box.

It took me a minute to realize why she was smiling at him and him at her. Both shared that flirtatious look that can bond one to another on the spot.

Then I heard it. He played Sweet Melissa by The Allman Brothers. 

He won her with a quarter and I was the one who felt he lost a fortune. 

Joel Hunter Borrelli 10/19/18

The Premiere

I needed a drink. A pre-party cocktail. I was honored to be invited to the premiere. It was going to be the right group of people in the right place. The problem was I’m not naturally sociable. As I grew older I mostly saved the intimacy of conversation for those I’ve known for decades. I knew in order to dilute the discomfort I’d have to spark my alter ego with tequila.

Caterina was supposed to join me but she canceled at the last minute. It didn’t really bother me. I may have dodged a bullet. I knew a bar on the block before. As soon as I walked in I saw her. She had an air of independence. I walked behind her and took a position to her right. I noticed her shredded jeans, her age; early thirties, and what appeared to be bourbon she was drinking.

As soon as the bartender saw me he recognized me. He brought me the Trago without my asking. An Irish bar with great food that stocked some of the best tequila in the world. It certainly wasn’t The Barney Stone.

The minute the glass hit the mahogany she motioned to the drink “Conor its on me”. “Generous but not necessary and I can’t allow it. What's that you’re drinking?” I asked trying to get the upper hand on chivalry. I’ve never let a woman buy me a drink not even most men. It was a fault.

25 minutes later and after she bought me two of the most expensive shots of tequila in the bar, she had her arm in mine as we walked out the door towards the party together. I never told Caterina that I had a date within 30 minutes of her canceling. She’d have caught on fire. She liked her option of who to be with but she hated anybody else to be with me.

In the elevator, we introduced ourselves. “I’m Joel and you’re either brave or crazy or both. And you?” She smiled “Sinthia with an S” she said. I made her spell it twice.

A Snippet by Joel Hunter Borrelli 6/21/18

This One Time...

Scene:

There were a lot of bars in this neighborhood. For as long as I can remember the average age of the patrons was early to mid twenties. The area drew those just out of college, not too far a distance from their sorority and fraternity days. Many continued to share apartments with some of the same people. They all seemed to be about 3 degrees of separation from one another. It was a gathering of those who knew each other from their hometown high schools reunited in the city after college, college pals. their friends and siblings. That would be enough to spark a dynamic dating scene, when you add Tinder you ignite an explosion

I found it fun to see them paired and grouped at tables picking up on snippets of conversation and trying to determine the relationships that brought them there together at that moment.

But now, at this hour, the bars were beginning to close. If you peeked in you’d notice that the stragglers all seemed to have an intimate relationship with the remaining crew, wanted to initiate one, or were too intoxicated to leave.

I saw the three of them as soon as my feet stepped over the corner of the curb onto the block. They were standing outside each having a cigarette. Two guys, one girl. Their posture and animated gesticulations implied they’d imbibed enough to be impaired. They were having a good time.

As I was walking by them, the one aiming for the redneck look with an untrimmed beard and barely a mustache, says to the other two “So my buddy and I...” and I immediately start to think about the texture of the many tales in life that begin in variations of the same way, “This one time my buddy and I....”. Then I began to think about a particular one of my own.

Joel Hunter Borrelli 6/30/18
 

A Job Like Any Other

I was tired of killing people. it wasn’t the profession it was made out to be. It could be financially rewarding depending on whether you were working by contract or by retainer. Most of the time though it was a job like any other. Similar to many people partcipating in the "gig economy" of the twentyteens, I was trying to balance my creative pursuits with providing. It wasn't what I had been doing. I didn't think this line of work would be disrupted and replaced by technology like the other two careers I had were.

I considered myself a Buddhist and I must confess there were times that certain assignments didn’t sit well with me. I understood the practicality of human disposal, most times its for the greater good. I didn’t fool myself or pretend to be altruistic about it. I knew there was a side of me that enjoyed applying efficiency to the executions. The tedious tasks required for the cleanup and sanitization may be what's put in the most Zen state I've ever achieved. I approached it with as much mindfulness as a monk washing dishes, chopping wood or carrying water. If you think about it the responsibilities of the job are not in conflict with my core beliefs or the general philosophy. I mean if you take into consideration reincarnation or more likely a metempsychosis, you were just extinguishing them in this realm. In a way just being the catalyst for them to move onto new experiences. 

Joel Hunter Borrelli 05/09/18

A Snippet from a short.

The Fernwood

“It was a place that if you didn’t know where it was, you wouldn’t know it was there” Teresa said about a restaurant she was familiar with. We both laughed. I knew exactly what she meant.

It was a place you weren’t going to come across unless you were lost.

It struck an immediate note with me.

I was used to venues like that. One of my favorite places on earth was off a back road. And other than the locals and a few small signs off the main drag you could’ve described it the same way.

The Fernwood.

I think back on those times I was coming out of the city into the Catskills on Thursday’s, Open Mic nights. Never knowing which musicians were going to turn out and what vocalists show up. Emil dressed in drag sometimes or as Austin Powers on others. Jenny offering to make you something to eat long after the kitchen closed. Smoking on the deck, listening to the force of water move boulders in the creek when it rained. I yearn to step back into the carefreeness of those times.

The excesses of the nights are still hard to feel bad about. Often I feel like it’s the most familiar happiest place I’ve ever known outside of home.

Joel Hunter Borrelli 9/6/18

Gypsy Love

from Gypsy Love

“She was a gypsy not just in regard to where she lived but who she loved.

She greeted each new place as “home” and each new love as “the one”. It wasn’t an act. It was exactly the way she felt at the time. Time and time again

Those men who gained her attention and affection would never be the same. She injected more passion into minutes than other women did into lifetimes.”

Joel Hunter Borrelli
8/24/18

                                             Caterina

"-When she met her mark she zeroed in,
she was a master of deception.
Even when you swore her off,
she pled her case for redemption
Every minute with her was like no other.
The days in-between were another thing altogether-"

Joel Hunter Borrelli - From Caterina in the upcoming "Ciao Darling"

"Caterina knew he cared for her. She was coming to realize though he wasn't going to chase her. He wasn't like the others she danced with, toyed with, teased and tempted. He was...

Joel Hunter Borrelli - from Caterina in the upcoming "Ciao Darling"

Cobblestone Streets, Neon Lights and Lightning Strikes

I was always drawn by the same place. No matter where I started off, no matter what neighborhood, I always ended up on this narrow cobblestone street. The place was an aberration. A dive bar here, where the loft apartments were coveted by an international crowd of trustfunders, hedgefunders and assorted overachievers.

It was years since I walked through the doors. Years since I was recognized and welcomed. My own Cheers for gods sake. The lighting of the place hadn’t changed. It was just the way it always was.

I couldn’t tell you why tonight was different than the other nights. As I walked up the crooked steps I couldn’t help but think “Would lightening strike me in the same place twice?”.

A Snippet by Joel Hunter Borrelli 6/2/18

Noble Gallant & Gone.

I couldn’t have dreamt it.

I couldn’t have written it but I will.

As the leaves turned the storm blew in.

I knew I had tempted fate again.

She was a beautiful storm, a dangerous storm she was a tornado & a hurricane.

Why did I do it?

Why had I tempted fate again?

I’d been through these storms before.

This one blew in from across the sea.

Picking up force she hovered near warm waters,

by the time the storm arrived here, her gusts were gale force winds,

that spoke to me in my native tongue.

I got picked up in her cyclone, caught up in her spins.

With her need for energy to keep her roll and her role

she used me as her fuel.

She called me noble, she called me gallant, she fed my ego, she fed my soul

But the storm was wicked and out of control.

Had she played me for a fool?

At first the storm faltered,

as storms often do.

Then the stars that had aligned suddenly shifted position

and were altered.

The moon rose, the waters grew,

the storm picked up and headed out to sea.

Leaving behind,

devastation, damage and debris.

And as she spun in another direction

forgoing my protection,

she moved along the shore.

You see I was a storm myself,

then the stars aligned

and what had calmed me to a gentle breeze

filled me full of strength once more.

As I was noble and gallant in a storm

those winds now gone mine had just begun.

I look for her return

as the ides of March introduce

the spring,  a calmer storm is often blown.

I’d welcome her embrace again

‘twas her winds, had stoked my own.

Joel Hunter Borrelli 01/21/17

La Tempesta

Joel Hunter Borrelli