Category Archives: musing

A Deadpan Judge

I had a certain reputation, I suppose, that persists to this day, as a man with a conscience who would occasionally work for free.  This judge, who had seen me in action working in this capacity, had his friendly court attorney call and pitch me an easy pro bono case.  Would I mind if she sent me the file?  It would be a one appearance case, and the judge would consider it a great favor if I would consider it, and he would accommodate my schedule.   This judge was better than most.  We put the case on for a day when I was going to be in Brooklyn anyway and I appeared and met the tenant.

The tenant, who the law did not consider a tenant, was distraught, a man about my age, a combat veteran and a shell of the self he once imagined he might become.  He was about to be evicted from his home, the law on the case was open and shut.  It was not that he was behind in the rent, he’d been paying it all along, since he’d given up his apartment and moved in to take care of his aging mother almost two years earlier.  The judge’s hands were tied.   The story was rather simple and unfortunate for him, under the New York City Rent Stabilization Law.

If the tenant had been living with his mother for at least two years prior to her death, or probably also prior to a disability that necessitated admission to a nursing home, he would have had a clear legal right to succeed to the lease his mother had with the landlord, under the same terms.  This is called the Right of Succession.   He had given up his place and moved into his mother’s apartment to take care of her as her health deteriorated.  As her dementia increased he was forced to bathe her, feed her, carry her to and from the toilet, change her diapers and calm her when she got upset.  After about a year and a half he could no longer provide all the care she needed and had her admitted to the dementia ward in a public hospital not far from her apartment.  The poor person’s version of a nursing home.  

“I need you to visit the tenant, his mother, and come back and report to the Court if there is any chance of her moving back into the apartment to live with her son again,” I think is the mission I was given by the judge.  The judge was grasping at the last straw to keep this unemployed veteran from becoming homeless because he’d done the right thing for his mother, even if for a few months less than the law required him to do it in situ in the subject premises, her rent stabilized apartment.  

The hospital was a fifteen minute walk from the court house.  It was spring time, I remember pastel buds on the trees and a carpet of green buds on the shady Brooklyn sidewalks.  Birds and squirrels probably went about their business on this mild and sunny day, but I didn’t notice.  The man and I spoke as we walked the tree lined streets to the hospital.  The conversation was somber as I explained the legal situation and he told me more about his life and limited options.

We walked for what seemed like miles inside the hospital building.  The building was like something out of the Ottoman Empire, could have been hundreds of years old, with ringing corridors and a labyrinth-like structure inside.  We came at last to the ward where his mother was housed, a ward he visited every day.  The nurses greeted him by name, and he smiled back at them.  We entered a tidy room that smelled of urine and disinfectant.  He approached an old, smooth-faced woman in a wheelchair, pulled a chair next to her and leaned in to put his arm around her.  Her expression barely changed as he stroked her back and called her “mommy” and kissed her.  She seemed to like this, even as it was clear she had no idea who he was.  He began to cry quietly as he held her, tears running down his face.  There was no point asking her any questions, I’d arrived too late for that.  I probably spoke to the head nurse to confirm the medical situation that was plain enough for a child to see.   I said goodbye to the man, who remained with his mother, and walked back to the courthouse alone.

I got back to the court room shortly before the lunch break.  As I walked in the judge nodded, raised his eyebrows and motioned for me to come forward.  As I did I said “Judge, if I had a heart that could still be broken, it would be in fifty pieces right now.”  

He looked at me with sympathy and said “I have no doubt of that, counselor, but I also have no idea what you’re referring to.”  He had about fifty other cases before him that day and the details of the one I was there on were not something he could call to mind instantly.  I refreshed his recollection and he sighed.  We both knew I’d have to surrender the apartment now, and arrangements were made, either that day or on a day a week or two later, with the landlord, a very sympathetic man who owned a small building, and his attorney, who was also pleasant and respectful.  I don’t recall the details now, the son probably got a couple of weeks to move out.  It must have been on a subsequent court appearance, because I’m quite sure he thanked me and we shook hands.

Stuck to Care

My father had a crusty, lovable, gravel voiced first cousin named Eli.   On one of many visits with him toward the end of his life, more than twenty years ago now, he tried to straighten me out with a memorable rap.  He delivered it in his dramatic fashion, standing, as I was, looking up into my face, spitting slightly.

“You know, you worry too much about other people.  You should worry more about yourself, Bub.  There are three rules you need to get into your head.  First: comes me.   Then:  comes me!  And third: comes ME!!!  After that you can worry about other people.  Who are you to worry about someone else?  Let them worry about themselves.  You take care of yourself.”

Excellent advice I have always only marginally abided by, even as I often think of that very smart airline advice to put your own oxygen mask on before helping the child or panicking old person next to you.  I don’t know why I am so often brooding on things that are, after all, statistics.  No less an authority than Josef Stalin famously said “the death of one man is a tragedy, the death of a million men– a statistic.”  As the genius William Steig had the fox say in response to the pretty little pig’s desperate question about why he was going to eat her, “why are you asking me?  I didn’t make the world.”  

It is beyond dispute that I didn’t make the world, why do I feel so debilitatingly responsible to do something about reducing its misery?  I am grateful for every advantage I have, but also inordinately troubled by the odds against most people, the invisible ones, the children of the invisible ones.  This is an alligator of a rhetorical question I am wrestling with, in a world where the majority of people do whatever good they can while trying to have a good life, while feathering their own nests as nicely as they can.  In a culture where the tide I am trying to swim against is a tirelessly promoted, never pausing, super lucrative torrent?  What hope can a lone fish have, swimming against such a tide, and why the struggle, pececito?

A little voice pipes up in response: the tide, however terrible or inexorable, ends in death for everyone, even for those who accumulate a million times more than they can ever use.   Whether you grow up in a slum in Pakistan where children die in massive numbers daily of diarrhea because deadly infections rage where there is no sewer system and many hundreds of thousands must nonetheless defecate in a limited space, or in a comfortable home somewhere where you can crap into a nice clean toilet in a room with a heated floor, your life ends when it is time for it to end, if not before.

How will you spend your limited time here?  If you have the chance to, and seemingly little choice in the matter, does it not make sense to push to the limits of your strength to do something you believe in?  The trick is finding the actual limits of your strength and not surrendering to that hopeless feeling you learned as a young child as soon as things become alarmingly difficult.  When the challenge becomes too daunting it is not unnatural to begin flinching.  If you would change the world, it will not do to flinch.  Or, if you must stop to flinch, Earthling, shake it off and get yourself moving again.

The children of the poor are born largely doomed.  Thus it has always been.  Billionaire monopolists like Bill Gates, once ruthless crushers of any initiative they could not profit from (like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller before him), turn philanthropist and spend huge sums promoting good ideas for improving the lot of the poor.  Why not put them in private school?  Worked for Bill Gates, did it not?  Just because the children of the slums might be shot by rivals for drug selling turf on their way home, or for any reason, or none, just because they may go to bed hungry and wake up in a ghetto, frightened, and facing a society that no longer has any profitable use for their labor, those things are no reason for their parents not to be able to use a voucher to get them into a private school, a charter school, if you will, outside of the public system.  That such a scheme removes the children of the most motivated parents from public schools while diverting resources from public education is no obstacle to its promoters.  Many promoters of this scheme have become rich and famous, while sometimes doing wonderful things for a small number of poor children, even as they arguably ensure the failure of one of the cornerstones of a functioning democracy: a good public education system.

A certain number of the educable few, raked from the rubble in the manner first described by Thomas Jefferson, will excel in these private schools and pass the standardized tests that virtually everyone in their local public school will fail. The most outstanding graduates will attend good schools and ascend to the middle and upper classes.  One in ten million will get their own TV show.  On that show they will say “only in America, baby!” to wild applause and they will mean it very sincerely.  

Most of the rest: massive standardized test failure rate, dropping out of school, death by gunshot, drug arrest, drug addiction, juvenile incarceration, teen pregnancy, a hard life in a dangerous neighborhood at best.  “At-risk” if you know what I’m saying. “Collateral damage,” yo.  If you can say it in a nice way, in a way that tastefully hints at the full horror instead of making it sound so horrible, why not?  Why dwell on a thousand kids from American slums stripped naked every day and thrown into solitary confinement at ‘joovies’ all over the country for getting into fights?  If they didn’t want to be incarcerated why did they violate the law?  And who is Amnesty International to say that solitary confinement of more than 15 hours qualifies as torture?  They’ve clearly never tried dealing with these feral fifteen year-olds.

I met many of these “at risk”  “collateral damage” kids at eight and nine years old: as bright and full of life as you and me.  Met them at an age when they had not yet been totally crushed by the odds they were up against.  I myself was soon crushed by the impossibility of helping more than one or two of them, of having no ability to meaningfully intercede on their behalf in the institutional meat-grinder where I met them.  Fast forward twenty years, dreamed up a creative plan to showcase their potentials, the moving parts of it seem to work.  Poised on a high, windy cliff, about to test the flying machine.  Why worry now?

Certainly no reason to waste energy fretting over why I am stuck to care.

 

In A Tight Spot

I am in a tight spot.  I put myself in this spot, without a doubt, I cannot pretend otherwise, but it is no less tight a spot.  In some ways, tighter.  “Who put you in this tight spot?” a friend will wonder, rhetorically.  

“I did,” you will be forced to admit.  And then it is time to talk about something else.  It is unbearably depressing, in a world of almost infinite tight spots, to talk to someone in a tight spot who put themselves there.

“Jesus, that’s a tight spot…” a friend will think, brow bent.  They brighten as the waiter hands over the wine list.

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Another Dream

Saw my recently dead friend Melz in a dream last night.  In real life he died on January 2, defying the doctors who predicted he wouldn’t make it to New Years.

In the dream it was shortly before his death, but he was game to hang out with several of us.  All I recall is that he was sitting on the floor and drawing enthusiastically on a low table.  We were playing some kind of drawing game, I recall he drew a few vegetables.  His drawings were pretty good, his line very confident and fluid.  I don’t remember him ever drawing in life, but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the talented fellow could draw if he wanted to.

Sekhnet, who interprets dreams as intently as the old soothsayers used to read animal entrails for portents, might say this dream was a reminder, as I look around at the barnacled shore, littered with dried out sea life, that Melz would give anything to be alive now.   Melz, she might say, showed up to remind me how precious life is, and how sweet and full of surprises.

“You see!” she might say, with the excitement of a kindergarten teacher when one of her students first reads their name out loud, “even you realize the meaning of that dream.”

I will smile, and nod.  Although, to be truthful…

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Lassitude

The air is not moving in here.  No sign of movement out there either.  The trees are motionless, not a leaf twitches.  The back of my t-shirt is damp.   Playing guitar as tasteless to me as it is to talented friends who, reckoning themselves failures because they never became stars, play only when drunk.  

The idea of getting drunk  — dry as the idea of playing.  The idea of writing– same thing.

What I’d like to do, but, of course, one can’t, is spin a cocoon and hang out in there, sleeping deeply, until it’s time to float and fly. 

 

On Learning About Other Damage Done by High Blood Pressure

I’d been worried about having a stroke each time I saw 152/100 as my blood pressure reading.  I don’t know what the stroke range is, but I know 104/70 is closer to the blood pressure I want than the, at best, borderline 137/89 I’ve been consistently getting.

“Stop fooling around,” a doctor friend who takes hydrochloride and Avapro to control her high blood pressure told me the other day.  “Your numbers, once they get elevated like that, will not come back down by themselves, your body has changed.  You’re doing damage to your heart and kidneys if you don’t get it treated.”

I call my doctor the next day to get the prescription phoned in.  We’ve been “monitoring” things for almost a year now since his eyes opened lemurlike, alarmed at my reading.   Hard to get a call back from him, missed the one I did get yesterday.  I’ll try the well-meaning liberal again on Monday.  Too bad he doesn’t use email like my urologist, but no sense stressing over how hard he is to reach.

Doing push-ups just now I felt the thickening of my heart muscle, squeezing, no doubt compromised by my high blood pressure. Must be why I’m so tired all the time too.  My kidney so far has been quiet, but, from what I understand, kidneys usually are.  

 

Excruciating

I didn’t stop to think how excruciating it might be, for those accustomed to animated banter from their old friend, with a few laughs mixed in, to see him sitting quietly at the table as others tell stories about their daily lives.   At one time their old friend would find a way to connect these stories into conversation, or at least interject something interesting, amusing or funny.  

Now look how he goes about the business of eating, distracted, chewing impassively as he silently judges everything from behind a mask of stoicism.  The stories being told around the table are anecdotes about people and things nobody at the table but the teller knows anything about.  The service is slow and the damned waitress is staring at her smartphone instead of bringing water or the check.

Damn, I thought a few moments ago, must be excruciating.

 

(note the author’s sly, nonchalant self-flattery– The Most Interesting Man in the World)

Dream

Remembering more dreams lately, a flurry of them in recent nights, as my imagination seemingly tries to recharge itself in the face of objectively dispiriting circumstances that call for heroic feats of imagining.  

At the end of last night’s I was, for the first time in years, back in that phantom second apartment of mine, the large space connected to my own cramped apartment where I stumble from time to time, wondering that I never use those rooms.   In the bathroom of the second apartment there was a dark blur of movement and a rustle behind the towel hanging on the rack.  It was a brown cat, at first afraid and then reassured by my quiet and calmness.  I kneeled and it came over, affectionate.  Petted the cat as I thought of the unused resources in my life and the sometimes terrible burden of our personal histories.

History can, and often does, repeat itself, but it is a mistake to feel that parallels between things happening now and things that happened in the past make the same outcome inevitable.  Dream and continue to breathe, sleep, eat well and exercise, only time will tell.

Happiness Research

In the new science of happiness, researchers have found that those driven by intrinsic motivations–  doing what they love, spending time with people they like, helping others, are much happier than those driven by extrinsic motivations– what we glibly call “success” here in the Free Market — wealth, status and fame.

Stated more directly, to paraphrase those interviewed by Roko Belic, director of Genghis Blues (a great documentary) and the 2011 Happy:  losers who hang out together, and value each other, are happier than winners driven to compete who have no good relationships.

Rocket science, yo.  Psychology 101, yo.  

But, of course, there’s no money to be made in happiness.  So it’s common sense that we who seek to maximize profit and drive the economy would present the world as a zero-sum competition where a few will win and everyone else LOSES.  The fear of losing?  BINGO!  Now we’re talking a trillion dollar industry.

Have a very nice day!

Albatross

I know a woman who married a tall, charming, athletic man a few decades back.  He was a salesman, and something of a bullshit artist.   He exuded self-confidence and threw money around to impress his guests, but occasionally he would stutter.  His stutter did not stop him from being very opinionated, very assertive, arguing forcefully for opinions gleaned from his wide reading.  His stutter did nothing to curb his road rage.

 I once saw him strike out in a softball game and throw his bat down in frustration.  He was a giant and almost shattered the bat on the hard dirt near home plate.  Next time up he popped up, put his head down and groaned in frustration.  His groan could be heard on the other side of the park.   The third time up he hit a monstrous drive that kept rising as it went, and it went further than any ball I’ve ever seen hit in a softball game.  He went into his homerun trot smiling.

The woman fought with him, and dominated him in many ways, but they clearly loved each other.  He loved her so much he kept buying her cowboy boots, at one time she had a dozen pairs.  Their daughter would later have two dozen Barbie dolls.  He was a high roller.  He left 40% tips if he liked the service.  Then things started going badly for him.  Over time his stories of bad luck stopped making sense.

For example, he had a very lucrative sales job, working on a small crew of salesmen who sold a product that flew off the shelves.  He was friends with the many store owners on his route, they often gave him hardcover books, current best sellers.  There was no reason to think this friendly salesman was putting the books in his case when the store owner was distracted writing him a check for the goods he delivered.  He was loved at work, one of their top earners and a bright guy with a great sense of humor who could make fun of himself.  Everyone believed him when he reported that his sample case had been stolen from his car.  Why would anyone sell his samples for a few hundred bucks when he was taking home so much money?

Once he came home with his clothes cut to ribbons by razors, his wallet and house keys stolen.  He’d pulled off the FDR to avoid a massive traffic jam and two crackheads had tried to carjack him on an East Harlem side street.  He reported they were each as big as him and had eyes like sharks.  He’d managed to fight them off, being hit by a 2 X 4 in the process and amazingly not going down, they got his wallet and house keys, but he managed to hold on to the car keys and drive home.  He was black and blue, his clothes sliced to ribbons, but otherwise OK.  Nobody will ever know what actually happened to him that day, though one suspects a gambling debt was involved.

He eventually was fired from the lucrative sales job when his second sample case was stolen from his trunk, and samples began showing up on the shelves of stores on his route.  He managed to talk his way back into the job, but was reassigned to a very slow territory and his sales, and income, plummeted.  The woman found out they had zero left in the bank, and very little coming in, and with a new baby in the picture she was very stressed out.

He eventually lost that job, had others, progressively less lucrative, lost them too, usually following the discovery of some petty embezzlement scheme he cooked up.   Each scheme had two characteristics in common: they netted a few hundred dollars at a time and they were designed in a way that guaranteed he would get caught.   My personal favorite is one I will relate in a moment.

The woman eventually realized that he was a person who was handy with an untruth if it suited the situation better than candor.  It took years, but eventually she came to see him as a liar.  The final proof came as they were house hunting, a couple of years after the birth of their second child, a son.  When she was pregnant with the boy she reported that her husband wanted another child “as much as he wants testicular cancer”.   Once the boy was born it was love all around for everyone.  They were going to put a down payment down on a house the woman loved, they were done negotiating and were ready to buy it.  He borrowed ten thousand dollars from his wife’s parents on a Monday, part of the money they were going to put down to buy the house.  Later that week he informed everyone that he’d declared bankruptcy on Wednesday.

The woman went into a rage, and a panic, and stopped sleeping and lost a lot of weight, she could not keep food down.  For a variety of reasons she didn’t leave him, though she slept with her young son for several years and actively hated her husband.

Fast forward several years and we are at my personal favorite story about this guy.  He was coaching his son’s basketball team with another guy, and they got to talking about the shit work the guy was obliged to take these days to pay his bills.  The other coach had a commercial extermination business and offered his new friend a sales job.  The pay was better than what he was making, he would be working for a friend, and the friend’s company was flourishing.

A big source of income was commissions for landing new accounts.  The first few months he opened a few accounts a week and he was taking home good money.  Then it became harder and harder to find new businesses that needed exterminator services.  He could not let his wife and children down, so he hit on another brilliant scheme.  

Trusted by his friend, he would often lock up the office at the end of the day, he had his own key.   Ignorant about the workings of computers, he managed to pull up accounts and change the details, making up new clients he’d pretend he’d signed up.  He would print out the new client information sheet, turn it in the next day, and his friend would slap him on the back and pay him a commission.

The only problem was, in order to create a new fake account to get a commission for, he was inadvertently deleting actual accounts.  He’d overwrite company A’s file on the computer, renaming it company X.  He didn’t know how to copy a file and retain the original, so an actual client was deleted each time he overwrote the file to create a new commission.   The scheme worked perfectly, for several weeks, until the deleted companies started calling in to complain.

“Hey, Dave, what the hell’s going on?  I’ve got waterbugs marching out into the waiting room, carrying away small dogs,” reported a disgruntled veterinarian, “I haven’t seen you guys in a month.  What the fuck, Dave?”

Dave was sincerely perplexed, checked his computer, did not find the vet’s account.  Once this happened a few times Dave figured out what happened and angrily fired his unethical buddy.

The man went home to his wife that Friday and sadly reported that Dave’s business was having a slump, and that Dave had to let three sales people go, and since he was the last one hired, he was the first one on the chopping block.  His wife was all sympathy, took him to dinner, then a movie, reassured him that everything would turn out OK.  She took him to the beach the next day, the family had a wonderful weekend.  She had finally completely recovered from her rage against him.

Until Monday when Dave had calmed himself down enough to call the wife.  He reported the crime, and how much he was hurt by the betrayal, and told her he was going to press criminal charges unless the $3,600 was paid back immediately.   They made a payment plan and the woman began paying her husband’s debt weekly out of her meager salary.

I urged her to finally tell her children the truth about their father’s treachery, otherwise she would appear once more irrationally angry at him and the kids would be rightly confused.  Honesty was the only light to be shined on this hideous situation, and she agreed.  Declining my help (I’d known them all for years and have had training as a mediator) she assured me that he himself had promised to tell the kids what he’d done.  I was skeptical.

When the big day came he put on a sad face and sincerely told the children: “you know, sometimes people make mistakes.  And, as you know, your mother has a hard time forgiving people, particularly me….”  At this the woman screamed, ran out of the house and began driving 90 mph on the highway.  To this day, I’m pretty sure, her children have no idea why she is often enraged at their father.  The father, after all, is an affectionate, playful, easy-going guy who takes things in stride.  Their mother, by contrast, is a demanding and stressed out nervous wreck who is often cranky and who treats their loving father very badly much of the time.

Now, we fast forward to the present.  The kids are both young adults, the daughter just graduated from college, the son on his way to college.  Lovely kids, and both quite brilliant, good looking and well-liked.

The man is now crippled with multiple disc and joint problems.  He can no longer stand or walk without pain.  He had to give up his off-the-books job delivering pizza, he can no longer drive or carry the bags and boxes to and from his van.  Pain killers do not seem to help, and he moans in pain as, after a long day at work, the woman waits on him, does the laundry, empties the dishwasher, brings him water, the TV remote, his book, his reading glasses.  He groans throughout the night.  This once muscular 240 pound athlete is now a shattered 300 pound albatross who has not left the house in a month.  He hangs heavily from his wife’s neck, and it is up to their son to tell the man not to groan all night, that he must not keep his wife awake and endanger the hardworking breadwinner’s livelihood.

I tell the story because, having heard it, and felt the weight of it on the woman, and the almost mythic proportions of it, it becomes impossible not to tell it to somebody.