The Hero With 1000 Laces

Explosives and Corrosives

2007-05-24T21:50:00.000-07:00

The balloon count was down to three. What had initially been a squeaking septet of latex and color was now reduced to a trio of white and yellow; two of the former, one the latter.
My karmic burden, currently represented by the wiry, anxiety-ridden black dog, foamed as she repeatedly tried to find escape from the tiny, pickled Toyota sedan. Her lips were pulled back to reveal the one insane smile that she’d worn almost constantly from the day I picked her out at the pound until now. As each balloon popped, the smile grew, to the point where I feared the next one might turn her completely inside out.

Another one went and now there seemed to be something downright medical about the appearance of the two enormous white balloons battling for space with the crazed mutt and the sweating, pasty alcoholic driver. It was as if we were in some kind of self-service transport to a mental institution.
Empty bottles rattled underneath the seat, muted slightly by the vodka, beer and wine that had given my car’s floor mats a syrupy, turf-like texture, similar to what the dirt and grass under the bleachers at a Single-A ballpark might be like. I thought about how when I arrived at my friend Paul’s niece’s birthday party, I’d take care to not let any of the bottles come into view. I thought about how I was going to spin the fact that there remained only two balloons, as I’d told Paul earlier in the day that I was going to stop at the toy store on the way to pick up at least six, if not more, “It’s the least I could do,” I said, knowing - as we all did by now - that I was indeed capable of considerably less.
This had been a big investment for me. This was something I considered to be a true act of generosity and honor. I spent nearly $20 on these balloons (gourmet balloons at that) for my friend’s niece and arriving with only $5 worth angered me on so many levels. $20 could buy two 1.75l bottles of generic vodka and two 40 oz. Miller High Life’s. $20 could get you two cases of Golden Anniversary beer and a jug of Burgundy. $20 could kill you if you played it right. Instead $2.50 was in my pocket, $12.50 worth of shriveled rubber and ribbon lay scattered about the car, and $5 now bounced between the ceiling of the Corolla and Jackson’s lathery snout, ready and risky like mines at sea during wartime.
When you’re an alcoholic nearing the end of a chapter of drinking, you know it, whether you’ve seen it before or not. If it’s not the neon yellow bile coming out of both ends of you, it’s the anxiety that forces you to pull over to the side of the road and sit in the dirt next to your car, trembling and praying to a god you still can’t believe in to please, oh fuck, please slow your heart down at least to the point where you can actually identify individual beats. It could be the way the mustard tint to your skin can no longer be rationalized as a tan (even in August) or the way the sweet, rotting smell emanating from every pore on your body disgusts your very own nose; a self-perpetuating nausea machine.
When you’re an alcoholic, you look for any little shot at redemption, if only to get you to the next drink in one piece. The failed love, the fights, the patronizing simultaneously horrified and sympathetic looks from complete strangers, the humiliating moments just before and just after blackouts; all of these rocket through your head like a major release movie being shown on all 10 screens of your cranial Cineplex at once. The film is paced perfectly, there are no lulls, no unnecessary character setups that could have been left on the cutting room floor. Every moment is exact, terrifyingly shameful art, and the coming end seems as if it in no way should be a surprise, and you hope to God it isn’t. You want the Disney treatment. You need the tidy little wrap-up.

I chose Jackson out of desperation. A friend of mine who was living at my house had two dogs and I became quickly envious of the constant companionship he enjoyed from them. I figured that a dog was indeed “man’s best friend,” especially because one wouldn’t have to worry about a dog waking up at 3 a.m. and drinking the rest of one’s bourbon. Well, not unless one were dumb enough to get a Border Collie or a Standard Poodle; they could do that and worse.
I’d been going to the pound every day it was open for a couple of weeks. I didn’t know exactly what kind of dog I wanted, but I had a few models in mind. A black dog would be good, I thought. When he or she would shed, it would match nearly everything I owned. Plus I would blend in more with the Cape Cod scenery, as the Massachusetts legislature had recently passed a bill providing tax incentives for anyone buying a Cape Cod Black Dog within the Cape and Islands area, and the resulting boom of the little ebony critters running the beaches was astounding. It was like when you hear your great uncle talk about how when he was a child, passenger pigeons were so populous that they darkened the sky; their 10 million strong flocks blocking out the sun like an avian eclipse.
I suppose I was already looking more and more like a native, as Cape Cod had the highest alcoholic rate per capita of anywhere in the country and my puffy redness gave me a free pass at any VFW or hardware store. But the dog would really camouflage me and for once in my life, I really wanted to go unnoticed; it was easier to drink alone that way.

I pulled into the driveway of Paul’s parents’ house, where the party had been going since 10 a.m. Since it was a birthday party for a six year old girl, the drinking would be easy, tempered and professional. Paul’s dad, Paul Sr., came out immediately to welcome me and survey my condition, sort of like a potbellied, Armenian version of the guy at the club entrance with the clipboard and the hold on the velvet rope. “Hey there, Joey. Glad you could make it,” he said, smiling and hopeful that I’d live through his granddaughter’s party. “Hey, is that your new…”

“…dog?”
The black blur escaped Paul Sr.’s sight before the word had fully entered the air. A few drops of spittle landed on the Corolla’s hood and remained for a single second before the hot metal introduced them to the July air.
I quickly responded with a loud “Yes!” to ensure that Paul he would know the dog and I were on the same team and ready to behave.
“Why don’t you come on in and we’ll find you something to, uh... drink.”
It was impossible to not notice my particular affliction. It was the middle of summer and even the majority of alcoholics had great tans going. It was just me and a small handful of seriously committed boozers who had this sheen that made one look as if one had spent the last week zipped up in a bowling ball that was tucked under an elephant in equatorial Uganda. Is it possible to look clammy? I was finding out.
I reached into the car and delicately brought out the last remaining balloon and followed Paul Sr. up the walkway to the house and readied myself for the waiting onslaught of sights and sounds. There’s something truly unnerving about pointy hats held on to little heads by rubber bands, especially when those little heads are making so much noise and having such a great time doing it. Depressed adults don’t really want to be reminded of the care-free happier times of youth, especially when they’re half in the bag on a hot summer’s day. The great irony was that these kids, so hopped up on sugar they’d probably fail a breathalyzer test themselves, would inevitably have to face the come-down, a descent would exponentially worsen just after the six year old boy who had the flu anyway and a tummy full of cake and Tang threw up on the five year old girl next to him after the big-for-his-age 10 year old man-child (and who let him in anyway?) with no motor skills whatsoever whacked them both with a broom handle as he missed the pinata by a good four and half feet. And then, still blindfolded and hearing something hit the ground after he’d hit it, proceeded to hit them both four or five more times before he realized pinatas don’t scream. Oh yes, they’d have their introduction to the pain of the vicious cycle.
Paul Sr. opened the door and it was all I’d feared and more. There was cake on the walls, on the ceiling, on the ceiling fan (which, I supposed, was why the cake on the ceiling had such a cool “spin-art” look to it.) One kid was hitting himself in the head with a plastic sword and another was drawing a lovely picture of the sun on the floor with a stick of margarine. A tape of the “Backstreet Boys” that sounded like someone might have spilled apple juice on it at some point blared warbling and distorted from a cheap boombox in the kitchen. Paul Jr. was sitting between his niece and some bald 6 year old (I didn’t even want to know) with a desperate smile so tight and pulled back that his goatee was practically hanging from his ears and I seriously wondered if he’d had plastic surgery since I’d seen him last.
He was being a good uncle. He loved his niece so much that anytime I saw him with her, it gave me that instinctual, paternal feeling that I really wanted to have kids someday, and soon. Of course, I came to my senses as I thought about how swimmingly things were going with Jackson and thought it best to just live vicariously through my stable friends.
Jackson, oh hell, where was Jackson? It wasn’t that I was worried about her getting away, it was quite the opposite. I was concerned more about a possible sneak attack. Jackson was hyperactivity disorder personified. She was hairy, black anxiety. She was in no way mischievous, it was rather she was absolutely chaotic. In a one mile radius, her speed alone ensured one would have a potentially disastrous encounter with her within 10 minutes.
“Jo-eeey!” said Paul, Jr. with great enthusiasm. “Glad you made it!” And he really was.
The good uncle would be here alone if he had to, but he very much welcomed even the trivial amount of help I could offer. “Paulie. Baby,” I said, using the Sinatra-isms we as a group of friends had all attempted to adopt during our ongoing love affair with swinger culture. Of course, even Joey Bishop wouldn’t be caught dead dressed like a church thrift shop mannequin and holding onto the sweat-soaked string of a single white balloon at a birthday party for a six year old girl (though Dean would have at least appreciated my aroma, while Frank would have just had us all shot and dumped in Bass River.)
I walked over to the end of the long table he sat at, dodging flying crayons and being careful not to slip on the sun. Paul’s niece, Corey, sat next to him, smiling calmly and helping the bald girl make a picture with the Etch-A-Sketch Corey had received as a gift. The amount of charity in this small corner of the kitchen was enough to nearly make me cry. It was, as everything involving this family and pretty much all the families of all my friends was, a remarkable, impossibly powerful machine of grace, love and absurdity. It was exactly why I had to be here, even if all I brought was one balloon. “Nice balloon,” Paul said, grinning. “Let me guess: Jackson?” he asked. “Mostly,” I said.
“How many did you start with? Four?”
“Seven.”
“Jesus.”
“Tell me about it,” I said.
“Wow, man. Did they all pop in the car?” he asked.
“Yep,” I replied.
“Christ, Jackson must have been freaking out,” he said.
“I’m lucky I made it here alive,” I said. “If you lived another five minutes further away, all the balloons would have been gone and I would have been picked up by the ambulance that takes you to the other hospital.”
“Ha-ha-ha-ha!” we both laughed, knowing that I wasn’t joking.
“Wanna drink?” Paul asked, fully intending the double entendre of asking both if I wanted a drink as well as whether or not I wanted to drink. “But of course,” I replied to both. It as like I was in the VIP room at The Sands as the Tanqueray and tonic was in my hot little hand within seconds (really it was jut dumb luck, as Paul’s mom was keeping ‘em coming in Paul’s direction, as along with a great deal of love that was getting Paul through this party, an equal or greater amount of gin was at work.) “Thanks, Althea,” I said, knowing that while Paul practically had an I.V. going, I would be limited to this one cocktail, as his mom was smart enough to ascertain that this was just sort of topping me off. It was relaxing though, and for the first time in hours, I exhaled.
“Happy birthday, kiddo,” I said, handing Corey the string to her lone, boring latex blob. “Thanks J...” It was at that moment that I heard the crash and the screams.
Jackson never had great eyes. She wasn’t blind or anything, probably not even near-sighted per se. It was more like her vision couldn’t hope to keep up with the rest of her and as a result, she ran into and through things all the time, even when one would think her reflexes - which were lightning fast - would compensate. But they often did not.
“Jesus Fuck!” Paul Sr. said, using what is still my all-time favorite expression. I looked over and saw that the screen of the patio door had been ripped away and was still recoiling from the impact of the streaking mutt. She had hit the deck on the fly and must have then been too preoccupied with the landing to determine her next move. She probably didn’t even notice the screen, it seemed, since it didn’t slow her progress in the slightest. “Joe, get your damned dog!” Paul Sr. yelled. But it was too late and before I knew it, her next leap had landed her smack dab on the middle of the buttery likeness of our solar system’s only star. It was like watching Mario Andretti hit an oil slick at Indy, if Mario Andretti were a retarded Labrador. Her legs seemed to multiply in front of our very eyes and I don’t think anyone would have been surprised to see a stream of silk fly from her ass and attach to a wall as an anchor. But instead, she accelerated, flying straight ahead towards the tunnel that was the space under the dining room table. Just as she was disappearing through the tent-flap of the tablecloth, the kid with the sword missed his head by a long shot and whacked the balloon as Corey was taking it.

And so it went.
And so did Jackson.
She blew up like a depth charge far beneath the surface of the sea. The sound began with the bang of the balloon and swelled into an explosion that lifted the table and everything on or around it off the ground. The Etch-A-Sketch hit the bald girl in the face, the punch that had been in Dixie cups for this moment floated in the air as if it and we were in orbit. My and Paul Jr.’s gin and tonics rose between us, out of our respective glasses and headed towards each others’ face. “Jesus Fuck!” said Paul Jr. as the table came crashing down, the punch came splashing down, and the gin and tonics made their burning baptism. I felt instantly blind as the alcohol doused my eyeballs. I reached under the table, wildly fishing around with my arms out straight like Lon Chaney playing a game of Marco Polo. “Jackson!” I practically screamed. “Get out from under there right now!”
Jackson ignored me completely and instead just kept jumping up and hitting the underside of the table with her head, though not nearly as hard as she had initially, as now she was probably a bit dazed. I finally got my hand on what I assumed was her collar and began to pull the bald girl under the table by her leg brace. “NOOO!!!” the bald girl screamed, thinking she was about to meet a most horrifying end at the hands of the crazed beast, unseen and scurrying madly, margarine-covered claws dancing a million steps a second as she tried to find purchase. The bald girl grabbed the Etch-A-Sketch that had hit her and swung it like a tennis racquet at me, aiming for my ear. I ducked and almost immediately, it seemed, I saw Paul Jr.’s nose explode in a gush of blood. He fell backwards off his chair and in doing so, created an opening for the captive dog to escape, which she did, running over the bleeding Armenian uncle, leaving a sunkissed, oily pawprint on his forehead. “Jesus Fuck!” Paul Jr. and Sr. said in almost perfect unison, with Paul Jr.’s utterance being slightly more garbled and nasally. “Oh my god, Paul!” I said. “Are you alright?” I certainly couldn’t blame him for not feeling the need to answer such a completely useless question, but I didn’t expect him to hit me, which he did, rather squarely in the nose. I careened to the side and fell on my back. Under any other circumstances, I’d have definitely hit someone back, even my best friend. But it was absolutely undeniable that I deserved this. If not for the total chaos, just for the balloons.

Hours later, with Jackson securely in the car (after she’d run through a neighbor’s yard and caused such similar mayhem that it made me think that she may have simply stumbled upon her calling and if she had, I was screwed) Paul Jr. and I sat outside his house, reclining on the back deck, ice bags and gauze held softly to our bloated faces.
“So, How many balloons did you start out with?” He asked.
“Seven,” I replied.
“Jesus,” he said. “That must have been one hell of a car ride.”
Paul was smiling, as much as he could.
“Man,” I said, “I’m lucky I made it here alive.”

Boston 2007

2007-04-29T08:22:00.000-07:00

I have run the Boston Marathon once before. My preeminent memory of the 2004 race is of the herds of runners scurrying this way and that, prior to the start, trying to find somewhere to pee.
Hopkinton, where the race has started from in each of its now 111 editions, is a tiny, rural town of 2,700 residents with neatly but unpretentiously kept lawns and practical wooden or vinyl siding on the houses. On that April Monday three years ago, it was an African grassland; the race participants like desperate gazelles flocking to the the edges of yards and ducking behind obscuring shrubs, police on horseback and foot acting like confused, learning lion cubs chasing them as only the first drops were hitting the ground and thus there were men running about with cocks flapping in the cool spring air and women hurriedly waddling away as one must when one’s thighs are limited by the shorts still wrapped around them.

That was then.

This year is all about bringing the love; encouraging whatever is necessary simply for survival itself. It is, even more than usual regarding marathons, about stupid courage, about competition and camaraderie.
This year, it was 43 degrees, raining and windy and a cop wouldn’t bat an eye if you pissed on his gun. The forecast for raceday was so dire (with some predictions calling for torrential rain, sub-freezing temperatures and sustained 45 m.p.h. winds) that there were actual high-level discussions of whether or not to cancel the race on account of weather for the first time in its history. By the time the day arrived - thankfully slightly milder than was expected - an air of gratitude took precedence over all.
Everywhere, there were men spreadlegged in front of bushes and women gathered in groups of 3 or 4 talking casually and laughing as they crouched comfortably next to each other anywhere; in the street, on a lawn, even a sidewalk. It was raining, who cares.

I sprint to the start, as my qualifying time has earned me a spot up front and I fully intend to enjoy such a perk as the difference between starting in the front and even 2,000 people back can mean minutes before the starting line is crossed. The gun sounds and we are cascading downhill.
There are many elements that contribute to the Boston Marathon’s deserved reputation of being one of the more - if not the most - difficult of the major road-run marathons in the world, but primary among them is the hills. It’s not the hills between miles 17 and 21, where the infamous “Heartbreak Hill” is the last in a series of three that is sure to make the ill-prepared and the ready alike weep, but the 4 miles of steep downhill running at the very beginning of the race.
Sure it makes for a great pace if one is fool enough to think that such is the rate one will run for the entire race. If they staged a 5 miler on this part of the course, there is no doubt that everyone who ran it would easily set their personal-best time at the distance and walk away without a scratch. Later that night though, even just the first four of those five miles would show the toll they’d taken.
The great marathoner and former personal one-time torturer of Alberto Salazar, Dick Beardsley, ran upwards of 140 miles a week readying himself for Boston in 1982. Thinking this still might not be enough preparation for the downhill portions, he sat at home at night, every night, and punched the tops of his legs 1500 times.
Downhill running is fast, but terribly shocking. The runner is basically falling further forward at a seemingly ever increasing rate of speed, and is stopping and skidding with each footfall. At 170 footfalls a minute, a just under six minute mile sees the legs accepting 1000 individual shocks, or 4,000 over the first four miles. I remind myself that it is only four miles and it certainly is nice to look down at my watch and see that I’ve run four miles in a little over 23 minutes with very little effort at all.

But here’s the rub.

Those little extra shocks break down the quadriceps muscle and other tissues of the legs in little, gradual, almost unnoticed ways. This kind of damage will only reveal itself much later. Specifically, it will reveal itself around 15-17 miles later, or right around the time that I am ascending the half-mile long incline that is “Heartbreak Hill.” The extra strength summoned for this climb and the fact that I am making sure I stay on pace as I do it, will ensure that I will have nothing left to try to catch anyone from this point on, and that the next 5 miles, the last miles of the race, will be all, 100% all, about holding on for dear life. I vowed to myself before the race that I would not do a mile faster than 5:45 (which I failed at, covering mile 3 in 5:41) and would not go slower than 6:59 (which worked out nicely as I ran my slowest mile, mile 19, in 6:54,) but after Heartbreak, I was afraid to look at my watch as I passed the mile markers, fearing that there might even be a great big “8” staring back at me. There was not, but I was stunned at this, as my gait had turned frighteningly abbreviated.

The following is in no way intended to appear arrogant.
My stride has been described, mostly by veteran fellow runners, as “easy,” “beautiful,” “effortless,” and “perfect.” It is not as if I set out to do this with any intention. I didn’t spend hours in front of dance studio mirrors until I honed my footstrike to look like the running equivalent of Catherine Deneuve circa 1967. It’s just how I like to run. It’s always been what feels right. It’s what makes sense to me if I want to get from one point to another in the least amount of time with essentially the least amount of effort. If I could consistently run sub 5 minute miles by dancing like Rick Astley, I would do it, though I would be in disguise, possibly as Rick Astley.
It is rare that I get to observe what my stride looks like. It’s just one of those things that I don’t get much of an opportunity to see, especially since I’m usually concerned with running as fast as I can. So when, somewhere in Wellesley around mile 11, there was a glass replacement store with seemingly miles of big plate glass windows as the facade of its showroom, I couldn’t resist checking myself out. I turned my head to see my image, tightly clothed in black as always, gliding along. Damn, I look good.
I am so glad, oh so glad, that there were no more opportunities after that, as by mile 22, I was shuffling ahead as if my shoelaces had been tied together. Luckily, everyone else was doing pretty much the same deathmarch, though every now and again some crazy bastard would come flying by in perfect stride and I and any other runner around would mutter profanities to no one in particular. Most of us, at this point of the race, were between 25 and 40 years old, but everything about us from our weird, resourceful limps to our bitchy demeanors bespoke of men well into their 80’s, glorious death only a few agonizing moments away now.

There’s a guy who’s been next to me for a good 2 miles now who has on a shirt that reads “Eureka.” I don’t know if he’s a vacuum salesman, or if he’s running for a corporate team, but I have decided that I’ll give into the vaudevillian joke and I keep thinking “Eureka sucks,” or, as everyone keeps shouting out said name as we pass, “you don’t smell so good yourself.” I have to get away from this guy.
I put on a “surge,” which is like flooring it in an ‘83 Chevette with only 2 good cylinders, and get a good 30 feet ahead relatively quickly. “Eureka!” I hear again “Oh, shut the fuck up,” I silently plead and step on the broken accelerator again. This guy, whoever he was, is undoubtedly responsible for me finishing in 2:45 rather than 2:46, and I am grateful for that. I just hope he never wears that damned shirt again.

I am not super-fast. I am fairly quick and certainly relentless and the pace at which I run will never get me into the comfort of the elite trailers and training rooms before and after major world races. However, running at the rate that I do does entitle me to certain perks that I enjoy and exploit to the fullest.
I came in 222nd place at Boston this year where close to 21,000 people ran. In New York, I placed 200th overall in 2005 in a race that had over 37,000 participants. In Falmouth I consistently place in the top 60 out of 9,000. At the Ballycotton 10 miler in Ireland I came in 14th out of 2,700. I don’t state these statistics to make myself feel oh-so-cool, because in any of those races there were lots and lots of people far faster than I. I state it to illustrate a point:
These events are set up to accommodate thousands of runners and often hundreds of thousands if not millions of spectators. Often they are run through the most public places in the most metropolitan of cities. Huge roads are closed down and open only to the racers. 5th Avenue is closed. Boylston Street is closed. Commonwealth Avenue is closed. Due to the length of these races, by the time I come down the road for the last portion of the race, there is no one around me, sometimes not for a 100 feet or more. Lining the sides of these empty 6 to 8 lane thoroughfares are 50,000 or more screaming spectators, pressing against fences and barricades and reaching around police officers wherever they can. It doesn’t take much energy - thankfully, as I have none to spare - to raise my hands in a motion that begs for applause and noise, and they always oblige. 50,000 people, 15 deep on the sidewalks of New York, or Boston, or even Falmouth, go absolutely buggy just because they know how good it feels to the runner, to me.
As I cross the finish line, an almost instantaneous quiet replaces the sound of the crowd and the silence makes for the most intimate fraternity. There are 30,000 water bottles, medals, bananas, heat blankets, bags of chips. There are hundreds of volunteers eager to help in any way. There are helicopters overhead and newstrucks as far as the eye can see, and yet still there is silence, as embraces and breaths and smiles are exchanged between the 40 or so runners surrounded by all of this, and for this very short chapter, I am one of them. We are alone and I have done something that will live with me forever. I get to be a rock star for one day. I get to hear the roar of the crowd and allow it to carry a body that is only partly, at best, connected to this mind at this stage of the race. It is wracked with pain, it is twisted and beaten, it is ready to give, but it can still raise a hand, turn up the volume, bring the love.

Short

2007-04-29T08:17:00.000-07:00

I almost dated a dwarf. I don’t mean that I came close to going out to dinner with someone who could have made it to the third call for Ewok auditions. I mean my very first girlfriend was almost a dwarf, missing the essential criteria by maybe an inch and a half, two tops.
She was proportioned like one of those Russian doll sets where each doll contains another doll inside it, she being the second to smallest. She also somewhat resembled what many cultures symbolize as a fertility totem, though I don’t think she would have been able to carry anything larger than a mango to term.
She had moved to Cape Cod from New York; a city kid, wise beyond the years of her peers. She always wore a cool, unimpressed expression that seemed to say, “I come from a place where the rats are bigger than me and the hot dogs are bigger than your penis,” or at least that’s how I took it.

She smoked Marlboro Reds, which counted for a lot, because this meant that she had chosen to smoke this particular brand, rather than steal the pack from her parents, as the rest of us did.
Most fourteen year-olds in my neighborhood couldn’t find anything stronger than a NOW or a Tareyton in a purse or glove compartment. It was the ‘80’s and smokers had begun to go lighter as many were suffering from the early stages of two burgeoning plagues; emphysema and Reaganomics, neither of which had ruined anyone’s lungs or self esteem just yet, but coughs and ill-advised investments were increasingly forthcoming.
Her name was Jem, (with a J) short for Jembelee. Her father’s name was James and she had three sisters, Jennifer, Julie, and Jocelyn. This was a long passed down family tradition, and a strictly patriarchal one at that. James’ dad’s name was Jasper, and his father’s name was Joseph. Jem’s mom was cut out from any entitled connection, as her name was Marilyn. Had James been borne sons, they would have all been J’s too.
The family also had a Chihuahua named Gene, but just so things didn’t become phonetically confusing , they pronounced his name with a hard “G”, making anyone who called the dog instantly as if they were from Calcutta, or perhaps Rio.

The summer Jem and I dated was preceded by a spring of utter discontent; birds chirped in hushed tones and flowers bitterly bloomed only once a week. Were I an even slightly intuitive soul, I’d have read the signs; the wind blowing from the north, the regular afternoon rains and the way they matched the cycle of the moon, the dog shit almost constantly found underfoot. But no, a girl had smiled at me from across the room for the first time. She had unleashed her exotic Gotham charms and they came at me like 5th Avenue DVD peddlers of romance and they all had the Star Wars trilogy (the good one's) for free and I had been hypnotized. By an evil midget.
"Can your dad give us a ride to the Barn?" she'd ask, meaning the small mall of artificially barn-like structures in Eastham that was the Gift Barn, the Game Barn and the Pizza Barn. Plus there was a mini-golf course, which, fortunately, bore no direct farmish title like "Corn Links," or the "Baa--aaa--aaa--ck Nine," though the 14th hole required negotiating a wildly swinging cow udder that bordered on pornographic.
"Sure," I'd say, every time, which was at least 4 times a week, knowing too well that for each ride I'd have to do a lot of bargaining and planning. My father was beginning to suffer from the early stages of Alzheimer's disease and though he was retired and, I suspected, secretly relished the opportunity to get the hell out of the house, he still had to be plied with promises that this would be the last time, a promise easy to make as he'd surely forget it had been made within the hour.
It should be noted my father also drove approximately 10 to 20 m.p.h. under the posted speed limit, meaning that in a 25 mile-per-hour zone, I could get out and run far enough ahead in a short enough time that, given the old man's failing mind, I could pretend to be a hitchhiker, and given the old man's sense of generosity, he'd pull over and pick me up, especially because of the slight resemblance I bore to his son.
He'd drop Jem and I off at the quasi-rural complex and slowly make his way back home, as my miniature mate and I waded into the sea of punk teens and white trash tourists that perpetually filled the area just past the parking lot and just before the entrance to any of the three barns. I always wanted to play miniature golf, but knew better than to float this idea as the one time I did, Jem completely freaked out, ranting about what an affront the mere name of the sport was. Instead we would find a picnic table, pull out some Marlboros and start to smoke the night away. Knowing what I know now, I often wonder if minus the cigarettes she and I would be, respectively, normal in height and really quite tall. This of course was all moot, as every single member of both her family and mine were not only all under 5 foot 8, but also smoked, with the exception of her two younger sisters, who were barely started on candy cigarettes.
Soon, friends with huge mohawks and patches on their jackets proclaiming a love for anarchy and bands such as the Circle Jerks and Scraping Foetus off the Wheel would arrive, having been dropped off by their parents, too.
They'd smoke and we'd smoke and they'd all be short and we'd still be short, and eventually, almost every time it seemed, my very first girlfriend would go off with one of them. Eventually she'd come back and I'd ask her where she'd been. Eventually I'd believe her and eventually it would seem as if nothing had happened, because, of course, it hadn't.
However, eventually I would see two of my friends who really loved each other and it would occur to me that they didn't leave with other people for hours at a time. They would just sit there and laugh and kiss in that awkward, repulsively wet and beautifully clumsy way teenagers kiss. Eventually, I'd come to my senses. Eventually I'd find a girl who smoked, who had all those patches of all those really fucking good bands, who was, like me, an utterly terrible but earnest kisser, a girl who really loved me. Even if it would only be for a short time.

Politics and Porn

2007-04-29T08:12:00.000-07:00

If you ever saw one of my elementary or middle school pictures you might wonder, “Oh dear lord, what the hell happened here?”
Pornography, politics and one terribly ungifted barber inadvertently uniting the two.

My parents didn’t really seem to pay a great deal of attention to my overall appearance after I turned 5; a total reversal from the time prior. Up until that age, any photograph you saw of me might have you thinking you’d stumbled upon “Kids Vogue” or some such magazine that doesn’t actually exist. There I was in my little red short suit. There’s little Joe playing on the beach in a sharp yellow swim trunks with matching flip flops and sandpail. See me strolling down Commercial Street in Provincetown, 1973, decked out in a kick-ass Osh Kosh B’gosh overall/sweater combo. I was stylish, ridiculously cute and outrageously, inescapably lame. As if some instinctual awareness of my developing loserdom had been awakened in me, I began to combat my parents’ fashion efforts with careful, socially toxic rebellions. Sometime in October of my sixth year, I thought it might be a curious little experiment to not change my t-shirt until Christmas, a boycott that sort of automatically excluded bathing. I’d do things like wear two different shoes and then lose them both before the end of the day, and just to make it interesting, each hours apart. I relished “Dental Days” at school, wherein us students would chew mysterious, certainly toxic pills that would turn the teeth of those beset with plaque red. I would make sure I had the reddest teeth and that they stayed that way for the whole day.
My parents surrendered quickly to such attacks, preferring to save the discipline for more important things like room cleanliness and counterproductive rules regarding eating.
However, one ritual that remained consistent for my elementary and middle school career, was that of the day-before-school-photo-day haircut. My parents reasoned that a good one or two months worth of filth could be neatly disguised by a good, clean cut, a little toothpaste and a shirt bearing an embroidered likeness of a man and a horse participating in what is such a grossly snobbish sport it makes sailing look like NASCAR.

My dad was an old school “man.” He wasn’t exactly cut from the same cloth as the local hunter/fisherman types, he was more European Aristocrat, but he had that oddly universal, bordering on homo-erotic need for serious American male fraternity. So, when it came time for the haircut, while I could have gotten a fine ‘do from the woman who cut my mom’s hair, or even a decent style from just your regular old family neighborhood barber, my dad instead took me to Jolly Roger.
Roger was, to put it mildly, a weird dude. His barber shop looked like a tiny moosehunting lodge, paneled in dark wood with hand carved signs nailed to the outside and 20 years worth of NRA stickers on the windows that blocked most of the light from getting in. He always wore plaid flannel shirts and black suspenders and he had sharp, close-cropped sideburns propping up a short, oily pompadour that smelled like cigars and Aqua Velva. The thing I remember most about him though, was this super-totally-ultra creepy grin he’d sneak out all too often and it for some reason made me think I was glad I wasn’t his dog.
Roger’s barber shop was always busy, with 4 or 5 guys waiting to get in his chair and get the most god-awful haircut known to man. It may seem strange that there would be such demand for low-rate chop jobs like the one’s Roger dished out with complete consistency, but more than anything, most of these guys were either killing time between the breakfast table and the Elks Club, or just waiting to die.

If you were from, say, Colorado or maybe Vermont and you now lived by the sea or on the flat plains of the midwest, if you saw my school pictures you would instantly get homesick and cry. My bangs were like a goddammed mountain range, and a freshly formed one at that. No sloping beauty of Mount Fuji here. No, Roger, each time mind you, managed to carve from my precious locks stunning renditions of the Rockies, of the Sierras, of Everest. Looking at the cragged line of my brow, I find it amazing I still have two intact nostrils.
Yet, still, there was a reason I didn’t protest too much the trips to Roger, and it wasn’t just the ever-present threat of an angry Spaniard. It was porn, and lots of it.
Roger, as one might expect, had a vast array of “educational” magazines strewn about the shop. The selection and range was as broad as it was confusing. Playboy, Penthouse, Oui, Gallery, Swank, Juggs, Better Homes and Gardens, Newsweek, Time, Hustler, Field and Stream, and Highlights for Kids. Oddly, there were no sports magazines. I think Roger and his buddies thought that pictures of guys sweating without hunting or being at war was way too close to gay.
I wasn’t advanced at much, still not, but I had a strangely early tendency to be girl-crazy.
I asked a girl out in the 1st grade, gave her a box of chocolates and everything. This was, not surprisingly, my first experience with rejection.
But now here I was at 10 years old and due to a plethora of yet more experiences with rejection, I was getting a pretty good idea that it might be a very, very long time (with my luck and social skills, likely longer than just about anyone my age) before I saw a girl naked. Because of this, Roger’s library became sort of a Holy Grail. I wasn’t so hyperbolic as to believe that within these magazines lay the very keys to human sexuality, but I at least held a hope that they’d give me some kind of general look at what I was missing, albeit in retrospect, minus the airbrushing.
Over the course of a year, my dad would take me to Roger’s maybe 5 times. Over 4 years or so, that was 20 trips. Somewhere around #12, I really began to case the joint. I picked up on when the attention wasn’t on me, when the pauses in conversation would and would not make for a good time for my plan to unfold.
My plan - and it’s simplicity was as brilliant as it was unintended - was to grab a copy of Newsweek and hold it up as if I were reading it. Then, when the timing was right, to quickly snatch, say, a Playboy and open it up inside the Newsweek. I, of course, hadn’t taken into account the fact that I would now appear to be reading a very thick copy of Time (though I reasoned that if pressed, I could just say it was the Fall Fashion Issue with a 62 page spread of Menachem Begin in Christian Dior “and look, there’s Leonid Brezhnev looking just smashing in a Gucci wrap!”) but that was a minor concern at best.
Roger and my dad were exchanging mono-syllabic jokes about brown trout and my dad must have come up with a real zinger, because Roger was suddenly doubled over with laughter (taking Fred-in-the-chair’s top of Mt. Washington and part of an eyebrow with him) and my dad was also in teary-eyed hysterics. I seized the moment, seized the Playboy and seized sociopolitical infamy.
Part of my plan was to ask Roger if I could take the copy of Newsweek with me to use for an extra credit report for school. I was sure he’d say yes, as I knew the value he placed on such a magazine was nothing compared to his truly treasured ones.
When it was my turn to get in the chair, I placed the magazine(s) under a copy of Better Homes and Gardens (I still don’t know what the hell that was doing there) and hoped for the best.
After my bangs had been transformed into the silhouette of a shattered radial saw blade, I climbed down from the chair and picked up the Newsweek. “Roger, would it be OK for me to borrow this? I have to do a report on a politician for school and I thought this guy would be good,” I said, referring to the old man with the receding chin, thin gray hair and glasses on the cover of the magazine. “Sure,” said Roger, adding with more than a tinge of hope, “You like Jesse Helms?” I stood there, unsure but sure I should just agree and be done with it. “Oh yeah,” I said “he’s the best.”
There is definitely some karmic lesson here regarding the objectification of women and how it may or may not relate to backwards-thinking politics, but to this day I prefer to be ignorant of it for fear that I may just suddenly become a horribly guilt-ridden monk.
Now, I was committed to writing a report on this Helms guy, a man I knew nothing about, nor did I really wish to, but I couldn’t get out of it because my dad had seen this whole little transaction occur and while he probably was at least partially on to me, he also would let it slide if I actually followed through. My pops was big on education, having been an immigrant who paid his own way through Brown and anything I did to lay to rest the still nagging fear that I might be mildly retarded was A-OK with him.

I have to say that for a 10 year old, I was a political monster, though only in a completely self-serving, narrow way, like a little, budding neo-con. I did things like refusing to order off children’s menus at restaurants because I found the suggestion belittling and discriminatory. I wrote angry letters (I’m not even making this up) to the Lego corporation, demanding that they make a Lego space set, which they in fact had, and I simply hadn’t been able to find it. I was a concerned citizen, man, but I didn’t know a damned thing about national politics (though later that year I would feel this strange, unfamiliar disgusted sensation when I learned both my parents had voted for Reagan.)
Copying the story from Newsweek verbatim would have been better journalism than what actually transpired. Instead, I took what to this day I’m still not sure but can only imagine was a not exactly glowing piece on the outwardly racist, purely evil Senator from North Carolina, and turned into, well, a glowing piece about the outwardly racist, purely evil etc. etc. I actually even titled it “Jesse Helms: an American Hero.” No shit. David MF Duke might have dialed that one down a bit.
The real beauty of it? The man who was my sixth grade English teacher who would be the recipient of said report and would undoubtedly give me an “A” for such advanced, impassioned journalism, was none other than Mr. Dennis Pearl.
Dennis Pearl was as close to a true left of center, progressive, intelligent and driven teacher as you could get. The fact that he was teaching the sixth grade is a testament to his sense of dedication to his calling. While most teachers at that level were there because they either couldn’t get anything better or 6th grade was as far as they could go and still be guaranteed intellectual superiority, Mr. Pearl was there because he viewed this age as a crucial turning point. And now here I was, standing in front of this hopelessly idealistic man, handing him a green folder with the letters spelling out “Jesse Helms” in red, white and blue stars and stripes.
“Wow, Jesse Helms,” he said, laughing easily, fairly sure this wasn’t a joke, but still pretty goddammed funny nonetheless. “’An American Hero’, you really like this guy, huh?” he asked. “Uh sure, yeah, he’s great,” I responded, trying to sound confident in whatever it was I’d written. “What do you like most about him?” Mr. Pearl asked, genuinely curious. I was struggling. I couldn’t remember much of anything from the article, as I kept taking breaks from reading to look at the Playboy I’d stolen. Suddenly numbers came to me “I guess it’s that he’s been a Senator for 10 years, I mean that’s like a lifetime,” which to me, it rather exactly was. Mr. Pearl laughed easily again at this. He had one of those laughs that only good teachers have. He would never mock you, even when that was essentially what he was doing in finding some weird 10 year old idea you’d proposed hysterical.
“Tell you what,” he said, “I’ll read this, and give you credit for it. But, I’d like you to go to the library and look up a little more info on Senator Helms,” he continued. “I’m not trying to tell you to think one way or another, but you might want to take a look at how he feels about things like black people, free speech and some other issues.” I began to get a very sinking feeling in the bottom of my stomach. The report was still within my reach and I wanted to take it back. I somehow knew that I’d done something so bizarrely and perfectly wrong that I needed to rectify it, or at least never let it see the light of day. “Well, maybe I should take another stab at this before...” I said, reaching in vain for the folder that now laughed out loud at me in the colors of the flag. “No, I’ll hold on to this. You’ve taken the time to write it and the least I can do is read it.” I knew I didn’t stand a chance.

I didn’t bother going to the library, as if something in me knew that all I needed to know about the good Senator from the Tar Heel state would be revealed to me soon enough. Instead, I went home after school and once again looked at the Playboy and had a sort of a 10 year old’s version of an epiphany. I realized that if I’d paid even one tenth the attention to the Newsweek article that I’d given to this other magazine, I might have had a better idea of just who this Helms character really was. Yes, this was probably true, at least on paper. However, still not necessarily. As with as much time I’d devoted to studying every inch of this precious volume subtitled “Entertainment for Men,” I still hadn’t learned much of anything about women.

Running Blind

2006-05-12T09:31:00.000-07:00

I love to run. I am a lover of rising, lurching, flailing, falling and all the while breathing in a rhythm at once simple and dangerously complicated. I look for new ways and new places to run not so much to break out of a rut but to test this graceful chaos under experimental conditions. I once ran through a pitch-black November night with a headlamp, headphones, and layer upon layer of polyester and neoprene, none of which insulated me from the wet, cold air. I found myself so away from my ability to listen to all the things my body was doing that I was unable to coordinate any of them and suddenly my limbs and lungs were playing on different teams, with my equilibrium the loser. I’ve run in 8 degree February and 99 degree July and in both cases wondered quite literally if I would live to remember the event.

I am a runner. When I run, my skin is alive, within and without. The feeling of my body swimming and punching through the air makes for a most visceral sensation; my eyes, ears and nose taking a back seat and finding themselves necessary for only the most utilitarian of applications, such as when to ignore the signs and voices instructing - if not imploring – me to turn. My feet become soft, intelligent landing pads that tell my legs to absorb the shock created by my repeated attempts at flight failing over and over again.

I run indoors, I run outdoors. I run in the morning, I run in the day, I run at night. I run in snow, sunshine, rain, wind, hail and if fire came into my path, I would run through it, too.
Most of all, I remember why I run.

It is the breath and the muscle and the way that even the most initially uninspired effort is quickly and consistently rewarded with that feeling of life. It transcends question, faith, chance and all else for me. It is proof once and for all that life likes to be loved, caressed, appreciated, and experienced.
I run indoors quite often. While many see a man running in place with an ignored TV in front of him, what they miss is that which is in the man and the area immediately around him. There is his blood, then his skin, then his sweat, then and inch of pure heat and then an invisible shield of absolute joy. It’s this last part that instantly turns even the most mundane of surroundings - such as a rubber floor, a television and fluorescent lighting – into the man’s perfect world.
There’s a fellow runner I see at the gym fairly often and if it’s anything other than raining outside and I’m inside, he wags his finger and gives me a “tsk, tsk…” look, or just shrugs and gives me a “what the heck?” mostly in good fun, however partly unmistakably not. To him, it’s as if I’m giving Mother Nature the bird, or taking the beauty of the road or trail for granted. He doesn’t know that I’m in a bubble every time out (or in as it were.) He doesn’t understand that while, in the end, I will always take sunshine over fluorescent tubes, fresh air over gym mold, and tar over treadmill rubber, that such a process of decision comes so far in second place that it is rendered nearly irrelevant. Firstly, I just love to run. After all, I am a runner.

Snoopy Made Me Do It

2006-05-06T07:24:00.000-07:00

(Originally published in Cape Cod Community College’s ‘The MainSheet’ 2/11/06)

“Newsflash: Thousands of Muslims stormed and set fire to the Danish Embassy in Beirut after a newspaper in Denmark published cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed. One person was killed in the attack.” –AP Wire

I can’t remember the last time I was so moved by a cartoon that I burned down an embassy. I mean, really, that’s just crazy. In the heady early 90’s, I knew in my heart that if those rascals Ren and Stimpy wished for me to send a stack of signed, blank checks to the playroom at a rehabilitation facility for problem gamblers and narcotics addicts, I’d do it without a second thought. Even so, I must ask myself, could a cartoon get me to do something violent? Something so without conscience? Something so against the very religion I adhere to that a desire to maim and kill others would undoubtedly have to be motivated by some total lack of identity and apathetic participation in mob rule? Maybe, but that might call for the command of God (Tex Avery) himself.
I mean, I can’t tell you how many times that Hagar the Horrible made me want to get off the couch and go beat up a Viking, but I maintained my sense of tolerance and civility. If the Road Runner gets your blood boiling the way he/she/it does mine, well then you know what I’m talking about (“Beep-beep, my ass...)

Fortunately, I’m an adult now. I like to think that no matter how angry I get at people that poke fun at even the things I hold most dear (i.e. someone badmouthing Jimmy Buffet… oh wait that’s me that badmouths Jimmy Buffet) that I can still find a way to pile it on - I mean, take it - with a grain of salt (and no, not on my margarita, thank you) and/or a rational retort.
If an offensive image appeared on television, it might be appropriate to write a letter to or call the station and voice your anger, I mean really voice it, like, in place of prepositions, use profanity. If it appeared in a newspaper, write a letter to the editor or stop by her office and bang on the window ceaselessly for, oh I don’t know, four or five hours, preferably on a Friday. But really, firebombs? Because something that was drawn in a format intended to entertain children (or at the very least appeal to the child-like perceptive qualities of our oh-so-adult brains) made you mad? Aww, poor baby. Maybe baby wants to get a real idea of the parts about compassion and peace in his Koran? Does that make baby feel better? Aww, that makes baby think for himself. Aww, baby’s brain hurts. Poor baby. Poor grown up baby.
I make this distinction because real babies - the ones who have only been of this earth for a matter of months - are nearly perfect; their only flaw being their need to make a heck of a lot of noise and throw things when they don’t get what they want. The other babies are different, in decidedly more dangerous ways.
These babies are everywhere it seems. Babies in the U.S. who bomb abortion clinics or show up at the funerals of people who died of AIDS with signs that read “God Hates Fags.” There are babies that go on national television to say that the hurricane that devastated an entire city and killed thousands of people was resultant of God’s anger with said city for its unholy ways. Babies are everywhere. The only problem is that many of them weigh upwards of 160 pounds, which would seem to indicate adulthood (or way too much formula.) Unfortunately, such maturity is not necessarily present. But since they’re so big, they have the ability to hurt other people, often as a result of not using their itty bitty baby brains to think beyond “cartoon make me mad, me kill cartoon-maker, me still like Danish cheese, me conflicted…”
Real babies, who could care less about their origins because they are perfectly contented little Buddhas, grow into children who ask “where did I come from?” who turn into teenagers who ask “Can you get high by smoking banana peels?” who become adults that realize “No, you can’t” It’s that simple.
Oh yeah, somewhere along the line, most people get an answer to the question they asked when they were children. The answer is rarely definitive, sometimes beautiful, and only a precursor for violence if the person asking hasn’t gotten it yet that you do something other than go crazy when something doesn’t go according to your (or your god’s) plan. Grow up, babies, and have some #@$%&! Havarti.

The Dope Show Continues

2006-04-26T09:38:00.000-07:00

This week, Miami Dolphins running back Ricky Williams was suspended for the entire 2006 season for violating the National Football League’s substance abuse policy for a fourth time. The illicit drug he was found to have in his system in each of his offenses was marijuana. Williams has never tested positive for any performance-enhancing drug, nor has there ever been any evidence of any other illegal substance discovered in or on him. The extraordinarily talented Williams has long been a controversial character due not only to his repeated marijuana violations, but for his having walked away from the sport for a brief period as well as his affection for meditation, yoga, art and his being unusually soft-spoken and articulate for a football player.

Barry Bonds will break Henry Aaron’s all time Major League Baseball career home run record by season’s end if his oft-injured knee holds up. Bonds almost certainly takes - or at the very least has taken – steroids. Steroids increase an athlete’s ability to perform by reducing healing time after workouts or injury and thereby artificially maximizing training sessions and increasing strength and power. Unfortunately, they can have what most might consider negative side effects, such as cancer, a tendency to precipitate aggressive behavior and shrunken genitals.
Major League Baseball has known about not only Bonds’ use of steroids for years, but of widespread, consistent use throughout its 30-team network.
Baseball’s tacit approval of the use of such drugs can be understood simply as its turning a blind eye in response to economic pressure.

MLB’s popularity and revenues had been in continuous decline since the early 1980’s and its heroes had long gone away. Pete Rose had been busted for gambling and subsequently banned for life, marquee teams like the Yankees and Red Sox were struggling to fill their own and visiting ballparks and the only shining star in Baseball’s otherwise darkened sky was a man by the name of Ripken whose claim to fame was having played more consecutive games than anyone else, albeit often rather well.
So when, in 1998, Messrs. Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa came along and chased Roger Maris’ 37 year old single season home run record of 61, everyone – public and baseball executive alike – was willing to ignore the fact that while Sosa alone would have appeared to be cartoonishly large, next to the pockmarked, gargantuan McGwire, he almost looked normal. That year, McGwire hit 70 home runs, Sosa 66. In 2001, Bonds hit 73.

Baseball more than any other sport, measures its significance and allure by numbers. It is constantly in balance with offense and defense with the common denominators being the rules of the game and the geometry of the ballparks as they relate to the players. While there has been, at times, an uneven evolution of ability in certain aspects of the game, the balance has remained consistent, existing in a state of - as more than one cheesy scribe has put it – perfect Zen.
It cannot be stressed enough that while advances in strength training and nutrition have produced far greater results than were possible in the time of Mantle and Maris, to go - in one generation - from two guys with farm-boy roots and roping forearms who can hit a ball 430 feet to weight room freaks with acne and gigantic heads who can knock a horsehide straight out of a stadium takes more than “Body by Jake” videos. It takes drugs; performance enhancing drugs. Were these drugs shown to have no negative side effects, it would seem logical that they become an unhindered part of the sports landscape. For the same reason that athletes seeking to build mass today eat things other than raw eggs and steak, the evolution of knowledge in nutrition will continue to reap benefits for not only athletes, but for the rest of the population. However, it is because steroids have conclusively been shown to have consistently negative side effects that they cannot be legal in sports at any level. It is simply not fair to make an athlete have to decide between his or her career and his or her health. It is very much the same as sexual harassment in that regard.

Now, back to Ricky Williams.
Marijuana has never been considered a “performance enhancing drug,” as even a brief listen to any live Grateful Dead concert will confirm. For anyone who has ever smoked grass, it is no great realization that one would likely not want to attempt to run away from a 280 lb. lineman with 4.5 speed when one cannot even consistently grab a Dorito because one keeps missing the bag’s opening because one cannot see the bag’s opening due to the tears welled up in one’s eyes as a result of the hysterical laughter inspired by the way one’s dog is looking at the television.
It is highly unlikely that Williams ever was high at practice or a game. The NFL has marijuana on its “banned” list because marijuana is illegal and the NFL is trying to keep a shiny - however perverse - all-American reputation intact, which is no small feat when a large part your fan interest is derived from a desire by most to see enormous men try to kill each other.
Steroids, unlike marijuana, create an uneven playing field; they distort history, they confound statistics and they promote an unfair advantage.

Barry Bonds will likely play out this season and Major League Baseball will then truly move forward with its inquiries. Unfortunately for its fans, the action will come too late and the damage will be irreparably done.
The National Football League, meanwhile, will uphold the suspension of one of its kinder and more colorful characters due to an, at best, misinformed and misguided rule. Were Ricky Williams to break one of the NFL’s cherished records, his being a pot smoker would hardly taint the occasion. In fact it would likely quickly become less of an important “example” to show the impressionable and more a late-night talk show joke.
If Barry Bonds breaks Hank Aaron’s record, baseball, as we know it - already hanging onto its history by a thread - is over.

Murder, Mayhem and Mass Millions

2006-04-19T09:12:00.000-07:00

I’ve never been a bumper sticker guy. However, I can’t argue with this: “The lottery is like a tax for people who are bad at math.” Now, that’s a bumper sticker.
As much as I respect those among my friends who profess on their bumpers a hatred of George Bush, a hope for whirled peas, instructions on what toll-free number to call if one wishes to dine on excrement in the event that the reader is less than impressed with the car operator’s driving tendencies, or even conclusions regarding piping plover taste tests, I cannot and will not join their ranks. Until now.

When I am at a Cumberland Farms, a Tedeschi’s, or any other of the rich, warm quilt of evenly placed food marts in our humble, wonderfully zoned region, more than half the time I end up behind some blessed septuagenarian, systematically spending his or her hard earned Social Security check on Mass Millions or Cash Winfall or Megabucks. Now, as I am prone to stereotyping, I will try to avoid jumping the three, well-marked inches to the conclusion that Fred the 71 year old pipe installer with the Masonic ring is likely a Republican who likely at least once in the past month – if not since breakfast – has made some sort of unfavorable comment regarding the status of illegal immigrants in this country (especially the brown ones) and how they are largely if not solely responsible for the downturn in the economy, high gas prices, violent television, us losing the war and "fags." In fact, everything and everyone else besides Fred has had a hand in helping him to arrive at the checkout counter of this very food mart, carefully investing in his future, picking tickets like a more speculative type would pick stocks. He’s going to win and he’s going to thank God when he does and he’s going to go to Foxwoods and blow it all and he’s going to be back at this very counter next year blaming the Pakistani convenience store clerk for selling him the winning ticket in the first place. In the meantime, I’ll still be standing behind him or one of his friends, waiting oh-so-patiently to pay for my chips and gas, finding not only the lottery, but the lighters shaped like cell phones, the $10 baseball cards and the rolling papers more and more attractive as the minutes pass.
I especially love how when Fred, Maggie (or whatever bag of protein is filling the orthopedic shoes in front of me) notices my definitely palpable impatience, they seem to slow down, if that’s possible, and really take their time with the choices they’re making. “Hmmm… I could get ‘Lucky 7’s’ but I won $20 on those in February. Maybe ‘Pot o’ Gold.’ Nope, Jimmy got $100 last week and then busted his leg at the Elks Club; bad luck there.” I’ll get an angry glance that says, “I’ve earned the right to stand here simply by existing on this earth longer than you and I’m gonna do it,” which is the kind of logic that is essentially on an even scale with my saying, “I can forcibly remove you from the checkout counter because I’m younger, stronger and since I haven’t blown my earnings on the %$#@! Lottery, I can easily post bail.”

The great singer (formerly of Black Flag and presently of Rollins Band,) speaker, writer and all-around righteous dude, Henry Rollins, once proposed that there should be varying degrees of murder for people that waste the time of others in such a fashion. His reasoning is that life is finite and the 5 minutes someone spends arguing with the lady at the airport ticket counter about why he should be able to bring a cleaver in his carryon luggage should be considered as 5 minutes less you have in the length of your life. If there are 3 degrees of murder and manslaughter, perhaps an offense of this type should be, say, 16th degree; a “life-larceny,” of sorts. I like that. If someone wants to charge me with that when I’m 70 years old and clogging up the line at “Romney’s Hydrogen and Refuse Mart” in what were formerly the pristine dunes of Truro, great. I’ll pay the $600 (if I have it after I fork over the $20 for M&M’s and the National Enquirer with the photos of a scantily clad Suri Cruise-Holmes caught on a Bali beach with President Rick Santorum) and be on my way.
Until then, move it, Gramps. As much as I appreciate your generous contributions to the state coffers resultant of your poor knowledge of arithmetic and as glad as I am that my road gets plowed because of it, I sense that your luck is in grave danger of running out.

Don't Let the Door Hit Your Perfect Ass on the Way Out

2006-04-05T01:50:00.000-07:00

I love what happens to people on their way out. I mean, as in dying, being canned, or just plain leaving for greener pastures (See “Exiting Presidents: Chapter 41- ‘This is the last we’ll see of George Bush.’”)
They – and by “they,” I mean the famous among us – are eulogized in such hyperbolic praise that even I, who am as hyperbolic as Mr. Peepers is hyperactive, am disgusted by the sheer melodrama played out every time some otherwise forgettable character is elevated to god-like status simply by the act of exiting.
As one example of this phenomena, I give you Richard Nixon, who’s only redeeming quality was his having given comedians a long sought break as they were exhausted from trying to impersonate LBJ. Nixon died a little less than twelve years ago.
For the unaware, Nixon set the mold for an entire generation of politicians to commit underhanded, illegal, unethical acts for the benefit of themselves and their friends. No, he didn’t start such behavior, as the Kennedy brothers and many if not all politicos before them abused power like Ike abused Tina. Nixon just did it shamefully and with such verve and audacity, that even then Secretary of State Henry “Power is the Ultimate Aphrodisiac” Kissinger must have raised his eyebrows and given Tricky Dick the big “Whoa, dude,” or more likely, just one soft “Oy…”
When Nixon kicked, it was only a matter of moments before Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings and all sorts of otherwise sensible television journalists (and how ugly and untrue do those last three words look together) simultaneously lost their minds and began singing the praises of a man who was responsible for the deaths of millions of Vietnamese and Cambodians (the latter to whom Nixon said “We’re not doing so well over here in Viet Nam, so….Howdy, Neighbor!”) Not to mention making Elvis Presley a deputy drug prosecutor, ironically, so soon before his death from – drugs.
Bizarre. Though I suppose it is perhaps our desire to ultimately see the good in everyone as we realize the gift of life itself trumps all judgments we make in this plane of existence. As if it is a humility we must embrace when faced with mortality in order to give us the courage to not be overwhelmed by simply the idea of life itself.
Of course, this does nothing to explain why Dale Earnhardt is called a “hero.” Up until his death, I imagine that even a great many of his fans shared a belief with his detractors that he was, in addition to being rather extraordinarily talented at driving around in a circle very fast, a belligerent redneck. But, boom, into - not so ironically - a wall his car went and now there are big #3’s on trucks everywhere. On thousands of bedroom and gas station walls you will find portraits of a man wearing an expression so tender and compassionate that he looks more like a kindly church usher than the man who’s nickname was “The Intimidator,” not to intimate that I am anything other than quite intimidated by church ushers (I always half expect to get poked with a cattle prod.)
In an entirely more irrational example, just because he actually-and-for-really did a lot of bad things to people, there is also no reasonable explanation for Ronald Reagan being remembered so fondly. Nor his wife, for that matter (oh wait, she just looks dead.) He made greed cool, he disenfranchised the poor, he grew the military-industrial complex into a bigger beast than Wal-Mart (alright, it’s not that perverse and corrupt,) and he did it all after building a solid career on the bloodied backs of blacklisted former friends in Hollywood who he happily turned in to the FBI as godless communists and enemies of the USA. Many of those folks never worked again and their families and personal lives disintegrated like so much old celluloid, while good old Ron smiled, waved, and told Mr. Gorbachev to “tear down this wall,” which Gorbachev had intended on doing for some time anyway without the opportunistic Reagan barking orders at him via CNN. Then, after a lengthy battle with Alzheimer’s that began to really take hold sometime early in his second term as President of the United States of America, he left for that big convention in the sky, no doubt shooting spitballs at Che Guevara and complaining to Saint Peter that “Che started it.”
I bring all this up because I heard two things the other day that struck me as ridiculous, and one was compounded by the other.
Tom DeLay, the former House Majority Leader and Republican Representative from Texas, resigned from his seat in Congress after corruption charges against him had begun to pile higher than a stack of two dollar bills in the back room of Zachary’s Pub on a Saturday night. DeLay bowed out and went, faster than you can say “Compassionate Conservatism,” from the guy every politician on either side of the aisle in this country was afraid to call “asshole,” just because of the high degree to which he is one, to the guy who was being hailed as “a real ‘get-things-done’ kind of a fella who everyone respected and loved,” who “really cared about his country.” Right. Like, he won’t be parlaying the proverbial gold watch he’ll receive into some sort of revenge on whoever dropped the ball and led to his indictment. What made this even more hysterical was the same Republican Party consultant I heard eulogizing the dear, departed DeLay compared him, in a very complimentary manner, to Newt Gingrich, citing Gingrich as an example of “intelligent leadership in the conservative movement.” Intelligent? Perhaps. Nuts? Definitely. It was great. It was the double whammy of utterly ridiculous canonization. It was a two-fer-one. It was like I died, went to hell, and not only got to see Jimmy Buffet play 147 songs in a row, but as it turns out, learn that he was just the opening act for the Eagles. Oh happy day.
Hey, when I go, I want people to say whatever is true. I want them to say, “Yeah, y’know, he really made me laugh, he smelled of running shoes. Honestly, I just can’t remember much else about him. Oh well. Hey! Quit bogarting the Mountain Dew!” I want to be whole when I’m here and nothing more when I’m gone.
Were any of these guys victims of an oh-we-just-didn’t-realize-how-blessed-we-were-to-have-them-in-our-presence, innocently apathetic mentality? Please.
By conveniently removing the mistakes from the book of history, not only do we reduce a collection the size of a James Michener box set to a Soap Opera Digest, we also run the risk of repeating the same errors in a seemingly ever-shortening amount of time. Need proof? Check out the 43rd President of the United States of America. May history recall him accordingly.

"I've Been Arrested By You, Take Me In..."

2006-03-30T12:04:00.000-08:00

“I see dead people.” I don’t know about you, but I’m fairly afraid of dead people when they’re walking around. Call me a wuss, but they give me the heebie jeebies. “I see cops.” This one scares me more, and I’ve been sober and law-abiding for years now. No, it’s not because I was once a criminal or on the lam, it’s because dead people seem to be less threatening and less ever-present.

I was in Ireland for a week last month and my friends and I used a rental car to get around the country. It’s a damned good thing that the rental contract stipulated no limit to the mileage we were putting on the car (nor did it explicitly discourage leaving small bits of the transmission on the roads of Cork, as we each took a turn learning how to shift with the left and clutch with the right) because we drove everywhere, two or three times it seemed. We put twelve hundred miles on that formerly pristine Toyota in five days. We saw one cop. We drove through cities, towns, burgs, counties and - on at least one occasion - a field full of sheep. We saw one cop. He was parked on the side of a road sitting in his neon yellow cruiser, speaking with a guy from a construction crew.
One cop. Twelve hundred miles. Five days. I imagine there were plenty of others around, but we just didn’t see them.
Now, be assured that I’m not going to play Ice-T here and yell out “Cop Killer!” (Though those who get all up in arms about Ice’s band Body Count’s song all those years ago might want to read up on the past behavior of the Los Angeles police department before they berate him.) I don’t hate cops and I’m not so naïve that I don’t believe them to be necessary for the existence of a just and civil society (which I hope to someday live in, if not here, maybe in Norway.) Cops respond to emergencies, they keep spouses from getting beaten up, they protect kids and everyone else, they stop thieves and perform lots of other useful duties. It’s their job and I realize it’s a hell of a lot harder than mine (except in August, as I’m a waiter who in that month ends up with more frayed nerves than a Bomb Squad technician with Parkinson’s.)
However, I have been counting the number of consecutive days during which at one point or another I have seen a cop. I’m at twenty-one. Oddly enough, I returned from Ireland twenty-one days ago. Some days I drive ten miles, some days a hundred. I usually see a cruiser within two or three. Then again, I live in Eastham.
I drove to Boston the other day and saw one police helicopter overhead, nine State Police cruisers along the way, ten local cops and couldn’t help but notice the cameras on the light poles on 93N. Has anyone ever read “1984” by George Orwell? How about “Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury? Some folks (and I use the term “folks” to imply pleasant, down-home, lobotomized morons) say “Well, if you haven’t done anything wrong, there’s nothing to be afraid of.” Again, has anyone ever read “1984,” by George… catch my drift?

The city is one thing. Crime, murder and mayhem are rampant in any city in this country and yes, subtract cops and I’m certain the situation would grow exponentially worse and fast. But this is Cape Cod, and the only place I don’t feel entirely safe is Hyannis, and that’s only because I can’t swim and I fear I might be chased into a sewage pond by Mall Security.
Does knowing there are police officers close by in the case of an emergency allow me to sleep easier? I suppose so, but quite honestly, I give it about as much thought as my car insurance. Does a constant police presence make me feel safer? Not even remotely. Why do I feel less safe and ultimately less free? Because it’s their job.
These people have families, they have lives, they have dreams and desires. If crime goes down or there is a demonstrated lack of necessity for a large police force, cops will lose their jobs. Cops, of course, don’t manufacture crime in order to remain employed, but like any employee, public or otherwise, their job security is only as assured as the need for them.
As an example of justice gone self-serving, a man I know was recently convicted of second degree murder. Without getting into the gory details of the case, let me state that he did in fact do something wrong, but nearly every legal analyst on either side of his predicament expected a manslaughter charge to be levied. Why was it not? The prosecuting Assistant DA was a young prosecutor who had been pressured by the state to come up with as tough a sentence as possible. She needed this on her resume and the state needed this as an example. It had very little to do with justice for the victim, a crystal meth dealer who had raped the perpetrator hours before dying. It had everything to do with the interests of a justice system so deep in red tape, bureaucracy and job security that by the time it came to pay, too many hands were out for anything in the form of mercy or fairness to be given to the man who was going to jail for at least 20 years.

Cops need to be needed. Budgets don’t shrink. Once a helicopter is added to the mix, it stays.
It’s not as if the police are so depraved that they wish for crime and badness to befall their municipality, to think that would be ridiculous. I truly believe that most of them got involved because they thought they could help people and make a positive difference. But now it’s their livelihood and regardless of how noble an officer’s heart is, he or she will rightly put the mouths he or she must feed ahead of a sense of societal balance and justice. I can’t blame them, I can only blame the people who approve their budgets and sign their checks. In the meantime, “I see cops,” and lots of them, and I - law-abiding citizen of the low-crime-rate Town of Eastham that I am - have the heebie jeebies.

Donna

2006-03-27T16:20:00.000-08:00

When I was four years old, my father was a sales executive for the local steel foundry and, consequently, there seemed to be a neverending stream of lame and broken men and women with hairpieces flowing through our living room.
I would entertain the frequent, unsuspecting guests that visited our house with trite jokes and hors d’oeuvres made of Saltines topped with salt (not a big hit among the ones with explosively high blood pressure, which were many, as we lived at the time in Myerstown, Pennsylvania, the absolute heart of the Bologna Belt).
Along with my famous dry sodium-shingles and my tried and true vaudeville act, I would further engage my audience with a little broken English. By this I do not mean that I struggled with expressing myself using the common native language, as in that area I was at least at the level of most eight-year-olds, or possibly Strom Thurmond. I mean to say that I tried to pull off a British accent that I thought sounded most convincing, for some reason, if spit out at 300 m.p.h., if speech can be measured in such a way. It was a neat little trick and I always got at least the courtesy laugh. I mean, who above the age of eleven was not going to give a four-year-old boy who sounded like Julia Child on methamphetamines at least a good old courtesy laugh, if only out of little more than fear. “ByjoveIthinkshesgotit!” I would speedily blurt out, assuming the posture and expression of a desperately insecure circus monkey, barely restrained by an invisible leash. “Oh my... right. Ha-ha-ha!” the rivet salesman from Allentown would nervously reply, quickly turning to the avocado plant to his left, pretending it had initiated a conversation about the Canadian trade tariffs proposed by Gerry Ford.
For this trick of mine and others like it, as well as my inability to draw within the lines in my coloring books (which, of course, initially seemed to indicate certain artistic talents but was later proven to be the result of far too much sugar and poor eyesight), I was enrolled in kindergarten a year earlier than everyone else, ensuring that in time I would be attending my prom with a mascara-enhanced peachfuzz mustache, a cracking voice, and enough uncontrollable hormones that I would start savagely humping the buffet.
I suspect that my parents reasoning in making this decision was twofold, in that 1) This would get me out of the house and allow my father to continue to age gracefully, and 2) This would get me out of the house and put a halt to my mother’s previously unknown condition that was causing her to age five years in the span of one day, if it so happened that on that day I chose to play one of my fun games with the neighborhood kids, such as “pin the tail on the deaf meter reader” (still my favorite).
So, off to school I went. I was three-foot-one, and while at home I’d grown comfortable with the way I towered over my grandmother, my fellow students appeared to all be at least twelve meters tall. However, there was one boy who was a bit smaller than me, which was a godsend. His name was Vincent and he was nearly subatomic. He, like me, could run very fast, especially when chased by Donna, the emaciated Laotian girl in the filthy pink dress who seemed to have full-body, extremely infected poison ivy during the entire school year.
Each recess, Vincent and I would just be standing around the playground, arrogantly discussing which direction offered us the most space in which to test our blazing speed, and out of nowhere would come Donna, mouth agape in a drooling, tongue-wagging mess, eyes the size of poached turkey eggs. And that pink dress, which as the school year went by, was looking more and more like something out of a George Romero movie. Come to think of it, Donna looked like something out of a George Romero movie.
We never really worried about getting touched by her, as when she ran she exhibited all the coordination of a box of long unused sports equipment tumbling down a flight of stairs, her head like a helmet bouncing off the railings and steps, her warped hockey stick legs tangling with each other as they savagely knocked everything near them. The sound of rubbing tape and frayed laminate filled the playground, emanating from a pink cloud of Calamine dust and spit.
No, we knew she would never actually catch us, it was simply the specter of her, the shadow she cast, and the heavy stench of layer upon layer of lotion and pus that made even the ten-foot demilitarized zone we usually enjoyed seem like not nearly enough distance.
To be truly free of Donna, we would have to kill her. However, since medical professionals had not yet begun handing out heavy, mood-altering drugs en masse and at the drop of a hat to small children, we just couldn’t seem to muster the psychotic anguish requisite to inspire such a move, so we just ran like hell.

Downhill Learning

2006-03-27T09:32:00.000-08:00

In the first half of 1982, I was the central figure in a cultural bloom of sorts that was so strange, flawed, artistically expansive and, ultimately, joyous that it made the Prague Spring look like the cocktail party before a figure skating competition.
My parents had been getting the dailies from the upcoming movie that my school’s guidance counselor was making about my impending psychological doom, and apparently it was a real old-school Exorcist-style shocker, because when the folks finally decided upon a course of action, the ensuing events were as unnerving as they were quick to unfold.
I was always a child who had a lot of time on his hands and not many people to spend it with. This is not to say that there were not other such loners locally, as many girls and boys (but mostly boys) that I knew were in the same boat. However, even they had little time for me as they were busy already honing the skills that would become invaluable later in their lives, such as when or when not to refer to someone as “my bitch,” or what color bandana goes best with a bright orange jumpsuit.
While these youngsters were torturing small animals, carving misspelled words into their arms, and lighting their siblings on fire, I could instead be found recording fake fart sounds on a tape recorder and gluing my fingers to the hood of the car.
It had been simple enough for my parents to accept my idiosyncrasies up until this point, especially since the I.Q. tests I’d recently undergone had finally laid to rest the nagging fear that I might be retarded. But as the B’s and C’s on my report cards magically transformed, and without much effort it seemed, into D’s and F’s, it was beginning to look as if my personally designed Waldorf-style approach to education was not working as well as we’d all hoped.
My mother, who comes from a long line of intensely mentally disturbed people from Pennsylvania (though that may be redundant), took the sudden emergence of these academic failings to mean that certain recent hormonal changes within me were not agreeing with my constitution. I could have told her that months before my grades dropped, as my ass had turned into a jiggling pair of misshapen cantaloupes and my voice made me sound as if I were gunning for third place at a goose-calling contest.
My parents arranged for me to begin seeing a child psychologist, which I took to mean that they could only afford to take me to some guy who couldn’t cut it as a psychiatrist and got sent to the minors.
While my parents felt hopeful, I was now terrified. My impression of head-doctors was that they would make every effort they could in trying to find the cure for what ails the mind of their patient, short of prescribing a lobotomy. And if all else failed, well, there was always the lobotomy. I’d made the mistake of renting the film “Frances” on beta only weeks before with the hopes of seeing Jessica Lange naked and as a nice little karmic lesson was left only with the fear that if I spoke my mind I’d quickly find myself staring down the wrong end of a freaking huge needle. I had failed at an incredible number of things in my life, given my age, and under this kind of pressure, I felt the odds were 6 to 1 that I’d soon be spending my days drawing with crayons on circular paper and trying not spill the contents of my drooltray into my Tang. The first doctor I encountered did little to allay these fears.
She was a 58-year-old former nun who, like many former nuns, had a queasy, preserved, formaldehyde smell about her. Whereas I thought anyone who’d just been sprung from convent life after 30 years would be showering on an hourly basis and buying new clothes of all sorts to try and shake the old feeling of the nunnery, she apparently was not quite ready to let go of all of its trappings, as along with the corpselike stench, she had brought, appropriately, a two-foot long cross with a bleeding Christ on it. I’m sure that as far as she was concerned, nothing could inspire a child to find the root of their being quite like the fragrant scent a of a stale, old, sexless woman and the looming specter of damnation, but I wasn’t quite sold on the idea. My parents, bless them, weren’t too keen on this either and were just about to remove me from her care, when, oops.... she died.
Well that took care of that, and pretty soon we had found a wonderful young man with a Ph.D. from Brown, a warm smile, a beautiful, large office, and ... a grossly misshapen hairlip.
I wanted to ask my parents if this were some sort of revenge that they were engaging in toward me and if it was, I wasn’t ready to give in, but instead was very curious as to just what they might have in store that could possibly top the dying, smelly nun and the genius with the radical facial deformity. What was next? An obese Teamster with a 10-inch hard-on? Perhaps a clown who could make a straightjacket out of ballons? I thought it best not to ask however, as I was hardly ready to accept that these ideas might pale in comparison to what actually lay ahead.
My new psychologist’s name was Geoff, and he spoke very clearly despite his lip problem, which quickly became less of a problem for me as I got to know him and began to see this man in a more humanistic light.
Our first few visits were primarily clinical, though not completely cold, in nature. Geoff would ask me questions regarding my school life up until then. He would ask about my friends, who I had always been reluctant to talk about with anyone for fear that a simple investigation would reveal that nearly all of them didn’t exist. I came to trust and admire Geoff, and as a result of this, I wanted to impress him. He struck me as very adult, which, I would imagine, was the impression he was going for, what with the doctorate from the Ivy League school and the wingtips. So when the subject turned to drug use, I saw this as a golden opportunity to flex the muscles of my B.P.U. (Bullshit Production Unit) that I’d recently had installed by former members of the Nixon White House.
Geoff asked me if I smoked marijuana, which I actually had. “Yes,” I replied. He asked me how often I smoked marijuana, which was once, and I said “Twice a day, every day. For years.”
Now had I stopped there, it could have signaled the beginning a glorious life of rehabs and support groups, but I had to push it.
He asked me if I snorted cocaine. I replied “Oh yeah, four or five times a day.” He inquired as to just how many Quaaludes I required to get through the day, “About ten or so, if it’s not a Monday,” I replied. “Jesus... Mondays, y’know?” Heroin? “Two or three a day, depending on how I’m doing at the track. You know how it is with the ponies.”
As my answers painted a clearer and clearer portrait that bore an uncanny resemblance to Keith Moon, Geoff was seeing a pattern develop. I remember his unsuccessful attempt at suppressing a grin after the Quaalude answer, as that must have been when he fully realized that I was yanking his ivy covered chain. I ,of course, thought that I was laying it on so perfectly that he was viewing me as a contemporary. One of my friend’s sisters had attended Brown in the ‘70s and relative to her accounts of the lurid goings-on there, the tales I was weaving regarding my imaginary drug use were not likely to stun a man who had just graduated from a school that handed out acid and speed as part of their “Welcome Weekend Tote Bag,” which also included a generous allotment of lubricant that you might want if you wished to participate in the Roman orgy continuously occurring in the Hall of Science.
And then, strangely, just as quickly as my drug use had reached such Stones-esque proportions, it subsided. As our sessions went on, Geoff assured me that I wouldn’t be needing all those substances anymore. I agreed thoroughly and told him that with his help, I knew I could stop. Often the cliché “easier said than done” is used in these situations. However in this instance, “even easier done than said” was entirely more applicable.
“I’m cured,” I stated rather matter-of-factly only a month later, making what I couldn’t possibly realize was a complete mockery of the hell I would endure some 18 years later. But from then on, our time together was spent walking down to the nearby pier, playing poker, and doing all sorts of other things that began to make my parents think that, while it was nice for me to have this kind of companionship, they could probably find someone from the local YMCA to pal around with me for a lot less than $100 per hour, and that’s even including the price of the necessary inoculations.
So ended the chapter of my life devoted to analysts, at least in the professional sense. My parents at least had apparently gleaned some knowledge of what made me tick from this experience, as the following months and years saw them taking me to films, concerts, sporting events, museums, and everything else short of strip shows and public executions, both of which I hope to take my children to someday. The very interesting thing about this ensuing cultural revival however, was that they assumed very separate roles in it. Sure, we still ate together, we still watched television together, and we traveled as a family to my tennis matches. But it was in the experiential expeditions that my parents felt each had something very singular to offer.
My mother is a woman who has always been so individualistic and of such superior intelligence that she was as much a natural to take the lead on affairs concerning my artistic enrichment as she was a shoe-in to be voted “Most Likely to Get the Hell Out of Pennsylvania” by her senior class, which voted by stomping on the floor once for “yes”, twice for “no”, and three times for “I still don’t understand. Could you please pass the sauerkraut?”
Once a week or so, she would take me to, usually, R-rated movies. I don’t mean to give the impression that she was taking me to the stripped down version of “Caligula” or “Porky’s 3”, but rather that we would go see films like “The Breakfast Club”, which had no nudity, and “Silkwood”, which featured a briefly naked but kind of disturbing and painfully scrubbed Meryl Streep, and “Witness” which, fortunately, showed the gorgeous Kelly McGillis nude but, unfortunately, did so in the context of her being Amish.
On the days that I was not being shuttled to this movie house and that or to this museum and that, I was cruising around with dad.
My father was a brilliant, handsome man who, despite his age of 69 years, commanded respect and attention and still turned the heads of women half his age, though sometimes this was simply because they were wondering if that smell was coming from him. Still, when we went places it was always as The Very Cool Old Guy and His Son Who Hopefully Won’t Become Another Frank Sinatra Jr.
We went to baseball games, where I was first introduced to the sport that would become, in conjunction with bebop jazz and an instinctive hatred of anything recorded by one James Buffet, the closest thing I have to religion.
I remember that this chapter in my existence was where I learned the importance of the strange duality of life as understood through the eyes of a Red Sox fan: The harder you wish to win, the less likely you are to do so, and the less likely it appears that you will win, the harder you must try. Words to live by, which is precisely why I often find myself rooting for other teams.
By far my favorite event that I would attend with my Pops was the annual tennis tournament held at the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, Rhode Island. My father had spent a great deal of time in Rhode Island in the 1930’s and he offered a unique and cherished perspective of the area. He had been enrolled at the aforementioned Brown University from 1933 to 1937, where orgies had been ruled illegal as one of the provisions of Prohibition, though cocaine was still passed around freely. Wherever we went, he had a rich and detailed story for it.
The Newport Casino, where the Hall of Fame Tournament was held, was home to some of the last, and by the far the finest, remaining grass tennis courts in the country. They were meticulously maintained entirely by, of course (in keeping with tradition), people of color earning just enough to starve; a fact that I was fortunate enough to be made well aware of by a father who had once been one of these people cutting the grass.
The tournament became an annual ritual for my father and I, and I looked forward to it every summer. We did stop going after four years however, as my father’s Alzheimer’s had begun to make the drive somewhat treacherous and ultimately misdirected.
I think it was after the time that we’d tried to get cheeseburgers at a bank that we decided it might be best to just go home.
At around the same time, I had begun to dye my hair and sport what would later be known as “The Sigue Sigue Sputnik Evening Wear Collection,” so though I was entirely up for shocking the traditionalists at the Hall, I couldn’t do so at the expense of my father’s dignity, especially since by this point he thought it was 1947, and trying to explain why my hair was pink would have taken too much energy that could better be spent just loving him.
But that was years later anyway.
I suspect that as my life goes on I will, as I do now, credit nearly every ridiculous and unexplainable creative thing that I do to that period of my life and the analysts who helped make it so strange and eventful, dead and alive, smelly and non.
Most of all, I thank my parents, without whose initial careless disregard of consequence after an all-night Tequila and stag-film bender I would not have been placed on this planet to begin with. Not to mention that I’d probably be taller.

Princeton Shminceton

2006-03-27T08:41:00.000-08:00

There is someone in my life whom I respect a great deal, though I disagree frequently with her on matters regarding class position and cultural ethics and semantics. She’s a bit of a blueblood, and I’m more than a touch trashy (what doesn’t go with Mountain Dew?)
One night I was going on about how my latent pursuit of knowledge in the form of higher education at one Cape Cod Community College was, to me, enriching, fulfilling and finally, likely profitable. With a smile, her head cocked to the side and her eyebrows raised, she assumed the expression my pre-school teacher had so many years ago as I showed her the purple turkey I drew (the one with the wings on backwards.) “Well, you’ll never get a good job unless you go to a good school,” she said, suddenly turning from bemused keeper of the potentially retarded young Navas to Brahmin infantrywoman. “The people at the top jobs care about those things.” I smiled as I assured her that a great part of the reason I was even attending college was to use the wisdom I would accumulate there to become better at avoiding precisely the people she spoke of.
I’d been a guest at more than a few development mixers at major museums, ballets and theaters and knew that the only thing worse than having your toenails pulled out one by one with vinegar-soaked ice tongs was listening to the idiot son of a Boeing executive talk about how integral he thinks the pop-art movement in late 90’s England is to the plight of Europe’s present working class and how the 10 foot high crucified sheep sculpture with the three toasters and a toilet seat glued to it is the most perfect symbol for that which he speaks of. Then, sizing you up, he decides that he’s sure your dinner jacket comes from Target and not Barney’s, which means that for the rest of the evening, you’ll be getting the same patronizing, thoughtless tone and half-smile from him that he thought he wouldn’t have to use until he saw the parking attendant. Oh, why was there only one Titanic?
I am reminded of class issues like this on a very regular basis, not only because I work as a waiter in a fine dining establishment, not only because I grew up playing the sport of tennis (which I admit less freely and with a greater degree of shame than the fact that I was once a crazed alcoholic who made Margot Kidder look like the Dalai Lama) and not only because this country is embracing class warfare and the idea of a caste system more and more as the days go by (how many more shows about rap stars’ extraordinarily huge houses with gold bathtubs do you want? Well don’t fret, there are five more due to premiere Monday.)
I am reminded of this because a good friend of mine - a sophisticated artist herself - and I spoke today about how so many former small liberal arts colleges are moving in the direction of becoming little more than prep programs for the corporate ladder. Economics has replaced Humanities. Business-Builders has replaced the Peace Corps. Money has overtaken knowledge as the yardstick of true wisdom.
I am reminded of this because I see dead people. No, not like Haley Joel Osment. I see them when I go to Boston, I see them here on Cape Cod. I see them as they see me. I notice them as they notice me. We notice we’re the same age. We notice that we have a plan. We notice that I couldn’t give a rat’s ass whether I am allowed in their club. We notice they want to be in mine, though I don't have one, because as Groucho said, "I wouldn't want to belong to any club that would have me as a member."
My friends? They base their judgment of a human on two things: one’s ability to love and the amount of bullshit clearly evident in one’s overall being. That’s basically it. A good sense of humor goes a long way, too, but it’s surprising how parallel that runs to the amount of crap in one’s soul. There are more people like this, and the funny thing is, they’re often the ones making the art that the people with the Prada bags want to hang in their condos in Reykjavic or simply prominently display their prominent name next to in a museum so everyone knows that "Artist" managed not to starve while "Patron" let everyone know how culturally advanced she was by noticing how talented "Artist" is.
It’s a crazy world. Someone ought to sell tickets. I’d buy one, especially if it gets me into the cocktail party at the Wilson Gallery afterwards. I want to mingle. (Just kidding.)

Pud

2006-03-27T08:30:00.000-08:00

When my father was a boy, he had a three-legged dog-named “Pud.”
Pud was missing his left, front limb, having lost the appendage in what the old man vaguely referred to as “a croquet mishap.”
My father had only recently arrived in the United States and having a pet like this afforded him even more notoriety in the small, rural Pennsylvania town he and his Spanish family had chosen as a new home than he would naturally warrant.
As if Pud’s mere appearance wasn’t enough to arouse the curiosity of the locals, he made sure his presence was certainly noted by siring not one, but two litters of pups within a matter of months. The country bitches had no idea what hit them.
My father, who told this story often, seemed quite proud of Pud’s sense of immediacy and focus. It was as if Pud was not only somehow representative of my father’s family’s strong Spanish pride, but was in fact related to them; like some long lost three-limbed cousin who was so full of testosterone, as evidenced by his outrageously thick coat of body hair, that he totally lacked any sense of self control and, as he was Spanish, was considered all the more sexy for it. If he were human, the town’s men would riotously applaud him before he was hung.
My grandfather, who I never met, lived a - according to my father - strange, illustrious and complicated life filled with sex and debauchery, not unlike Pud.
He died quite young, at 44 in fact. The family had always unanimously agreed that he was felled by lung cancer. However, presented with even a brief summary of the man’s life one would easily deduce that it was entirely more likely that the true cause of his early departure was the bug that conquered the Roman Empire rather than the illness that struck down the Marlboro Man.
Regardless, before leaving this planet for the Great Orgy in the Sky, he had the foresight to bring the whole brood to the U.S., having had a very influential friend pull a few strings in order to make sure the entire Navas brood was able to come over as one.
Through World War I and into the 1920’s, my grandfather was the linguist to the King
of Spain. He had mastered the major European languages at an early age, and then went on to learn many Arabic and Turkish dialects. These tools made him a very valuable asset to a kingdom that dealt with equal frequency with the rest of Europe as with the nations of Northern Africa and the Middle East.
According to family legend, at each stop on his diplomatic trail he planted a seed, but not necessarily in the tradition of Johnny Appleseed, really more like Pud.
Unfortunately, due to politics, politics, politics, as my grandfather’s haughty reputation began to grow as swiftly and unstoppably as a lesion on the fatty cerebellum of a gigolo linguist, his value to the kingdom as a connective commodity decreased in kind.
His removal from the governmental hierarchy seemed imminent, and so he began to consider a proposition he had received from one Thomas Alva Edison, a well-established American inventor who, some years earlier, had contacted him with a plan to produce the very first instructional language recording.
My grandfather decided to take Edison up on the offer. He had long been thinking of abandoning an increasingly volatile King, and the United States seemed as good a place as any to settle, especially since he’d heard from a fellow traveling sex-maniac friend of his that while in Europe or Africa or the Far East one might have to travel hundreds if not thousands of miles in order to commune with women of different colors and ways, in the U.S., a man need not walk more than a block to sample the earth’s rich bounty of female flesh. He pictured America as Heaven’s Apple Grove; each tree hanging heavy with breasts and lips of all flavors; Golden Delicious for he with a Swedish yearning, Red Rome’s if one lusted for a taste of Italy, Granny Smiths for, well… you know.
My grandfather knew that getting the whole family of three boys, three girls, a wife, and an amputee dog with unstoppable sperm across the Atlantic in one fell swoop was going to take a little finagling, since even back then in the nation’s formative years, U.S. Immigration was already beginning to establish and hone it’s policy of avoiding extending too open an invitation to any person burdened with the misfortune of being even slightly brown.
To make matters worse, one of my Dad’s sisters was in fact his half-sister, and in an abstract but genealogically sound way, also his aunt.
My grandfather had somehow managed to impregnate his wife and his wife’s mother within a six-month period. You can imagine how complicated birthday parties were. Until they learned the basics of human reproduction, the two half-sisters thought they were just strangely spaced twins. This could have remained little more than a deeply scarring family secret were it not for the fact that this blip could end up posing a serious threat to the smoothness of the tribe’s move.
U.S. Immigration and Naturalization policy required proof of legitimacy regarding all children coming in, so a lie of some sort would have to be concocted.
The scheme ended up being that the younger of the two girls, Olivia, the one whose
mother her sisters and brothers called “Grandma,” would become a cousin, orphaned by the tragic death of both of her parents in, not quite a croquet accident, but by an incident that indeed had a story, the telling of which some 75 years later would become considerably more ridiculous and unbelievable: the sinking of the Titanic.
What made this fabrication stranger yet was the simple fact that the ocean liner in question had gone down some 11 years prior, and since my father’s sister was only eight years old (and small even for that) at the time of this great migration, she would, in addition to pretending she was really only a peripheral character in the family order, have to assume the posture and disposition of a child with a terrible, genetic, (i.e. non-contagious), disease that caused her to not mature properly.
So, now this poor girl, who only days before the trip had been a healthy, happy eight-year old, living like royalty just down the street from one of Europe’s most powerful monarchs, would have to quickly and convincingly transform into a deformed, parentless, disheveled rag of a thing, just waiting to die on the shores of a new land, with hope in her heart, invisible water on her brain, and blind faith in her insane family.

Maybe it was because each of them occupied such a particularly odd station in an already particularly odd family that Pud and Olivia had a bond. They enjoyed a relationship that the rest of the family was simply, not altogether unintentionally, excluded from.
Both were essentially novelties to the family; Pud as sideshow stud, Olivia as a sort of faux Tiny Tim, though since her maladies were fictitious, she received none of the sympathy afforded the Dickens character.
My father’s family perceived reality as something that needed to be nourished and cultivated, like a soup that - left to its own devices - would remain little more than a pot of water with some meat and vegetables floating in it, were it not for the steady hand of a devoted chef guiding it towards perfection.
They held no illusion that the story of life might cease to unfold were they not there to put their collective or individual touches to it, rather that it would be about as exciting as a bullfight with no matador if someone, someone from the Navas family specifically, was not present to ritualistically slay the mighty beast, draping it in fine silks that dangled and flowed from long, bouncing, bloody darts and swords.
That’s how my father’s father was, that’s how my father’s mother was, and that’s how everyone except Olivia and Pud were.
Everyone but Olivia and Pud had come into this world with a sense of privilege, entitlement and destiny. Each of them possessed a stare that could freeze the sun and make the ocean run for cover. Each of them chose his or her words, cutting words, very carefully, yet spoke them with such quick, lucid ease that the venom the seemingly harmless utterances contained had already silently slipped into the target’s heart long after there was any chance at an antidote being prescribed, much less effectively administered.
Olivia, on the other hand, was prone to often telling her siblings (all five of them) and parents (all three of them) that she loved them. This was unsettling, especially to my grandfather.
“Love,” my father’s father would say, was a word whose sound “I would hope only to hear in the presence of a priest giving last rites, preferably to me.”
The word gave him a queasy feeling, and if asked why, he would likely have said something to the effect that its use offended his sense of integrity. He would say that he felt it had lost any real value, having been thrown about by so many hackneyed pretenders just looking for a good time; by so many clods on the clumsy prowl for easy action; by so many lotharios to so many Arabic, Egyptian, Italian, Moroccan, Dutch, Finnish, English, Danish, German, Greek, Russian, Indian, Japanese, Chinese and Swedish women who had been too weak and so desperately in need of the emotional sustenance that the word represented that they left their brains in the bedroom hallway as they, time and time again, failed to reject the clumsy advances of such tired, clichéd, amateurs.
“I love you, Papa,” Olivia would say, and Papa would wrinkle his nose and cross his legs. He was brought up in a strict Roman Catholic tradition, and he had felt guilt in every
part of his body, but never quite so strong as he did in a particularly delicate area every time Olivia said those words, which she said nearly every day, if not to him, to another member of her consistently unnerved family
Many people, she would learn the hard way as life went on, say the words simply because they hope to hear them immediately repeated in their direction. “They may as well be saying it to a mirror,” Olivia would say to herself when she was 23 years old, her soon-to-be-revealed-as-gay boyfriend having the evening before said the phrase to her some twenty-one times, she estimated, during his bombardment of repeated drunken, requests for her to permit him to bring a man to bed with them. His begging had been fruitless, his persistent declarations of affection gone unreturned.
“I love you,” she told her mother. She always smiled while saying this, because the whole reason for saying it could be broken down into three simple parts: 1) It made Olivia smile, 2) It made other people smile, eventually, she hoped, and 3) She meant it.
“I love you,” she would say to Pud, and Pud would wag his tail so violently that, given his lack of proper ballast, he would invariably fall over in a matter of seconds. Pud liked being loved, and Olivia liked that she was getting the desired response. Happiness.

Pud had a lot of love to give; even after leaving so much of it all over the neighborhood, and each day he found new ways to distribute the love, albeit by more figurative, less paternity-concerned methods.
Pud often began his mornings with a quick jog out to the nearby golf course. The course was owned by a prestigious, private club, and the Navas house bordered the 16th fairway, protected, barely, by a sparse collection of dogwoods and young spruce trees.
The house had become a favorite target of duffers with terrible slices, and once the word had gotten out that the people in the house were immigrants, the scenes of projectile-driven carnage that regularly took place there could almost be perceived as some strange preview of Pearl Harbor. Nonetheless, each morning, Pud would trot out confidently amid the hail of missiles and make his rounds.
What Pud could not have known was that his appearance as a three-legged dog, how ever much a source of strength it had become to the struggling, demented family, was startling to the town’s residents, especially those who happened to playing golf at 7 a.m., and especially those 7 a.m. golfers who were still drunk from the night before, which were nearly all of them, as golf, rich society folk and heavy, heavy drinking went together like, well, like it always will. The golfers, having commenced play around sunrise, would usually be on the 16th fairway, or the front porch, by 7 or so.
As Pud was the pet of a linguist, it would not be far-fetched to surmise that he might actually be able to understand a variety of English slang terms. This theory would be supported by his jumping high in the air and doing a full somersault each time a startled, pickled, golfer would yell something like, “Jesus Christ! What in the hell is that?!” at the sight of him. Such proof was offered often.

“Holy shit, Phil! Did you just see what I saw?!”

- somersault; lots of wagging -

“Godammed thing looks like it should be dead!”

- another somersault; more wagging -

“Christ on a crucifix, Reggie! That’s the ugliest looking dog I have ever in my life
seen!”
- somersault -.

“Hey Reg, that thing looks kind of like the puppies your Wolfhound just had...”

- a contented, satisfied look and just one, quick wag of the tail -

“…shut the hell up, Phil.”

Pud’s days weren’t always this enjoyable, but more often than not, his morning stroll was generously peppered with the sweet sounds of the fully weirded-out.
Following his initial parade, he would stroll over to the pond between the 4th and 5th hole, where, after a few slurps of water that could cause birth defects in children and a couple of choice bites of goose droppings, he would flop down for a nice long nap.
He was seldom disturbed, either because of the hour, or the particular spot, or because of his being potentially mistaken for a dead - possibly as the result of voodoo - dog.
However there were a couple of instances where his rest was interrupted.
He had been poked with a stick on one occasion.
A group of young boys had happened upon the resting, flaccid Pud and were daring each other to “touch the dead dog.” Of course, it wasn’t long before one of them was dared to the limit. And of course, it was only a matter of seconds after this that Pud revealed that he was indeed still quite of this earth by moving his remaining front leg in a quick, jerky fashion, a reaction that could very well have come as much from the stick as from a dream Pud may have been having (perhaps one in which he had four legs and there were miles of golf courses populated by nothing but incontinent geese.)
Regardless, the children fled, shrieking like monkeys on fire as they ran fast across the manicured landscape.
Another time he found himself waking up in a trashcan, bumping along in the back of a slow-moving old truck driven by the assistant groundskeeper. Again his powers as a terrifying force came to the fore as he jumped out of the barrel and ran ahead of the unsuspecting driver. The driver, so startled by the sight of what he deduced must be the ghost of the ugliest dog he’d ever seen, turned the wheel so abruptly and violently that the meandering truck did a gentle turn and roll onto its side, its occupant actually sort of walking off the tipping machine as it went. Shaken, the assistant groundskeeper rubbed his eyes and took another hard look at the animal-spirit now trotting across the 7th green. “Sweet mother of Moses” he whispered, loud enough for only a dog to hear.

- somersault - .

-end-

"How Green Was My Bally?" or "Beyond the Bally of the (Lou) Rawls" (oh, that's just fucking ridiculous)

2006-03-27T08:20:00.000-08:00

I may be a stupid American (a term that while watching the Torino Olympics seemed to become increasingly redundant,) but I do know coffee. And now I know bad coffee. I mean really bad coffee. Like, as in “make-you-cry-like-you-just-watched-Bambi-right-after-your-dog-got-hit-by-a-car-and-your-ice-cream-fell-on-the-ground” bad coffee.
A fellow java fanatic who had recently been to Ireland had warned me about the quality and treatment of the bean on the Emerald Isle. Though she is occasionally prone to hyperbole, I’ve found her assessment of the situation to have been grossly understated. To say this coffee was merely “bad” is to say Jimmy Buffet is “sort of crappy.” But why focus on the negative? I’m coming back from one of the most beautiful places on earth. “40 shades of green”? Try 10 times that. Nice people? You’d be hard pressed to find Buddhists on Ecstasy as smiling and helpful as the Irish. It’s really a bit frightening when you come from a region that makes prison look warm and congenial. Again, why focus on the negative? Pride mostly, which as I will explain, has been slightly reevaluated for me by the gentle hand of Eire.
Ireland. Incredible landscapes. Stunning, humbling history. Utterly bizarre and consistently unhealthy breakfasts. Terrible coffee.
By “terrible” I mean weak. Weaker than the argument for going to war in Iraq. Weaker than an anorexic midget after 5 hours of arm wrestling. It is what Coors Light is to Guinness. It is what Matchbox 20 is to Motorhead. Weak. Through its translucent, beige glow, you could read the bible without your glasses on. You could read the fine print on your cell phone contract (which one makes more sense to you? I’m torn myself.) During the trip, I took to augmenting the six to nine cups with which I would begin the day (I normally have two) with Red Bull. I would have gladly welcomed crystal methamphetamine into my routine were it not for the danger its production posed to the plumbing of the Long Quay Guesthouse Bed and Breakfast.
Speaking of breakfast, over the course of the last six days, I have ingested at least eleven different types of meat totaling 29 pounds. As a runner, I’d be concerned about my cholesterol were it not for the coffee acting as a blood thinner.
All week, I was focused on two things above all else: my friend’s wedding (as it was the true center of this trip) and the Ballycotton 10 Miler road race. My heart attack, which seemed inevitable, would most likely happen at the latter. Though I do get fairly emotional at weddings, I doubted that even a real tearjerker would get my pulse up into the 170 range. All week, as I inhaled round after round of what is known as “The Full Irish Breakfast,” I pictured my head blowing up somewhere around the six mile mark, its contents landing Jackson Pollock-like on the lush, green fields and unsuspecting sheep.
The Full Irish Breakfast consists of two or three “banger” sausages (picture breakfast links made of meat and overcooked oatmeal), two pieces of thick, fatty bacon, two eggs (scrambled or fried), white toast and two pieces of “pudding.” Now, this pudding is not the kind you’re going to see Bill Cosby happily hawking on TV to little kids. Nor is it the type of stuff you get in Germany, which is basically cooked, clotted blood. No this is the stuff hot dogs are made of, plus grains, plus blood. Yummy. And, as an added bonus, it allegedly acts as an aphrodisiac, according to our gap-toothed, lisping B&B owner. This last effect comes in handy, as no one is feeling particularly sexy after living on little more than Guinness and animal byproducts for a week. Oh yeah, they throw a half of a very small tomato on there for color, without which your plate would be a frightening sea of yellow and brown.
In the States I exist on a fairly healthy, all-natural diet. I don’t eat any processed foods, I keep my fat intake down and I don’t ingest any drugs whatsoever, excepting, of course, my beloved java and a bit of sugar here and there. Now like any self-involved, narcissistic American, I assume this plan makes me a healthier person. It makes me faster as a runner, better as a worker and maybe even makes be look a couple of years younger than 43 (which stinks because I’m only 35.)
With all this clean living, I’d managed to run a personal best of 56:14 for 10 miles, not Speedy Gonzales, but not exactly Slowpoke Rodriguez either.
So what did I do in the Ballycottton 10 Miler after straying about as far away from my usual ways as I can, in a field that included as the winner none other than the current Irish Cross Country Champion (Vinny Mulvey) and some of the country’s top runners? 54:44 and 14th place overall out of 2,811 finishers.
My head didn’t explode, I didn’t feel like I was carrying chunks of the Blarney Stone in my belly as I ran and I actually clocked a 5:19 final mile, uphill, out-sprinting one of Ireland’s top club runners down the stretch with a 26 second 200 meter kick.
So just what the hell do I do now? Make my coffee with a teaspoon of grounds and a gallon of water? Subscribe to the Jimmy Dean diet plan? Fry my Powerbars in pork fatback? Or just race only in Ireland? Maybe that last one wouldn’t be a bad idea. It turned my world upside down, shook it around, and set it upright again new and improved. Just goes to show that with all I know, I don’t know much. But I do know coffee.

The Menu is Full and it is Holy

2006-03-27T08:15:00.000-08:00

What a week! Where do I start? “Operation Swarmer”? Issac Hayes and Scientology? The government vs. Google? The Dubai port deal? Sure, you may ask, “Hey Joe, has finding something about which to write your tired, pseudo-clever claptrap ever been such a cinch? I mean really, you could spray birdshot from the proverbial merry-go-round and be sure of hitting the proverbial Texas lawyer in the cheek. It might only be a matter of days before the proverbial Washington Press Corps was given the proverbial news.” But I digress. And by the way, yes it has been this easy before. Like, consistently. Like, really, stunningly consistently. Like, for six freaking years. If stupid things occurring around the world as an indirect or direct result of U.S. involvement were individual snowflakes, we could hold a Super G competition on the South Lawn of the White House.
Uncharacteristically, let’s keep this short and sweet.

“Swarmer” (for the unaware, US armed forces last week launched the biggest ground offensive in nearly a year in the Salah ah Din province of Iraq):
Have you ever gone to a Middle Eastern restaurant and had shwarma? It’s kind of like what you find in a Gyro. It’s slow-cooked beef, chicken or lamb that’s been roasted, turned and seasoned on a skewer and served in bread like a rolled up sandwich.
I happen to work in a joint owned by an Israeli with an astute grasp of military history and strategy, not to mention a library’s worth of knowledge regarding food, especially the stuff local to him. To he and many others, “Operation Swarmer” may as well be called “Operation Reuben,” with sheets of terrible, terrible Russian dressing and sauerkraut raining from the sky like tasty napalm!

Issac Hayes:
(OK so this nothing to do with the government, but I think we can all agree South Park would never have enjoyed such wild popularity were it not for the rich, fertile, humid air of stupidity that has been circulating about our little corner of the biosphere for say, oh, five or six years.):
Formerly-washed-up-but-now-fabulously-wealthy one-hit-wonder soul sensation Isaac Hayes quit the Comedy Central cartoon “South Park,” last week, citing religious bigotry and intolerance as his reason for leaving. As South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker said in a statement following Hayes’ resignation, “He didn’t seem to have a problem with us making fun of Christians, Jews and Muslims.” Hayes is a Scientologist. Regardless of his personal beliefs, it can’t be stressed enough that there is a huge difference between bigotry and humor. When you don’t let someone eat next to you because you don’t like the way they think or look, that’s bigotry. If you let them eat wherever the heck they want but laugh at them because they’re putting mayonnaise on their fries, that’s humor. Delicious humor. Heck, you can even go ahead and loosen the proverbial cap on the proverbial salt if you’re feeling particularly mischievous. Just don’t be shocked when your humorless French businessman victim knocks your proverbial teeth into your proverbial chili.

Google:
The Feds say they want Google’s search records to help in their efforts at defeating terrorists, to which I say, “Stand fast young entrepreneurs!”
Let me ask you this, if the government had access to all internet searches and say, a very, very good friend of mine typed in “Bush twins nude,” do you think he (or she, OR SHE) might see a ’03 Crown Victoria outside their house someday soon? (Those are the ones with the double fog lamps, right?)

Dubai:
Before I say anything else, please let me stress that I am not - I repeat – am not agreeing with GW on this one. But, (and it’s a big “but,” even bigger than Dick Cheney’s) Dubai had nothing to do with 9/11, almost as little as Iraq, except for the fact that one of the 9/11 hijackers did come from Dubai and none (let me translate that for you, as in “nada,” “zero,” “zilch,” and “zip,”) came from Iraq. Of course, the rest of them were from Saudi Arabia, but they’re our friends.
Sure the Dubai guys are just as corrupt as anyone in terms of insider information and shady business dealings, but the only reason the Republicans, the Democrats and the vast majority of the American Public got all freaky about the proposed Dubai port deal was because the guys from Dubai are Arabs and Arabs were responsible for 9/11. Hey, Canada may be responsible for Bryan Adams, but I’m still up for the Raptors coming to the Garden. Xenophobia wears many disguises, with this edition bearing a startling resemblance to Tennessee Republican and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. Frist’s mask sold millions in its first week on toy store shelves, breaking the seemingly untouchable record long held by Jesse Helms, who - though hampered by age - may yet, unfortunately, live to wrest it back.

Yes, it’s been a lounging, relaxing week here at Del Boca Navas. Instead of the usual “trying-to-figure-out-what-to-lampoon-and-being oh-so-unsatisfied-with-the-results,” (as the chorus of readers shouts in unison, “So are we!”) I have a seemingly never-ending stream of material flowing to my front door like so many Jehovah’s Witnesses pamphlets. Were I a religious man, I’d think it was some sort of divinely supplied gift. But, well… you know.

PJ, Brad, Howard and everything in between (originally published in Cape Cod Community College's newspaper, The MainSheet)

2006-03-27T08:06:00.000-08:00

Those of you who read my writing in this paper on a regular basis and eagerly await each successive serving, I commend your lack of outside activities and “simple” tastes.
If you’re still reading now, I thank you again and ask that you get off the pills, spit out the beef jerky and get rid of that “Mike’s Hard Lemonade”- soaked futon you vowed you’d keep forever since it was on it that you banged the sister of the guy who won the last “Survivor.” There, see? You’re better than that. Damn straight.
Now, as you know, regular reader, I have been on a bit of rampage of seriousness lately, covering such topics as gay marriage, reality TV, the war in Iraq and other issues that one might consider somewhat important.
Now, I don’t mean to distance myself from any of these issues that I will forever stand for, (except for the reality TV bit; I was watching the “Make Me Look Like Brad Pitt” thing the other night and I confess, I laughed, I cried, I wrote bad checks, they got me) However, the level of pretentiousness that has been building exponentially in me as a result of my sober opining on this string of hard topics has begun to worry me a little bit.
I’m afraid to look in the mirror because I’m afraid I might see Joe Lieberman looking back at me, and behind him Tipper Gore (as my secret, conservative inner woman.)
My sense of humor, once a staggering force revered by fearful relatives and extremely close, sympathetic friends, has taken a back seat to a furrowed brow and (yeesh) thoughts of working for the Kerry campaign. So, my remedy? My cure-all for what ails my increasingly snicker-less soul? Dumb lists of who is and who is not cool. Come with me as we elevate and skewer, together, just like we said we would.

Cool:
Polly Jean Harvey-

The British rocker who makes Liz Phair look like one of the Spice Girls. Sure, Liz told us that women want all sorts of things done to them that no one was willing to attest to in such a way before she got so bold, but PJ chimed in that she wanted all those same things as well, done more often, and she still won’t be even close to satisfied. Oh yeah, and if you do a real piss-poor job, she’ll kick your ass and then write a song about it.
All of this would be moot and Ms. Harvey would be just another 100 lb. chick with the guts to be an effective bouncer were it not for the fact that her first two albums “Dry” and Rid of Me” still stand as two of the finest, rawest, most aggressive guitar/bass/drums records of the last 30 years. Period.
To top it all off, she gave the coolest compliment to another musician ever when she concluded that the band Morphine was the sexiest band she’d ever encountered. How did she arrive at this assessment? By sitting on top of Morphine bassist/singer Mark Sandman’s bass cabinet during a show while wearing really tight leather pants. Rock on. Rock on hard.
Benicio Del Toro-

The second coming of Brando is one of those guys who could show up at a poetry slam in New York, read the tag off a mattress and walk out with not only first place, but the deed to the club. Sure he’s had some pretty parts, (hey, when you look like that, it’s OK to let the camera be nice to you once in a while) but he’s also played a mildly retarded, alcoholic Native American (The Pledge) and a pot-bellied, vomiting lawyer (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) and walked away with both films. He’s the rare blend of almost incomprehensible talent, weird beauty and verve that comes along rarely. The man is bad-ass to the bone.

Uma Thurman-

If you don’t already hate Ethan Hawke for his unbelievably bad writing, cheesy facial hair and making an entire demographic look bad in “Reality Bites,” hate him just for cheating on Uma. What a putz.
Uma’s got the looks that kill. She doesn’t even have to be as gorgeous as she is. She could look more like Ethel Merman than Uma Thurman, she could look more like Thurman Munson, she could have even had something to do with “Monsoon Wedding” and she’d still have that special something going on that transcends it all (yes, even “Monsoon Wedding,” the film that Americans everywhere who also enjoy Hugh Grant movies, “World Music” and frozen Indian dinners thought was “just so…different.” Right. Different in the sense that this time, the same recycled, predictable Hollywood story has people with darker skin, there’s more peach everywhere, and lots and lots of yogurt. Yes, I realize this has nothing to do with Uma, but I still feel it’s deserves mentioning.

Honorable Mentions:

David Bowie (beyond cool), Patti Smith, Donald Rumsfeld (sure the man’s as evil as 10 Hitlers, but boy can he riff), Ani DiFranco, Elvis Costello, Brett Favre (toughness is cool), Lance Armstrong (his kind of toughness is extremely cool), Alanis Morrisette, Erykah Bydu, Lili Taylor, Spike Lee, the Coen Brothers, Everyone in Jane’s Addiction and all of their friends, likewise for The Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Beastie Boys, and all sorts of dead people from Dizzy Gillespie to Joseph Campbell to Anais Nin.

Not cool:
George Bush-

(Bet you didn’t see that one coming.) Note that I have intentionally left the distinguishing middle initial out because I can’t really decide which is the lamer. George I is more intelligent (then again, so is his refrigerator with the new-fangled ice maker) than George II, but even George II isn’t as stiff as his pop. I mean, who would you rather drink with? In the end I suspect each of them would try to kiss you if you’re a boy, as I’ve long theorized that the bizarre, almost psychotic aggressive behavior displayed by each of them is simply the byproduct of bottled up homoerotic impulses. And you know Rummy’s battling that demon every damn day.
Howard Stern-

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know, I know. I don’t want him pulled either. Hell, I’d fight to the death to make sure the KKK has the right to say whatever the hell they want. The radio, like the TV, has an off switch. My problem with Howard isn’t that I think he’s vulgar (you will never know how many prospective loves I have foiled by inadvertently revealing my propensity towards truly juvenile, lewd, disgusting humor. I mean stuff that would make Stern himself start passing out bibles in front of Wal-Mart.) No, with Howard it’s that I really don’t dig his ego and his intellectual laziness. He could be just as base as he is now, but he’s also got the brains and the chops (not to mention the resources) to really stick it to the powers that be. Listening to him is like watching a pro athlete that you know has loads of talent and no desire to train and learn how to maximize it. Howard Stern is Derrick Coleman.
If I want to watch (or listen) to some awkward guy with bad hair, mentally (or otherwise) get off while his underlings (carefully chosen to not be nearly as intelligent as him) laugh at all of his jokes in even, measured guffaws, well, then I could just watch a White House press conference. Hey, I go to the humor media to get away from politics, man.
If Howard goes, I hope it’s only because the ratings went naturally bad. If the FCC wants to take him out, (which does in fact seem to be the case) I’m in the fight against it all the way.
For example, as much as I want to see Pat Robertson off the air, I only want it to be because hundreds of thousands of people realized in close succession that there is no big invisible eye in the sky ready to burn them to death if they aren’t good little Santa’s Helpers coughing up dough for absolution.

Honorable Mention:

Hootie and every single one of the Blowfish and anyone who even so much as worked as a roadie for them, Don Henley and Jimmy Buffet (may they both be burned to a crisp by a Tequila Sunrise), John Ashcroft, Reggie White, Jeremy Shockey, Nick and Jessica, Dave Mathews and his terrible violinist, and all sorts of dead people from Pol Pot to John Wayne to Mama Cass.

So there you have it. Again, my gratitude for your continued enthusiasm and attention. I feel much better now, my relatives are laughing again as they clutch their gin & tonics and edge towards the door. My friends are gently patting me on the back like the characters in a futuristic Spielberg film might symbolically console the hologram of a chum who’d been lobotomized years ago. “Ahh, yes, that’s better. If only his Jell-O dish was real.”
Now, on to more serious matters. Where are my leather pants?